Synopsis

Scientific materialists are not sure what to make of religion. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues that religious faith is a mind virus that has parasitized brains selected for gullibility. Unfortunately, Dawkins’s evolutionary psychology is a universal acid. Were it true, it would undermine the credibility not only of religion, but also of science itself, including evolutionary psychology. Dawkins’s special pleading for science-science is immune from skepticism, because it is tested against reality-is not persuasive, because the scientific method relies on nonscientific principles that cannot themselves be tested. Dawkins fails to engage effectively the question of truth, but, presuming that faith is irrational, he offers an implausible reductionist explanation of it.

In their recent book, How God Changes Your Brain, neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman appear at first to be friendlier toward religion, arguing that thinking about God is good for the brain, our health, and our relationships. But while the techniques of meditation that they study do provide more evidence of the power of the mind over the body, they do not essentially involve faith or support any particular religion. And Newberg and Waldman also promote a spiritual indifferentism and pragmatism antithetical to any traditional religion, including orthodox Christianity.

Unlike Joel Osteen, who can offer only quasi-religious pop psychology, neuroscience has all the authority and prestige of a hard empirical science. This appeals directly to the dominant creed of scientism, which assumes that materialistic science alone is capable of producing knowledge. Yet among scientific materialists, there is significant disagreement about what to make of belief in God. For some, like Richard Dawkins, a neuroscientific account based on Darwinian principles allows us to explain away faith as a harmful delusion.¹ Others, like Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, appear friendlier to religion. These scientists provide experimental evidence that visualizing and thinking about God can be good for subjects’ brains, their mental health, and their relationships.² But is this sort of account really helpful to the cause of Christian apologetics? In what follows, I will first respond to Dawkins’s charge that God is a delusion, showing that his arguments are self-destructive and fallacious. Then, I will consider whether the “God is good for you” approach of Newberg and Waldman is really an improvement.

THE GOD DELUSION

According to Richard Dawkins, “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip-side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses….The truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad.”³

In general, Dawkins argues, religion can be explained “as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions,”⁴ perhaps “a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love,”⁵ and is a useful form of self-deception because it enables communities to cooperate under some shared goals and guidelines, thus promoting survival.

One major problem for Dawkins’s argument is that he attempts to apply a universal acid only selectively: by its nature, a truly universal acid will eat up everything, including the person applying it. If it is true that our brains are configured by evolution to slavishly trust our elders, and that we have no way of distinguishing good advice from bad, then this would have to include the advice of scientists, who most certainly function as the elders of modern technological societies saturated with scientism. In other words, if Dawkins’s account of our brains is correct, then we can have no good reason to believe it, since we are in no position to distinguish this truth from error.

The same point applies to Dawkins’s suggestion that religion be understood as a “mind-virus,” that is, a collection of “memes.” According to Dawkins, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body…so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via…imitation.”⁶

However, as Alister McGrath has pointed out, “If all ideas are memes or the effects of memes, Dawkins is left in the decidedly uncomfortable position of having to accept that his own ideas must be recognized as the effects of memes. Scientific ideas would then become yet another example of memes replicating within the human mind.”⁷

As one might expect, Dawkins has attempted to evade this conclusion by claiming that scientific ideas are a special exception to the rule, because of the way they are tested against reality. But this response is epistemologically naïve, because it forgets that the scientific method depends on nonempirical principles (such as those of deductive, inductive, and abductive logic), and if our minds are as unreliable as he claims, we can have no good reason to trust these principles. Dawkins, blissfully unaware that he is propounding not science, but materialist philosophy, has blundered into the logical minefield exposed by Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga showed that if evolutionary naturalism were true, then it would make our minds too unreliable to trust anything, including evolutionary naturalism.⁸

What makes matters worse is that evolutionary psychologists have conceded this point without apparently realizing it. For example, Steven Pinker admits that on his view, “our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth.”⁹ And Lewis Wolpert claims that “our brains contain a belief generating machine, an engine that can produce beliefs with little relation to what is actually true.”¹⁰ With no sense of irony, Wolpert later claims that “science provides by far the most reliable method for determining whether one’s beliefs are valid.”¹¹ The problem, of course, is that if our belief-forming mechanism favors useful but largely false beliefs, this will also include our scientific beliefs. Even if natural selection could somehow hone beliefs relevant to our everyday survival so that they were mostly true, this still would not be good grounds to trust recent scientific theories, because they played no role in the survival of our ancestors. As Pinker says, “Our ancestors encountered certain problems for hundreds of thousands or millions of years-recognizing objects, making tools, learning the local language, finding a mate, predicting an animal’s movement, finding their way-and encountered certain other problems never-putting a man on the moon… proving Fermat’s last theorem.”¹²

Surviving lions and swamps has nothing to do with the developments of quantum mechanics-or of evolutionary psychology itself. Evolutionary psychology implies that our minds are too unreliable to accept any scientific theory, including evolutionary psychology. Thus Dawkins fails to show that scientific materialism is immune from the corrosive acid he unleashes on religion, leaving his preference for the former a matter of arbitrary intellectual imperialism. McGrath perceptively observes: “Anyone familiar with intellectual history will spot the pattern immediately. Everyone’s dogma is wrong except mine. My ideas are exempt from the general patterns I identify for other ideas, which allows me to explain them away, leaving my own to dominate the field.”¹³

There is a second and purely logical flaw in debunking accounts of religious (or moral) ideas, which was exposed long ago by C. S. Lewis in his essay, “Bulverism.” As Lewis notices, merely to offer an account that might “explain away” why someone has a belief simply bypasses the question of whether the content of the belief is true. This question requires us to examine the evidence for and against the beliefs themselves, evidence that exists outside of people’s minds and brains. So before the skeptic can claim that religious ideas derive from a tainted source, he must first show that they have no supporting evidence, or provide more compelling evidence against them.

“In other words, you must first show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.”¹⁴

Upon reflection, no one would take seriously the idea that applied mathematics is false because modern brain-scanning techniques have shown what is really going on in the brain when the mathematician solves differential equations. It is therefore only because Dawkins has assumed that religious claims are noncognitive sentiments unsupported by evidence that he spends so little effort looking into the matter.

When we consider the time Dawkins does devote to the truth question-evaluating arguments for the existence of God and the reliability of the New Testament documents-we find that he simply has not done his homework. Thus, Alvin Plantinga concludes, “You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.”¹⁵

Michael Ruse, an agnostic Darwinian philosopher, concurs: “Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science). A major part of the book involves ripping into the chief arguments for the existence of God. I confess that it is the first time in my life that I have felt sorry for the ontological argument.”¹⁶

When it comes to the New Testament, Dawkins considers only the views of skeptical Bible scholars, ignoring mountains of first-rate work by such leading apologists as Craig Blomberg, William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, John Warwick Montgomery, and N. T. Wright. A good scholar must refute the strongest case for the view that he opposes, not merely cite the chorus of those in his own choir.

The same general moral applies to a variety of other debunking strategies, such as the attempt to explain away religious experiences as a defect in the temporal lobes, the result of a “God gene” or of a misfiring “God spot” in the brain.¹⁷ All of them assume without argument that no religion is grounded in evidence. Yet the central Christian claims are about Christ’s saving work in history, and therefore can be investigated using secular, empirical methods.

THE GOD PLACEBO

After seeing one’s religious beliefs dismissed out of hand, it is initially comforting to read that some neuroscientists think that religion might have a more positive role. The title of Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman’s 2009 book seems encouraging: How God Changes Your Brain. But it turns out to be yet another contribution to the cottage industry of books that appear to be about God, but really are not.¹⁸ The authors admit early on that “neuroscience cannot tell you if God does or does not exist.” Instead, at most they are studying mental representations of God, “as an image, feeling or thought,” and they are not really interested in the question of truth, because they follow the same line of thought as other evolutionary psychologists, according to whom “most of the human brain does not even worry if the things we see are actually real. Instead, it only needs to know if they are useful for survival.”¹⁹ As a result, the authors completely bypass the questions of which religion’s portrait of God is closest to the truth, and instead focus on the pragmatic benefits of various spiritual ideas and feelings for people’s health.

When we look at the actual techniques of meditation presented in Newberg and Waldman’s book, it is not clear that even a vague, unitarian spirituality plays a role. The authors cite yoga, which, with its meditation and focused breathing, helps “improve memory and cognition” and “counters the effects of depression.”²⁰ But the techniques were tested on a construction worker-”Gus”-with no spiritual focus: “Our study shows that meditation can be separated from its religious roots and still remain a valuable tool for cognitive enhancement.”²¹ Again, they tell us that they “discovered that you could take God out of the ritual and still influence the brain.”²² And in fact, all of the techniques presented in the book can be practiced by secularists: “For the purpose of reaching the broadest audience, we have removed the religious inferences.”²³

Well, if God, religion, and spirituality play no essential role in any of these exercises, the logical conclusion is that the source of their efficacy lies elsewhere. The authors admit that driving Gus’s four-step plan to improve memory is “expectation,” which “is one of the underlying principles of optimism,” which “also governs the…’placebo effect.’”²⁴ So a perfectly reasonable conclusion, having nothing to do with spirituality, is that the human mind can exert a downward causal influence on the brain, precisely the conclusion of neuroscientists Jeff Schwartz²⁵ and Mario Beauregard.²⁶ Alas, Newberg and Waldman, who are thoroughly wedded to the scientific materialism conventional in their discipline, do not seriously pursue this line, probably because they do not really accept that the mind has any real causal power over and above that of the brain. They content themselves with saying that the power of expectation “is simply the brain doing what millions of years of evolution have led it to do,”²⁷ which confirms their materialist orthodoxy, but provides no explanation whatsoever. In my opinion, the real value of the book (more evidence that materialism is false because the mind has independent causal power²⁸) is buried by a smokescreen of talk about spirituality, which the authors admit is irrelevant to their actual results.

Along the way the authors make numerous, unrecognized assumptions that beg important questions. For example, they assert that “the benefits gleaned from prayer and meditation may have less to do with a specific theology than with the ritual techniques of breathing, staying relaxed, and focusing one’s attention on a concept that evokes comfort, compassion, or a spiritual sense of peace.”²⁹ But the benefits the authors are studying are health benefits, and most people are not praying for or meditating about their own health! For example, if a prayer is for someone else’s health and the prayer is granted, the important results are not in the brain of the person praying. More importantly, Christian believers are concerned with praying to the true God and conforming their will to His will: the whole pragmatic approach of the book suggests erroneously that the only reason to believe in God is for the benefits He may bring us, as if God is a kind of cosmic vending machine. This hardly matches Christ’s prayer to the Father in Gethsemane, “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36 NIV).

The underlying problem is that like Daniel Dennett,³⁰ Newberg and Waldman seek to study religion as a natural phenomenon, which leads them to make numerous category mistakes. Thus they have headings such as, “What part of the brain makes God real?” and “The chemical nature of God,”³¹ which reduce God to something like a secretion of our own brains. If God is real, and He made us, the language is quite absurd. If the topic had been scientific beliefs, would the authors have used the headings, “What part of the brain makes laws of physics real?” or “The chemical nature of physical laws”? They do, of course, note that some kinds of drugs (like psilocybin) make people more open to certain “feelings of unity, sacredness, intuitive knowledge, and ineffability,”³² but provide no criteria for distinguishing illusions from veridical experiences, and appear naively to assume that such spiritual experiences are necessarily positive, having no definite doctrine by which to test the spirits to see if they are of God (1 John 4). The fact that the authors find it unimportant to know any serious theology does not help.

Newberg and Waldman assume that everything real is best understood from the outside, studied as a specimen, but as C. S. Lewis argued, this discounts the possibility that there are some things best understood only from the inside. Just like a pain, a religious experience can be correlated with a neural event, but impersonal knowledge of this event does not tell us what it is like to have that experience. “It is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is.”³³

Further, Lewis pointed out, it must be a fallacy to suppose that all that is really going on in these experiences is the neural events, for then, “what about the cerebral physiologist’s own thought at that moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist’s skull. Where is the rot to end?”³⁴

In fact, neuroscientists themselves continue to rely on subjective conscious states, both for their subjects’ reports and in their own observations. The renowned neuroscientist Benjamin Libet confirmed this: “The whole foundation of my experimental studies of the physiology of conscious experience…was that externally observable and manipulable brain processes and the related reportable subjective introspective experiences must be studied simultaneously, as independent categories, to understand their relationship.”³⁵

As for the question of whether an experience is an illusion or a genuine insight into reality, this can only be investigated by examining the world outside of people’s brains. No one would take seriously the idea that a formula of applied mathematics should not be used to build bridges because we now know what is going on in the engineer’s brain when he thinks of the formula. We would test the formula against objective reality. Newberg and Waldman never consider the idea that a religious claim could be tested against the objective facts of history, yet this is precisely what the Christian claim allows and even demands. As Paul tells us, if Christ was not raised as a matter of genuine, historical fact, then our faith is futile (1 Cor. 15: 17), and in defending the resurrection, Paul appeals to the public evidence reported by hundreds of living witnesses (1 Cor. 15: 3-8).

Despite their professed scientific neutrality, the authors in fact share a large collection of nonscientific prejudices about which religions are most “advanced.” They think that religions that are maximally inclusive, tolerant, and nonjudgmental are clearly superior. In one of their surveys, they were disappointed to discover that only thirty percent of respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Are other religions correct, even when they differ from my own?”³⁶ The authors have simply assumed that religion is a matter of subjective feeling with any confessional statements serving only as mantras, making their cognitive content irrelevant. Anyone who understands specific religions immediately sees the problem with accepting all religions as true-they make mutually exclusive claims about who or what God is and about how humans can be saved. For example, Christians claim God is triune, that God became man in Christ through whom alone we can be saved (John 14:6; Acts 4:12), but Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation (and the crucifixion and resurrection) of Christ, and deny that we need Christ to be saved. It is not intolerance, but simple logic that leads the faithful Christian to think that Islam is not correct.

Further, the more inclusive, pluralist religion that Newberg and Waldman prefer is not really tolerant at all.³⁷ For it logically implies that all of the specific religions that make definitive claims about the nature of God and salvation are false. It is also clear that the authors have begged the question against any religion claiming that God has specially revealed Himself through scriptures, by assuming that all religious experiences are “generated” by the brain and that this explains “the great diversity of religious ideas and theologies.”³⁸ What if God revealed Himself by acting in ordinary history, and inspired authors to record what happened, as Christians claim? Then these ideas were not ultimately “generated by the brain” but derive from historical fact. The same presumption makes Newberg and Waldman talk of “the future of God,”³⁹ as if it were a matter of our constructing the most socially and genetically useful concept of God. Perhaps we should have a referendum and find out which god most people would like? Better yet, a “god of the month” club might be popular-for a while. Evidently, the authors can only conceive of theology from below: human attempts to reach up to the divine, which inevitably means making a false god in our image. The idea that we should humbly conform ourselves to the living and true God in whose image we are made is never considered.

While Newberg and Waldman see a lowest common denominator religion as a panacea, it is really only what Christian Smith and Melissa Denton have identified as “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a nondoctrinal spiritual pragmatism, devoted to being good and feeling good, with a distant god who is there if needed, but not involved in most of life. Such a religion provides us with no clear portrait of whom we should worship, and its god does nothing to solve our deepest problems-our moral failures and our mortality. As Lewis observed, “A minimal religion…has no power to touch any of the deepest chords in our nature….There is…nothing that can convince, convert or (in the higher sense) console; nothing, therefore, which can restore vitality to our civilization. It is not costly enough. It can never be a controller or even a rival to our natural sloth and greed. A flag, a song, an old school tie, is stronger than it; much more, the pagan religions.”⁴⁰

Ironically, Smith and Denton observe that the followers of this creed still find their life in particular places of worship with specific teachings. The minimal theism of moralistic therapeutic deism “appears to operate as a parasitic faith….This religion generally does not and cannot stand on its own, so its adherents must”-despite obvious contradictions-”be Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Jewish Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Mormon Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, and even nonreligious Moralistic Therapeutic Deists.”⁴¹

FAIR WARNING

A clear enemy is easier to defend against than a false friend. Those like Dawkins who attempt to explain faith away are obviously hostile. But when scientists proclaim themselves friendly to poorly defined notions of spirituality and religion, there is a danger that well-meaning Christians will uncritically embrace a Trojan horse. Although they claim to provide a neutral scientific account of religious experience and practice, Newberg and Waldman advocate a nebulous indifferentism that is flatly incompatible with Christian faith. It would be wise to beware of neuroscientists bearing gifts.

Angus Menuge, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin.

NOTES

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

2 Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).

3 Dawkins, 176.

4 Ibid., 177.

5 Ibid., 185.

6 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192.

7 Alister McGrath, Dawkins’s God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 124.

8 Alvin Plantinga’s argument traces to C. S. Lewis’s argument in chapter 3 of his Miracles. Plantinga first stated the argument in “Is Naturalism Irrational?” chapter 12 of his Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). A later version of the same argument, including a technical correction and some helpful simplifications is presented in Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). More recently, Plantinga has responded at length to his critics in “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts” in James Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). For a defense of Plantinga’s and Lewis’s argument, see my “Beyond Skinnerian Creatures: A Defense of the Lewis/Plantinga Critique of Evolutionary Naturalism,” Philosophia Christi 5, 1 (2003): 143-65.

9 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 305.

10 Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 140.

11 Ibid., 216.

12 Pinker, 304.

13 McGrath, 124.

14 “Bulverism,” in Walter Hooper, ed., God in the Dock, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 273.

15 Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion,” 1 (http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/marapr/1.21.html).

16 Michael Ruse, review of The God Delusion, Isis, 98, 4 (December, 2007): 814-16.

17 For more on this topic, see Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’ Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), which I reviewed in Christian Research Journal 32, 4 (2009): 54-55.

18 A similar work is Dean Hamer’s The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004), a study of “self-transcendence,” which has nothing specifically to do with God. Locals near my home regularly achieve “self-transcendence” by immersing themselves in the Green Bay Packers. Self-help spirituality is also not really about God (or at any rate, not the true God), but about techniques of self-motivation that deny the full reality of sin and the necessity and sufficiency of Christ’s saving work. The best recent critique of this phenomenon is Michael Horton’s Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).

19 Newberg and Waldman, 4-5.

20 Ibid., 27.

21 Ibid., 31.

22 Ibid., 44.

23 Ibid., 174.

24 Ibid., 34.

25 Jeff Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

26 Mario Beauregard, “Mind Does Really Matter: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies of Emotional Self-Regulation, Psychotherapy and Placebo Effect,” Progress in Neurobiology 81, 4 (March 2007): 218-36.

27 Newberg and Waldman, 34.

28 For a recent defense of the downward causal power of the mind over the brain, see my article, “Is Downward Causation Possible?” Philosophia Christi 11, 1 (2009): 93-110.

29 Newberg and Waldman, 48.

30 Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007).

31 Newberg and Waldman, 54-55.

32 Ibid., 58.

33 C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock, 214.

34 Ibid., 215.

35 Benjamin Libet, “Do We Have Free Will?” in Anthony Freeman, Keith Sutherland, and Benjamin Libet, eds., The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (Exeter, England: Imprint Academic, 2000), 55.

36 Newberg and Waldman, 70.

37 This point is well made by J. I. Packer in his “Paul against Pluralism,” in Tough-Minded Christianity: Honoring the Legacy of John Warwick Montgomery, ed. William Dembski and Thomas Schirrmacher (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2008), 2-19.

38 Newberg and Waldman, 79.

39 Ibid., 82.

40 C. S. Lewis, “Religion without Dogma?” in God in the Dock, 142-43.

41 Christian Smith and Melinda Lindquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166.

In a recent documentary entitled Collision, leading atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian theologian and pastor Douglas Wilson go on the road to discuss and debate this question: “Is Christianity good for the world?” It is a fascinating discourse covering a host of issues, but one theme continues to emerge throughout the narrative: whether atheism can provide a justification for morality. Atheists often make the claim that they can live good moral lives without believing in God.

SYNOPSIS

Atheists often argue that they can make moral claims and live good moral lives without believing in God. Many theists agree, but the real issue is whether atheism can provide a justification for morality. A number of leading atheists currently writing on this issue are opposed to moral relativism, given its obvious and horrific ramifications, and have attempted to provide a justification for a nonrelative morality. Three such attempts are discussed in this article: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s position that objective morality simply “is”; Richard Dawkins’s position that morality is based on the selfish gene; and Michael Ruse and Edward Wilson’s position that morality is an evolutionary illusion. Each of these positions, it turns out, is problematic. Sinnott-Armstrong affirms an objective morality, but affirming something and justifying it are two very different matters. Dawkins spells out his selfish gene approach by including four fundamental criteria, but his approach has virtually nothing to do with morality—with real right and wrong, good and evil. Finally, Ruse and Wilson disagree with Dawkins and maintain that belief in morality is just an adaptation put in place by evolution to further our reproductive ends. On their view, morality is simply an illusion foisted on us by our genes to get us to cooperate and to advance the species. But have they considered the ramifications of such a view? Each of these positions fails to provide the justification necessary for a universal, objective morality—the kind of morality in which good and evil are clearly understood and delineated.

Hitchens brings this challenge to believers: “Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.”¹ Another atheist, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, offers a list of “pretty good” atheists—including, he says, Thomas Edison, George Orwell, Marie Curie, and Mark Twain—and notes that they “led exemplary lives of service,” contributed greatly to the social good,” and were “kind, considerate, altruistic, and caring.” He argues that “surely someone on this long list of atheists passes muster. That is enough to refute the claim that all atheists are immoral.”² Daniel Dennett adds that “I have uncovered no evidence to support the claim that people, religious or not, who don’t believe in reward in heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob, or break their promises than people who do.”³

What’s fascinating about these claims is that they miss the real issue at hand. Many theists believe that atheists can utter profound ethical statements and live good moral lives. The apostle Paul explains one reason why this is so: “When the Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires…they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them” (Rom. 2:14–15 NRSV).

When a person, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or what have you, is functioning properly and not repressing or ignoring his conscience—especially while dwelling in a cultural milieu that reflects the moral truths of God—he basically knows right from wrong, good from evil. However, to know or believe that something is right or wrong is very different from justifying that thing’s being right or wrong. For example, one could know that flipping the light switch in the kitchen causes the light to go on and have absolutely no understanding of why this occurs or justification for how it really does so. By arguing for a belief in or knowledge of morality without providing a justification for morality, atheists confuse moral epistemology (moral knowledge) with moral ontology (foundational existence of morality). The real question at hand is this: What grounds the atheists’ moral positions? What makes their moral views more than mere hunches, inklings, or subjective opinions?⁴

We can get to the heart of the atheist’s dilemma with a graphic but true example. Some years ago serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to over thirty murders, was interviewed about his gruesome activities. Consider the frightening words to his victim as he describes them:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.⁵

While I am in no way accusing atheists in general of being Ted Bundy-like, the question I have for the atheist is simply this: On what moral grounds can you provide a response to Bundy? The atheistic options are limited. If morality has nothing to do with God, as atheists suppose, what does it have to do with? One response the atheist could offer is moral relativism, either personal or cultural. The personal moral relativist affirms that morality is an individual matter; you decide for yourself what is morally right and wrong. But on this view, what could one say to Bundy? Not much, other than “I don’t like what you believe; it offends me how you brutalize women.” For the personal relativist, however, who really cares (other than you) that you are offended by someone else’s actions? On this view we each decide our own morality, and when my morality clashes with yours, there is no final arbiter other than perhaps that the stronger of us forces the other to agree. But this kind of Nietzschean “might makes right” ethic has horrific consequences, and one need only be reminded of the Nazi reign of terror to see it in full bloom. This is one reason why thoughtful atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others don’t go there.⁶

But what about cultural moral relativism—the view that moral claims are the inventions of a given culture? Most thoughtful atheists don’t tread here either, and this is one reason why: If right and wrong are cultural inventions, then it would always be wrong for someone within that culture to speak out against them. If culture defines right and wrong, then who are you to challenge it? For example, to speak out against slavery in Great Britain in the seventeenth century would have been morally wrong, for it was culturally acceptable. But surely it was a morally good thing for William Wilberforce and others to strive against the prevailing currents of their time and place to abolish the slave trade. For the cultural moral relativist, all moral reformers—Wilberforce, Martin Luther King, Jr., even Jesus and Gandhi, to name a few—would be in the wrong. But who would agree with this conclusion? Thankfully, most leading atheists agree that moral relativism is doomed.⁷

So what do they affirm? Here are three accounts that recent atheists have defended: (1) objective morality simply “is,” (2) morality is based on the selfish gene, and (3) morality is an evolutionary illusion.⁸ Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

OBJECTIVE MORALITY SIMPLY “IS”

One approach some atheists have taken is to affirm that there are objective moral values. After all, couldn’t a person both believe that there are objective moral values and believe that God does not exist? Is the God/morality connection a necessary one? While there are some atheists,such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michael Ruse, J. L. Mackie, and others, who do hold that morality cannot be objective without the existence of a God, there are others who disagree. One such person is atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. He puts the point concisely: “In fact, many atheists are happy to embrace objective moral values. I agree with them. Rape is morally wrong. So is discrimination against gays and lesbians. Even if somebody or some group thinks that these acts are not morally wrong, they stillare morally wrong.…[Agreeing that some acts are objectively morally wrong] implies nothing about God, unless objective values depend on God. Why should we believe that they do?”⁹

But again the question arises: What grounds moral values? Sinnott-Armstrong answers this way: “What makes rape immoral is that rape harms the victim in terrible ways…It simply is [immoral].”¹⁰ As already noted, being moral and having a reasonable foundation or justification for being moral are two very different issues. To use the example mentioned above, I can wholeheartedly believe that the lights in the room will turn on after I flip the light switch without any understanding of electricity. I can still function well in society, going from place to place, flipping light switches and never even entertaining the idea that electricity is involved in the process of causing the lights to turn on (at least until the light switch breaks). If, however, someone asked me to provide a justification for the lights going on when the switch is flipped, and my reply was simply, “They just do,” this is no answer at all. The fact is, the flow of an electric charge (among other factors) grounds our explanation for the lights going on when the switch is turned on. This is what gives us an ontological basis for being “light-switch flippers.” The same applies to morality and God. One may well be able to deny God’s existence and still live a moral life, but there would be no fundamental basis, no objective moral grounding, for such a life. There would be no answer for Bundy.

MORALITY IS BASED ON THE SELFISH GENE

A second approach some atheists have taken is to attempt to ground morality in biological evolution. This is the approach Richard Dawkins takes. In his book, The Selfish Gene, he argues that “we are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”¹¹ On his view, our moral aspirations and beliefs are predetermined posits of our genetic machinery, selfishly programmed to advance the gene pool. He grants that selfishness does not at first glance seem to be a good foundation for a moral theory, and in his later book, The God Delusion, he expounds on his position. He agrees that “the most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish.”¹² Nevertheless, he argues, sometimes selfish genes “ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically” or morally.¹³ This happens especially with an organism’s kin—brothers, sisters, and children. For “a gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself.”¹⁴ But it also happens through another means, he argues: reciprocal altruism. This is the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” idea, and it takes place not just with one’s close relatives, but also between various members of the species and even among members of different species.

Dawkins adds two further elements to his moral account: reputation for generosity (that is, one acts altruistically so others will form the belief that he is generous), and buying authentic advertising (that is, one acts morally in order to prove that he has more than another—that he is dominant and superior—and so can afford to be altruistic and moral).

So Dawkins provides four components of an attempt to provide justification for acting morally:¹⁵

1. genetic kinship (helping one’s family members even at one’s own expense);

2. reciprocation (beyond one’s kin, the repayment of favors given where both sides benefit from the transaction);

3. acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness (convincing others one is a moral altruist);

4. buying authentic advertising (strutting one’s good deeds before others to impress them and infer one’s superiority).

In essence, this is what Dawkins seems to be saying: our genes are preprogrammed selfishly to replicate themselves. Even so, individuals don’t always act selfishly because our genes—working at the level of the organism—sometimes act in altruistic and moral ways, as this offers better gene propagation over the long haul.

Now, an obvious and glaring problem with this view is that it has virtually nothing to do with what we generally understand to be morality—with real right and wrong, good and evil.

On Dawkins’s account, a person is kind to his neighbor because he’s been preprogrammed by his genes to do so (at least some individuals have been so preprogrammed; others perhaps not), and he’s been so programmed because acting this way confers evolutionary advantage. There is no objective right and wrong on this view. We simply call something “morally good” because our genes have, through eons of evolutionary struggle and survival, gotten us to believe that it is so.

But do Dawkins and other atheists who affirm this view really believe that rape, murder, and the like are not truly and universally evil, but are merely socially taboo for purposes of evolutionary advantage? Are good and evil just illusions conjured up by our genes to get us to behave in certain ways? This leads to the third view.

MORALITY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY ILLUSION

A third approach to an atheistic account of morality has been put forth by evolutionary ethicist and atheist philosopher of science Michael Ruse and his colleague Edward Wilson. Here is how they describe it:

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.…Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race.¹⁶

Morality, on this view, is something most of us believe in, follow, and practice, even though it doesn’t exist in reality; it’s just an illusion foisted on us via evolution so that we don’t kill ourselves off as a species.

Such a view has dire consequences. Indeed the Edinburgh Review, one of the most respected British magazines of the nineteenth century, observed that if Darwin’s evolutionary account of morality turns out to be right, “most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct….If these views be true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of conscience and the religious sense.”¹⁷

In order to have a consistent and reasonable objective moral stance—a moral view in which you can substantiate a claim that this is right and that is wrong, this is good and that is evil—you need to have an objective moral basis. As C. S. Lewis argued so well, there must be a universal moral law, or else moral disagreements would make no sense. But a universal moral law requires a universal Moral Law Giver—an objective grounding for that moral law.¹⁸ None of these atheistic accounts provides us with one. No atheistic account has ever provided one. We can put the atheist’s problem concisely:

1. If moral notions such as good and evil exist objectively, then there must be an objective foundation for their existence.

2. Atheism offers no objective basis for the existence of moral notions such as good and evil.

3. Therefore, for the atheist, moral notions such as good and evil must not objectively exist.

While it is good that Ruse and Wilson acknowledge this conclusion and don’t try to smuggle in an objective morality in their atheistic worldview, I wonder if they have contemplated the moral ramifications of their position. On their worldview, we are merely evolved brutes whose very existence is derived from the naturalistic laws of evolution, including random mutation and survival of the fittest in which the strong survive and the weak die off (and sometimes the strong kill off the weak in their struggle for survival). We are simply the byproducts of a “nature red in tooth and claw,” to quote the poet Tennyson. Is it any wonder that the atheistic regimes of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Pol Pot—devoid as they were of any significant Christian influence—were responsible for the mass murder of over 100 million people in their quest for dominance, more lives destroyed than in all of the religious wars in the history of the human race? These regimes were not discordant with an atheistic basis of morality; they were consistent with it.

Christopher Hitchens and his ilk are wrong: Christian morality, rooted as it is in a transcendent, personal, omni-benevolent God, has truly been good for the world. Heaven help us if an atheistic morality, rooted in evolutionary theory or otherwise, should ever become the guiding moral force on a global scale.

Chad Meister, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Bethel College and author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Building Belief (Baker, 2006) and the Christianity Today 2010 Book of the Year in Evangelism and Apologetics, God Is Great, God Is Good (IVP, 2009).

notes

1  Christopher Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” www.washingtonpost.com, Saturday, July 14, 2007, A17.

2  Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality without God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22–23.

3  Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 279.

4  For more on this, see Paul Copan, “The Moral Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, ed. Paul Copan and Chad Meister (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 127–41.

5  A statement by Ted Bundy, paraphrased and rewritten by Harry V. Jaffa, Homosexuality and the National Law (Claremont Institute of the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1990), 3–4.

6  For more on the New Atheists’ views of morality, see my essay, “God, Evil, and Morality,” in God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible, ed. William Lane Craig and Chad Meister (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 107–18.

7  Sam Harris, for example, recognizes the inherent dangers of moral relativism and speaks out against it in his book, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 170–71. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us what his moral theory is.

8  Utilitarianism is another approach that an atheist could take, but this is not commonly done—especially by the new atheists.

9  William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33.

10  Ibid., 34.

11  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), preface to 1976 edition, v.

12  Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 216.

13  Ibid., 216.

14  Ibid.

15  Dawkins summarizes these components himself in ibid., 219–20.

16  Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 316. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Macbeth is about to kill King Duncan, he has a hallucination of a dagger floating in the air.

17  As quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 327–28.

18  C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1953), chaps. 1–5.

Throughout our mortal lifetimes the existence of evil will present a challenge to belief in God, but it is not an insurmountable challenge. As a magazine devoted to Christian apologetics, we have demonstrated this to be the case many times,¹ and we expect to do so many times more.

What people who stumble over the problem of evil on their way to faith in God often fail to notice, however, is that the existence not only of evil but also of good logically poses a far more serious obstacle to reaching the opposite conclusion of disbelief. In other words, the fact that morality is an inescapable dimension of the human experience (even when people choose to do evil) does not seem to square with a randomly evolving godless universe, but it fits perfectly within a purposeful universe created by a moral God.

In this issue of the JOURNAL two feature articles depict the struggle of the nonbeliever to find a basis for the universal sense of morality in something other than God, and other articles touch on the same topic. In each case the solutions proposed are similar, and this similarity was not highlighted in the articles by design. We assigned one of our feature articles to deal with the philosophy of utilitarianism and another to address the evolutionary ethics of Richard Dawkins. The remaining articles were to cover unrelated topics of apologetic concern. It was only in editing the articles that I noticed the pattern.

Utilitarianism is a modern form of an ancient approach to ethics called hedonism. In both systems good is defined as pleasure or happiness and evil is defined as pain. Whereas hedonism maintains that the greatest good occurs when the individual achieves pleasure, utilitarianism holds that the greatest good occurs when the greatest number of people achieves happiness.

It turns out that Richard Dawkins’s evolutionary ethic, in its most noble formulation (at times it is quite ignoble), is essentially utilitarian. Furthermore, popular motivational speaker Anthony Robbins, who is neither a philosopher nor a professing atheist, nonetheless grounds his message of personal power in a hedonistic ethic of pleasure as good and pain as evil. Finally, our review of the book Naturalism parallels these feature articles in its discussion of problems that occur when atheists attempt to ground morality in nature or evolution.

From different places in the magazine, therefore, distinct criticisms are voiced that complement each other. Together they resoundingly refute hedonism, utilitarianism, and evolutionary ethics. Atheists for whom truth matters should be troubled by the inability of these prominent representations of their worldview to do justice to one of the most fundamental and important attributes of human nature.

However, the problem of good and evil is a good problem for those atheists who have followed their belief system to its logical conclusion of nihilistic despair and are seriously ready to consider evidence for the existence of God. I should know. Decades ago, at the beginning of my spiritual journey, I was one of them.

—Elliot Miller

notes

1 See, e.g., Lee Strobel’s “Why Does God Allow Suffering?” published in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in vol. 24, no. 1, http://www.equip.org/ articles/why-does-god-allow-suffering-Elliot Miller

SYNOPSIS

Hitchens brings this challenge to believers: “Name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever.”¹ Another atheist, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, offers a list of “pretty good” atheists—including, he says, Thomas Edison, George Orwell, Marie Curie, and Mark Twain—and notes that they “led exemplary lives of service,” “contributed greatly to the social good,” and were “kind, considerate, altruistic, and caring.” He argues that “surely someone on this long list of atheists passes muster. That is enough to refute the claim that all atheists are immoral.”² Daniel Dennett adds that “I have uncovered no evidence to support the claim that people, religious or not, who don’t believe in reward in heaven and/or punishment in hell are more likely to kill, rape, rob, or break their promises than people who do.”³

What’s fascinating about these claims is that they miss the real issue at hand. Many theists believe that atheists can utter profound ethical statements and live good moral lives. The apostle Paul explains one reason why this is so: “When the Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires…they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them” (Rom. 2:14–15 NRSV).

When a person, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or what have you, is functioning properly and not repressing or ignoring his conscience—especially while dwelling in a cultural milieu that reflects the moral truths of God—he basically knows right from wrong, good from evil. However, to know or believe that something is right or wrong is very different from justifying that thing’s being right or wrong. For example, one could know that flipping the light switch in the kitchen causes the light to go on and have absolutely no understanding of why this occurs or justification for how it really does so. By arguing for a belief in or knowledge of morality without providing a justification for morality, atheists confuse moral epistemology (moral knowledge) with moral ontology (foundational existence of morality). The real question at hand is this: What grounds the atheists’ moral positions? What makes their moral views more than mere hunches, inklings, or subjective opinions?

We can get to the heart of the atheist’s dilemma with a graphic but true example. Some years ago serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to over thirty murders, was interviewed about his gruesome activities. Consider the frightening words to his victim as he describes them:

Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.⁵

While I am in no way accusing atheists in general of being Ted Bundy-like, the question I have for the atheist is simply this: On what moral grounds can you provide a response to Bundy? The atheistic options are limited. If morality has nothing to do with God, as atheists suppose, what does it have to do with? One response the atheist could offer is moral relativism, either personal or cultural. The personal moral relativist affirms that morality is an individual matter; you decide for yourself what is morally right and wrong. But on this view, what could one say to Bundy? Not much, other than “I don’t like what you believe; it offends me how you brutalize women.” For the personal relativist, however, who really cares (other than you) that you are offended by someone else’s actions? On this view we each decide our own morality, and when my morality clashes with yours, there is no final arbiter other than perhaps that the stronger of us forces the other to agree. But this kind of Nietzschean “might makes right” ethic has horrific consequences, and one need only be reminded of the Nazi reign of terror to see it in full bloom. This is one reason why thoughtful atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and others don’t go there.⁶

But what about cultural moral relativism—the view that moral claims are the inventions of a given culture? Most thoughtful atheists don’t tread here either, and this is one reason why: If right and wrong are cultural inventions, then it would always be wrong for someone within that culture to speak out against them. If culture defines right and wrong, then who are you to challenge it? For example, to speak out against slavery in Great Britain in the seventeenth century would have been morally wrong, for it was culturally acceptable. But surely it was a morally good thing for William Wilberforce and others to strive against the prevailing currents of their time and place to abolish the slave trade. For the cultural moral relativist, all moral reformers—Wilberforce, Martin Luther King, Jr., even Jesus and Gandhi, to name a few—would be in the wrong. But who would agree with this conclusion? Thankfully, most leading atheists agree that moral relativism is doomed.⁷

So what do they affirm? Here are three accounts that recent atheists have defended: (1) objective morality simply “is,” (2) morality is based on the selfish gene, and (3) morality is an evolutionary illusion.⁸ Let’s take a brief look at each of them.

OBJECTIVE MORALITY SIMPLY “IS”

One approach some atheists have taken is to affirm that there are objective moral values. After all, couldn’t a person both believe that there are objective moral values and believe that God does not exist? Is the God/morality connection a necessary one? While there are some atheists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michael Ruse, J. L. Mackie, and others, who do hold that morality cannot be objective without the existence of a God, there are others who disagree. One such person is atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. He puts the point concisely: “In fact, many atheists are happy to embrace objective moral values. I agree with them. Rape is morally wrong. So is discrimination against gays and lesbians. Even if somebody or some group thinks that these acts are not morally wrong, they still are morally wrong.…[Agreeing that some acts are objectively morally wrong] implies nothing about God, unless objective values depend on God. Why should we believe that they do?”⁹

But again the question arises: What grounds moral values? Sinnott-Armstrong answers this way: “What makes rape immoral is that rape harms the victim in terrible ways… It simply is [immoral].”¹⁰ As already noted, being moral and having a reasonable foundation or justification for being moral are two very different issues. To use the example mentioned above, I can wholeheartedly believe that the lights in the room will turn on after I flip the light switch without any understanding of electricity. I can still function well in society, going from place to place, flipping light switches and never even entertaining the idea that electricity is involved in the process of causing the lights to turn on (at least until the light switch breaks). If, however, someone asked me to provide a justification for the lights going on when the switch is flipped, and my reply was simply, “They just do,” this is no answer at all. The fact is, the flow of an electric charge (among other factors) grounds our explanation for the lights going on when the switch is turned on. This is what gives us an ontological basis for being “light-switch flippers.” The same applies to morality and God. One may well be able to deny God’s existence and still live a moral life, but there would be no fundamental basis, no objective moral grounding, for such a life. There would be no answer for Bundy.

MORALITY IS BASED ON THE SELFISH GENE

A second approach some atheists have taken is to attempt to ground morality in biological evolution. This is the approach Richard Dawkins takes. In his book, The Selfish Gene, he argues that “we are survival machines— robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”¹¹ On his view, our moral aspirations and beliefs are predetermined posits of our genetic machinery, selfishly programmed to advance the gene pool. He grants that selfishness does not at first glance seem to be a good foundation for a moral theory, and in his later book, The God Delusion, he expounds on his position. He agrees that “the most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish.”¹² Nevertheless, he argues, sometimes selfish genes “ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically” or morally.¹³ This happens especially with an organism’s kin—brothers, sisters, and children. For “a gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself.”¹⁴ But it also happens through another means, he argues: reciprocal altruism. This is the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” idea, and it takes place not just with one’s close relatives, but also between various members of the species and even among members of different species.

Dawkins adds two further elements to his moral account: reputation for generosity (that is, one acts altruistically so others will form the belief that he is generous), and buying authentic advertising (that is, one acts morally in order to prove that he has more than another—that he is dominant and superior—and so can afford to be altruistic and moral).

So Dawkins provides four components of an attempt to provide justification for acting morally:¹⁵

1. genetic kinship (helping one’s family members even at one’s own expense);

2. reciprocation (beyond one’s kin, the repayment of favors given where both sides benefit from the transaction);

3. acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness (convincing others one is a moral altruist);

4. buying authentic advertising (strutting one’s good deeds before others to impress them and infer one’s superiority).

In essence, this is what Dawkins seems to be saying: our genes are preprogrammed selfishly to replicate themselves. Even so, individuals don’t always act selfishly because our genes— working at the level of the organism—sometimes act in altruistic and moral ways, as this offers better gene propagation over the long haul.

Now, an obvious and glaring problem with this view is that it has virtually nothing to do with what we generally understand to be morality—with real right and wrong, good and evil.

On Dawkins’s account, a person is kind to his neighbor because he’s been preprogrammed by his genes to do so (at least some individuals have been so preprogrammed; others perhaps not), and he’s been so programmed because acting this way confers evolutionary advantage. There is no objective right and wrong on this view. We simply call something “morally good” because our genes have, through eons of evolutionary struggle and survival, gotten us to believe that it is so.

But do Dawkins and other atheists who affirm this view really believe that rape, murder, and the like are not truly and universally evil, but are merely socially taboo for purposes of evolutionary advantage? Are good and evil just illusions conjured up by our genes to get us to behave in certain ways? This leads to the third view.

MORALITY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY ILLUSION

A third approach to an atheistic account of morality has been put forth by evolutionary ethicist and atheist philosopher of science Michael Ruse and his colleague Edward Wilson. Here is how they describe it:

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.…Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race.¹⁶

Morality, on this view, is something most of us believe in, follow, and practice, even though it doesn’t exist in reality; it’s just an illusion foisted on us via evolution so that we don’t kill ourselves off as a species.

Such a view has dire consequences. Indeed the Edinburgh Review, one of the most respected British magazines of the nineteenth century, observed that if Darwin’s evolutionary account of morality turns out to be right, “most earnest-minded men will be compelled to give up these motives by which they have attempted to live noble and virtuous lives, as founded on a mistake; our moral sense will turn out to be a mere developed instinct….If these views be true, a revolution in thought is imminent, which will shake society to its very foundations by destroying the sanctity of conscience and the religious sense.”¹⁷

In order to have a consistent and reasonable objective moral stance—a moral view in which you can substantiate a claim that this is right and that is wrong, this is good and that is evil—you need to have an objective moral basis. As C. S. Lewis argued so well, there must be a universal moral law, or else moral disagreements would make no sense. But a universal moral law requires a universal Moral Law Giver— an objective grounding for that moral law.¹⁸ None of these atheistic accounts provides us with one. No atheistic account has ever provided one. We can put the atheist’s problem concisely:

1. If moral notions such as good and evil exist objectively, then there must be an objective foundation for their existence.

2. Atheism offers no objective basis for the existence of moral notions such as good and evil.

3. Therefore, for the atheist, moral notions such as good and evil must not objectively exist.

While it is good that Ruse and Wilson acknowledge this conclusion and don’t try to smuggle in an objective morality in their atheistic worldview, I wonder if they have contemplated the moral ramifications of their position. On their worldview, we are merely evolved brutes whose very existence is derived from the naturalistic laws of evolution, including random mutation and survival of the fittest in which the strong survive and the weak die off (and sometimes the strong kill off the weak in their struggle for survival). We are simply the byproducts of a “nature red in tooth and claw,” to quote the poet Tennyson. Is it any wonder that the atheistic regimes of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Pol Pot— devoid as they were of any significant Christian influence— were responsible for the mass murder of over 100 million people in their quest for dominance, more lives destroyed than in all of the religious wars in the history of the human race? These regimes were not discordant with an atheistic basis of morality; they were consistent with it.

Christopher Hitchens and his ilk are wrong: Christian morality, rooted as it is in a transcendent, personal, omni benevolent God, has truly been good for the world. Heaven help us if an atheistic morality, rooted in evolutionary theory or otherwise, should ever become the guiding moral force on a global scale.

Chad Meister, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Bethel College and author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Building Belief (Baker, 2006) and the Christianity Today 2010 Book of the Year in Evangelism and Apologetics, God Is Great, God Is Good (IVP, 2009).

notes

1 Christopher Hitchens, “An Atheist Responds,” www.washingtonpost.com, Saturday, July 14, 2007, A17.

2 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Morality without God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22–23.

3 Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 279.

4 For more on this, see Paul Copan, “The Moral Argument,” in Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues, ed. Paul Copan and Chad Meister (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 127–41.

5 A statement by Ted Bundy, paraphrased and rewritten by Harry V. Jaffa, Homosexuality and the National Law (Claremont Institute of the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1990), 3–4.

6 For more on the New Atheists’ views of morality, see my essay, “God, Evil, and Morality,” in God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible, ed. William Lane Craig and Chad Meister (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 107– 18.

7 Sam Harris, for example, recognizes the inherent dangers of moral relativism and speaks out against it in his book, The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 170–71. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us what his moral theory is.

8 Utilitarianism is another approach that an atheist could take, but this is not commonly done—especially by the new atheists.

9 William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33.

10 Ibid., 34.

11 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), preface to 1976 edition, v.

12 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 216.

13 Ibid., 216.

14Ibid.

15 Dawkins summarizes these components himself in ibid., 219–20.

16 Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 316. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, when Macbeth is about to kill King Duncan, he has a hallucination of a dagger floating in the air.

17 As quoted in Robert Wright, The Moral Animal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 327–28. 18 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1953), chaps. 1–5.

In an essay responding to a debate on the existence of God, Dallas Willard uses the phrase, “ontologically haunted universe,” adding, “It is haunted by unnerving possibilities.”¹ Willard suggests that a successful argument against atheism results in that worldview being ideologically haunted. Rather than merely reacting to atheism—or any sort of skepticism, for that matter— actively engaging in establishing a haunted universe in the world-view of the atheist is a critical component in making the case for Christian theism.

In the world of the occult or paranormal, a haunting refers to a recurring manifestation of a ghost, usually at a particular location such as a home or other building. Haunting can also mean to disturb or bother the sensibilities or mind. It is in the second sense that this article will provide “ghosts” for the atheist, not as occult phenomena, but as apologetic arguments intended to nudge atheists from their worldview in the direction of Christian theism by weaving cognitive tensions in the fabric of their view of reality. These tensions can fester, bothering atheists because their worldview becomes haunted by ideas that favor the existence of God.

The recent rise of the so-called new atheism and its associated overt hostility to religion, particularly Christianity, calls out for a rational Christian response rather than merely defensive posturing. While the temperamentally belligerent tone of much of the new atheism is disturbing, the arguments presented are anything but new. In fact, many of the arguments the new atheists present are of the traditional variety, albeit in the guise of antagonism rather than a cordial meeting of the minds determined to discover truth. As a result, many Christians are on the defensive. We are certainly called to defend the faith, but this does not mean always being reactionary, thus allowing atheists to set the tone and topic of discussion. We need to engage actively on our terms instead of theirs.

What figurative ghosts can Christian apologists provide to haunt the universe of the atheist? There are many, but I will briefly present ten, the first three being traditional natural theology arguments for the existence of God.

Ghost #1: Cosmology. If the universe had a beginning, and if everything that has a beginning has a cause, then what caused the universe? To state that the big bang caused it is not a sufficient answer, as the big bang, if accepted, is an event. But what caused the event? In short, this first ghost is a brief presentation of the Kalam cosmological argument.² It argues that the best explanation for the origins of the universe is God.

Ghost #2: Design. Is the universe fine-tuned to support intelligent life? Is it designed? Does apparent design in the universe, both at a macroscopic and microscopic level, suggest chance or design? This is a brief presentation of one form of the teleological or design argument. It suggests that biological life and other factors, such as a seemingly biocentric universe, point to the reality of an intelligent designer behind the cosmos.

Ghost #3: Morality. Do moral standards exist? If so, where do they come from? If they are mere inventions of beings who themselves are the result of time and chance, then there are no real standards of right and wrong. The result is moral relativism or variations of a sort of social contract theory of ethics. Whatever the atheist explanation, it falls short of having ultimate and transcendent authority. If God exists, however, we have a real and transcendent standard of right and wrong.³

Ghost #4: Evil and Suffering. Atheists often appeal to the reality of evil and suffering as an argument against God. If God exists, the argument goes, then why does He allow so much evil and suffering in the world? But where does the atheist get the idea of evil? Where does that sense of injustice in the world come from? To call something evil requires some understanding of the reality of good. But where does this standard come from?

Ghost #5: The Intelligent Christian. Another ghost that may haunt the universe of the atheist is the existence of the intelligent Christian. When I was an atheist, I was under the impression that most Christians were idiots. Unfortunately, most of the believers I encountered were intellectually ignorant, unable to articulate why they believed what they believed, much less able to engage with an atheist on more than a superficial level. When I began to encounter intelligent Christians, however, both through their writings and in person, I was haunted by a problem: how seemingly intelligent people embrace Christianity? Yet history is filled with individuals possessed of obviously great intelligence who also embrace Christianity as being “true and reasonable” (Acts 26:25 NIV). Christian thinkers are unlikely to compare to the intellectual greatness of the likes of Augustine. Nevertheless, we can model an intelligent and reasonable Christianity as an example for atheists not of a blind faith, but of a reasonable faith.

Ghost #6: Atheism as Nihilism. Followed to its logical conclusions, atheism ultimately leads to the despair of nihilism. In the end, there is no lasting meaning to life within atheism because within its framework there is no God, no real grounding for morality, no reason for human existence, and no lasting meaning to anything we do. In this regard, atheism has nothing truly positive to offer the world. This is why traditionally it is Christians who help the needy, establish hospitals, and care for the hurting. Atheism has no real foundation to offer help to the world, unless its foundation is borrowed from a justifiably moral worldview such as what is found in Christian theism.

Ghost #7: Reason and Intelligibility. Why are we able to reason? If we are merely the products of randomness rather than intelligence, why do we think our reasoning abilities actually have the power to arrive at truth? This is a version of the argument from reason.4 A somewhat related argument is one from intelligibility, related to the design argument. As Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli wrote, “Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence, or both intelligibility and intelligence are the products of blind chance.”⁵

Ghost #8: Pascal’s Anthropological Argument. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued that Christianity offers the best explanation of the seeming paradox of human greatness and wretchedness. Why is it that we are capable of such greatness, but also of such wretchedness? The explanation is found in Christianity. The doctrine of the Fall accounts for our capacity for wretchedness, while being made in the image of God accounts for human greatness.⁶

Ghost #9: Explaining Christ. Another ghost for the atheist involves explaining Christ. Given that Christ existed and the New Testament Gospels are accurate accounts of His life, what explanation do atheists offer for Christ? This argument involves going beyond the traditional “Lord, liar, or lunatic” options presented in some popular apologetic works, as there are other options to consider.⁷

Ghost #10: Christianity’s Positive Influence. The new atheism revels in pointing to the many supposed failings of Christianity. While there are excellent responses to the typical critiques,⁸ this ghost for the atheist concentrates on Christianity’s many positive influences throughout history in areas such as humanitarian aid, the arts, philosophy, social reform, science, literature, and more. Far from being a negative influence on the world, Christians have sought to love their neighbors, doing to others as they would have others do to them. The Golden Rule and God’s love as the key foundations of Christian ethics are hardly negative, but vastly positive.9

Atheists who become Christians generally do so as the result of a series of progressive steps that ultimately lead to theism, then, perhaps after interludes exploring other worldviews, Christian theism. The interludes pose a danger in establishing a haunted universe for the atheist. The atheist may be diverted by another false worldview instead of making it all the way to Christianity. That is why the Christian apologist cannot merely offer arguments for the existence of God without ultimately pointing to Christianity as the solution and best explanation of reality.

Not all atheists, moreover, will be haunted by the same ghosts. An incremental approach to dialoguing with atheists offers a variety of rigorous and well-crafted arguments that will create intellectual tensions in their thinking. Over time, these tensions may move the atheist closer to theism. If Christians can haunt the atheist universe by presenting reasonable arguments, that is not an apologetic defeat, but a significant step towards belief and acceptance of Christ.

—Robert Velarde

Robert Velarde is author of Conversations with C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press), The Heart of Narnia (NavPress), and Inside The Screwtape Letters (Baker Books). He studied philosophy of religion and apologetics at Denver Seminary and is pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary.

notes

1 Dallas Willard, “Language, Being, God, and the Three Stages of Theistic Evidence,” in Does God Exist? The Great Debate, ed. J .P. Moreland and Kai Neilsen (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), 207. The book has since been reprinted by Prometheus Press (1993), while Willard’s essay is available online for those who wish to read the original context of his comments: http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=42

2 Perhaps the most vocal evangelical Christian proponent of the argument in our time is William Lane Craig. See his book The Kalam Cosmological Argument (London: Macmillan, 1979). An example of the cosmological argument used by Craig in debate with an atheist may be found in God? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

3 There are many variations of the moral argument. C. S. Lewis presented a popular version in Book I of Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952).

4 C. S. Lewis presents the argument from reason in chapter 3 of Miracles (New York: Macmillan, 1960). It has since been reexamined and defended by Victor Reppert in C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).

5 Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 66.

6 A more detailed presentation of the argument is found in my article, “Greatness and Wretchedness: The Usefulness of Pascal’s Anthropological Argument in Apologetics,” Christian Research Journal 27, 2 (2004).

7 See, e.g., Kreeft and Tacelli, chap. 7.

8 See, e.g., Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000) and Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001).

9 See my booklet, What Christianity Has Done for the World (Torrance, CA: Rose Publishing, 2007).

Knowing that Philip Pullman conveys his atheism through his fiction, I expected the assault on Christianity one witnesses in reading through The Golden Compass, the first book of the His Dark Materials trilogy.¹ Quite unexpectedly, however, Pullman’s unholy fantasy ensnared me and nearly swallowed me whole. Only by God’s grace through my privileged training in the scriptures and Christian apologetics did I emerge from the experience without doubting the truth of the Christian worldview. Now with the movie-release of The Golden Compass, I feel increasing anguish for young people who will undoubtedly be moved by Pullman’s storytelling and, potentially, become hardened against the true gospel.

I believe that J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, though certainly influential, cannot compete with Pullman’s ability to provoke his readers, especially young people, to question what they believe is true and real. I have thought long and hard about how it is that Pullman so grabbed me despite my having every reason to slough off his creation as irrational and blasphemous—it is irrational and blasphemous. We all suspend disbelief when we enter a fictional world —and we possess an astonishing capacity to rationalize any sinful thought, belief, desire, or behavior; but Pullman, I think, has accomplished something extraordinary in his novels.

I do not doubt that my emotional attraction to Pullman’s creation says as much about me as it does about the work itself. I, apparently, do not have attraction-immunity to a particular literary device that Pullman created. This device is the “daemon” (pronounced “demon”), which Pullman masterfully exploits as a subtle but radical redefinition of the image of God in humans. Ostensibly, a daemon is the outward physical manifestation of the soul in animal form. Through this redefinition Pullman subverts the Christian worldview and retells its story of creation, fall, and redemption from the perspective of atheistic nihilism. Pullman’s enthralling exploration of the daemon, then, forces the reader to imbibe the worldview that supports it in order to sustain fascination with it. And the reader wants to remain fascinated by it. The daemon thus is ingenious and utterly evil.

The Bible teaches, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen.1:27 RSV). Christian theology holds that this image-bearing entails that humans are spiritual, personal, self-conscious, rational, emotional, volitional, relational, immortal, and powerful; and as originally created, humans also possessed an inherent righteousness, holiness, and direct knowledge of God.² Collectively, these qualities further entail that human beings are most truly human only when in loving submission to, and communion with, their Creator and, to a lesser degree, fellow bearers of the image of God, especially within marriage between a man and a woman.

In The Golden Compass, however, each human and daemon pair essentially forms a complete, autonomous male and female union such that to be human is to commune with and submit to no one but one’s self. In an introductory note Pullman explains that The Golden Compass is “set in a universe like ours, but different in many ways,”³ and the differences emerge early, with multiple references or allusions to daemons in every chapter. On the opening page the narrator introduces Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon (or “Pan”), who is scolding her in whispered conversation. Throughout the story Lyra and Pan converse out loud with one another, though we also learn that they communicate in nonverbal and (something like) telepathic ways. They constantly carry on subject/object dialogues. Repeatedly, moreover, we are shown and told that Lyra loves Pan and Pan, Lyra. No pet is more faithful to his owner, and no owner more devoted to her pet, but Pan is no mere pet. They feel for each other, but each also feels what the other feels and experiences what the other experiences.

This autonomous relationship is brought out further in gender references and allusions. A person’s daemon is of the opposite sex, except in rare cases. Humans, moreover, naturally find the notion of touching another person’s daemon repulsive. Speaking of “the most beautiful daemon she’d ever seen,” the daemon of a highly respected elder, Farder Coram, the narrator tells us that Lyra “longed to touch that fur, to rub her cheeks against it, but of course she never did; for it was the grossest breach of etiquette imaginable to touch another person’s daemon.⁴

The violation that occurs within the story when a human does touch another human’s daemon evokes feelings we associate with sexual molestation.

Human/daemon relationships in Pullman’s universe subsist as subject/object relationships between male and female; Pullman thus relativizes gender as a social construction whereby each human is literally both male and female, in varying proportions. The subject/object relationship between the male and the female completes the autonomous self. Nature and Scripture, however, tell me plainly that I am male. It is the true and living God, moreover, who is my Other, and after Him, other people, not myself. I owe to God what Lyra gives to Pan.

Pullman’s fantasy is irrational by contradiction, of course. In what I take to be an allusion to the self-sufficient Christian Trinity, in which the one eternal God subsists in three distinct persons, at the end of The Golden Compass Lyra exults in her preserved union with Pan: “We’re still one being; both of us are one.”⁵ Instance after instance in the fantasy, however, contradict this proclaimed unity. A startling example intended to communicate coming of age is representative:

“Then a bath, with thick scented foam. Mrs. Coulter came into the bathroom to wash Lyra’s hair, and she didn’t rub and scrape like Mrs. Lonsdale either. She was gentle. Pantalaimon watched with powerful curiosity until Mrs. Coulter looked at him, and he knew what she meant and turned away, averting his eyes modestly from these feminine mysteries as the golden monkey [Mrs. Coulter’s daemon] was doing. He had never had to look away from Lyra before.”⁶

For some of us this subject/object language, despite the irrationality, raises already compelling storytelling to new heights with powerful emotional effects. I literally grieved over Lyra and Pan in their jeopardy and elated in their victory. They are a couple. These are children, of course, and their affection is real and moving. As I read I fell in love with their love for one other—their compassion and nurture for each other, the banter and scolding they share in communion, the comfort and protection they reciprocate. I want them to thrive, to succeed in rescuing Roger and the other children, not just because it is a very good thing to rescue enslaved and tortured children but because Lyra and Pan want so desperately to see them free like she and Pan are. I want Lyra and Pan to undo the evil Church Magisterium and to liberate her father, Lord Asriel, because they, Lyra and Pan, innocent and victimized children as they are, seek that with all their heart and strength.

Over these horrific wrongs it is right to recoil in grief. And this intense emotional response provides another way for Pullman, to paraphrase Hank Hanegraaff, to suck the reader into his world and get his worldview into the reader. All the while I struggle to become clear about the actual object of my affection and must remind myself that this love for the other is nothing more than sickening self-love, no more endearing in children than in adults.

The reader must ultimately choose whether to celebrate with Lyra and Pan their new knowledge and freedom to traverse the multiverse, the currently popular naturalistic explanation offered to explain away the need for a Creator. Reading or watching Pullman’s tale is very risky, even if one is thoroughly grounded in the understanding and defense of the Christian worldview. If you are not grounded, you must become so. We live in an age when such study is no longer optional. I, therefore, suggest that if you decide to encounter The Golden Compass either through book or film, you first engage the clarion critical review of Pullman’s fantasy trilogy by Mark Ryan and Carole Hausmann Ryan entitled, “Killing God: The Propaganda of His Dark Materials.” This exemplary instance of Christian discernment was published in the Christian Research Journal (vol. 26, no. 3 [2003], available online at www.equip.org).⁷

Good storytelling draws us into the thoughts and feelings of others, and through fiction we experience ways of sensing and interacting with the world that we would not otherwise realize. These experiences wrought through imagination can profoundly affect how we perceive reality from the moment of that encounter on, even if we are not fully aware of any shift in our perception. That, of course, is one reason why the Bible repeatedly tells us to watch our life and doctrine closely, warning us to guard continually against the inexorable influence of corrupt morals or bad teachings. Bad company corrupts good thinking and good morals. For these reasons, then, I must impute to the His Dark Materials series, whether in novel or film format, an NC-17 rating for its power to destroy one’s worldview.

— Stephen Ross

NOTES

1. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, His Dark Materials, Book One (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, first Knopf paperback edition, 1998).

2. See Kenneth Richard Samples, A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth Claims to the Worldview Test (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 172–79.

3. Pullman, The Golden Compass, unpaginated, prior to table of contents.

4. Ibid., 142.

5. Ibid., 399.

6. Ibid., 77.

7. I also strongly recommend that you study Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Reading between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature (Wheaton, IL.: Crossway Books, 1990); Brian Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment (Downers Grove, IL.: InterVarsity Press, 2002); and especially, Samples, A World of Difference.

Oxford University–educated philosopher Antony Flew—son of a Methodist minister, atheist since age 15, and participant in C. S. Lewis’s Socratic Club at Oxford—recently shifted from atheism to “positive belief in an Aristotelian God.”

Flew told the Christian Research Journal that his newfound deism has not affected his daily life. If Flew notices beauty in a garden, is he now inclined to think “God made that”?

“No,” he answered, matter-of-factly.

Flew has expressed some weariness with the frequency of inquiries from skeptics and journalists, but not with the opportunity to discuss his reasons for changing his mind. “I’ve never been afraid to admit that I was wrong about something,” Flew said by phone from his home in Reading, England. “I’m prepared to explain it to people who want an explanation.”

Flew has discussed his deism at length with philosopher Gary Habermas of Liberty University, Flew’s occasional sparring partner in public debates. Habermas has turned their interview into a question-and-answer feature for the Winter 2005 Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

Habermas and Flew speak by phone with some frequency. Habermas told the Journal that he began noticing changes in Flew in 2000. By early 2003, Habermas said, Flew described himself as “an atheist with big questions.” Philosopher Douglas Geivett of Biola University said he became aware of Flew’s movement away from atheism when he received a personal and unsolicited letter in which Flew announced his acceptance of a certain argument for God’s existence.

“Here’s a guy who may be more open-minded than I thought,” Habermas said. “I think over the years we haven’t taken him at his word when he says he goes where the evidence leads.”

The evidence, in this case, led to Flew’s conclusion that naturalism was an inadequate explanation for how life began. “Darwin saw that there was a problem with the origin of life,” Flew told Stuart Wavell of the Sunday Times. “It is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinary, complicated creature of which we have no examples. There must have been some intelligence.”

Flew has stressed repeatedly that he has come to believe in God only as the Creator, but not as a deity who has remained involved with His creation. In affirming belief in an Aristotelian God, Flew stresses that he has not come to believe in the God described by Islam or by Christianity. In both of these religions, Flew is troubled by teachings on hell—which he rejects as incompatible with God’s holiness—and on what he describes as God functioning like a despot, demanding to be feared and obeyed.

“Even the greatest monsters of our time—like Hitler, Lenin, and Mao Zedong—might be subjected to a few millennia of hard labor, but not to an eternity of torture,” Flew told the Journal. “If my argument is wrong, then I ought to be much more concerned about my fate in the universe, which is apparently in the hands of this monster [God].”

Flew says that he’s not fond of any idea of eternal life, whether in hell or in heaven. Wavell of the Sunday Times wrote that when he pressed Flew on whether he yearned for proof of an afterlife or of a benign God, Flew “became cross” and said, “I don’t want a future life. I want to be dead when I’m dead and that’s an end to it. I don’t want an unending life. I don’t want anything without end.”

Richard Carrier of The Secular Web wrote a critical review of Flew’s changing views, first treating them with skepticism because of two previous false reports, in 2001 and 2003, that Flew had become a Christian, then deriding them after receiving letters of confirmation from Flew at the end of 2004. In a January 2005 update to his critical review, Carrier wrote that Flew “has not made any effort to check up on the current state of things in any relevant field…[and] has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship.”

As Carrier noted, Flew wrote in his latest letter, “I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a…radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit.” Carrier wrote, “This would appear to be his excuse for everything: he won’t investigate the evidence because it’s too hard. Yet he will declare beliefs in the absence of proper inquiry. Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous.”

Douglas Geivett said that Carrier seemed concerned that Flew’s new beliefs “would disturb people’s faith that God does not exist.” Geivett also expressed discomfort about Christians drawing too many conclusions from Flew’s movement to deism. “Our apologetic does not depend on the conversion of a notable atheist, and I don’t like the approach of ‘He’s one of us now, so there.’ I’m much more concerned that Flew is given the space he needs to draw his own conclusions and report them on his own terms.”

Geivett stresses the difference between Flew’s new beliefs and historic deism. Historic deists were moving away from Christianity and toward atheism. Flew, however, seems to be moving in the opposite direction from his decades-long atheism.

Geivett believes deism gives greater breathing room than atheism to any philosopher who’s willing to follow evidence where it leads. “There’s a problem with staking a reputation on your denial of God’s existence,” he says. “It’s much more difficult to retreat from that position.”

“Flew’s views are fluid and a little dynamic right now,” Geivett says. “What he objects to in Christianity is the idea of double predestination—which many Christians also object to. Why that is such a sticking point…I don’t quite understand.”

Both Geivett and Habermas say they have enjoyed their friendship with Flew, who contributed a chapter to their book In Defense of Miracles. “He’s a very amiable person,” Geivett says. “I respect him, and I regret the churlish attitude of some who are scandalized by his intellectual honesty and his cautiously nuanced position.”

Habermas counts Flew as one of several skeptic friends, and he is considering writing a paper on the importance of friendship with nonbelievers. “It’s important that Christians have such friends, regardless of whether they’re prepared to change their mind,” Habermas said.

— Douglas LeBlanc

A few published and prolific atheists apparently have commandeered the soapbox at the proverbial free speech alley, vowing not to surrender it until the extraordinary and popular delusion of God is completely dispelled. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, in less than twelve months atheism’s newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007) are in print.

“The character of the ‘village atheist’ reappears from time to time in history, usually after the latest scientific announcement or the latest natural disaster. His title is akin to that of ‘village idiot’ which was popularized by George Bernard Shaw in 1907,” says Christian apologist Joel McDurmon, author of The Return of the Village Atheist.¹ “The idea is that every village had its ‘idiot’ who was full of opinions and advice on every topic, would never shut up, and made little sense. No one took the guy seriously” (p.xiii).

When the title “village idiot” becomes that of “village atheist,” it speaks of the person who thinks that science has all the answers and that the idea of God is an illusion. “Like the village idiot, he knows everything, argues till he is blue in the face, never shuts up, and yet never learns,” says McDurmon, “and like the village idiot, no one really takes him seriously, either” (xii).

Despite what McDurmon notes is a tendency of atheists to wax dogmatic, however—consider Dawkins’s claim that “if [his] book works as [intended], religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down”—some argue that there are reasons enough to take them seriously. One of the main reasons is that much passionate debate raises questions for many people, such as, Is faith intellectual nonsense? Are science and religion locked in a battle to the death? and, Is Christianity simply a force for evil?

Then there is the matter of the cult of personality. Stephen Ross, research assistant to the President of Christian Research Institute, believes Christians should take the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seriously because “these guys are so confident and their rhetorical force so convincing, there are people who may believe the message even if they don’t understand the arguments. These [Christians] should not be reading these books without qualification,” he told the Journal, “On the other hand, the critical thinker, able to see through the smokescreen of rhetoric and to endure their caustic delivery, would be led to ask the question, ‘Is this is the best you’ve got? Maybe my worldview has a lot going for it after all.’”

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, realizes that the rise of the “new” atheism confirms the ancient biblical wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun.” He is quick to note several stunning new developments, however.

“Promulgating atheism has become a lucrative business [and] profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today’s fashionable disbelief from the varieties of atheism that have arisen over the millennia,” he says.²

The most obvious characteristics, Berkowitz states, are best realized by a historical comparison of the new atheism to the classical atheism of Epicurus and Lucretius, the Enlightenment atheism of the eighteenth century, and the anti-modern atheism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. “Whereas classical atheism rejected belief in the gods in the name of pleasure and tranquility, the new atheism rejects God in the name of natural science,” he says. “Unlike Enlightenment atheism, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which went to some effort to disguise or mute its disbelief, the new atheism proclaims its seemingly never-ending hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops.” And, according to Berkowitz, whereas antimodern atheists considered the death of God movement a blow to the human spirit, the new atheism views the abandonment of religious faith in the modern world as a good thing, “lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a divine presence in history.”³

Christian and secular responses to the flood of new atheist material appearing on bestseller lists, television, radio, and Internet blogs and sites are gradually building, too.

Founded in 1978, American Vision is a nonprofit Christian think tank, national training center, book publisher, and speaker’s bureau whose mission, according to its Web site (www.americanvision.org) is “Equipping and Empowering Christians to Restore America’s Biblical Foundation.” The strategy of American Vision is to do so using the Internet, radio, television, audio/video resources, publications, and training seminars.

The latest such resource is a two-minute commercial that has been broadcast globally via the Internet and television. “Atheists present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers,” reads the Web site promo. “The French Revolution, Communism, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the atheistic worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of Christians and the killing of anyone who gets in the way. What’s worse is that atheism is paving a wide road for Islam to advance in our nation and around the world.”

The commercial script reads:

This is Sam [Harris]. He writes books. Sam likes to think. He uses words like reason, rational, and real. Sam thinks that God is not real and that evolution is a fact. Sam is a nice guy and cares about you. He thinks you should stop living your life based on the morals of a 2,000 year old fairytale book like the bible and just be reasonable.

This is Richard [Dawkins]. He writes books, too. He’s one of Sam’s friends and doesn’t believe in God either. In fact, he thinks that parents who teach their children about God should be arrested….

This is Robespierre [Maximilien Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution]. He lived 200 years ago in France. He liked to think and use words like reason and rational just like Sam and Richard. But he also liked to kill people who disagreed with him. [This was]… known as the reign of terror.…Maybe if more people decide to listen to Sam and Richard we could all be more reasonable and rational like Robespierre. Maybe we could even have our own reign of terror for people who continue to be irrational and believe silly storybooks like the bible.

Tongue-in-cheek aside, even avowed atheist, philosopher of science, and author Michael Ruse believes that the militancy of the new atheism is uncalled for and counterproductive and that progress toward answering the ultimate questions occurs only by engaging in dialogue and not just shutting people down with sheer force of rhetoric. On the cover of The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, by Oxford theologian Alister McGrath and his wife, Joanna Collicutt McGrath, in response to Dawkins, Ruse is quoted as saying, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.”

In case you’ve been too busy to attend the pronouncements at the village free speech alley or could not find a friend and were afraid to go alone, an update on the various books, Web sites, blogs, articles, and videos are noted in Table 1 (See page 8), “New Atheist Attacks and Christian/ Secular Responses,” with the disclaimer that neither the Christian Research Institute nor the Christian Research Journal necessarily support the particulars of doctrine or the perspectives of any sources contained therein.

— C. Wayne Mayhall

NOTES

1. Joel McDurmon, The Return of the Village Atheist (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 2007).

2. “The New New Atheism,” WSJ Opinion Journal, Wall Street Journal Editorial Page, July 16, 2007, WSJ.com, www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010341.

3. Ibid.

As a science writer, I am excited by topics most people read about only in the dentist’s office when all the popular magazines have been taken. As an evangelist, I’m grateful that my interest in nature is useful in turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones toward faith. Most objections that unbelievers bring up concerning the Bible and science have straightforward answers; however, the problems are often made tougher than necessary because of my skeptical friends’ previous encounters with Christians. I can only imagine how these people must have talked past each other:

Unbeliever: “Evolution is a fact. It occurs through differential reproductive success of individuals in a population.”

Christian: “Oh yeah? Then how do you explain Mount Saint Helens? Creation scientists have proved the Grand Canyon was formed the same way. And how do you explain human footprints found in dinosaur footprints in Texas?”

To which, of course, the unbeliever responds: “Your case is overwhelming. How can I be saved?”

Three Surefire Rules for Evangelistic Failure

If you’d really like to do your part to marginalize Christians and to be sure that skeptics associate us with cultists and loonies, try the following:

1. Rather than displaying confidence that all truth is God’s truth, insist that skeptics choose between the Bible and science, or between your “Christianized science” and everyone else’s science. Give unbelievers some obscure or controversial fact they’ll never find in their biology texts to show them how wrong they are.

2. Rather than starting a conversation with skeptics by finding common ground, look for controversy. Why be like Paul on Mars Hill when you can by like Jerry Springer on TV? You’ll have much more fun getting people riled up.

3. Have an us-vs.-them attitude. Be sure skeptics know that you have marked them out as the enemy. Give them a clever take-it-or-leave-it answer that will put them on the defensive rather than encouraging them to give the issues real thought.

For Success: Have the Right Attitude

On the other hand, if you’d like to do the work of an evangelist, “your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus,” who humbled Himself for the sake of the people He came to reach (Phil. 2:5–8). We have infinitely more reason to be humble than Jesus did, especially when we approach His creation. Just because we’re Christians, it doesn’t mean we are automatically experts in every field and have answers to all the mysteries in nature. We need to approach God’s creation with awe and a passion for truth.

Let’s not start out judging our unbelieving friends for having doubts about our message. Skepticism, after all, has to do with personally examining the evidence — and that’s what we want! I view skepticism as a uniquely human trait, clearly separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Let’s encourage critical thinking in seekers now that will help keep them out of the cults later.

Seven Questions to Get Unbelieving Skeptics Thinking

The following topics may be helpful when scientific issues have become a special sticking point for people you wish to reach. As you seek to find some useful common ground with skeptics, consider raising questions that help them see the lack of contradictions between the Bible and science:

What does science actually tell us about …

1. …the origin of the universe? From the ancients until Einstein, people who had not been influenced by the Bible assumed that the universe has existed eternally, relieving them of the burden of dealing with ultimate origins. Today, overwhelming evidence has forced over 95 percent of cosmologists to subscribe to the theory of a big bang creation event. For those who care to think about it, this theory requires a mysterious, prior Cause beyond the universe.

A universal beginning provides the most scientifically acceptable explanation for the observed expansion of the universe. As NASA satellite team leader George Smoot wrote in the foreword to my book on modern cosmology: “Until the late 1910’s, humans were as ignorant of cosmic origins as they had ever been. Those who didn’t take Genesis literally had no reason to believe there had been a beginning.”1

2. …the purpose of the universe? Of course, scientists say this topic is outside the scientific domain; yet their observations have made it difficult for them to avoid acknowledging a mysterious phenomenon called fine-tuning. It turns out that the fundamental forces of nature — the universe’s expansion rate at the beginning, the ratio of the proton and electron masses, and so on — each have values that fall within extremely narrow parameters necessary for life.

Many scientists, with no prompting from theists, speak of the “anthropic principle” as their best explanation. The values of nature’s constants can best be predicted when scientists calculate as if anthros, or humanity, is the purpose behind them. Psalm 66:5 tells us: “Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works in man’s behalf!”

3. …the origin of life on this planet? The theory of evolution has nothing to offer in explaining this event. Though origin-of-life study is an active field of research, no one has come up with a scenario, let alone a theory, that most scientists are willing to accept. One of science’s greatest unmet challenges has been to explain the origin of life’s DNA code, which information scientist Hubert Yockey calls “mathematically identical” to alphabetic language in its specificity and complexity. The most popular hypothesis speculates that RNA-based life provided an interim step, since RNA is simpler than DNA while also using a code to specify the production of proteins; but RNA would require a predecessor as well.

Modern evidence exacerbates these problems by showing that life appeared on earth almost as soon as the planet provided the conditions for it. This leaves little time for what scientists had expected to be the most time-consuming stage of life’s history: the development of the cell and its genetic code.

Modern theories of self-organization and chaos have explained how interesting patterns can be created without intelligence. No theory, however, has been able to overcome the impossible odds against any natural mechanism producing information, that is, meaning.

4. …the origin of the major animal groups called phyla? According to Darwin (and modern neo-Darwinists), life evolved from the bottom up; that is, small changes accumulated into larger ones over millions of years. We should therefore find animal groups with the greatest differences between them (called phyla) later in time, nearer the top of the fossil strata. We should be able to categorize animals into more widely separated groups as time passes, and these groups should become more numerous.

“But that story is not true, according to our fossil finds,” paleontologist Jun-Yuan Chen told me during my visit to seven Chinese sites containing the world’s oldest animal fossils. “The new phyla make their start in the early days, instead of coming at the top.” Also, the number of animal phyla become fewer with time, not greater. New phyla have not continued to appear in all the ages since the early Cambrian period. Naturalistic expectations of a bottom-up pattern are unfulfilled by the evidence, while the actual top-down arrangement observed in the fossil record fits well with the concept of design.

5. …the patterns we find in the fossil record? Neo-Darwinism predicts a gradualistic pattern showing slow transitions from one type of life to another as small changes accumulate. The noted, recently deceased Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the true state of affairs: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”2

Rather than seeing obvious connections between organisms fitting neatly into an evolutionary tree, the actual, typical pattern we find for each animal and plant in the fossil record is: (1) sudden appearance, (2) tiny changes over long periods, and (3) extinction.

Again, this mysterious pattern comes as a surprise to naturalistic theorists. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the Bible, by contrast, spells out all the creation details, but we can say, very conservatively, that the pattern fits what we’d expect from the hand of God as well or better than a naturalistic theory that ignores life’s actual history.

6. …the development of intelligence? As evolutionary biologists see it, only one species out of an estimated 50 billion developed high intelligence on this planet after 4.6 billion years. Harvard zoologist Ernst Mayr declared that, if intelligence has such high value, we should see more species develop it.3 Stephen Jay Gould viewed the intelligence of Homo sapiens “as an ultimate in oddball rarity.”4

The biologists’ view, however, contradicts science’s much cherished Copernican Principle, which tells us that we are typical, not exceptional. Faced with contrary evidence, scientists who are honest must admit that they have to give up either the observation that intelligence appears to be almost impossibly rare or unique or the view that human intelligence is typical in the universe. The Bible sides with the evidence: there is indeed something special about us.

Where did our species get the volitional ability to override our natural instincts? How does “differential reproductive success” explain the human ability to write great literature, compose symphonies, create fine art, and do abstract math? We don’t need these abilities to survive.

7. If our intelligence and volition were purposely created, what might be our Creator’s purpose for us?

The Creator could have made us like automatons, or like animals, to follow Him instinctively. The fact that He didn’t leads us to wonder why one volitional Being would go to the trouble of creating another volitional being, particularly when we can use our wills to defy His will — unless He wants to have a personal relationship with us. The highest kind of relationship offers parties the ability to reject the relationship. Isn’t it reasonable, then, that the Highest Being would want to have the highest kind of relationship — love — the relationship in which each person willingly gives himself or herself to the other?

The Bible tells how the God who is beyond our universe entered His own creation in order to demonstrate His love for us in the most dramatic, personal way possible. “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

That’s one way to introduce the gospel message. Any of these questions about the Bible and science will serve a worthwhile purpose if they help open your skeptical friend’s heart, as well as his or her mind, to the Good News you want to share.

When published on glossy paper in two-column format and distributed on the pages of a widely circulated magazine, a stinker of an argument can be transmogrified into a seemingly shining example of keen insight. With Matt Young’s article, “Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe,” we have a specimen of this sort. What might have been an open-minded inquiry into the nature and grounds of religious belief was, from the start, a campaign of atheological apologetics.

YOUNG’S METHOD OF INVESTIGATION

Young’s investigation into the grounds of religious belief assumes that “the only way to get at [objective] truth…is through empirical observation”; thus, “it is appropriate to examine the claims of religion empirically.” Let us call this unrestricted demand for empirical support of all things rational “the Principle of Scientific Imperialism,” or PSI.

A debilitating defect plagues PSI: it is self-referentially defeating — that is, if the principle is correct, it itself is something that no one can ever know. No set of empirical observations can tell us that all knowledge must be grounded in empirical observation. Furthermore, “empirical observation” is a complicated matter. Scientists routinely infer from empirically observable states the existence of objects or states that are not, strictly speaking, observable. Electrons, quarks, the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, garden variety quantum events — these are just a few examples of unobservables whose existence credible scientists affirm.

I wouldn’t want a handyman working on my house if he didn’t understand the limitations of a hammer. It’s likewise a bad idea to turn science education over to people who don’t understand the limitations of science. Commitment to PSI, thankfully, is not essential to good scientific practice.

It is incumbent upon all intellectuals to search out the best evidence supporting any position they intend to refute and to be fair in their representation and assessment of that evidence. As adjunct professor at the Colorado School of Mines, Young should have drilled for the mother lode of Christian scholarship. The paltry nuggets of fool’s gold that he proudly displays for facile refutation unfortunately suggest either that he overlooked important veins of evidence or he confused what is of value for dross.

YOUNG’S CONCLUSIONS

Young’s treatment of specific evidence for religious belief is set out in two parts. In the first part we encounter the odd objection to the literalness of the book of Jonah and the status of the Book of Job as a theodicy, a complaint about specious appeal to “Bible Codes” as evidence of divine authorship of the Bible, and the assertion that there is a “myriad of errors and inconsistencies in the Hebrew Bible and in the Gospels.”

Speaking for myself, so-called Bible codes contribute nothing to my belief in the divine authority of Scripture. Hand-wringing about the “obvious fiction” of Jonah is a red herring. The book of Job, moreover, is not intended to set forth a justification for God’s permission of evils in the world. It is, rather, a reminder that our failure to understand God’s permission of evils has no bearing on God’s justification for permitting them. Young’s silence on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is curious in light of his generalized complaint that “most presumed miracles can be explained or accounted for without invoking divine intervention.” The Resurrection is a good test case for this thesis, but Young does not run the test. I wonder why?²

With the tone of a rant well established, Young turns next to arguments for the existence of God. Six specific arguments are treated with the sensitivity of a meat grinder. I comment on a few of these.³

TWO VERSIONS OF THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

Cosmological arguments all deal in some way with the truly fundamental question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

The Argument from First Cause. This is an argument, says Young, that “assumes that the universe cannot be infinitely old” and infers that “there must have been a first cause.” With uncharacteristic good judgment, Young acknowledges that the universe had a beginning and that this is evidence that the universe “probably had an ultimate cause.”⁴ This concession is more momentous than Young realizes. His only complaint is that the ultimate cause of the beginning of the universe might be something other than God since “there is…no evidence that the ultimate cause was purposeful.”

On the contrary, the evidence that the cause was purposeful, and therefore personal, is actually quite strong. After all, we are familiar with only two sorts of causes: events and agents or persons. Since an event cannot be the cause of the first event in the history of the universe (i.e., the beginning of the universe), it is most reasonable to infer a personal cause for this event. Furthermore, the beginning of the universe marks the beginning of time itself, so the cause of the beginning of the universe must be timeless. A free decision on the part of a personal being makes the best sense for the origin of time.

The Argument from Contingency. Young gives no indication that he understands what it means for an object (e.g., the universe or a part of the universe) to exist contingently. An object need not have a beginning in order to be contingent. It must simply be possible for it not to have existed. If it is possible for some object not to have existed, that object is contingent and needs a cause, but there cannot be an infinite regress of contingent objects causing the existence of contingent objects. There must, therefore, be a necessary being that is the ultimate cause of the existence of any contingent thing.

THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

Young considers two versions of the argument from design. He first looks at “the argument from evolution,” which holds that the evolution of increasingly complex organisms implies the existence of God, who designed the evolutionary process for this purpose. Young argues that the evolutionary process is “too haphazard” for this explanation to count as good evidence. “Periodic mass extinctions” supposedly indicate the haphazardness of the evolutionary process.

Young may be alluding to the problem of explaining the “irreducible” or “specified” complexity of living organisms and their parts.⁵ Observed irreducible complexity is the output of a process constituted by a chain of causal antecedents. The problem for an antisupernaturalist is that nothing in the causal chain itself can explain the apparent goal-directedness of a process resulting in irreducible complexity. At a stage in the development of an organism, it may have components that are vestigial, serving no purpose. As the organism continues to develop, the otherwise vestigial components may be integrated in such a way as to play a more fundamental role in the function of the organism. It’s difficult to see how “periodic mass extinctions” have any bearing on this issue.

The second version of the design argument appeals to the anthropic principle. Anthropic design refers to the existence of a design plan for the production of an environment suitable for the existence of living organisms. It is common knowledge that the biosphere of the earth is a particularly fit habitat for humanity. What is astonishing is that the physical requirements for the existence of this habitat prove to be incredibly fine-tuned. If crucial physical conditions in the universe were altered ever so slightly, living organisms would have no place to live and flourish. Relevant conditions include the rate of expansion of the universe, the nuclear force holding the particles of atoms together, the gravitational force, the efficiency of star formation, the entropy level and mass of the universe, and so on. This argument, says Young, is “completely circular and impossible to take seriously,” but he does not explain how he comes to this conclusion.

THE ARGUMENT FROM RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Young objects to appeals to religious experience. First, “there is not one shred of evidence…that mystical or religious experiences are objectively real and not hallucinations or other well understood mental phenomena.” We are, however, far from understanding mental phenomena so completely that we can conveniently reduce all apparent awareness of God to, for example, the operations of mechanisms in the parietal lobe of the brain.⁶ Young needs to present evidence that religious experiences are mere hallucinations or mental phenomena of some other kind.

Second, Young complains that there is no way to test whether a religious experience is veridical (coinciding with reality). A belief grounded in experience, however, may be judged to be veridical as long as there is no special reason to deny that the object that seems to be presented in the experience actually is presented in the experience. Young demands a positive test for veridicality when a negative test will serve the purposes of rational belief-formation.

Young is troubled by the lack of empirical evidence for the existence of God. He is like the Russian cosmonaut who went into outer space to see for himself whether God exists and came back to report that since he did not see God, there must not be a God. As with the Russian cosmonaut, Young’s commitment to PSI blinds him to the many evidences that do support belief in God. To appreciate the value of these evidences, one must be clear about the proper standards of appraisal and about the way these evidences contribute to the overall case for theism. This is not the time or place to develop this point. My more limited goal has been to salvage from the wreckage of Matt Young’s mangled exposition and facile refutation a few of the more standard arguments for God’s existence.

NOTES

1. Matt Young, “Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe,” Skeptical Inquirer, September–October 2001, 57–60.

2. See R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, eds., In Defense of Miracles (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997).

3. For a fuller discussion of Matt Young’s article, see the version published at the following Web site: http://www.talbot.edu/core/maph/resources/geivett_ idopt.pdf

4. My own development of the evidence for this can be found in my book, Evil and the Evidence for God (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

5. See Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996); William A. Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999).

6. See the following two recent books on this general topic: Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought(New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001).