Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector of Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia, and here’s what he has been saying recently:
…The new atheists proclaim their gospel with the fervour of believers: God is dead, man is free, free from the destructive illusions of religion and morality, of reason and virtue. But then a someone dies, suddenly and cruelly, like the young man known to many in ..[this] parish [in [Eastern Georgia] who was killed in a freakish accident last weekend. And his death casts a pall of grief over his family, his friends, their families, his school, and many others. Yet if he was no more than an arrangement of molecules, a selfish gene struggling to replicate itself, there can be no reason for grief, or for the love that grieves, since these are (we are told) essentially selfish survival mechanisms left over from some earlier stage in hominid evolution. Friendship is just another illusion. But of course we do grieve, even the atheists. And in so grieving, they grieve better than they know (or think they know).
The grieving atheist cannot provide any reason why he grieves, or why he (rightly) respects the grief of others. For to grieve the death of such a young man is implicitly to affirm the reality of the soul. Man is embodied, to be sure; but what is embodied is a soul, capable of memory, reason, and love. To grieve the loss of anyone then is to lament the departure of a unique being, whose mind and heart have touched our lives in spontaneously beautiful and inimitable ways. To grieve is to travel even beyond the lost life of a loved one to the origin and source of the love we have known, and there to register our gratitude. To grieve, therefore, is to affirm that there is a higher source of value than ‘the selfish gene’ – there is a God, who is absolute truth and goodness, the very possibility of knowledge and love…
Where to begin?
Silly man.
According to most religions I know about, certainly the Abrahamic ones, my late dog, Buster, had no soul. And yet I grieved when he died, and I still grieve when I contemplate the loss. Many believers do the same, despite what their creed tells them. All beings are “unique,” whether they have souls or not. When we interact with them, we have feelings — indeed, we often have feelings for inanimate objects and grieve their destruction. Feelings are natural. There is probably a scientific explanation for why we have them, but the plain, observable fact is we do have them.