Answering Atheists: The Sermon

In preparation for today's sermon, I was reading a blog by a young atheist named Luke Muehlhauser. Scrolling down through the comments on his “My Story” page, a comment about the Sabbath caught my eye.

Luke was responding to a comment by an long time friend named Kenneth. Kenneth had written that he was still a believer even though he often failed to live up to his ideals and even though he had real questions about some theological matters, like, for instance, whether Sabbath was Saturday or Sunday. Kenneth wrote, “I still love you bro. Always have. Always will no matter what. You guys really left an imprint on my life.” He encouraged Luke to reconsider belief, then signed off by saying he was trying to live like Christ.

Luke, the atheist responded: “If you live like Jesus you will do the world a favor. Don’t let me dissuade you from that! . . .” Luke then restated his conviction that believing in any kind of gods was erroneous. Luke concluded with this postscript: “I’m pretty sure the Sabbath is Saturday. That’s what it was for hundreds of years before Christians moved their Sabbath to Sunday sometime in the 3rd century C.E. :)”

So how would you respond to these words of Luke, the atheist? What can we say besides, “Amen!”

The point of this sermon is to rebut the claims of some atheists. However, I begin with this positive picture of a particular atheist as a reminder that atheists are people. Most of them are smart people. Many of them are highly conscientious people. Our disagreement with their assertions should be coupled with a respect for their personhood and their own commitment to truth as they see it. Not everything they say is wrong. Sometimes, their freedom from the constraints of religious tradition enables them to see and speak truth that is missed or avoided by believers. So respect is in order even while I vigorously dissent from atheism.

Atheists are quite rare in the United States. Polls place the number at less than one percent of the U.S. population. In spite of their rarity, atheists have created a splash recently with several best-selling books. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is perhaps the most famous or notorious.

These “New Atheists” argue loudly that religion is not just unprovable, it is false. They insist science has conclusively demonstrated the fallacy of believing in God. There is no longer any room for agnosticism—that is a courteous, respectful open-mindedness—when it comes to religion. Honesty demands a forthright renunciation of belief in God.

Why should Adventists enter this debate?

We know God exists. As a denomination we have championed one of the most radical forms of theism, young earth creationism. Not only do we have the Bible on our side, we have our own prophet to validate our belief that God has spoken and we have correctly understood. So why not simply dismiss the New Atheists as arrogant blowhards?

First, atheists are smart, educated and committed to truth. More importantly, they claim to speak for the community of smart, educated people that staff American universities and research facilities. Most importantly, they claim to have arrived at their opinions through a relentless quest for truth. Intellect, education and an obsession with truth have been high values in Adventist history.

Early Adventist evangelism featured long lectures and intense intellectual engagement with the Bible and ancient history. The early evangelists were avid students of history as they worked out their interpretations of prophecy. Adventism did not advance primarily through miracles or colorful worship. The Adventist appeal was not to emotions or “spirituality.” It was to truth, to an elaborate cognitive system of theology and prophetic interpretation, a version of truth that flatly contradicted deeply entrenched traditional Christian beliefs. The evangelists were not highly educated in a formal sense, but they made a great show of their book learning as they argued in favor of Sabbath-keeping and the meaning of Daniel 2, 7-9 and most of the Book of Revelation. As the church gave increasing attention to the healing arts, Adventist colleges across the country and around the world strengthened their science offerings and in general gave attention to the academic quality of their courses.

Both Adventist evangelism and Adventist education have always insisted loudly, emphatically that our supreme interest is truth. Not tradition, not cultural continuity, not creedal purity, but truth.

This regard for intellect and education features prominently in the Bible. When God was looking around for someone to lead his people out of Egypt and give them and the world the Ten Commandments and an entire legal, social code, he chose a man who had received the highest education available in his day.

In the New Testament, when God needed someone to lead the early church toward a truly global mission, he again chose someone who had the equivalent of a Ph.D. Of course, the Bible includes examples of “simple” people who played gigantic roles in God's work. Their creative or spiritual genius is no argument against the value of education and intellectual culture in the life of the church.

Given the history of respect for intellect and education common in both the Bible and the Adventist Church, when a group of men claim that intellect, education and a high regard for truth compel them to speak against God, we cannot simply ignore them. Our respect for the community they claim to represent compels us to speak up.

Second, atheists are people.

Atheists are people. People Jesus died for. People God loves. People with moms and dads, wives and husbands, children and grandkids. Real, live people. Love for these people compels us to respond to their their challenges.

It is highly unlikely that argumentation is going to change the minds of Dawkins and confreres. They have already read all the arguments Christians can think of in favor of belief. However, while change is unlikely, it is not impossible. The change of mind by Anthony Flew is a dramatic example. He was an outspoken atheist for decades, then recently wrote a book titled, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Because atheists are people, there is always the possibility they may change their minds.

Third, atheists often voice questions that lurk in our own hearts and in the hearts of our children. When we thoughtfully and respectfully examine the claims of these famous atheists, we may find ourselves addressing questions that gnaw at our own faith or the faith of our children.

We encourage our children to go to college, to get all the education they can, to develop their minds to the highest possible level. Our children who become scientists and artists and scholars and writers will live in a world where the ideas of these atheists are given a lot of credibility. We owe our children an intelligent response.

So what is our answer to atheists?

1. Religion is as old as humanity. This is a no-brainer statement within the context of conservative Adventism. God created Adam and Eve 6000 years ago and instructed them in spirituality. Curiously, this statement is equally affirmed by most secular anthropologists. The oldest human sites include indications that the people who lived there had some sort of religious awareness. This does not, of course, prove religion is true or good. However, it offers strong support for the claim that being fully human includes being religious or spiritually aware. There are people who are tone deaf. Some people are color-blind. Some are born insensitive to pain. Some are born with cognitive deficits. However, while these deficits are “natural” we recognize them as deficits. The lack of spiritual or religious sensibility common among atheists is just as readily explained as a deficit as it is an indication that the atheist has “transcended” superstition. To be fully human means to be religious or spiritual.

2.There is no “mounting evidence” for any satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of life or the universe. In his book, The Blind Watch Maker and more recently in the God Delusion, Richard Dawkins argues every which way he can that the apparent design we see in nature is illusory. We think we see the handiwork of an intelligent designer, when in reality all we are seeing is the natural outworking of natural law.

Even if we granted all the “facts” claimed by Dawkins, that is if we agreed that natural law could completely explain the development of the universe post-Big Bang and the the fossil record of changing life, we would still face two huge questions: 1. Whence the Big Bang? 2. Whence life? 3. Whence the natural laws?

Whence the Big Bang?

A frequent refrain in atheistic writing is that we should believe nothing without adequate evidence. Since the Big Bang is posited as the beginning of all evidence, naturalism cannot say anything at all about the nature of reality prior to the Big Bang. There is no “natural” evidence for that reality, so naturalists ought not say anything positive or negative about reality prior to the Big Bang. That includes saying anything about God prior to the Big Bang. Maybe God existed before the Big Bang, maybe not. In the absence of all “natural” evidence, naturalists, including Dawkins, ought to remain silent. Or if they are going to speak, they ought to be clear that they are no longer speaking as naturalists. Rather they are speaking spiritually or philosophically in the service of their own preferred myth.

Whence Natural Law?

Just as atheism (naturalism) cannot logically say anything about reality prior to the Big Bang neither can it speak meaningfully about the origin of natural laws. Within naturalism there is no “reason” for things to be the way they are. They just are. While some scientists lack the human instinct to ask “why?” others more philosophically and spiritually inclined cannot help themselves. (Note: the failure to ask why is evidence of a deficit not evidence of higher development.) If “natural law” explains the origin of everything, it is “natural” to ask where the law came from? To claim the laws are eternal means making claims about reality prior to the Big Bang. To claim the laws were inherent in the universe generated by the Big Bang leads right back to question, why were they inherent? What (or who) made them inherent?

Dawkins attempts to turn this line of reasoning against believers. He writes in The God Delusion, "The temptation [to attribute the appearance of a design to actual design itself] is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” That is you can't claim God is the designer because that immediately raises the question who designed God.

This is a problem for Dawkins but not for believers. Unlike Dawkins naturalistic system which requires every effect to have a cause (because if you find an effect without a cause you have found something that is not natural), religion squarely faces the fact that there is an end point in the regression of causes. Who designed God? No one and nothing. This is not a problem for religion. It is one of the grand rational arguments in its favor. The question, where did God come from? may be interesting, however, the very essence of mature religion is the recognition that we cannot get behind God to some other ultimate reality.

Dawkins and others are optimistic that naturalism will be saved from the embarrassment of this failure to account for the origin of the universe by recent work in theoretical physics. I remember reading not long ago a glowing account in Scientific American about multiple dimensions and universes. Supposedly, in these other universes and dimensions things that cannot be true in our universe must be true there. These “other truths” include different and contradictory natural laws. Of course, this runs squarely into the problem that the theories about these other universes are extrapolations from mathematics and natural laws that work in our universe. So if one attempts to make a strong argument in favor of the “reality” of these other universes, you end up making an argument that sounds like: the natural law and mathematics of our universe prove that natural law and mathematics are variable outside our universe. But if they are variable outside our universe how can we trust what they say about that “other reality.” If they are variable, there is no reason to trust them in the slightest when they speak about stuff “out there.”

Whence Life?

Dawkins claims there is mounting evidence for the ineluctable development of life out prebiotic chemicals. I don't know what counts as evidence. While there is a steadily augmenting body of evidence for a long history of development of life over time, there has been abject failure to find any evidence for the spontaneous origin of life from prebiotic chemicals.

The recent headlines, “Scientists Create First Synthetic Life” provide one more bit of evidence against spontaneous generation. The work involved replacing the DNA in a cell nucleus with an artificially created copy of DNA. This does not suggest that information rich DNA could happen to assemble itself. To the contrary. Highly intelligent beings with a DNA model to work from can create a copy if they work hard enough, have enough technology and information behind them and an unlimited budget. None of this applies to the primordial world.

The more we know about life, even the simplest forms, the more complex we understand it to be. Cells contain information and machinery. Neither information nor machines arise spontaneously. If “natural selection” is truly responsible for the origin and development of life, then for fully intact humans (that is people with spiritual and philosophical curiosity) “natural selection” rather than being a satisfying explanation, becomes one of the strongest occasions for asking, where did that come from? Who designed that? Natural selection demands an explanation of its own origin.

The Big Bang and natural selection do not even begin to answer the question of origins. Both of these theories, in fact, highlight the limits of naturalism. They point directly at their own beginnings, utterly unfit to go beyond those beginnings to the reality that existed before.

Nothing in nature proves that God is the reality beyond the Big Bang and natural selection. However, religion does have this going for it: it lines up with instincts of wonder, awe and conscience that apparently have characterized humans for however long humans have existed. In short, religion lines up with being human.

3. We can make sense of morals and aesthetics only by appealing to “something above.”

One of the grand failures of atheism is its inability to offer any intellectually satisfying account of morality or aesthetics. Rationally speaking, if there is no God, there is no ought. Science persuasively, powerfully describes what is. (And believers sometimes make fools of themselves by discounting what science sees.) Science cannot speak about what ought to be.

The various attempts to account for morality based on evolutionary models might be more persuasive if their authors could live in the world they construct. They can't. If someone plagiarizes their work or sells pirate copies of their DVDs, these authors would protest saying this was wrong, immoral, unfair, unjust. But these words are meaningless apart from a moral system that stands outside humanity. Even the “quest for truth” which is one of the clarion calls of the New Atheists makes no sense outside a framework of meaning that depends on a residue of theism. Why should anyone be concerned for truth? Why not settle for that which advantages me, true or not? Apart from appeals to something “higher” there is nothing to say that truth is better than advantageous fiction. There is nothing in the neutrinos, electrons and protons of the universe to support a naturalistic explanation of moral judgments. In fact, the more elementary you get, the more utterly disconnected “reality” is from morality. To make sense of the special characteristics of humanity, things like language, art and morality, instead of probing more and more deeply into the elemental particles, fields and processes of nature, we have to go the opposite direction and invoke something above.

Historically, the common name for that something above is God.

4. What about all the evil done in the name of religion?

It is easy to find examples of evil done in the name of religion. Back in the days of Joshua, the Jews tried to exterminate the Canaanites because they believed that was God's will. And most Christian and Jewish commentators since then have agreed that this was, in fact, God's will. In our day, Muslim extremists cite the Quran in support of indiscriminate killing of “infidels.” The Quran says it. They believe it. That settles it. David Koresh who operated on the periphery of Adventism based his weird and dangerous ideas on his understanding of the Bible. Mormon extremists who abuse and misuse women justify their behavior by citing their religious books.

So when an atheist says religion is dangerous because it is used to justify harming others, we as believers must humbly acknowledge the truth of their charge. However, this argument cuts both ways. In the twentieth century atheism prompted far more slaughter than religion.

National Socialism (Nazism) and Marxism (communism) were emphatically atheistic and “scientistic.” They claimed their system was scientific. Hitler, Stalin and Mao sacrificed millions of people to their “scientific” beliefs. Then late in the century, Pol Pot of Cambodia tried again to set up a scientific political system. His experiment resulted in the death of nearly twenty-five percent of the population of Cambodia.

If the genocide of the Canaanites and the immoral predations of Muslim fanatics prove that religion is not good, the regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao are even more compelling evidence of the evil of “scientific” or atheistic social policy and political philosophy.

So how shall we respond to the charge that religion is evil because evil is done in the name of religion?

First, make sure we are not doing evil in the name of religion. Quit spanking your children. Every study that has examined the spanking of children shows that children do better without spanking. A swat on the rear of a toddler is not the end of the world for the kid or the parent. But it is time for us to quit arguing in favor of spanking our kids because Proverbs says, Spare the rod and spoil the child. Spanking is not conducive to the best human development. So quit.

Quit supporting “change ministries” for homosexuals. They don't work.

Do support services for women in crisis pregnancies.

Do support quality education for all.

Do good. That is the strongest argument in favor of the goodness of religion.

5. Take responsible, effective action.

I appreciated a comment someone posted on my blog this week. “Belief in God is bad because it results in magical thinking. Believers expect God to help them, protect them, make it better and as a result they often don't do what they should to take care of themselves.”

Unfortunately, I can think of examples where believers have used religion as a substitute for responsible, effective action.

I remember talking with a young man a few years ago. He was out of work. I asked him what he was doing to find work. He said, “God will provide.” I pressed him. “Yes, I know God will provide, but what are you doing to cooperate with God's providing.” Unfortunately, the answer was pretty much, nothing. He was waiting for God to drop a job into his lap. God does that some times. A job you weren't looking, a job you didn't expect just walks up and knocks you on the head. However, this is not the usual way God works.

It is irresponsible for a believer who needs a job to refuse to send out resumes or knock on doors or make phone calls or network with friends because “God will provide,” If you need a job, you ought to actively look for work. In this economy that can be very discouraging. Still God expects you to take action. Praying is not enough. Hoping is not enough. Believing is not enough. All of those things are precious and valuable. Don't dispense with them. Still, having hoped and prayed and believed, it is time to get up and do. If you don't, you're giving atheists ammunition for their war against faith.

This principle is relevant in every area of life.

Do you want to be stronger? Walk. Lift weights. Do you want to be richer. Save. Budget. Don't eat out. Don't buy a car on credit. Don't buy anything on credit. Do you want to be holier. Spend time daily in meditation, prayer, Bible reading, serving. Do you want better children? Shower them with affection and affirmation. Make sure that your own behavior in every area of life is more noble, more pure, more disciplined than you expect from them. Get rid of your TV.

Ultimately answering atheists is not about persuading them but cultivating and purifying our own faith.

The best “answer” to atheists is to obey Jesus command to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And to practice the habits of healthy spiritual and family life. If paying attention to the challenges posed by atheists can prod us in this direction, then even they become agents of God. In a sense, we thus participate in their redemption.