As some of you know, I have recently become obsessed with studying this phenomenon that many are referring to as the “New Atheism.” Much of my free time has been devoted to listening to lectures online, finding and purchasing debates, and scanning the internet and the blogosphere’s intellegentsia to see what the leaders of this movement and their followers had to say. Most recently, I’ve prepared part of my reading list for this summer, which will begin with readings from Harris, Dawkins and Dennett, respectively, and followed by responses from McGrath and Haught. [Note: I have already worked through Hitchens’ work and D’Souza’s response].
The first piece of literature I have worked through has been Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, and, to say the least, I found myself outraged by some of the arguments in the book. However, it is not my point here to point out the flaws and/or strong points I saw with Harris’ letter (100+ pages including the afterword), although there is much to talk about, and I will hopefully touch on that soon.
What amazes me most about Harris’ claims and his outright denial of God has almost nothing to do with him. In truth, as a Christian, I expect people to “suppress the knowledge of the truth” (Rom 1:19ff). It should not necessarily surprise me that people react the ways they do to the idea of a Supreme Being, much less the God of Scripture. No. What amazes me most about reading Mr. Harris’ letter is my own response to such a thing. As my roommate and close friends can account for, time and again I found my self uncontrollably upset about some of the arguments being made. I felt they were intellectually lacking in many respects, and the fact that the book had received so much attention was bothersome to me. My immediate response was anger and to call Mr. Harris a pompous jerk. And this afternoon I found my attitude in many ways incompatible with New Testament Christianity.
Hear me out on this. Poor arguments and attacks made against the Christian faith should be addressed, and I intend to address (briefly) Harris’ book later, once my emotions have calmed down. Such attacks cannot go unnoticed and unaddressed. However, the response from a Christian should be one that both represents the seriousness of the message of Christ and expresses the love that only Christ can place in our hearts. What I mean is that while righteous anger is sometimes necessary in responding to arguments like these, the Christian cannot be dominated by an angry spirit and seek to respond to an attack with another mean-spirited attack.
I hope this makes sense.
As I was reading Tom Schreiner’s A New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ this afternoon, I came upon his section on “The Saving Work of God and Christ in Paul.” As I read, the truth of what I expressed above fell on me like a ton of bricks. Here’s the point. My response to such arguments by men like Harris, Dawkins, etc., should not be primarily anger, but sorrow and concern for their attitude towards Christ. My response should not be an attack, but prayer.
I know that any “atheists”, “anti-theists”, “skeptics”, etc., who may read this could find my concern for them uneasy. No doubt, they will respond that they do not need my prayers, nor do they want them. They see my belief as silly as trusting in a fairy-tale wizard or a fairy godmother. Surely, they do not want my prayers, nor will they be moved with gratitude by my desire to do so. They will be unmoved and, perhaps, indignant at my assertions. Still I must pray.
I must pray, not because they want it, but because I am compelled by what I believe to act in this manner. We do, after all, believe that our belief determines our behavior, correct? I must be moved to prayer, because God is the only One who can do anything for them, just as He is the only One who could have ever caused me to see my need for Him. We all are born as those who rebel against God, and only God overcomes our rebellion.
I am not usually fond of these kinds of musings. Indeed, I find them to be cheesy and just plain weird many times, but this is my confession. My response to the claims of this so-called “New Atheism” must be praying for peace, not provoking an attack. Today, Justin Taylor pointed out a transcript from John Piper on humility that I have found very helpful. He points out that we should not marvel that those on the other side are lost, but that we on this side have even been saved [cf. Luke 10:20].
Wow… I’m your opposite. Literally. I am a dedicated anti theist who spends an inordinate amount of time looking into this.
Calmness isn’t entirely necessary. This isn’t Star Wars- there is no danger of falling to the dark side. You can still be angry and make a point- you just need to have the focused anger. It exists for a reason. If you have lost your head those, than yeah, good choose.
Prayer is silly though. If God is all knowing it is pointless. In that case you don’t need to pray and the only point of it is to make yourself feel better. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with trying to feel good- however in this case it is using double think.
“I know that any “atheists”, “anti-theists”, “skeptics”, etc., who may read this could find my concern for them uneasy.”
Not quite.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m still considering myself an anti-theist. But responses such as yours are probably the most undermining to the cause of the so-called ‘New Atheists’ than any other I’ve yet to come across.
So although I still stand in strong disagreement, I’m also glad that there’s still room for mutual respect.
So with all due respect, I have a question for you.
What is your opinion on whether or not atheists can be moral?
I’m not out to argue with you over this. Clearly I think atheists can be moral, but in this case I’m genuinely curious about what a thoughtful theist such as yourself thinks about the issue of atheist morality.
@Samuel — thanks for taking the time to read the blog… all of them. I understand why you may think prayer is unnecessary, but your premise is coming from a misunderstanding of Christian theology. The fact that God is all knowing does not necessarily mean that there’s no reason to pray. Much has been written on this by a number of theologians, and it’s been handled very well. Broadly speaking, it’s an illogical jump to go from all-knowing to impersonal, which is where that presumption takes us.
Not to mention, I’m not worried about “slipping into the dark-side.” As a Christian, I’m concerned with personal and community holiness. The Christian life is about being conformed into the image of the Son, Jesus Christ (cf. Rom 8:28-30).
@Ubiquitous — thanks for reading and also, thanks for your kind remarks. Although, I’m not quite sure what you mean by undermining the cause of the new atheism. I haven’t really addressed the arguments yet. (Feel free to respond; I’d like to make sure I’m being clear).
I’ll answer your question quickly. I do think atheists can be moral in the sense your speaking of. They can and they do perform acts of kindness, generosity, sacrifice, etc. Non-Christians, indeed Non-Theists, can be nice people.
The qualification I would make is that Christians are just concerned with “morality”; they’re concerned (or should be) with loving God and their neighbors and having their actions flow from those two desires.
And you’re correct; there’s still room for mutual respect. I look forward to hearing your response.
Well, sometimes I have idle hands.
And, no it isn’t. If God is all knowing and all powerful (or just reasonably so) than he doesn’t have to use prayer to be personal. The easiest method would simply project a presence and feelings of calm and tranquility. Or simply causing good things to happen. Ironically enough continuous reinforcement is less effective than intermittent reinforcement.
From a naturalistic prospective prayer is a way of showing group solidarity, trying to get feeling of calm and an attempt at magic. Needless to say it has no effect aside from the psychological one… and yes, they have tested it.
Perhaps Harris made you mad because you could find no real way of refuting him beyond your religioius fantasy. My only question for you is, why do you think God exists? Do you think God made the entire universe or just the earth?
@Sam, who said God had to? Would it not be logical (at least for me, not for you…) to believe that God chose to do so?
@Mike, that’s not the case… at all. Harri’s arguments are seriously flawed. As for your question, I doubt any answer I give would be taken seriously. Instead, I suppose, it would be criticized in whatever way, especially since my above post is not in any way an attack or assessment of atheism. Rather, it’s a personal post about my own responses to disagreement.
Thanks for reading.
Heh. I wasn’t planning on giving a particularly long response. But just quickly:
I’ll elaborate a little on this, but I want to emphasise that I’m not interested in a confrontational argument on this topic. I’m just clarifying a little on what I meant.
Essentially, the new atheism makes two arguments. Firstly, that God does not exist. Secondly, that religion is bad for us.
It’s much easier for us to make the second argument when we’re confronted by hysterical and irrational fundamentalists. It’s much harder for us when we’re confronted by someone as reasonable as yourself. That’s why I said it was undermining to my cause – but undermining for all the right reasons. I’m happy to be undermined in this fashion.
You’re welcome.
Before I get into this, I’d like to say that it seems to me that underneath the religious nature of your original post, you’re arguing strongly in favor of tolerance and compassion – two things of which I’m very much in favor.
The main point that I have when embracing the idea that religion is bad for us goes something like this:
Morals are codified guidlines deisgned to support living a compassionate lifeCompassion is an innate quality of many living things, particularly humansFrom 1 and 2, morality is a human inventionFrom 3, we do not get our morality from religion
It would follow from this is that by trusting in religion to give us our morality, we’re actually neglecting the practice of compassion which should be the focus of a moral life.
The idea is that people who succesfully live a compassionate life under religion are commendably doing so in spite of their religion’s attempt to steal the focus away from compassion. It is the people who fail to maintain their focus of their morality on compassion and allow it to shift completely to religion that wind up doing all the bad stuff.
Once again – I’m not trying to attack you on this topic. You were very respectful in your original post. I’m not approaching you as an enemy here.
Heh. I wasn’t planning on giving a particularly long response. But just quickly:
I’ll elaborate a little on this, but I want to emphasise that I’m not interested in a confrontational argument on this topic. I’m just clarifying a little on what I meant.
Essentially, the new atheism makes two arguments. Firstly, that God does not exist. Secondly, that religion is bad for us.
It’s much easier for us to make the second argument when we’re confronted by hysterical and irrational fundamentalists. It’s much harder for us when we’re confronted by someone as reasonable as yourself. That’s why I said it was undermining to my cause – but undermining for all the right reasons. I’m happy to be undermined in this fashion.
You’re welcome.
Before I get into this, I’d like to say that it seems to me that underneath the religious nature of your original post, you’re arguing strongly in favor of tolerance and compassion – two things of which I’m very much in favor.
The main point that I have when embracing the idea that religion is bad for us goes something like this:
Morals are codified guidlines deisgned to support living a compassionate lifeCompassion is an innate quality of many living things, particularly humansFrom 1 and 2, morality is a human inventionFrom 3, we do not get our morality from religion
It would follow from this is that by trusting in religion to give us our morality, we’re actually neglecting the practice of compassion which should be the focus of a moral life.
The idea is that people who succesfully live a compassionate life under religion are commendably doing so in spite of their religion’s attempt to steal the focus away from compassion. It is the people who fail to maintain their focus of their morality on compassion and allow it to shift completely to religion that wind up doing all the bad stuff.
Once again – I’m not trying to attack you on this topic. You were very respectful in your original post. I’m not approaching you as an enemy here.
Hmm.. My original post didn’t form the list properly. Bugger.
1. Morals are codified guidlines deisgned to support living a compassionate life
2. Compassion is an innate quality of many living things, particularly humans
3. From 1 and 2, morality is a human invention
4. From 3, we do not get our morality from religion
Che: I have a feeling you and I would get along just fine. You seem like a cool-headed individual, and even though we disagree, I’m sure civil conversations would never be outside our reach.
First, thanks for your clarification. It’s greatly appreciated
You’re right that I do seek compassion and tolerance (although I do have to qualify this and say that I believe Christianity is the exclusive truth… otherwise, why believe it, right?).
Further, I appreciate you not attacking; that’s very respectable. Those who come to a conversation to fight are never looking for “dialogue.”
I would disagree with humans possessing the innate quality of compassion. I think there’s something to be said in favor of it, and it seems to have some merit. However, I would say that this compassion (however present it may be from one person to the next) is tainted by a fallen nature that we all possess. That is I believe all are born as sinners. I’ll have to leave it at that for now. Going any further would take far too long.
I’ll leave with one question, and I’m interested in your response. How do we determine what “morality” is, in your opinion? In other words, how do I know I’m performing a moral act? Is it subjective or objective… or a little of both?
Aren’t we all polite and humble.
As far as I can tell, the whole purpose of morality is that we should act out of compassion. So a moral act is an act that is performed because the mind of the performer is in a compassionate state.
But that then rolls over to the question, what is compassion.
Once again, as far as I can tell compassion is very simple. It’s reacting to the suffering of someone else as if that suffering were your own. Bear in mind that when I say react here, I mean it on a very deep level – you would actually respond to the suffering in a very deep, emotional, visceral way, such that you actually feel the suffering you percieve.
As a qualifier, taking pride from doing good things isn’t neccesarily a bad thing – but compassion doesn’t concern itself with pride.
Also, I don’t mean compassion in such a way as to deprecate the self – that would be masochistic. The idea is that, when it comes to suffering, you dissolve the seperation between yourself and those around you. In this sense, it’s not possible to be masochistic.
Note that I think that the same thing can work with happiness – that’s affection. I like to think of love as being the combination of affection and compassion… But compassion is the more important of the two. Without compassion, affection is somewhat hollow.
So to get back to the original point. To me, morality is just a system of guidelines that act as an aide to get us to act in a compassionate way. It’s like if you’re going to the gym. Compassion here is the act of lifting weights. Morality is knowing which excercises to do and how to do them.
So to my mind, if a system of morality exists that doesn’t lead a person to compassionate action – or worse, leads a person towards sadistic violence – then that system of morals is a failure of its own purpose.
How’s all that sounding? Looking forward to your thoughts.
I believe I’m following your thought. I’m fine with your definition of compassion, but I’m a little hesitant whether to say that the purpose of morality is to get us to act out of compassion, principally. I might be willing to accept that, though.
I agree that compassion crosses the barrier between the self and the other person so as to alleviate the suffering, pain, etc. Furher, I agree that if morality does not lead to compassion, then there is a flaw in the system.
But I suppose my question still remains, where does this morality come from? That is, you say that “morality is a system of guidlines that act as an aide to get us to act in a compassionate way.” But from where do we receive this morality? And should we all have the same system, or guidelines? You’ve acknowledged that there is an aide in a system of principles, but how do we access those? So, after that, would it be subjective (up to me to decide what morality is for myself), or objective (a set of morality that stands to be true on its own grounds)?
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Considering your second question first – “Would it be subjective or objective.”
Firstly, I think that there’s an assumption in the question that it must be one or the other. I think that any system of morality that relies exclusively on either subjectivity or objectivity is bound to be a flawed one. There needs to be a bit of both.
Subectivity is needed, because compassion is based on our subjective understanding of what it is to suffer. So you can’t rule it out. On the other hand, the mechanics behind our subjective experiences are, by neccesity, opaque to our subjective experience. So we can’t just trust them outright either.
That’s where objectivity comes in. We need an objective view such that we can examine what’s going on in the foggy space behind our subjective understanding of the world – but not to the total exclusion of our innate understanding for what suffering feels like.
So to put it in more simply, I think that subjectivity is the important bit – but it must be temered with objective analysis.
So the first question: Where does it come from?
If you go back to my metaphor of lifting weights at the gym, I think you’ll see where I’m coming from.
There’s two great things about being a human. Firstly, we can be compassionate. Secondly, we can recognize that compassion is a good thing and strive to develop it.
That’s all you need to devise a system of morality. You can work out a system that you think will lead to compassion, and then try it out. The bits that lead to compassion get validated. The bits that don’t lead to compassion get dropped or revised.
It’s kind of like how a person can read up a bunch of books on how to excercise and try them out. The person can run with the excercises that lead to better pyhsical fitness, and leave the ones that don’t work behind. He can also pick and choose between the excercises he enjoys and the ones he doesn’t such that he still meets his end goal of improving his physical fitness.
Just substitute ‘potency of compassion’ for ‘physical fitness’ and you can sort of see where I’m coming from.
If I may be so bold as to switch gears, I can even give a Christian interpretation of this kind of process.
I’m not sure how you’ll take that idea. It’s a concept I thought up in high-school a little bit before I turned away from theism altogether. I found the two worldviews to be too incompatible, and compassion won over law. Then from the outside, religion looked so different than it had looked from the inside.
But anyway, I’m rambling. My writing’s normally so much more focused than this.
Looking forward to your response.
I think it’s more apparent now for the both of us that our differences are that of worldviews. I would say that an objective based morality is the only one bound to succeed over a community. I understand your case for a subjective/objective approach where things are open to interpretation (in a sense). I think I’d agree to an extent that we can’t just trust objective systems outright.
I don’t want to overexamine your illustration of reading books on working out, so you can take this or leave it. It seems that even in all the different systems, one will emerge as the best and most efficient, which I think could prove to be Christianity if understood properly.
I do appreciate your attempts to give a theistic answer; it’s an interesting take. Although, I’d have to disagree (and since I’m running late for work, I’ll have to make this quick). I think it would be unfair to boil down the attributes of God to one – compassion – and leave out the others in seeing how his creatures are to act and react (namely justice, mercy, and perhaps certain instances of righteous anger and wrath). In the end, I don’t think compassion ever leads us to overturn a law from the Bible, I would se it pointing to the fulfillment of the law (in loving God and neighbor), and that fulfillment finds personification in Jesus Christ.
That’s pretty brief, but I hope it explains some of my position. Also, I hope you check out this John Lennox seminar I posted above. I plan on listening to it in the next week and I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Can you delete the last post I made – the one with the nested block-quotes?
Here it is again:
I’ll definitely have a listen to the seminar and give my thoughts. But I just thought of an interesting comparison between our two ways of thinking.
Brad:
Che:
That seems like an interesting way of putting it – but I don’t want to run the risk of trivializing your view on God, so I’m happy to be corrected.