The “New Atheists” have sold a lot of books and spun up a lot of media coverage; what they haven’t done, particularly, is make a very good case for atheism. Mostly, they preach to the converted and mock those who disagree with them; along the same lines as C. S. Lewis’ observation (in The Screwtape Letters) that not everyone can make a joke but anyone can talk about something as if it’s funny (which is how he defines flippancy), they’ve demonstrated that it’s easier to act as if something’s already been proven than it is to go out and prove it. Remove their assumption that atheism is the only intellectually respectable position, and there’s not a whole lot left.
Now, this wouldn’t matter if their assumption were correct; but it isn’t. In truth, as William Lane Craig notes in a recent article in Christianity Today, that point of view is behind the times. The relative weakness of the intellectual case for atheism was underscored when the world’s most important atheist philosopher, the man who first argued for “the presumption of atheism,” Dr. Antony Flew, abandoned atheism (a change of mind he discussed in interviews with Dr. Gary Habermasand Dr. Benjamin Wiker). Perhaps in part consequence, more and more of the younger generation of Christians have become interested in apologetics (the study of the defense of Christianity on rational grounds); as I’ve posted before, I wouldn’t be surprised if the primary long-term effect of the “New Atheists” and their work is not the growth of atheism but the growth of the church.
I linked to this by the by in my previous post, having discovered that it was up while I was looking for something else, but it really deserves its own: Edward Tingley has a stellar article in Touchstone called “The Skeptical Inquirer: If Only Atheists Were the Skeptics They Think They Are,” which I commend to your reading. It is, drawing on Pascal, a devastating frontal assault on the idea that the absence of scientific evidence for God is an argument against the existence of God. As Dr. Tingley says, “Skepticism raises the question, Is there any way forward after we have given up on material evidence? It certainly doesn’t answer it.”
Here are a few brief excerpts from the essay to whet your appetite:
Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.
That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth. . . .
There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief. . . .
Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists. . . .
This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?
This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.
Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.
The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.
I encourage you to read the rest—it’s truly a superb piece.
What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote,
The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don’t naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, “There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.”
This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can’t ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can’t use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we’d end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as “There is a God,” or “There is no God”—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we’ve done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we’ve drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we’ve developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.
That said, while believingsomethingis easy, believing inChristisn’t. Far from it, in fact. And this isn’t for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; “scientific” objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, sciencehasn’tdisproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It’sa different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I’ve known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I’ve never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal,writes, “Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.”) Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don’t want to. As Chesterton wryly observed,
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn’t designed to meet our “felt needs”; it isn’t, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O’Connor put it, it isn’t a big warm electric blanket, it’s the cross—and we don’t particularly want the cross. We don’t particularly want a God whocalls usto deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall tosay, “My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light.” We can’t get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can’t get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus’ yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what wewantto do, but to doing what weneedto do. Getting there, however, isn’t easy; it’s far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.
And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that’s just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don’t want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it’s harder to believe than not to, and so it’s all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for “the life you’ve always wanted”—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can’t do is raise Christians.It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that’s trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind upescaping one moldmerely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thingTaylor satirizedwhen he wrote,
So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I’m feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!
You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn’t reallyChristianitythey’re rejecting.
The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in aPerson, and a commitment tofollowthat Personwhereverhe might lead us. To borrow from the old story about theGreat Blondin, it’s not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he’ll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it’s a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It’s a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.
The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it’s not about us at all—it’s not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be “our best life now”; it’s not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it’s about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn’t easy; in fact, O’Connor and Taylor are right: it’s harder to believe than not to.
Harder to Believe than Not to
Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?
Chorus:
Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.
It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn’t know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don’t want to listen.
Chorus
Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.
Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.
They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It’s harder to believe than not to.
I’ve written on Dr. Richard Dawkins and the rest of the “new atheists” once or twice (or maybe three times, or even four), so I was interested to see Dr. John Stackhouse reflect on a recent appearance Dr. Dawkins gave at the University of British Columbia (UBC, pronounced “you-bys-sey”). His comments are in three parts, evaluating Dr. Dawkins as rhetor, ethicist, and mirror (of the style and flaws of a certain type of Christian apologist and preacher); he has some interesting things to say, especially regarding Dr. Dawkins’ encounter with West Coast vegetarianism.
Driving in to church this evening for the Wednesday night stuff, I ended up behind a car (briefly) with a bumper sticker that read, “Question everything.” I thought, “Really? Everything? Does that include questioning questioning everything? Why question everything? Question it how? On what grounds? And if you question everything, what sort of answer should you expect to get?”
I was of course partly being snarky (to myself); but I do wonder, does that person really mean it? What would they think if you started questioning science? “Are you sure the theory behind the internal-combustion engine in your car is sound? Why should you trust that gravity will hold your tires on the road? Can you be certain that turning the wheel actually makes the car turn? On a different note, why do you believe in the theory of evolution? Is there really the evidence to support it? Can you be sure that the people who support it aren’t doing so from ulterior motives?” And so on, and so forth . . .
Then too, I saw recently, I don’t remember where, that someone (Richard Dawkins?) had propounded a set of “Ten Commandments for Atheists.” Leaving quite aside the question of why atheists would support having commandments in the first place, one of them was, “Question everything”; and yet, I know they don’t mean that, because on the evidence, they certainly don’t believe one should be commanded to question atheism. At least, Dr. Dawkins and his ilk tend to respond pretty sharply to those who do.
The truth of the matter is, no one ever means anything like “Question everything”; even René Descartes, who came the closest, didn’t get that far (nor, I think, did he want to). Most people, when they say “Question everything,” really mean something like this: “Let me question everything you believe that I don’t want to believe in, and let what I want to believe right alone.” Saying that would be far more honest; somehow, though, it doesn’t have quite the same ring.
Or has he simply rejected a watered-down version of God that isn’t the God of the Bible and Jewish/Christian tradition? After running acrossthis joint interviewTimeconducted with him and Dr. Francis Collins in November 2006, I’m not so sure. Check out this exchange:
TIME: Could the answer be God?
DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
COLLINS: That’s God.
DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small—at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.
How about, for starters, that if one goes to Scripture and to the history of Christian thought—perhaps especially to the Augustinian stream out of which the Reformers arose, but not only—what one finds satisfies Dr. Dawkins’ conditions? This makes me wonder if he is in fact rebelling, not against true Christianity, but against one of the debased, culturally comfortable forms of the sort that moved J. B. Phillips to declare,Your God Is Too Small. (Interesting that he addressed the subtitle “to believers and skeptics alike.”) Certainly in a lot of ways, Dr. Dawkins sounds a lot more like St. Augustine and John Calvin there than he does an atheist.
Then there’s this, the final word of the interview as printed:
DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, whichI cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Three thoughts on this. First, Dr. Dawkins sounds here a lot more respectful of religion in potential than he ever has of any particular religion; which suggests that his mind is rather more open on the point than I ever would have guessed, and also seems to me to further support the thought I voiced above. I strongly suspect that if anyone asked the right questions, we’d find that the god Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a god the church doesn’t believe in either, and that his view of what Christianity actually is would prove to be more than a little out of whack.
Second, his lumping Jesus together with the Greek gods fits in with that; it shows real ignorance and failure to understand. If he sees the Incarnation as of a piece with Greek mythology, I hardly blame him for rejecting it.
And third, I think the root of that failure is to be found in the one thing that doesn’t occur to him: that that God he has powerfully described might have acted to revealhimself, rather than waiting for us to get smart enough to reveal himforourselves. I almost think the only thing that divides Dr. Dawkins and orthodox Christian faith—and of course it’s a very large thing—is the absence of a doctrine of revelation.
In case anyone suspects this interview might not be representative of Dr. Dawkins’ views in this regard, he sounded very similar ina fascinating interview with Ruth Gledhillof theTimes; he even told Ms. Gledhill, a Christian, “I don’t think you and I disagree on anything very much but as a colleague of mine said, it’s just that you say it wrong.” (Check outher blogfor more thoughts and material.)
When I put up my earlier post on atheism, I didn’t expect the response I got (though perhaps that’s only because I hadn’t run across Samuel Skinner before; as much time as he spends on other people’s blogs arguing his position, he really ought to start his own). I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, however; what I described as the adolescent atheism of the self-impressed isn’t an attitude conducive to taking criticism well, or to having one’s heroic self-image challenged. Given that, I probably should have expected someone to take umbrage; after all, when you consider yourself the only rational person in the room, as Mr. Skinner evidently does, it’s a little hard to have someone tell you your thinking is shoddy, adolescent, self-deluded and shallow.
Given that there was a response, however, the arrogant, dismissive, and hostile tone of that response was no surprise at all. As R. R. Reno notes, that sort of tone is becoming de rigeur from atheists these days.
The intemperate, even violent tone in recent criticisms of faith is quite striking. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens: They seem an agitated crew, quick to caricature, quick to denounce, quick to slash away at what they take to be the delusions and conceits of faith. And the phenomenon is not strictly literary. All of us know a friend or acquaintance who has surprised us in a dark moment of anger, making cutting comments about the life of faith.
This isn’t how it used to be; atheists of past generations could be calmly superior, unconcerned in their certainty that religion was dying away. Voltaire, for instance, calmly predicted that Christianity would be extinct within fifty years of his death. Why the change?
I suspect the answer is to be found in part in this comment from historian Paul Johnson: “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.” The calm face of atheism past was founded on its smug certainty that religion was on its way out; that certainty no longer holds, so atheists must actually deal with religion, and as Dr. Reno concludes,
There is something about faith that agitates unbelief. . . . As Byron recognized, modern humanism can easily become cruelly jealous of the modest claims it stakes upon the noble but fragile human condition. To believe in something more—it can so easily seem a betrayal. And because the reality of faith cannot help but ignite a desire for God in others, it is not hard to see why our present-day crusaders against belief take up their rhetorical bludgeons. They fear the contagion of piety.
It seems to me, then, that the sheer persistence of religious faith is eroding the urbane face of atheism, exposing the violent impulse underneath; though Mr. Skinner tried to deny it in his comments, there is a link between atheism and nihilism, because atheism is ultimately a belief in nothing. It isn’t alone in this, either; there are many who consider themselves religious believers who actually, at the core, share that faith in nothing; as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written, the common religion of our culture “is one of very comfortable nihilism.”
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives.
This is, as Dr. Hart notes (in what is truly a brilliant article), the inevitable logical consequence of
an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess . . . a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value.
As Dr. Hart goes on to demonstrate, this is the logical consequence of Christianity, which strips away all other gods, leaving only one choice: Christ, and the paradoxical freedom of the gospel, or nothing, “the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.” As already noted, there are many who would say they worship Christ who in truth worship at the altar of their own freedom of choice; but they at least have another option before them, however imperfectly or confusedly they may understand it. For the atheist, there is no other option than “an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.” Indeed, atheism is a commitment to want no other option; and faith, even as confused as it often is, threatens that commitment. That, our “present-day crusaders against belief” simply cannot tolerate, and so they “take up their rhetorical bludgeons” to destroy “the contagion of piety” once and for all; and when they march, they march under the banner of Nothing to eradicate belief in Something—or rather, Someone.
Atheism is a profitable subject these days, having launched a number of bestsellers—and not only by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Richard Dawkins; the notoriety of their books has created corresponding interest in books by Dr. Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion) and the Rev. Tim Keller (The Reason for God), among others. Indeed, the Rev. Keller’s book currently stands at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list and #56 overall on Amazon.com, which wouldn’t have happened without the conversation Dr. Dawkins et al. began. There is more of a market for serious apologetics in this country than there has been probably in decades, and we owe it all to enemies of the faith.
As I stop to consider that fact, I can’t help thinking that for all the outrage from some quarters directed at folks like Hitchens, Dr. Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dr. Daniel Dennett, the end result of their efforts may well be to boost the church rather than atheism. I’ve protested before the intellectual shoddiness of the “new atheists” in their engagement with theology, philosophy and history; what I hadn’t noticed was how shoddy their atheism itself is. Georgetown’s John F. Haught, writing in The Christian Century, points out that they essentially want to throw out God but keep all the trappings; Marx would have called them incurably bourgeois, and there’s no doubt that they lack either the insight (into what they’re really asking) or the courage (to face that insight) of older atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. Hitchens and his confréres think their critique of religion is original and radical, and are quite impressed with themselves for it (as indeed they seem to be in general); but the truth is, compared to Nietzsche in particular, they’re pikers. Their atheism, far from being the evidence of maturity they appear to believe it to be, is essentially adolescent in character, founded less on a serious engagement with the world than on a visceral rejection of things they don’t like. On an intellectual level, it simply doesn’t measure up to the wealth of Christian apologetics; and if reading God Is Not Great or The God Delusion spurs people to go on to read The Dawkins Delusion or The Reason for God, I can’t help thinking that the church will come out best of it in the end.
It’s one of the interesting (and annoying) things about scientists these days—well, to be precise, about the high-profile ones who write heavily-publicized books attacking Christianity—that they refuse to hear of anyone without a Ph.D. in science writing anything at all bearing in any way on science, and treat anyone who tries with utter contempt, but don’t hesitate to wade into the fields of the humanities, of which they know nothing at all, with the serene assurance that since they’re scientists, they must be experts here, too. Watching the likes of Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg dress up as philosophers, theologians and historians would be hysterically funny were it not so embarrassingly cringe-inducing, at least for those who actually know something about practicing the disciplines of philosophy, theology and history; it’s amateur hour to the nth power, rather as if someone stepped out of America’s Funniest Home Videos and into the finals of American Idol. Watching the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga dismantle Dawkins’ bookThe God Delusion, however, is a very different experience, one in which Dawkins’ work plays the role of carrot to Plantinga’s Cuisinart; for his part, Weinberg’s smug, self-satisfied theory of historical development doesn’t fare much better against Barton Swaim.
I’ll concede, it would be unreasonable to expect these folks to stop trying to refute Christianity; but I would appreciate it if they would at least set aside their disciplinary arrogance and treat the humanities with the same academic respect they demand for the sciences.
Edit: as noted in the comments, including Daniel Dennett with Dawkins and Weinberg was inappropriate in more than one respect; he has therefore been removed. Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. That said, I would still appreciate it if he would “treat the humanities with the same academic respect [he] demands for the sciences,” even if he’s formally a philosopher himself, as he treats even his own ostensible discipline with public disdain.
Interesting meditation over on the First Things website by one of their junior fellows, Ryan Anderson, on the question, “Are Atheists Victims of Discrimination?” He concludes that in some ways, yes, they are, but that much of it is self-inflicted (and much of the rest is in reaction to the public bloviations of folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer); and he ends with this:
Atheist discontent still bears a seed of redemption, though, as it points to the fundamental human longing for community, shared values, and shared lives. That they feel this need goes unfulfilled isn’t surprising, since it’s a large element of what religion is all about. Far from unjustly discriminating, then, believers ought to water that seed by charity and prayers so that its seedling might one day be grafted onto the one true Vine.
