Why I'm not an Atheist #1 - Because my Parents weren't

Last mod­i­fied on 2009-10-27 01:02:12 GMT. 4 com­ments. Top.

I put this as the first rea­son for not being an athe­ist, not because itʼs most impor­tant, or because it  is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of how some­one stays out of athe­ism — itʼs not. But because for many athe­ists this is the great explana­tory fac­tor behind my theism.

Only a fool would deny the influence of par­ents and soci­ety. Itʼs a help­ful analy­sis of the way in which we come to believe the things that we believe — the soci­ol­ogy of knowledge.

But is that suf­fi­cient to sink my “non-atheism” right in the beginning?

Well that would only be the case if in fact other forms of knowl­edge were free from the same kind of soci­ol­ogy. But all knowl­edge is soci­o­log­i­cal to one degree or another. Only a  fool would say that every thought he ever had, heʼd come up with him­self. Most of our  thoughts come from oth­ers. We all belong to a com­mu­nity of one sort or another that rein­forces the plau­si­bil­ity of some beliefs  and dis­cour­ages other kinds of beliefs.

The athe­ist PR machine likes to talk as if itʼs the excep­tion — it talks as if athe­ism is the con­vic­tion one arrives at when you start think­ing for yourself.

But the more I look at athe­ism, the more it seems to me that there are plenty of oth­ers to help you do your think­ing. Richard Dawkins writes about the aim of his book like this:

“My dream is that this book may help peo­ple to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay move­ment, the more peo­ple come out, the eas­ier it will be for oth­ers to join them. There may be a crit­i­cal mass for the ini­ti­a­tion of a chain reaction.”

Dawkins aim is not sim­ply to present the argu­ments, and let the argu­ments speak for them­selves. Rather his aim is, one might say, a soci­o­log­i­cal one — he hopes to give peo­ple courage to own their con­vic­tions through the knowl­edge that there are oth­ers who share them. And through that, oth­ers might be encour­aged to join the throng­ing crowd.

But Dawkins is not being decep­tive. Itʼs the way all human knowl­edge works. We are not  just ratio­nal beings — we are also rela­tional beings, who depend on each other for all sorts of things, knowl­edge included. The fact that I depend on some­thing for my knowl­edge does not make me irra­tional, it makes me human.

I talk to a lot of uni­ver­sity stu­dents who are athe­ist or agnos­tic, who all use the same kind  of argu­ments. Did they all really, some­how aston­ish­ingly, come up with the same argu­ments inde­pen­dent of each other? No, the major­ity have just bought into intel­lec­tual trends of the day — they have been ʻindoc­tri­natedʼ, and most donʼt have the sense to see it. (They really think they think for them­selves!) They dis­be­lieve, in other words, because they were born in the West! If theyʼd been born in Iran, odds are, they would believe some­thing com­pletely different.

Luck­ily for athe­ists, their beliefs might still be true irre­spec­tive of the fact that they got them from their cul­ture — but that would need to be demon­strated in some other way. Which is how I treat my Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions — theyʼre not true because my par­ents believed them, but nei­ther are they decep­tive just for that rea­son either.

Why I'm not an atheist #2 - Scientific Naturalism is powerful, but not enough.

Last mod­i­fied on 2009-10-28 02:02:19 GMT. 28 com­ments. Top.

I resist nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions of my belief in God.

Athe­ist still use philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments, but it seems they are more a tool for unset­tling Chris­tians rather than the lifeblood of athe­ism. What seems to give much of mod­ern athe­ism its strength is that in scientific nat­u­ral­ism it has found a way of explain­ing the world that doesnʼt need God. The philo­soph­i­cal argu­ment still has its place of athe­ism, but it is less urgent and less press­ing. The best argu­ment against under­stand­ing the world in a the­is­tic way is to pro­vide an ele­gant, attrac­tive, pow­er­ful mode of expla­na­tion that has no need for God.

The scientific nat­u­ral­ist mode of explain­ing the world is very pow­er­ful. It is indeed an impres­sive and ele­gant human achieve­ment to have come up with this nat­u­ral­ist expla­na­tion of the world.

And yet I hold out on this very pow­er­ful way of under­stand­ing the world.

Why main­tain a belief in God, when there is a very rea­son­able expla­na­tion of the world that doesnʼt require God? Indeed why am I not an atheist?

A cou­ple of reasons:

Firstly, I main­tain a dif­fer­ence between the con­clu­sions reached by sci­ence, and the
asser­tions made by nat­u­ral­ism.

Sci­ence is a method­ol­ogy. It takes as its start­ing point obser­va­tion – phys­i­cal evi­dence of
one sort of another is the means by which sci­ence dis­cov­ers phys­i­cal causes.
You can do lots with the method­ol­ogy of sci­ence. Itʼs very pow­er­ful! But one thing you can­not do with sci­ence is prove that phys­i­cal causes is all there is. You assert a con­clu­sion if it has already been woven into your method­ol­ogy at the start. Nat­u­ral­ism con­scripts sci­ence — it says: Look at all the phys­i­cal causes sci­ence has dis­cov­ered, and sci­ence can explain how it all works, so there must be no other causes.

But the inter­pre­ta­tion of your scientific con­clu­sions depends not on your sci­ence, but on your philosophy.

I look at the con­clu­sions of sci­ence, and I see in them a dis­cov­ery of how God has done things in the world.

A nat­u­ral­ist looks at the con­clu­sions of sci­ence and says, There is no need for God.

Both asser­tions are beyond the realm of sci­ence — there is no scientific exper­i­ment you can do that can prove one over against the other. Any obser­va­tional data you find will just fit into a prior philo­soph­i­cal frame­work you have estab­lished for yourself.

This is why some of you are agnos­tic rather than athe­ist. You are com­mit­ted to the scientific method, but have seen that it is not in itself sufficient to say any­thing about God, for or against. We decide on other basis. Sci­ence is like a big bucket — an enor­mous bucket — that you can plumb the depths of the ocean with. But just because youʼve got a full bucket doesnʼt mean youʼve got the whole ocean. Itʼs far too impe­ri­al­is­tic to claim that!

But sec­ondly, I reject nat­u­ral­ism as a phi­los­o­phy because it is too pow­er­ful.
Iʼll need to explain what I mean!

Nat­u­ral­ism explains my con­vic­tions about God in evo­lu­tion­ary terms. This is one of the humor­ous back and forths that always hap­pens when athe­ists and Chris­tians engage: the Chris­t­ian will present some sort of rea­son or fact why the athe­ist should believe in God, and the athe­ist will respond with: Well I can explain fact using just nat­ural phys­i­cal expla­na­tions. I point to the fine tun­ing of the uni­verse as evi­dence that God made it; the nat­u­ral­ist says, that doesnʼt prove God, because, as unlikely as it is, sheer ran­dom forces just made it like this.

I point to the num­ber of peo­ple around the world, and through­out his­tory  who believe in God, as evi­dence that we are hard­wired for God — but the nat­u­ral­ist explains all such belief as a kind of  by-product of our evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment … reli­gion has helped us sur­vive, but that doesnʼt prove thereʼs a God. I point to the beauty and design in the world and all the things we value, as signs that we are built and cre­ated by and for some­one greater than our­selves; but the nat­u­ral­ist will encour­age me to be sus­pi­cious of my per­cep­tions “The illu­sion of design is a trap that has caught us before” Dawkins writes.

Thereʼs a long list of things that evo­lu­tion­ary nat­u­ral­ism is pow­er­ful to destroy and tear down, and the harder athe­ists use it with enter­tain­ing and for­mi­da­ble skill.

But hereʼs my ques­tion: why stop with reli­gion? If reli­gion is the prod­uct of evo­lu­tion­ary
adap­ta­tion, then why not ratio­nal­ity? Why ought I to be sus­pi­cious of my per­cep­tions of design, but not sus­pi­cious of my per­cep­tions of whatʼs rational?

If evo­lu­tion­ary nat­u­ral­ism is true, then ʻratio­nal­ityʼ is not to be explained as some char­ac­ter­is­tic of our species that con­nects us with the real world — it is merely a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the species that  helps us sur­vive bet­ter in the real world. The power of rea­son depends on its objec­tiv­ity — that it is really true and con­nects me to the world in a way that is true. But evo­lu­tion is not inter­ested in truth — itʼs just inter­ested in sur­vival. What we think about the world may be noth­ing more than a dream, an inven­tion of our prag­matic minds.

Dar­win him­self realised this, and wrote to a friend:

“With me the hor­rid doubt always arises whether the con­vic­tions of manʼs mind, which has been devel­oped from the mind of the lower ani­mals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Nat­u­ral­ism is a very pow­er­ful sword. Nat­u­ral­ism does away with God, to be sure. But in the process, it does away with every­thing. Noth­ing we know or per­ceive can be depended on as con­nect­ing us to the real world — any­thing our brains tell us are merely the prod­uct of evo­lu­tion­ary adap­tion. If phys­i­cal forces really do explain every­thing, then they must truly be allowed to explain every­thing — even my own expla­na­tions. It is just a case of spe­cial plead­ing to ʻexemptʼ nat­u­ral­ism from its own razor.

Nat­u­ral­ism, and athe­ism, in terms of what it actu­ally teaches, seems to me to be a coun­sel of despair. My love for my fam­ily, my con­cern for oth­ers, the rea­sons I get out of bed in the morn­ing — all of them are illu­sions, and irre­deemably so.

Now please donʼt mis­un­der­stand me: I donʼt mean that every athe­ist is liv­ing in despair!
Iʼm glad to say thatʼs not the case. But if the phys­i­cal evo­lu­tion­ary causes are the only expla­na­tion for life you have, how can you assert the real­ity of mean­ing of any kind? Itʼs not enough to say that you do assert the exis­tence of mean­ing and love and beauty! When I hear athe­ists do that, I just think they are talk­ing as a semi-Christianised athe­ist, still spend­ing some cul­tural credit hang­ing around from Chris­tian­ity! Itʼs not enough to say evo­lu­tion­ary nat­u­ral­ism doesnʼt lead to mean­ing­less for you — you have to show why it shouldnʼt?

Why I'm not an Atheist #3 - Jesus

Last mod­i­fied on 2009-12-02 02:25:26 GMT. 71 com­ments. Top.

Every­thing Iʼve said to this point you might describe as the neg­a­tive rea­sons for my not being an athe­ist — things which oth­ers find per­sua­sive about athe­ism which I donʼt find persuasive.

But the strongest rea­son I refrain from choos­ing athe­ism is because of Jesus. I sup­pose itʼs nat­ural for some­one like myself to be cat­e­gorised as a ʻthe­istʼ, but I feel no par­tic­u­lar attach­ment to the­ism per se. I am a Chris­t­ian — if I am a the­ist, it is not because I have highly devel­oped argu­ments for the­ism which have led me there. It is because I am con­vinced — rightly or wrongly — that God took on human form in the man Jesus Christ, and that he did so in order to save human­ity from his own judgement.

But again athe­ism is quick to expose my con­vic­tions as a delusion.

“Although Jesus prob­a­bly existed, rep­utable bib­li­cal schol­ars do not in gen­eral regard the New Tes­ta­ment (and obvi­ously not the Old Tes­ta­ment) as a reli­able record of what actu­ally hap­pened in his­tory…” (The God Delu­sion, p. 122)

Why do I hold on to my con­vic­tions about the his­toric­ity of Jesus Christ when there is so
much schol­ar­ship indi­cat­ing itʼs a myth gen­er­ated over time?

Well, the thing about this schol­ar­ship Dawkinsʼ talks about is that it doesnʼt actu­ally exist.

I donʼt mean that there are NO schol­ars that pro­pose the kind of things Dawkinsʼ says, but that the claim that ʻrep­utable bib­li­cal schol­ars in gen­eralʼ say this kind of thing is just not defen­si­ble. There are SOME schol­ars who make those kind of claims, and often do so not in jour­nals but in pub­lish­ing direct to the public.

But read­ing a lit­tle more widely than just Richard Dawkins, and Bar­bara Thier­ing, you dis­cover that within schol­ar­ship itself there is large ʻmid­dle groundʼ which just gets on and analy­ses the NT doc­u­ments in just the same way you would analyse any other doc­u­ment from his­tory — nei­ther to debunk nor to defend Chris­tian­ity, but to see what they say his­tor­i­cally. Sweep­ing claims that that schol­ar­ship slants towards a mytho­log­i­cal read­ing of those gospels is just absurd. It shows that Dawkins is not acquainted with seri­ous his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship, or chooses not to write about.

Terry Eagle­ton is a marx­ist scholar who wrote a justly famous review of Dawkins book. In it he had this to say about Dawkinsʼ engage­ment with scholarship:

Imag­ine some­one hold­ing forth on biol­ogy whose only knowl­edge of the sub­ject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on the­ol­ogy. Card-carrying ratio­nal­ists like Dawkins, who is the near­est thing to a pro­fes­sional athe­ist we have had since Bertrand Rus­sell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to under­stand what they cas­ti­gate, since they donʼt believe there is any­thing there to be under­stood, or at least any­thing worth under­stand­ing. This is why they invari­ably come up with vul­gar car­i­ca­tures of reli­gious faith that would make a first-year the­ol­ogy stu­dent wince. The more they detest reli­gion, the more ill-informed their crit­i­cisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judg­ment on phe­nom­e­nol­ogy or the geopol­i­tics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the ques­tion as assid­u­ously as they could. When it comes to the­ol­ogy, how­ever, any shoddy old trav­esty will pass muster. These days, the­ol­ogy is the queen of the sci­ences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval hey­day. — Terry Eagle­ton, “Lung­ing, Flail­ing, Mis­punch­ing”, Lon­don Review of Books, Octo­ber 19, 2006.

In talk­ing about Jesus, I need to address that his­tor­i­cal ques­tion, because you may be expect­ing me to defend my con­vic­tions about the his­tor­i­cal Jesus. But I would sug­gest the shoe is on the other foot — if you are con­vinced of the mythol­ogy of the gospels, and heir muti­la­tion over time … where have those con­vic­tions come from? Why are you so sure of them? Is it because you under­stand the his­tory, or because you have taken on faith the claims of cer­tain schol­ars and writ­ers? I know you can run off to the web, or pull out the God Delu­sion and find some­one who agrees with you — but Chris­tians can do that too.

Find­ing some­one to agree with you can help, but it doesnʼt make it right.

For me, there is good rea­son to under­stand the doc­u­ments of the New Tes­ta­ment as pro­vid­ing a his­tor­i­cally reli­able con­nec­tion with Jesus Christ. The doc­u­ments were writ­ten by eye­wit­ness, or were the words of the eye­wit­nesses writ­ten down within the life­time of those who had lived with Jesus. There were many other gospels, but these were sec­ond cen­tury doc­u­ments that syn­the­sised the orig­i­nal Jesus with 2nd cen­tury gnos­ti­cism — which was the rea­son for their rejec­tion. The trans­mis­sion of the doc­u­ments was not with­out error, but there are so many copies of the NT from dif­fer­ent peri­ods and dif­fer­ent regions that the copy­ing errors are pretty easy to iden­tify, and very few of them are of any real significance.

Now they are just claims, and there is his­tor­i­cal data behind those claims — I did a whole talk on it at CU last semes­ter called “True Words?”— you can lis­ten to it on CUʼs web­site if you want.

So when I say that Jesus is the definitive rea­son that Iʼm not an athe­ist, I hope you donʼt think to your­self, Well heʼs just deluded, and has an imag­i­nary friend called Jesus, or that Iʼm wor­ship­ping some later myth about Jesus. When I say Jesus, I mean the real his­tor­i­cal Jesus who I think it is plau­si­ble to believe was a man who claimed to be both the son of God and the sav­iour of the world.

But itʼs not Jesusʼ his­toric­ity — itʼs Jesus him­self who is the main rea­son why I inter­pret atheism’s claims negatively.

I donʼt wor­ship Jesus because Iʼve got good argu­ments about him — I wor­ship him because he is supremely wor­thy of wor­ship. He is the cre­ator who has writ­ten him­self into his cre­ation. I hope you will for­give me if I speak about him!

He claimed to be with­out sin; he claimed to be God, and did things that only God could do; he claimed to be the only path to rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with God. It was because of those claims that Jesus was treated with­out com­pas­sion. He wasnʼt crucified for telling peo­ple to love each other — but for claim­ing to be the king! He was lied about, arrested, endured a mock trial, beaten, whipped, nailed to a cross and a crowd mocked him and spat on him. In the face of that rejec­tion, on the cross, his con­cern was for the for­give­ness of his ene­mies. In his death, he paid a penalty, endur­ing our death for us – that we could be for­given. The cre­ator died for us in order to rec­on­cile us to himself.

Jesus con­fronts us: he says we are cor­rupt, not just morally, but intel­lec­tu­ally. That in cut
ting our­selves off from God we have forced our­selves into a posi­tion of hav­ing to invent
alter­na­tive expla­na­tions for the world that donʼt include God.

So I have a choice — I can lis­ten to what the athe­ist says about Jesus (a mytho­log­i­cal figure, mis­un­der­stood by Chris­tians), or lis­ten to what Jesus says about the athe­ist (humans loved by God but in rebel­lion against him cre­at­ing philoso­phies with which to remove Godʼs influence). Each has an explana­tory power about the other — itʼs not an easy deci­sion. I am not an athe­ist, because I have lis­tened to Jesus and for my part, I am per­suaded he speaks truth.

Author: Dave Walker

Dave is campus director for AFES at James Cook University in Townsville. Before training at Moore Theological College he was a scientist. He has four sons, seven chickens, and one wife.

Read Dave's 4 articles.