Tag: church

Atheists v. Evidence

ImageIn recent posts on arguments for theism, I’ve been both fascinated and befuddled by responses from atheist critics.  The particular approach that I’ve taken is to show that rational and moral adults act as though God exists even while they may ironically deny his existence.  I have yet to receive any meaningful rejoinders.  But there is one response that I have received consistently, which is, in so many words, “You haven’t offered any evidence for God.”

Now what’s befuddling about this is that, in fact, I have.  The moral argument, for instance, is actually deductive evidence for the existence of God.  The argument goes:

If there is no God, objective moral values don’t exist.

Objective moral values do exist.

Therefore God exists.

What I’ve said is that everyone, including atheists, generally subscribe to the first premise, and all but the mentally ill subscribe to the second.  In fact, atheists usually complain about God on the grounds of moral principles that they believe hold objectively to all people at all times, including God.  So in fact, I hardly need to prove the existence of God to an atheist – everyone already lives as though God is there.

What’s befuddling is how many atheists over-confidently assert that I haven’t offered any evidence.  What they mean is “empirical evidence,” or evidence that can be tested by the senses.  What I’ve offered is rational or philosophical evidence.  But what I’ve offered actually does qualify as evidence.  Insisting on empirical evidence is in fact self-refuting, because there is no empirical evidence to prove that things can only be believed on the basis of empirical evidence.  This was the now well-documented failure of verificationism and logical positivism, which have lost their followership.

So I believe I’ve offered a solid if not irrefutable proof of the existence of God.  The onus is on the atheist to demonstrate how on earth he could come up with a moral critique of God on the basis of a material world that generates no objective moral values.

The Atheist Who Loved God

In chapter 6 of The God Delusion, angry atheist and former scientist Richard Dawkins claims to explain where morality comes from for the atheist as a rebuttal to the charge that atheists cannot be moral.  What he produces is a bizarre intertwining of straw men and other fallacies.  What Dawkins flirts with, and fails to address, is the actual moral argument for the existence of God.

The moral argument goes simply:

Without God, objective moral values do not exist.

Objective moral values do exist.

Therefore, God exists.

But Dawkins fails to address the real moral argument for God’s existence.  First I’ll summarize chapter 6, then I’ll review whether or not the moral argument for God’s existence withstands Dawkins’ critique.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 6 OF THE GOD DELUSION

Dawkins begins the chapter by battling people who write hateful comments on atheistic websites.  This is the worst kind of straw man argument.  Instead of taking on any serious kind of theism or religious behavior, he cites inflammatory examples of people who obviously don’t hold to Jesus’ teachings while they attack atheists.  It’s important to note that what Dawkins is doing here is misleading.  It is not a scholarly engagement with meaningful ideas.  It’s no more meaningful than entering into a debate with a middle schooler in a comment thread on YouTube.  This goes on for 5 pages.

Dawkins then proceeds to the argument that morality could develop through evolution.  The “selfish gene,” the gene that survives for generations, does best by programming the organism that carries it to survive.  In some contexts, survival is best promoted by kin altruism, where a society of beings protect one another.  Likewise, reciprocity, in which genes program organisms to return favors for favors, is a beneficial trait for survival.  Or again, generosity may be assumed to allow certain members of a species to show dominance over others, proving that he is the one who is better off and can give more, which is likewise beneficial.  As a consequence of these evolutionary possibilities, morality can exist without God.

Yet when these natural instincts lead us to accidentally care for kin that are not genetically related to us, they are “misfirings.” Dawkins himself even points out that adoption is a human form of genes misfiring, though he claims that he doesn’t mean this to be pejorative.  Yet caring for someone who is in pain but who is not genetically related to us is an example of these “blessed, precious mistakes.”

Here Dawkins starts to betray himself.  He calls compassion and generosity “noble,” but clearly the word is meaningless.

Then it gets worse.  He cites another researcher who claims that morality has a “universal grammar” because it is hardwired into our brains through this evolutionary process.  In other words, we share the same biology, and as a result we all have similar moral inclinations.  Dawkins is here attempting to have the cake of objective moral beliefs and eat it too by saying there is nothing fundamentally binding about them.  They too must be “misfirings,” though Dawkins fails to point this out.  He still wants them to be “noble,” though they are clearly nothing more than accidents.  He uses several hypothetical examples to show that we can have moral feelings that aren’t grounded in clear principles.

Finally he gets to the real moral argument, and totally biffs it.  Again, as he is fond of straw men, he poses the question in such a way that the adherent is portrayed as being moral only to earn rewards from God.  Dawkins then mocks this as petty.  He dodges entirely the fact that moral objectivity is grounded in God’s design for humanity, rather than in simple rewards.  Moral objectivity derives from our beginning, not our end, our creation, not our judgment.

He flubs again when he cites an example of how a near riot broke out when the Montreal police went on strike.  “the majority of Montreal presumably believed in God,” Dawkins asserts.  “Why didn’t the fear of God restrain them…?  This is positively ridiculous.  Canada has for decades been a post-Christian culture, and the claim that a majority of Montreal believed in God is ridiculous.  Furthermore, the bank robberies and looting that took place can hardly be attributed to the majority of Montreal.  Dawkins completely misrepresents this event to prove his own convoluted conclusions.  He does the same thing again when he quotes a study that says crime is higher in states where religiosity is higher.  This is the fallacy of composition – the claim that something that is true of the whole must be true of the parts.  A larger religious population in a state does not imply that all people within the state are religious, nor that the events, good or bad, that happen within that state are a direct result of whomever is the majority of the population.  Here, Dawkins’ ignorance is laughable.  It’s embarrassing to see a supposed scholar come out with something that would have failed him on a freshman philosophy exam.

Perhaps Dawkins realizes that he is losing ground here, because he starts to waiver.  “Even if it were true that we need God to be moral….” Then a page later, “it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion.”

So then he leaps to the other side, “Fortunately, however, morals do not have to be absolute.”

And having now admitted that, Dawkins throws a rod.  He spends the next several paragraphs deriding patriotism for leading to war.  Then he just trails off into criticizing the formation of religious holy books.

THE MORAL ARGUMENT

Let’s see how the moral argument survived.

Premise 1:  Without God, objective moral values do not exist.  Dawkins supports this premise.  He clearly admits that moral inclinations are misfirings aimed at personal survival.  In A River Out of Eden, Dawkins puts it simply: “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.  We are machines for propagating DNA.”

Premise 2: Objective moral values do exist.  Well strangely, Dawkins supports this claim too.  Nobility is objectively good.  He believes that crime is objectively wrong and chides religious states for having too much of it.  He believes the bloodshed and war that result from patriotism are wrong, and ironically, he believes that consequentialist morality is objectively better than absolutist morality, a claim which he makes absolutely!

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His criticisms of God elsewhere in the book come from his belief that the actions of God in the Bible are objectively wrong.  So while I don’t know that Dawkins would own up to it, all of his seething rhetoric is filled with the belief in objective moral principles that he believes should apply to everyone.

If the two premises are true, the conclusion is logically unavoidable.  God exists.  Binding objective moral values cannot exist in a simply material world.  They must come from design and purpose, and specifically, from a purposeful designer.

So tonight I give thanks for Richard Dawkins, the atheist who proved the existence of God.

Everyone Believes

One of the things that fascinates me about modern defenders of the Christian faith is how casually they begin in the wrong place.  They start with the assumption that their listeners are objective and analytical and can be persuaded by facts.  I doubt this is true.  Then they assume their role is one of defense attorney who presents a reliable case sufficient to free God from the atheist’s accusations.  I know this isn’t true.

The Bible starts in a completely different place, saying we are “without excuse” for not believing (Romans 1:20).  The atheist needs a defense attorney.

And what’s most surprising about this to me is that the guy who says he doesn’t believe in God has already shown that he depends upon a world in which God does exist in three ways.

First, when one says, “God does not exist,” that person is assuming that the purpose of communication is to tell the truth.  They assume that they are somehow morally obligated to try to reflect what they think accurately, and they assume the person to whom they are speaking is doing the same.  But this moral undergirding is suspicious.  If God doesn’t exist, morality is at best a mistaken byproduct of blind evolution.  So long as survival of the fittest is the only goal, there’s really no objective moral obligation.  I can tell the truth if I want and not if I don’t.  But when we say, “God does not exist,” we’re assuming that communication in general rests on a real obligation to tell the truth, which is a moral claim.  It’s just strange to me that we act as though objective morals should exist, when a universe without God doesn’t require objective morality.

Second, when you say, “God does not exist,” you are assuming that the thoughts in your head accurately reflect the world around you.  You really think that in the universe, there is not a God, and that your perception of that world is accurate.  But there’s a problem.  In a godless universe, everything is simply matter.  Everything is made up of colliding particles.  Our brains in our heads are just a collection of particles that have come to function in certain ways.  But there’s nothing objective that obligates the particles in our heads to give us an accurate picture of the real world (this is sort of the red pill here).  It’s the same as the first point in a way – nothing objectively obligates brains to “tell the truth,” or to work in a way that is objectively accurate.  Yet when someone says, “God does not exist,” there is a fundamental assumption that brains and sensory organs must work accurately.  Descartes, Berkeley, and company knew that they had to ground their philosophies in the assumed existence of God before they could begin talking about what they did and didn’t know about the world.  But the assumption that our senses are right isn’t necessary in a godless material universe.

Third, when you say “God does not exist,” you are trusting that communication actually works.  You are trusting that the ideas in one person’s head can be translated into language, perceived consistently, and received accurately.  Deconstructionists like Foucault would say that this misrepresents they way language actually works, as truths are simply the falsehoods that have been hardened by the long baking process of history.  Derrida would observe that the place where we assume big ideas are connected to particular expressions of those ideas (where “forms” are stamped into “particulars”) is a lot more fuzzy than we assume when we talk to each other.  Again, a material universe with no guiding conscience would not necessitate that words  have meaning or that language is effective.  These things require something more purposeful than the blind movements of particles.

So when someone says “I don’t believe in God,” they are trusting that we are bound by the objective moral obligation to tell the truth, that our brains are bound to purposefully reveal accurate information, and that communication can be infused with objective meaning, none of which should necessarily exist in a godless universe.  That person is acting like God is there at exactly the moment she says he isn’t.

So ironically, the person who says “God does not exist” is actually proving that God does.

Explore this and other curiosities in my book Hardwired: Finding the God You Already Know, available this September from Abingdon Press.

My Hope for the Pope

ImageThe new Pope may not be any different than the old pope, or the pope before that one.  But if you want to consider the signs, there are some fascinating and promising potentials here.  Two things of note, both firsts.

He’s a Jesuit.  Jesuits are known for three things: founding universities, evangelizing non-Chrisitians, and fighting with corrupt authorities that need to be reformed (specifically, with Rome).  There has never been a Jesuit Pope before.

Secondly, he chose the name Francis.  This is a touch ironic, because he’s not Franciscan.  And no pope in the over 800 years since Francis lived has chosen that name.  Maybe because it’s hard to sit on the Vatican’s estimated over $10 billion and bear the name of the guy who chose poverty.  But it’s a promising choice.  It’s a second sign of the possibility of reform.  He may mean to signal that he’s going in with the intention of cleaning up some long-standing messes, and maybe particularly the church’s ambiguous relationship with Jesus’ awfully clear teachings about money.  And if the RCC has a chance of impacting the next generation, it will be through those who value truth and evangelism more than money.

We’ll see.

The Future Church

The Christian movement was founded around an empty tomb, and now everywhere you look there are churches like empty tombs dotting the American landscape.  They are buildings that were once great centers of worship that are now simply museums.  Any pastor who ignores this will be a curator one day himself.  But there are a few of us who won’t put up with that trajectory.

If the Church in America is going to survive into the next generation, it’s going to have to be a few things that it isn’t and a few things that it doesn’t want to be.  To survive, the Church is going to have to be pushy, stubborn, crass, hyper, and bloody.

Pushy – We’ve been weaned on the message that Christians are judgmental and overbearing.  Youth pastors in the 80’s were telling their students, “Just try to be normal and try to be a good friend.” The results of witness-by-assimilation have not been stellar.  In the next generation, Christians are going to have to be clear, articulate, and persistent about their proclamation of the gospel.  A secular culture won’t pick it up by osmosis.  A friend of mine tried hard to be a good witness at his workplace through kindness and exemplary living.  Finally someone asked him, “You seem different.  Are you a vegetarian?” The coming Church is going to have to be rigorously evangelistic if it intends to keep its doors open.

Stubborn – I’ve been told over and over again that people don’t like how narrow-minded Christians are.  Nonsense.  The only movements which have proven to have staying power in world history are those which are stubbornly dogmatic.  Clarity, not complexity, propagates a movement.  The next generation of Christians living in a secular culture are actually going to have to know what the Bible says and why they won’t compromise it.

Crass – For some time now, Millennials have been branded as valuing authenticity more so than previous generations.  A friend of mine, who is a Boomer-at-heart born in the X Generation, says that no generation has ever valued inauthenticity.  But the opposite of authenticity isn’t inauthenticity, it’s performance, and there are lots of churches that are into performance.  The next generations of Christians will not be able to mount elevated pulpits to distribute biblical truth from the perspective of an unaffected, objective third-party.  The preacher is going to have to rise from the pews (which will be theater chairs) and do less “Thus sayeth the Lord!” and more “…and he’s saying it to me too, and we’re going to have to figure out how to obey this together.” And that’s going to make for some pretty raw preaching, in which congregations actually stop committing the docetic heresy when it comes to their pastors.

Hyper – The rising generation is not only increasingly secular, it is also increasingly entitled.  It will spend a lot of time pouting about the fact that no one handed it a job when it finished its degree.  In that era, the Church is going to have to return to the passion of a God-ordained work ethic in which productivity is valued and providing for a family is honored.  Christians are actually going to have to work hard to have a church, rather than resting on a Christianized culture which will just hand it to them on Sunday mornings.

Bloody – There are going to be a few martyrs in the next generation of American Christendom.  It won’t be so dramatic as a crucifixion.  It will be much more bureaucratic.  They will be stretched across unfriendly laws which make it harder to carry out a belief system which actually shapes the world instead of just comforting the psyche.  They will be sued into submission while liberality shrugs.

The Church in America is about to go through a reworking.  I don’t fear that it will erode quite the way it has in Europe and Canada, because American evangelicalism got such a firm hold here where it did not elsewhere in the West.  And a lot of churches, instead of closing, will just hand their keys over to the immigrant population which had previously been renting.  Through either means, the Church in America so much as it remains viable will be a more clear, wiry, hungry animal than it was in the last era.

Cultural Scripts

The reason this debate is at the center of culture is because Christians have not acted like Jesus.  Don’t try to demonize gays and lesbians on this.  If Christians had shown a shred of decency (or even of humanity) over this issue over two thousand years, they might not be suffering the backlash that they are just beginning to suffer.  That’s because Christians have addressed this issue with pronouncements and position papers rather than love.  It never crossed the minds of the bulk of Christians to identify with the woman caught in adultery and facing death by bludgeoning.  We just stood back and said, “The law says no.”

Picture a fifteen year old boy.  He’s lost in a world of confusion as he tries to establish his identity, find friends, individuate from his parents, dream of the future, and fall in love.  He is a mess of ego and hormones.  No one who has been fifteen would ever do it again.

Now imagine that he finds himself attracted to other boys, with whom he identifies.  Girls just don’t hold the same interest.  But between the things he hears from the bullies on the playground and the things he hears from the bullies in Sunday School, he kind of knows that this is off script.  So he keeps it to himself.  It starts to make him nervous, because he wants to be normal.  He wants to be accepted.  He starts to pray that his desires would change or go away.  But they don’t.  He dabbles in gay pornography and then feels ashamed of himself.  He still doesn’t tell anyone.  He doubts himself.  He doubts prayer.  He doubts God.  He doubts life.

Now he is presented with two cultural scripts.  A cultural script is sort of a storyline for your life.  They’re all around us.  It tells us how you are to generally behave if you want to fit into any one particular group, culture, or relationship.  There’s a brutish, truck-driving, military man script.  There’s a demure, responsible housewife script.  There’s a driven, type-A, businessman script.  This fifteen year old is offered two scripts.

One is a growing culture of love and acceptance.  It teaches that he should be free to develop into his full potential as a responsible, thoughtful adult.  It teaches that he should be able to express his opinions without persecution, silence, and shame.  It allows him to fall in love and to seek companionship.

The second script tells him that he is broken.  It says so with a sense of sympathy.  The solution to the brokenness is suppress his desires and manage his behavior.  This can be done with a lot of work, prayer, and support.  However, by and large, there are not people around who know how to support him.  He’s referred to a specialized group that has quiet meetings in the back room of a church.  There’s not a sense that he is supposed to talk about it.  He’s ok, but questionable.  To be fair, his closest friends know his deepest secrets and love him.  They walk with him.  It’s only because of them that he doesn’t feel completely alone.

The first script is being offered by the gay community.  The second script is being offered by the Christian Church.  One is confident, growing, and seems to be arising out of persecution with force and popular appeal.  The other still seems to be limping along without a clear message.  Which one is this fifteen year old likely to take?  Which one would you take?  Which one sounds more like Jesus?

Dear Christian Church – as you suffer the consequences of the mess you’ve made, pray that the secular culture around you does a better job following Jesus’ teaching to love your neighbor than you have.

In my next post on the subject, I’d like to talk about what the Bible does and doesn’t say.

An Apology for Bullying

I remember being bullied.  It happened a few times in my childhood, and in particular in middle school.  Perhaps it didn’t happen as many times as I think it did, but maybe the few that I can remember were so severe that they overshadowed a lot of those years.

There was an experience I remember for which I still feel guilty.  It happened at that moment at which you see the bullying shift in the direction of someone else, and you feel safe or relieved because it isn’t you this time.  Some bullying happens when the person who is simply glad not to be the victim on this go around joins in the taunting.  I joined in bullying someone else, and I need to say I’m sorry.

There was someone I helped to pick on, because it meant the blame wasn’t on me.  Someone specific.  She didn’t deserve it.  She had faults, which everyone could see, things that she did to make herself awkward and inappropriate.  But she didn’t deserve what we said about her.  Who knows what was going on behind the scenes to make her the mess that she was, but we shouldn’t have made it worse by taunting her.  And I need to apologize.

She is the Church.  And there have been countless times that I have stood in front of a crowd and derided what I called “institutional religion,” because I knew other people would cheer me for saying it.  I bullied her, because I knew for a moment it would put me in the “in” crowd, that no one would make fun of me for being a priest while I was busy picking on the Church.  I even thought it would make people pay attention to what I had to say, because I was picking on someone that they liked to pick on.

She took the ridicule silently.  She stood there like a would-be King in the hands of sadistic Roman centurions on Good Friday.  She kept up her silent work of reforming character, inspiring the broken, converting the lost, and feeding the poor, while I made fun of her, while I capitalized on her failures and easy vulnerabilities.

It’s taken me half my life to actually realize what she is up to, what she means to accomplish.  If there is yet to be redemption in American society, if we are to find value, if we are to dig through the sludge of materialism and vanity to find a bedrock of meaning and humility, it’s going to come through the work of the Church.  I’m so sorry for picking on something which, I now believe, in the mind of God, is such a beautiful dream of what we might be.  Perhaps she has endured the way I have treated her specifically because she realized what she could make of me.  Like He did.

Denominations

I’m persistently stunned by my colleagues’ inability to talk openly about the death of Protestant denominations in America.  Denominations are a dimly glowing wick around which the fingers of time are closing, but you would guess that they think it’s the Olympic torch from the way they refuse to talk.  Note that I do not find resistance in the form of alternative visions for the future of denominations, only resistance to open communication.  I feel like financial giving to the denomination is a kind of overpriced life support because half the family is not ready to admit that the patient is gone.

So in general, when I talk about the decline of the denomination, I find myself trying to soften the blow by following up my observations with the disarming phrase, “I’m just saying.”

Rev. Dr. Dan Chun announced at the 2008 General Assembly that the PC(USA) had been losing members for 42 years and would cease to exist in 40 more.  He’s being conservative, assuming a steady decline of 50,000 per year.  However, to be honest, we lose more each year than the year before.  I’m just saying.  We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to talk about it.  I’m pretty sure that talking about death doesn’t bring it on.

We would be wise to watch the closing years of the United Church of Christ.  They are half the size of my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and dropping at about the same rate.  There will be ways that the UCC turns off the lights gracefully and not so gracefully, and we should take it as a case study for preparing for our own final years.

But is this the worst of all things?  Denominations are a temporary expression of an eternal reality.  It’s the eternal reality that counts, not the temporary expression.  So long as churches can faithfully witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, what’s the harm in changing form?  What’s wrong with molting?  For my colleagues who are too afraid to talk about death, would you be more open if we just pretend like Christianity is shedding its skin?

In any case, there are those for whom 40 years is more than a lifetime away, and they will go to their own rest peacefully before the denomination.  So they don’t feel inclined to talk about it.  There are those who are nervous about their pensions, so they don’t feel inclined to talk about it.  Women in ministry have found life-giving affirmation within precious few denominations, ours being one of them, so the conversation brings them sadness and anxiety.  Those whose professions are system dependent on a denomination are in trouble, so they won’t talk about it.  But for the army of reasons, none of them have the power to change the coming reality.

So let’s take a hearty gulp from the honesty stein.  Denominations are on the way out; Jesus is not.