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The third in the series on apologetics at Above Bar Church, Southampton. This one considers the charge that, in the words of Richard Dawkins, ‘religion is one of the world’s great evils’. The audio is not yet synchronised to the slides.

Handout available here.

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At Above Bar Church, Southampton, we’re doing something a little different for the next few weeks on Sunday evenings. The congregation is splitting for the teaching part of the service. Andrew Page is teaching a series on Hosea, while John Risbridger is doing a Bible overview and I’m teaching a short series on apologetics. This is the first of six sessions, and it’s a very general introduction. I’m grateful to Marcus Honeysett for suggesting the great opening discussion question. Those of you who have read William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics may recognise some of his influence on me here.

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This article by first published in Idea magazine and on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins 2009

Image courtesy Icon Film Distribution © 2009

As the world marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, his influence on the world is as enormous as ever. Whatever you think of his ideas, there’s no doubt that they have shaped science and profoundly affected many aspects of contemporary culture. Darwin’s meticulous work established the natural sciences as a serious scientific discipline for the first time. If this was Darwin’s only legacy, he would still be a towering figure in the history of science. But for most people, his name is linked only with On the Origin of Species.

The new film Creation tells the story of how Darwin finally came to publish it in 1859, and the struggles that led up to that point. He had arrived at the essentials of his theory at least seventeen years earlier, but kept his ideas to himself and a few friends. One reason he delayed was because he wanted much more supporting evidence. Earlier evolutionary ideas had been highly controversial; Darwin feared the response to his work, so he wanted to be sure he was on solid ground. He spent eight years studying barnacles.

Creation shows that Charles Darwin was also concerned about upsetting his wife, Emma. She knew his Christian faith was dwindling, and was concerned that his scientific desire for hard proof was making things worse for him. The film also stresses two other factors: the ill health that plagued him for the second half of his life, and his grief over the death of his beloved daughter Annie, shortly after her tenth birthday in 1851. This event brought to a tragic climax Darwin’s questions about the place of suffering in God’s creation and he eventually became an agnostic.

Image courtesy Icon Film Distribution © 2009

But he never saw himself as at war with God, much less that his ideas had killed God, as Thomas Huxley claims in Creation. The initial disagreement over On the Origin of Species was not primarily about what theological implications it may have had, but about whether or not the science was true. There were Christians and scientists on both sides of the debate.

A supposed conflict

From the beginning, though, a small minority was appalled by Darwin’s ideas while another minority seized upon them to support atheism. Today Darwin has become the focal point of a supposed conflict between science and faith, which he would have had no time for. He saw no reason for animosity between science and religion. Towards the end of his life, he wrote, ‘It seems absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.’ Some people flatly deny Darwin’s statement. Many atheists – the best known being Richard Dawkins – maintain that evolution by natural selection in a godless universe is the only rational belief. Meanwhile, some Christians insist that belief in God is inconsistent with belief in evolution.

Between these two are many shades of opinion. Some Christians argue for intelligent design, for example, while others accept evolution as God’s means of creation and see no conflict with the Bible. And Darwin’s influence has gone far beyond biology, often in ways that he would object to. The concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’ has been used to justify various theories in the social sciences – anything vaguely to do with some kind of evolution. This nexus of ideas has become known as ‘social Darwinism’, though it has little or nothing to do with Darwin’s biological theory.

‘Survival of the fittest’ wasn’t even Darwin’s phrase, though he later adopted it. It was coined by economist Herbert Spencer in arguing for laizzez-faire free-market economics. Today, pundits discuss the credit crunch in Darwinian terms: if some businesses go to the wall, that’s just tough, because the fittest will survive.

An error in reasoning

Darwin’s ideas have been used to justify racism, though he was vehemently opposed to it, and eugenics, though he objected to any kind of government coercion. But these views don’t come out of Darwin’s work at all. They result from a basic error in reasoning: attempting to derive moral ideas of how human society ought to be from Darwin’s description of what he believed the biological world is like.

Whether or not ‘Darwin’s big idea’ is right, we must realise that it is rather limited. Yes, after 150 years it’s still a powerful theory for explaining biology, but as these misuses of it show, there are more important things at stake. Questions of morality and meaning are much more fundamental, but science can say nothing about them. Morality cannot be derived from biology, so where does it come from? It must come from something beyond us if it is to have any objective value. Otherwise society is at the mercy of its strongest members.

Atheist followers of Darwin believe that his ideas destroy the uniqueness of human beings, and that the meaning of life becomes merely passing on our DNA. Yet we instinctively feel that life is more than this. But where do meaning and purpose come from? Why, like Darwin, do we seek truth, rejoice in beauty and love deeply? The answer to these questions is the one that Darwin gave up on because of his grief. Only the existence of God allows for objective morality. Only God gives human life real meaning. Only God can make sense of suffering; without him it is utterly meaningless. And only God can account for the very existence of life.

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

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It has been a central plank of ‘new atheism’ that religion exists to fill a void in people’s understanding. Where no rational explanation seems to fit, so the argument goes, people create a new belief to explain something. So, for example, people did not know where the world came from, so they invented the creation story and a God to act as creator of it to fill that void.

This is flawed for a number of reasons, not least because it is perfectly possible to hold both the scientific rational explanation of how events occur whilst also holding a religious belief about the meaning and purpose of those events.

However, it also seems false to Mouse for a more basic reason. People believe all sorts of things. Some of the time we are sceptical to our bones. For example, yesterday Derren Brown successfully predicted all six winning lottery numbers before they were drawn. We’ll have to wait until Friday to find out how he did it, but as yet, Mouse has not heard anyone calling for him to be burned as a witch. Nor has Mouse heard of anyone falling prostrate before him in adoration of a deity. In other words, we don’t leap to a manifestly irrational belief simply because we can’t explain something.

In other instances, we do just that. Conspiracy theories abound about just about every notable event. Following on from the death of Michael Jackson, there have already been numerous ‘sightings’ of the King of Pop alive and well in various places around the world. Theories that he faked his death to escape debt and the burden of his upcoming tour are widespread and believed by a surprising number of people. It is said that 9 out of 10 people in America believe that John F Kennedy’s death was a conspiracy.

So what does all this prove. Mouse’s view is that it proves absolutely nothing. Whether people believe something or not does not make the slightest difference to whether that thing is true or not. The ‘new atheists’ need to move on from their simplistic and clearly flawed view. Christians, in turn, need to be better at explaining why they believe the existence of God and the divinity of Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God are objective truths.

H/T to David Keen for the Derren Brown story

H/T Church Mouse Blog

Posted via email from Tony Watkins

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Christopher Hitchens and John Lennox debated at the 2008 Edinburgh International Festival on the subject of ‘Can Atheism Save Europe?’ You can buy the DVD from The Fixed Point Foundation. When I posted this earlier today, it was available on YouTube, but it’s been removed.

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One of a series of five-minute interviews on the BBC website conducted by Matthew Stadlen. Dawkins gives quick summary answers to a number of quick-fire questions about his atheism. As in his debate with John Lennox in Oxford, he doesn’t entirely dismiss the possibility of God, but clearly doesn’t think there is any evidence worth paying attention to. Dawkins is rightly insistent on the importance of evidence. He says, ‘there’s no reason to believe anything for which there isn’t any evidence.’ Absolutely. The problem is what kinds of evidence Dawkins considers to be legitimate. In A Devil’s Chaplain (p. 248) he writes:

Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

I agree with this completely. My quibble is with his underlying assumptions that the only valid evidence is empirical and that only scientific knowledge is valid. The trouble with these assumptions is that they are self-defeating. You cannot scientifically prove, or have empirical evidence for, the idea that only scientific knowledge is valid and that you need empirical evidence for everything.

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Roger Ebert is the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and one of the most respected critics in the world. He has often commented on spiritual issues in a way which suggests he has a real interest in them, but no convictions about there being any spiritual reality. He’s not alone in this, of course. He has recently posted on his blog an explanation of where he’s come from, in a religious sense, and where he is now. He had a Catholic upbringing which he views very positively, in terms of the morality it instilled in him, but which didn’t apparently help him to develop any confidence in the existence of God himself:

Catholicism made me a humanist before I knew the word. When people rail against “secular humanism,” I want to ask them if humanism itself would be okay with them. Over the high school years, my belief in the likelihood of a God continued to lessen. I kept this to myself. I never discussed it with my parents. My father in any event was a non-practicing Lutheran, until a death bed conversion which rather disappointed me. I’m sure he agreed to it for my mother’s sake.

Did I start calling myself an agnostic or an atheist? No, and I still don’t. I avoid that because I don’t want to provide a category for people to apply to me. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. Chaz, who has a firm faith, leaves me to my beliefs. “But you know you’re one or the other,” she says. “I have never told you that,” I say. “Maybe not in so many words, but you are,” she says.

But I persist in believing I am not. During in all the endless discussions on several threads of this blog about evolution, intelligent design, God and the afterworld, now numbering altogether around 3,500 comments, I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist – which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.

I understand why Roger Ebert wants to avoid being labelled as an atheist, but I’m not sure he can avoid the agnostic label quite so easily. It just means he doesn’t know, but it doesn’t, as he suggests, carry the connotation that he could or even should know, but cannot or will not. But it is just a label, and we all too easily use labels to pigeon hole people and even attack them without actually listening and understanding them. Later in his post, Ebert says:

If there was a First Cause, was there a First Causer? Or did Big Bangs just happen to happen? Can we name the First Causer “God?” We can name it anything we want. I can name it after myself. It is utterly insignificant what it is called, because we would be giving a name to something that falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge. So it is a futile enterprise.

Ebert raises important questions. Why do Big Bangs happen? Why is there something rather than nothing? As Stephen Hawking once remarked,

. . . Even if there is only one unique set of possible laws, it is only a set of equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to govern? Is the ultimate unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that. (Black Holes and Baby Universes, (London, Bantam Press, 1993) p. 99)

Given that everything we know about the universe and everything we experience points to the existence of causes for effects, there must be a first cause for the universe. Yes we can name that First Cause anything at one level, but it is only insignificant what we choose to call it if that first cause is impersonal. But what if the Christian understanding that the first cause is a personal God is right? Then it matters enoromously. Roger Ebert would not think it utterly insignificant if I decided to call him whatever I liked. The difference between the two, he would say, is that Ebert is knowable and falls well within various categories of thought, while ‘God’ or ‘First Cause’ ‘falls outside all categories of thought and must be unknowable and irrelevant to knowledge.’ This is an extraordinary claim. At a stroke he dismisses all of theology, all Christian experience and all Christian history. It is true that any God is intrinsically beyond my ability to understand completely, because God is infinite and I am decidely finite. But that does not mean I cannot know some things about God. Why must any God be unknowable? Inaccessible to scientific exploration, yes, because God is a spiritual being and science is only able to deal with the physical dimensions. It is reasonable to assume that God is unknowable if it all starts with, and depends on us. But what if God chooses to communicate? What if he chooses to reveal himself to human beings down through history, particularly through divinely inspired writings? What if he chooses to take on properties of the physical creation and step into it as a human being, revealing in his words and actions God himself? What if he did this in order to rescue us from our rebellion, or our ignoring him, in order to develop a relationship with us? What if he even wants to live in us, transforming us more into his likeness? The simple answer is that it would change everything. No longer would God be remote, inaccessible, unknowable, unfathomable. No longer would God be irrelevant. The Christian claim is that all my ‘What ifs’ are answered in the affirmative: this is precisely what the Bible claims has happened. If it’s true, it makes the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the central event of history. It is not only a question of what the Bible says, either. Jesus’s life and death, even his resurrection, are events for which there is very strong historical evidence. And the testimony of millions of Christians down through history is that have personally experienced the inward transformation which a relationship with God brings. Isn’t Roger Ebert missing something vital here by defining God as unknowable and irrelevant? As Francis Schaeffer said of God many years ago, ‘He is there and he is not silent.’

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