First of all, please understand that I’m not becoming an atheist. I’m about to restate an argument against the existence of God, one which I feel as if I “grasped” today. But that doesn’t mean I’ve adopted that argument. It’s my job, as a novelist, to try to understand how people think, even when they’re very different from me. I’d say, “I’m a professional. Do not try this at home,” but I don’t really believe it’s destructive to faith to understand opposing arguments. It’s vigilance and intellectual honestly.
Anyway, I think I figured out one reason why atheists feel morally superior to religious believers, even though history is not exactly overflowing with examples of atheists who were great humanitarians and moral paragons (no doubt there are some, but in general religious believers have been both far worse and far better than atheists).
To an atheist, anyone who says he believes in God appears to be complicit in cruelty.
The atheist looks at the world and says, “Look at all the evil and pain and injustice. If there’s a God, He’s guilty of causing all this. Therefore, anyone who claims to love that God is consenting to evil, like concentration camp inmates who collaborate with the guards.”
Well, of course, that gets down to the old theodicy argument—“If God is good, why is there evil?” But it adds an extra element—“If you consider yourself a moral person, how can you implicitly condone all the evil in the universe by supporting the Perpetrator of the evil?”
I have neither the time, the energy nor the genius to answer this objection adequately. But I would raise the following points:
I think this argument overstates the importance of evil. It’s the attitude (I know it well, believe me) that says, “The positive is nothing. The negative is everything. Sunshine is less real than darkness. Joy is less real than suffering. The glass is half empty, and the full part doesn’t matter.”
The fact is, we all recognize goodness and beauty, and respond to it. If the universe is essentially evil, as this argument seems to suggest, how is it that we’re not content with evil? Isn’t that an argument that we have some essential connection with goodness, one that’s kinked and frayed, but impossible to ignore?
Secondly, it seems to me the only rational response to a belief that the universe is essentially evil and cruel, would be to commit suicide. Now, people do kill themselves all the time. But it seems that’s rarely their first choice, even if they’re atheists. First they try to find joy and meaning in all kinds of pursuits—pleasure, wealth, love, inner peace. Only when all those things fail do they do the Irreversible Thing.
It’s almost as if they’re looking for a reason to believe in something greater than themselves.
Faith, by definition, means believing in something that isn’t completely explained. If it were explained and comprehensible, it wouldn’t be faith. Not only that, any God I could comprehend would be inherently suspect as a deity. I want a God who understands things I don’t understand.
It makes perfect sense to me. 1) If there’s a God, He’s smarter than me. 2) If He’s smarter than me, He’ll do things I don’t understand. 3) If He does things I don’t understand, I’ll need faith in order to accept them.
I don’t expect to convince anyone with this argument. But maybe somebody from the other side will read it, and try the exercise I tried above—to try to grasp, to some degree, why I believe the way I do.
The negative is everything, positive is nothing temptation was well addressed in the Screwtape Letters, IIRC.
Also, in my observation, nearly every adherent of a false religion feels superior to those who follow the truth, especially those religions that put man at the centerj. Whatever their religion, they have chosen it. If they have chosen it, it must be better than all the others or they wouldn’t have chosen it. The fact that it allows them to be at the center of the universe, nay it instists upon it, only confirms the obvious intelligence of their choice.
Fair enough. However, I imagine atheists and non-Christians would say the same thing about us.
Lars; I have No idea why you would say “but in general religious believers have been both far worse and far better than atheists.”
– give me some examples of Christians who have been worse than Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
– the atheist argument ignores the fact that human beings are made in the image of God. If man were just a mindless animal as the Darwinists say there would be no discussion of morality. (i.e. only because man is a creature made my God can morality exist; there could be no morality in a universe consisting solely of matter in motion.)
– endlessly we see materialists ‘borrowing’ theistic arguments. (i.e. a materialist has no right to speak of morality. If you’ve read Dawkins, you will have noticed that many times he admits there is no such thing as right and wrong in a materialist universe. How could there be?)
I’ll grant that in terms of pure body count it’s hard to beat the cruelty of the atheists and materialists.
But there’s a particular cruelty that has gone into activities of religious villains that can’t (in my view) be denied. When I read about some of the methods of torture and execution used by “Christians” in history, the contrast between Christ’s teachings and the actions of some of His purported followers is so great that I can only understand it in terms of Lewis’ principle that the highest things become the lowest when they’re corrupted. In other words, a bad man is far worse than a bad rat, a bad angel worse than both.
The two examples of Christian cruelty I hear cited most often would be the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. Unfortunately, while both of those events were conducted as official acts of the dominant church of their day, both represent the imposition of Christianity by force, which Bible believing Christians of our day would consider an oxymoron. Christianity is an internal relationship of the heart, salvation by faith – not conformity to an external standard, dogma or practice. It cannot be imposed by force. Therefore, as a Christian I see the cruel acts of the Inquisition and the Crusades as actions of non-Christians taking on the guise of Christianity. Unfortunately, the rest of the world only sees that torture, war and other acts of violence were done by those claiming the name of Christ. I could get all depressed about it. Rather I will take it as a challenge to more clearly and effectively teach the truth.
C.S. Lewis helped me a lot on this in my own conversion experience, both in The Screwtape Letters and in Mere Christianity. As much as I hate to admit it, one of the things I hadn’t realized I was doing (as an atheist) was confusing messed-up Christians with Christianity itself. Lewis quite rightly had some harsh things to say about the intellectual bankruptcy of that way of thinking (if you can call it thinking).
More recently, despite some serious problems with some of the content of The Shack by William P. Young, we decided to stock it in our bookstore precisely because again and again and again we ran into unbelievers who found it opened a door past the problem of evil, and let them take a look at Christianity (which they’d ruled out, because they thought God must be evil, to allow suffering).
That’s extremely interesting and intriguing, Kathryn.