By DONALD DeMARCO
Margaret Ann Vosper, better known as Gretta Vosper, is an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. She is a self-professed atheist. Not surprisingly, her rejection of any belief in God has caused some controversy. Nonetheless, a recent decision by church authorities has given Rev. Vosper security in her role serving a Christian community.
The United Church of Canada was founded in 1925 as a merger of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. At that time, it claimed a membership of 6.25 percent of the Canadian population. By 2009, its adherents dropped to 1.4 percent, according to its own published figures. Between 1968 and 2009, it lost more than half of its membership.
The question that prevails is whether the United Church is broad enough to include God. Concerning her newly established security as a minister, Rev. Vosper says: “It’s going to be wonderful. Now we’ll be able to really fly.” Being inclusive, these days, even for a religious congregation, does not necessarily include God.
It would be a mistake to think that Rev. Vosper has no supporters or that her atheistic ministry is not regarded as something positive. I was struck by a letter to the editor that appeared in the November 13 issue of the Toronto Star.
Letters to the editor are believed to reveal something prevalent about how people think. They allegedly provide a window to the world. The writer in this case states that Gretta Vosper is simply bringing the church into the twenty-first century. He suggests that people of other religions should adopt her position now that Darwinism has thoroughly refuted the myth of Creation upon which all religions are based.
It seems to me that left unchecked, one indefensible position leads to another and another and another. According to Genesis, on the first day God said, “Let there be light: and there was light.” On the second day, God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.” It was not until the fifth day that life made its first appearance, when God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
Now, Charles Darwin was a biologist, a student of various forms of life. But in the order of creation, life appeared relatively late, not until an environment that could sustain life was prepared. How then could biologist Darwin, whose position stands solely on the ground of his biological research, be in a position to refute the existence of a world that was completely devoid of life? He really did not have a leg to stand on, at least in terms of refuting Creation. If God stopped His Creation after the first day, could a biologist, who had not been created, somehow, disprove God’s inaugural act: “Let there be light”?
As a matter of fact, despite the grandiose title of his celebrated work, The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin failed to prove the origin of a single species of life. It is instructive to know that the original title of his work was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. This embarrassing and certainly politically incorrect title was changed in 1872 to The Origin of Species.
It has been well established by competent researchers that the survival of the “favoured races” led directly to the notion of Aryan supremacy and ultimately to the Holocaust. Roy H. Schoeman, a Jewish convert to the Catholic Church, states that the ideas that led to the Holocaust were “introduced by Darwinism and epitomized in our country by Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger” (Salvation Is From the Jews, p. 191).
He cites a very Darwinian statement of Sanger: “Organized charity itself is…the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents….[Nothing is] more insidiously injurious than…to supply gratis medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” (Pivot of Civilization).
Darwin did not refute Creation, he paved the way for de-creating human beings believed to be less than worthy of survival. It is not an easy thing to defend atheism. An anonymous pundit who has an appreciation of logic and metaphysics has made the following parody concerning the atheist position.
He defines atheism as: “The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense.”
G.K. Chesterton’s witticism comes to mind: “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
“Why is there something rather than nothing, when it would have been much easier for there to have been nothing?” is one of the central questions of philosophy. Surely nothing cannot generate something. Only nothing comes from nothing. It is the existence of God that has been proven, not His nonexistence.
What does the future hold for Canada’s United Church? Will more atheists join the ministry? Will they seek desperate reasons to justify their stand? And will the church be inclusive enough to welcome anti-Christians? Will congregants respond affirmatively to such spacious broadmindedness?
And how will it be possible to unify contradictory positions? If anything goes, will anything stay? Under such circumstances it is not likely that things will “really fly,” but that they will continue to circle in a chaotic and confusing manner.
We throw out the Bible at our peril. It has no substitute, nor can Rev. Vosper ever exclaim, “God help us.”
(Dr. DeMarco is a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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