New Atheism_A Survival Guide

by Graham Veale

  ‘Outsiders’ to moral feelings could be convinced that there are objective moral truths. When all the evidence, psychological, sociological and philosophical, is amassed, it is easy to argue that real moral values exist. Even so, we would reckon that outsiders lack a full understanding of morality. Most people do not believe in the reality of beauty and goodness because they have worked through a philosophical proof; they believe because they are ‘insiders’ convinced by their own moral feelings that moral values are as real as any law or substance described by science.

  My ‘inside’ experience of morality can justify my belief in some basic moral absolutes—the dignity of human life, say, or the value of compassion. Now, religious experiences are just as powerful as the experience of goodness, obligation and beauty. So, arguably, they carry the same justifying power for the person who has the experience. A sceptic might object that moral experiences are more widely reported than experiences of God. But God is not an impersonal rule or value; God is personal. So God can choose how and when to reveal himself; the theist will not be at all concerned if some people do not share her religious experiences. Some people lack a moral experience; that does not make it wise to disregard my own.

  Of course our moral and religious experiences need to be evaluated. We should not endorse uncritical devotion to ideas based on nothing more than emotional experiences. If we believed that our emotions were being manipulated, or that we are emotionally imbalanced for other reasons, we should not trust any beliefs derived from our experiences. And if the beliefs that we form simply do not make sense, given what we know about the world and about ourselves, we should reject them. With this in mind, we can ask if Dr Francis Collins’ was irrational to accept God’s existence on the basis of his waterfall experience—his ‘insider test’.

  Dr Collins was in good mental health, and he had his religious experience while hiking in the wilderness; he was hardly vulnerable to psychological manipulation at the time. His religious experience was not atypical; nor did it imply an irrational set of beliefs. For example, he did not hear a voice telling him that a perfectly loving God wanted him to kill as many innocents as possible. If that had been the case, Collins could have dismissed the very idea as incoherent and meaningless. So Dr Collins had no good reason to doubt his experience.

  Crucially, Collins’ new belief in God not only made sense of his religious experience; it helped him to make sense of his entire world. He could see that the evidence of morality did not undermine, but strengthened, the experiential evidence that he gained from his own personal experience of God. When he looked at all the evidence available to him, he did not find anything that undermined his religious experience. And the best explanation for all of his evidence, the objective evidence available to everyone, and his own private ‘insider’ experience, was that God is real.

  The ‘Outsider Test’ asks if Christianity can provide an explanation for the world around us. The evidence of design, morality and the resurrection of Jesus mean that the Christian faith passes that test superlatively. The ‘Insider Test’ asks if Christian theism coheres with our inner experiences. We argued that spiritual desires and religious experiences can give us good reason to believe in God. However, as we will see, only the gospel reveals a God worthy of worship; without the cross and resurrection of Jesus our spiritual desires could never be sated.

  * * *

  51 The story of Irving’s trial is expertly told by Richard Evans in Telling Lies About Hitler (Verso:2002) and Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial (Harper:2006).

  52 debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/02/outsider-test.html (retrieved 1st Jan 2012). Loftus is continually revising the test, and it is not clear which version is ‘canonical’.

  53 Paul Moser The Evidence for God (Cambridge:2010), 17.

  54 Michael Argyle Psychology and Religion (Routledge:2005), 74

  55 See Montagu Barker’s Psychology, Religion and Mental Health (Rutherford House: 2000); Charles Taliaferro ‘In Defense of the Numinous’ in Philosophy and the Christian Worldview eds. David Werther and Mark Linville (Continuum, 2012); CS Evans and R. Zachary Manis Philosophy of Religion (IVP: 2009), 98-115

  56 ‘‘Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matt. 7:21–23).

  57 John Calvin Institutes, 47 www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.pdf

  58 Michael Murray, ‘Scientific Explanations of Religion and the Justification of Religions Belief,’ in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on Evolutionary Explanations of Religion Edited Michael Murray and Jeffrey Schloss (Oxford: 2010), 169

  59 Alvin Plantinga Where the Conflict Really Lies (Oxford: 2012), 52–53

  60 ‘Evolutionary Accounts of Religion: Explaining and Explaining Away’ by Michael Murray and Andrew Goldberg, and ‘Explaining Religious Experience’ by Charles Taliaferro, both in The Believing Primate (Schloss, Murray eds).

  61 My account of the ‘spiritual desires’ is based on Clifford Williams excellent Existential Reasons for Belief in God (IVP Academic: 2011).

  62 Quoted by Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, 397

  63 Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies, 132

  64 C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity (HarperCollins: 2001), 136–137

  65 Francis Collins full testimony can be read at www.bethinking.org/science-christianity/test-of-faith-chapter-1-learning-the-language-of-god.pdf

  66 www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7156/full/448864a.html

  67 whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/francis-collins-as-nih-director/ (retrieved 25 Feb 2012).

  68 Knabel and Schmidt appear in Michael Burleigh’s Moral Combat (HarperPress: 2011).

  7

  A Gospel for Good Men and Scoundrels

  “How do you know all this?,” he cried. “Are you a devil?”

  “I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.”

  G. K. Chesterton, The Honour of Israel Gow

  For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

  The New Atheism represents a significant re-branding of unbelief. Once upon a time, some atheists (the continental, existential type) were angry at God for not existing; God’s absence robbed our world of significance. Marxists rejected the Kingdom of God for a monumental struggle with history. And nearly all atheists were outraged at the terrible suffering of our world. Schopenhauer, for example, wished that the earth had remained as lifeless as the moon. These atheists argued that a good God would never have allowed such a world. This ‘problem of evil’ was the bedrock of Atheism.

  But a gloomy demeanour doesn’t suit the modern market-place. A makeover was necessary if religion was to be challenged as a source of meaning and hope. Some sceptics even took to calling themselves ‘Brights’; no sense of despair there, then. If God doesn’t exist, we should just look at the bright side of life; at least we can choose our own values. New Atheists are wild and witty, in a Python-esque way. They would rather write worship songs for a Flying Spaghetti Monster than engage with existential angst. This cheerful, cheeky nihilism has been popularised, mass produced and distributed at little cost to the consumer. The New Atheism might not be deep, but it is fun!

  Yet we must respond to the problem of evil because it presents the greatest challenge to theism. Why would a perfect being, a personal God of unlimited love and power, create a world with suffering in it? The theist can give a neat, snappy reply to this question. God permits evil and suffering to bring about some greater good. Suffering provides us with the opportunity to grow in sympathy and compassion. God gave us the gift of moral respons
ibility; we chose to abuse that gift with cruelty and savagery. However, God can use pain to call us back to him, and to teach us to depend on him.

  So there are greater goods, like moral responsibility and compassion, which justify the existence of evil. If only the problem of evil could be dodged so easily! There is so much suffering in the world; is it all necessary to bring these greater goods about? This is the problem of gratuitous suffering—some suffering seems to serve no greater good at all. Human responsibility does not require the existence of cancer or rabies. An anonymous, orphaned child dying unnoticed in a gutter allows no opportunity for compassion. Why doesn’t God intervene to root this needless suffering out of the world?

  The problem of gratuitous suffering is compounded by the problem of horrendous evil. Horrendous evils are so terrible that those who suffer them would rather not have been born. A parent who accidentally kills their own child and a child who has been raped repeatedly by their own parent have both suffered horrendous evils. A God of unlimited love would not just value human race as a whole; he would value each individual human being. He would want every human’s life to have more good than evil in it; the problem of horrendous evils presents us with individual lives that seem to contain more evil than good.

  So how can the Christian respond? By immediately pointing out that God did not create a world in which individuals, through no fault of their own, undergo lives which contain more evil than good. But we must remind the atheist that, if theism is true, the possibilities for goodness are not exhausted by what we observe in the world around us. God would be capable of sustaining a person in an afterlife, and a life of eternal bliss would outweigh any horrendous suffering that we have experienced here.

  So a theist could respond to the problem of horrendous evils by insisting that God can overwhelm evil with good in the New Creation. God will allow no-one to undergo a life with more torment than blessing unless they reject the blessing on offer. 69 What about the problem of gratuitous suffering? Many evils do not seem to directly bring about some greater good. So, some theists concede that many tragedies do not increase the amount of goodness in the universe; if God brought a ‘greater good’ by allowing Alois Knabel to shoot children in the neck, then only He knows what it is.

  However, God offers every human an eternal life good enough to overwhelm any amount of suffering. Furthermore, God guarantees that evil will not have the final say; God’s victory is assured. So, these theists argue, why should we expect God to prevent every instance of gratuitous suffering? God would be forced to intervene continuously in our world, changing the nature of our universe, and seriously undermining human responsibility. Gratuitous evils might just be the price we pay to have moral responsibility. 70

  Other theists are not comfortable with this answer; they are inclined to think that God ordained all things for the good. 71 They point out that humans need to remember their limitations when thinking about God and suffering. Consider insects so small that they are invisible to the naked human eye. If an entomologist were to tell you that your arm was covered in such insects, it would not be rational to deny this because you cannot see any insects. You are not in a position to detect these creatures with your eyes.

  So consider the gap between God’s mind and ours. We should concede we are not in a position to detect all the goods that God knows of. True, we cannot understand what possible good could come from the actions of murderous Nazis; it seems as if the world would have been better off without them. However, God’s purposes will be infinitely more subtle than we can imagine; his capacity to bring good out of suffering will surpass all human knowledge.

  The different theistic responses to the problem of evil sounds like great theories, but they are hardly sources of great comfort. We have established that evil does not provide decisive counter-evidence to theism; but we have been forced to admit that some of it seems gratuitous. We do not have a neat, tidy explanation for many terrible events. And, in any case, those who have suffered horrendous evils are rarely interested in the implications for philosophy of religion.

  Yet, if the Christian cannot supply a complete explanation of evil, she can provide a reason to trust God. The Son of God was crucified for us; and the Father’s heart was broken. The message of the cross includes the revelation that God has suffered for us and with us. In fact, if God turned his face away from his son in anger (as Jesus’ cry ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ indicates) then God has suffered more than we ever could. The cross is a sign that God’s love, and God’s mercy, dwarfs all imagination.

  It is also a sign that God’s goodness will overwhelm suffering. On the first Good Friday, Jesus’ disciples would have believed that God had abandoned his Messiah. That belief would have needed an urgent reassessment in the light of Easter Morning. The Father did not forsake the Son, and God will not forsake us. The Christian might not have neat explanations for every instance of suffering; but the cross and the resurrection provide the Christian with reasons to trust God. And these are not events that have occurred in an abstract, metaphysical realm. They are part of our history, concrete examples of God’s goodness.

  In the last chapter we pointed out that humans have a need for consolation; we all have fundamental spiritual needs that define us. One of those needs is the need for salvation. We need to know that our suffering matters; that it is not the contingent side effect of evolutionary history. We need to know that there is a way out of suffering; not by pretending that suffering is an illusion, but knowing that one day suffering will be defeated. The message of the cross provides the consolation that we need in the presence of evil. And this message is not mere wish fulfilment; it is confirmed by the resurrection of Jesus.

  But the cross and the resurrection were not just intended to bring an end to the unrelenting chaos in the world around us; the message of the cross is that God’s son died to end the bedlam that rules in each human heart. This is an offensive message; we do not wish to acknowledge that we are so flawed that only the death of the Son of God could heal us. Nevertheless, the message of the cross, and God’s call to be transformed by it, is the final piece of evidence that we want to consider.

  The Story So Far…

  Let’s take a breath and rehearse what I have argued so far. Christians believe in a personal God of limitless loving power.Theism can be treated as a hypothesis, and we can find evidence that supports this hypothesis. If there are features of the universe that reflect purpose, a personal God would explain those features; we would have evidence of God’s existence. The universe’s order and structure, objective moral values, the resurrection of Jesus Christ and human spiritual needs are all ultimately explained by theism.

  We have also noted that a person can have reliable personal, experiential evidence of God’s existence. Now, intellectuals from Plato to Kurt Godel have found the case for God to be intellectually interesting and compelling. But a theoretical belief in God’s existence is of little value if it is not accompanied with a personal trust in God. A God of love would not be interested in the speculations of life’s spectators. It is important to know that God exists. It is also good to know what God is—unlimited power and love. But we should not be satisfied until we know who God is.

  If theism is true, it does not merely describe the universe. Theism also prescribes how we should live. If God is the Perfect Being then nothing else is more worthy of worship! It follows that we should seek to worship God; we should want to know God, and to be transformed by him. This gives us a way to assess the credibility of the Christian gospel, for any true revelation should describe an unsurpassable God, more worthy of worship than anything else that we can imagine. Furthermore, any true revelation should seek to challenge us, transform us, and answer our deepest needs.

  As we noted at the end of chapter 5, Christianity reveals that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, inextricably linked by the same unlimited power and love. God the Father gave his only Son, who suffered and died for us. The love of Go
d stretches our imaginations and conceptions to breaking point. Who else could be worthy of worship? Furthermore, the gospel of Jesus Christ is challenging and consoling in equal measure. It reassures us that God is with us and for us; but it also demands that we unconditionally surrender to the love of God in faith and repentance.

  We tend to associate worship with any activity performed in a church, or our acts of religious observance. We might not understand Christian rituals; we often have no emotional connection with them. Still, we tend to act as if worship consists of taking bread and wine at the right time in the right way and repeating the right lines from the right prayer. Or, if we attend a Church with a ‘user-friendly service’, we might identify worship with brief, intense experiences generated by the enthusiasm of a band of contemporary musicians.

  To identify religious experiences, however profound, or religious observance as true worship is to get the cart before the horse. We might well experience transcendence or awe; we might have a keen sense of God’s providential care. But compared to true worship such religious experiences are worthless. If God is truly worthy of worship—if he is as good as it gets—then worshipping him will cost us our mind, soul, will and understanding. Simply put, it means allowing God to have the final say over everything that we are.

  That is to say, true worship begins with a changed heart. Before our acts of worship can mean anything at all we must trust God, asking him to change our characters, our motivations and our desires. The process might be sudden and dramatic; it might be subtle and gradual. But unless we allow God to occupy our hearts, to dominate and exploit our emotions and desires for his own ends, we simply are not worshipping him. We have not realised who or what God is.