• What is your view of Daniel’s 70 weeks?
• Must I tithe off of a legal settlement?
• What is the biblical basis for saying Christ suffered more than the cumulative suffering of all humanity?
• What are your thoughts on Les Feldick?
• Should we prepare for doomsday?
• Who are the people who say, “Lord, Lord,” in Matthew 7:21-23?
• Do ghosts exist? Are they demons?
• When did demons lose the ability to take on human form?
• What are your thoughts on The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins? I found this book in my granddaughter’s room.

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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

John Dominic Crossan, who is virtually ubiquitous on television, radio, and documentaries, says that that Jesus Christ was never resurrected from the dead and that His body was thrown into shallow grave barely covered with dirt, and eaten by wild dogs who roamed the execution grounds.[1] He also says that when he hears Christian talk about resurrection, he hears hope but not history.[2]

Not only are the attacks on the historical Jesus coming from without, but the attacks are coming from within as well. Rob Bell, one of the liberal emergent church leaders, has said that if Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists found Larry’s tomb and did DNA samples and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing that we would not lose any significant part of our faith, because it is more about how we live.” [3]

Or think about Peter Jennings, he has passed on now, but he was famous in television documentaries for saying that Christians have faith, but reporters have facts. So he perpetuated the Enlightenment’s false dichotomy between faith and reason.[4]

I also recently mentioned James Watson, who is a Nobel Prize winner and also well known as co-discover of the structure of DNA. He said, “Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more significant figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed.[5]

You also have Richard Dawkins who said just last week in The Wall Street Journal, “Evolution is the creator of life… the greatest show on earth, the only game in town…Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip…God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.”[6]  He had previously said, “If you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.”[7]

You also have Karen Armstrong, who fully buys into Darwinian evolution, which by the way is not based on equality but inequality. She asks, “But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled?” What of the “death and racial extinction”? Her answer is that the notion of God like any “good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity”[8] In an arbitrary world controlled by natural selection, even though Darwin was right and we evolved from the primordial slime, and that everything is brain-based chemistry and genetics and is fatalistically determined, for Armstrong it doesn’t matter the Bible is a myth, for it helps you cope with the reality that Darwin unearthed. In her opinion, the Bible is a good psychology book, not true, but it’s a helpful myth.

Now I’ve just scratched the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is a mass of ice looming under the water. If this is all true, that gives us all the more reason to learn how to defend our faith. A great new product we have is Lee Strobel’s Case for Christ, Case for Faith, and Case for a Creator DVDs all in one package. This is absolutely crucial for the modern Christian. It deals with the Historical Jesus, Questions About Our Faith, and the Case for the Intelligent Design of the Universe. I encourage you to get this brand new resource at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-7000-0274.

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I thought it was a particularly poignant because James Watson, who is a Nobel Prize winner and also well known as co-discover of the structure of DNA, made a statement that shows us that we are in a war of ideas. He said, “Charles Darwin will eventually be seen as a far more significant figure in the history of human thought than either Jesus Christ or Mohammed.” This isn’t by some wild eyed liberal that everyone writes off as crazy, this is someone who has won the prestigious Nobel Prize and was co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.

It shouldn’t surprise us that pagan intellectuals write or think like this, they’re pagans exercising their job descriptions. The problem is that their message is heard by multitudes because we as Christians haven’t given a reasonable answer. In other words, we haven’t exercised our job description, which is to be ambassadors for Christ. Some Christians are secret agents who have never blown their cover before the unregenerate world.

In the article in the Wall Street Journal, on one side you have Richard Dawkins, and if Thomas Huxley was Darwin’s “bulldog,” Richard Dawkins has been aptly described by some as Darwin’s “rottweiler.” Dawkins makes various statements that are of great concern. He says, “Evolution is the creator of life… the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.” “Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip.” “God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.” This is the Darwinian evolutionary point of view.

This is set up as a Pro/Con, on the one side, you have the Darwinian evolutionists and on the other hand you have someone who supports the notion of a creator. In that particular corner stands Karen Armstrong. What does she say? She asks, “But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled?” What of the “death and racial extinction”? What of the callous cruelty and evolutionary waste? Her answer is that the notion of God like any “good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity” in an arbitrary world controlled by natural selection. Her point is not that God is real; the idea is that a belief in God can help you deal with the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled. In this view, the Bible is no more than psychology book that can help you cope with the evolutionary process.

All of this is being said in an age of scientific enlightenment in which the fossil record is saying no to evolution. It’s being communicated in an epoch of time, in which ape-men, fiction, fraud, and fantasy abound. It’s being communicated in a time when design without a designer is ever more untenable. In an epoch of time in which empirical science explodes the myth of Darwinian evolution. If you’ll notice I’m very careful with my words because we as Christians certainly believe in microevolution or changes within kinds, but the notion that a lizard becomes a bird is singularly untenable in an age of scientific enlightenment.

My point in saying all this is to note that we are in a war, a battle, and it is crucial that you as a believer are equipped to give a reason for the hope that lies within you with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15). We somehow have this notion that science is the child of secularism, that is false. Science could have only arisen within a Christian worldview. A secularist could have come up with alchemy but not chemistry, with astrology but not astronomy. The notion that secularism birthed science is completely false and as Christians we are commanded to know how to answer those who are leading our children and our children’s children astray. This should not be done by bolviating but with gentleness and respect, using our well reasoned answers as springboards or opportunities to share the grace, truth and love of the one who spoke and the universe leapt into existence.

We have many resources on this topic ranging from a brand new DVD called Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record to a classic DVD we have recommend in the past entitled The Privileged Planet and much, much more. You can check these out at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.

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Whether or not you support Barack Obama and his policies or his politics, I would say in like fashion that it’s hard not to be impressed by his forthrightness with respect to religious convictions. He says that “to say that men and women should not inject their personal morality into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.” ^[1] Now I would agree with that, but what he gives with one hand he takes with the other, because on the one hand he voices respect for religious convictions and personal morality, but with the other hand he substantially undermines the foundation on which they are grounded. I’ve mentioned this before, but in his “Call To Renewal” keynote address to religious leaders, Obama asks the following questions, “Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith?” ^[2]

While I applaud Obama’s injection of religious dialogue into public policy debates, I am obviously appalled by the manner in which he mischaracterizes and marginalizes the Bible in the process. Nowhere does the Bible suggest slavery is ok. Nor does the Bible suggest stoning your child is ok.

It is worth noting that Obama’s mischaracterizations are eerily similar to those voiced by President Bartlett in the once wildly popular television series The West Wing. In fact it sounds an awful lot like that he spent a great deal of his time listening to President Bartlett, and now it sounds like he’s parroting President Bartlett. Not only so, but his mischaracterizations are comparable to those now being voiced by a crass new breed of anti-theists who make similar charges, albeit in a far more strident and expanded fashion.

One of those is Christopher Hitchens, contributing editor to Vanity Fair. In God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he goes so far as to say that “the Bible contains a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride price and for indiscriminate massacre.” ^[3]

There is also Richard Dawkins who vacuously asserts that “a designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity, because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape.” Thus, says Dawkins, “The whole argument turns on the familiar question, ‘Who made God?’” ^[4]

Not to be outdone, Bart Ehrman, who is in my neck of woods as Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, makes a plethora of accusations against the Bible and it’s authors. Ehrman deems the very manuscripts persevering the New Testament to be flawed, reasoning that we do not have the original autographs but possess only copies of copies centuries removed from the originals, which contain errors in “thousands of places” such that “there are more differences among our manuscripts than there were words in the New Testament.” ^[5] Thus, Ehrman concludes, “Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end.” ^[6] Thus to say as I have many times on the Bible Answer Man that the Bible is divine rather than human in origin is, according to Ehrman, just dead wrong.

Punmeister Bill Maher gets in on the act by effectively characterizing people who hold to the authority of Scripture as those who, for all intents and purposes, have lost their brains somewhere in the narthex of a church. A major reason why Christianity is so dangerous according to Maher is “it stops people from thinking.” ^[7] Displaying a breathtaking form of idiosyncratic fundamentalism from the left, Maher asserts that the Bible, “was not meant to be history. It was not meant to be literal. They were parables. People read it back then and read into it something that was not literal. We’re the dummies who read it literally.” ^[8]

Maher doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what it means to read the Bible literally. Christians don’t say that we read something in a wooden literal sense, but we say that you read it in the sense in which it’s intended. The notion that the Bible is all parabolic displays an ignorant assessment of the most widely read book in the history of the human race. Just a cursory reading through the Bible shows that it is a rich treasury replete with all kinds of genres.

Unfortunately, Maher is still not done. The notion of an afterlife is just plain “dumb.” Says Maher, “Some human beings, whose brain was no better than theirs, told them he knew what happens when you die. And it’s pretty silly to believe what some other human tells you when he tells you he knows what happens when you die.” ^[9]

Obama, Hitchens, Dawkins, Ehrman, and Maher are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg and that’s the problem. Today you have professors, political sages, and public personalities increasingly raising doubts in the minds of millions regarding the validity of a biblical worldview. Left unchallenged, their smoke screens reek havoc on Christianity by stumbling seekers and galvanizing skeptics against “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3).

In an age in which internet fallacies travel half-way around the world before truth has had a chance to put it’s boots on, it is ever more crucial to know what you believe and why you believe it.

All of this to say that we have developed a great new resource for you to use called, Confronting The New Village Atheists: Are Christians Really ”Ignorant,” “Stupid,” “Brainwashed,” Or “Insane”? To get your copy log unto our Website at www.equip.org or call us at 1-888-700-0274.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Barack Obama Website, News and Speeches: Call to Renewal Keynote Address” (http://www.barackobama.com/2006/06/28/call_to_renewal_keynote_address.php). Accessed March, 24, 2009.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 102.

[4] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), 109.

[5] Bart. D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible and Why (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 10.

[6] Ibid., 12

[7] Bill Maher on CNN Larry King Live, January 28, 2004.

[8] Bill Maher on ABC, Politically Incorrect, January 24, 2002.

[9] Bill Maher on CNN Larry King Live, January 28, 2004.