Darkness vs light: being atheist in a Christian nation

VICTOR KALALANDA, Lusaka March 27, 2021

IN a country proclaimed as a Christian Nation, and where a large percentage of the population profess the faith, it is hard to imagine anyone would question the existence of God. 

But then, there are some some at the country's public university who find it illogical that anyone would actually believe that God exists.

Such belief is adamantly held by atheists at the University of Zambia (UNZA), like 24-year-old Immanuel Richie—and he does not care what you think of him or feel for him, whether contempt or sympathy.

What is odd is that Immanuel is a media scholar, preacher’s kid and former Christian.

Tall and bespectacled, Immanuel regards his atheism, the highly controversial belief that God does not exist, like his badge of honour and he often has got loads to say when he broaches up the subject of his convictions to his peers.

In fact, when I ask him if he is an atheist, he admits without apology, “Yes, officially,” and adds, with undertones of sarcasm, that “sing me the national anthem.”

He says of himself that “a lot of people are my friends because I really make it easy. I smile when I’m not supposed to. I make them believe their shallow belief systems are significant and they can logically be squared. I downplay my role, [or else] these nasty folks don’t know who they’re friends with.”

But given his Christian background as a staunch Jehovah’s Witness and, ironically, as a son of a numinous stentorian Pentecostal preacher, it was not until he went to UNZA that Immanuel began to believe that “science and philosophy are the best things that have ever happened to humanity, primarily because they make lying, deception and intellectual fraud extremely hard to get away with.”

What could be described as an epiphany for the third year media and communications student began with his pursuit for more knowledge and it happened against the backdrop of Zambia’s first pandemic lockdown.

“How I found myself being sceptical was when school was closed for the first time during COVID. So I read a book by Richard Dawkins called the God Delusion. So I started reading that book because, I was like, um, you know what, let me just see how other people have these dissenting views, so that I can be able to debunk them and in a case where somebody asks me when I’m in the field ministries as a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s the way I approached the book. So when I started reading the book, however, as I went further, I started to see, ummm, the arguments are pretty sound and I’ve never seen things in this light. So I started probing further and then when I started doing that it became hard for me to reconcile, say, the Bible and natural science. I began to see loopholes,” he discloses.

In his self-declared war against religion, partly waged through his books, it was thus Richard Dawkins, the world-famous atheist and erstwhile Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, who killed Immanuel’s religion.

As he read further, the UNZA student was no longer the typical Christian apologist that Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to be, but he was seriously beginning to doubt the veracity of the biblical Genesis story and its account of creation, in which dinosaurs and primitive humans are absent, according to him.

“If we’re going to believe the Genesis account then we’ve to struggle with where to fit these [fossils] because they were existing, their bones are there, their records are there. Do they really fit in or were the people who were writing the Genesis story unaware of what we’ve scientifically discovered today? If they were unaware then that puts into question whether they were inspired or not, or were they just people who were trying to understand the world based on the information they had at the time?” he says.

On the dinosaur question, Evangelist Simbai says the reptiles “are not mentioned in the Genesis creation story, and neither are miniature horses, hippos, bats, to mention a few. But their families are, and the species keep multiplying and going extinct owing to various evolutionary factors lauded by scientists themselves, whose simple corresponding theological explanation is that since the entrance of sin, life to a larger extent became adverse to itself. The very nature of humans has been adversely affected, and some animal species have gone extinct as a result, and new ones have come up through cross breeding, amalgamation and adaptation.”

Furthermore, after reading the work of another notorious atheist, Christopher Hitchens, Immanuel was convinced that it is not a tenable idea to say the rainbow symbolises a covenant between God and the children of Israel because rain droplets merely act like glass prisms which produce the rainbow phenomenon.

He actually believes that the earth and the human population are just a fluke in the cosmos because, as he puts it, “If you just go beyond, like, our solar system, which is in the Milky Way galaxy, there’re other multiple planets out there which we cannot even reach with our telescopes because they’re so far away. There could be other organisms living there but we’ve no idea. But then if we’re gonna say we’re part of the grander plan, we’re designed for some sort of supernatural purpose, I think you’ve more burden of proof on your side as opposed to someone who goes like, ‘Okay, you know what? I really doubt that we’re part of the grander plan ‘cause we seem to be an accident.’ ‘Cause we seem so tiny to matter so much when it comes to the whole space we’re in.”

Most of Immanuel’s arguments and convictions about the universe may not easily be disproved because despite science reaching a very advanced stage, “There is so much that we don’t understand about [the world out there]; therefore, everything is possible,” states Dr Brenda Namumba, Zambia’s first female doctoral astrophysicist.

Now fascinated deeply by philosophy, cosmology and the work of atheists and agnostics like Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, Rodger Penrose, Neil Degrass Tyson, Stephen Hawkins, Edwin Hubble, Frederick Nietzsche, Charles Darwin and Bill Nye, Immanuel is just one of many atheists at UNZA, an institution with a transformative secular outlook, despite hosting people of different faiths, including a Christian Centre opened in 1986.

According to a study by Prof Brendan Carmody on the nature and role of religious studies at UNZA from 1985 to 2005, it was with difficulty that UNZA management itself accepted chaplaincy at the institution.

There is at least one pronounced atheist on each faculty at the country’s leading university, with one of the most notable ones being top scientist Peter Cheuka, who is currently pioneering word-class drug discovery for malaria using synthetic methods at UNZA.

“Of course,” Dr Cheuka says, “I’m very proud to be an atheist. I actually consider the Christian faith right now to be some kind of bondage. When Christians see me, when I talk to them, they’ll be sorry about me but I’ll also be sorry about them, yeah, because I know they’re lost. The journey hasn’t been an easy one because being raised in a Christian family and then taking such a radical step, a one hundred and eighty degrees turnaround in someone’s belief wasn’t an easy one. I’ve come to one conclusion that when we’re born as humans we’re born with some truth that unfortunately gets suppressed by religion. You won’t believe this: when I was a small boy I used to actually serve as an altar boy and some people used to think I was going to become a priest. I used to ask some questions as to why it had to take Europeans and other people from foreign lands to bring us what they consider as God’s true message. I used to question why it wasn’t the other way round and why God would only have a son and no daughter is mentioned? Not even the mother is mentioned, for example. But I was told there are certain questions that you don’t have answers to.”

Fully grown and with information and Internet research tools available, it was at UNZA that the Christian faith of the chemistry lecturer was “significantly shaken,” he says, “because during that time I’d an opportunity to access information that I couldn’t access when I was a boy.”

After reading through the Bible, he found problems with chapters like Exodus 21, where he believes God endorses slavery and promotes genocide.

He says of Bible writers that “I challenged God a long time ago to say, God, well I’m not the kind of person who believes my fellow human being because I know human beings can lie. So what assurance should I’ve that the person who brought me the Bible did not lie? I have never seen God myself, so my fellow human being should not come to claim that they’ve seen God in a vision.”

Married to a Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) woman, Dr Cheuka says though he does not impose his beliefs on others in his home, he says he also rivals Christians by relentlessly preaching his message, including to his own children.

He argues that Christianity’s 10 Commandments were plagiarised from the 42 Laws of Ma’at, and that the Virgin Birth is not unique to Jesus but common with mythical Egyptian gods like Horus, adding that the Second Coming of Jesus is mere falsehood because he believes resurrection never happened. 

But UNZA’s popular Christian preacher, Elijah Simbai, dismisses plagiarism as a possibility.

“Many examples here could be cited including, but not limited to, sex as a procreatory tool, which could never be said it was copied by one people from another. About one half of the 10 commandments present basic principles of universal application in human transactions of all cultures and eras. The other half speaks of the basic principles of the relationship that subsists between the ruler and the ruled. It is little wonder, therefore, that other civilizations apart from the Egyptian, including the Assyrian and Babylonian, have similar creeds, the only difference usually being on the keeping of the Sabbath day holy, since other civilizations had separate days of worship. Rather than being evidence of plagiarism as others might want to contend therefore, it must be properly viewed as evidence of the common vanity of the human heritage historically,” he argues.

Another famous atheist at UNZA is philosopher Julius Kapembwa, who carried out a philosophical inquiry into the scientific theory of evolution and Christian beliefs, for his master’s degree at the university.

Dr Kapembwa finds it unfair that when the Government taxes him it sometimes spends the money on religious and moral causes, since as a Christian nation, there is no clear separation between the state and religion in Zambia.

The controversial freethinker, who is also married to an SDA woman, says many atheists like himself “started off as very good Christians, except they reached the end of the road in terms of their seeking for answers and they found they couldn’t find the answers in theism. And once you step out of theism or Christianity, as you step out of the box, it becomes immediately clear that a lot of things that we accept or accepted are just not up to scratch as well founded beliefs.”

Unlike most atheists who trace their background to a troubled childhood or having an estranged father while growing up, it is interesting that these non-believers at UNZA largely hail from intact homes and have gone on to have loving Christian parents or wives, who do not seem to judge them.

Though UNZA may still be religiously obstinate due to its old Marxist orientation, it is a centre of religious activity on the weekends, when it swarms with fellowships and different denominations.

According to the last census in 2010, Zambia had more non-believers than Muslims, a trend that will supposedly continue given the growing number of universities and the apparent relationship between education and atheism.

But for most Christians, their position on atheism and the different types of non-believers in the country is embodied by the views of UNZA graduate and renowned Baptist preacher, Conrad Mbewe, who says: “The reason why people want to have this well designed universe without recognising its divine Designer is because they want to continue living in sin. The moment you admit that God exists you have to obey his commandments. Let’s face it: You don’t want to do that!”

And simbai adds that “if God doesn't exist, and there is no standard of morality that is outside of the human sphere, then there would be no mind or sense of guilt and accountability, and there'd be no depression or stress. But psychologists accept that guilt is intrinsic in humans because the mind, on which it rests, is an ethereal concept which answers to a standard set beyond the individual possessing it. I don't know what atheists will say this standard setter is, but I say it's God, although they don't want to admit it.”