Responding to the New Atheism

Glenn, thank you for being a part of this again.

And so, this show is going to kind of deal with the responses to the various positions that have made its way into the public square. So, Glenn, I think what we want to do first is to just review the five areas that we were dealing with that we say – arguments that New Atheists put forward that seem to resonate in the public, and then we'll work through the responses. So, what are the big five from the big four?

Second is the problem of religions. And it's not simply a matter of – although it is this – a matter of religious conflict without history – throughout history. But the elephant in every room is the problem of pluralism. And how do we discern truth claims of various religions? The old claim that, "All religions are true; they all lead to the same place," is easily disproven.

And now, the question becomes, "Which of these various truth claims is the right one; which one is to be followed," and that maybe the best response is no religion at all. And I think that's part of what leads to a growing percentage of the population unwilling to affirm any religion.

Third is the problem of the Bible. And by "problem," I mean the way the Bible has been read and how critics respond to two major issues: the presentation of God in Scriptures as – and the emphasis on things like the Flood and genocide, that God appears to be harsh and cruel and vindictive.

But at the same time, the way the Bible has been read and the Bible has been used by various fringe groups to defend all kinds of things, and maybe even, to some extent, by mainstream Christianity – the Bible – to defend slavery in the past and –

And then there's the problem of unfulfilled expectations. That there are a lot of people who have – this is part of the growing nones – N-O-N-E-S – of people who have been disillusioned by Christianity to recognize that – whose testimony is, "I hear that God is a God who answers prayer. I pray, and nothing happens. A God who delivers people from harm, and I wasn’t delivered from harm. A God who protects his children, and I wasn’t protected."

And that sometimes that's rooted – and I suspect we'll talk more about that – but sometimes that's rooted in a misunderstanding, a faulty teaching about God and the way he works, and sometimes it's back to full circle, back to the problem of evil and that, "How do people of faith, and particularly Christian faith, respond to the horrific prevalence of evil in the world?"

So, you've got content and tone. And we talked a little bit, at the end of the last show, about tone. But I think it might be good, before we deal with the content levels of the response to standpoint and talk a little bit how you even walk into this space, and what kind of tone is important to bring to it, and why that's an important part of the equation.

I think what we're talking about here are several difficult and multifaceted, complex issues, and that there is, secondly, a great deal of diversity in the way those convictions are held and the way they are expressed that lead us to –

And then I think, third, there is the relativistic worldview, the pluralistic worldview that often dismisses truth claims by, "Well, that's your view. It works for you and not for me," so that in the midst of that, it seems to me that listening and hearing and understanding is the first and most important thing. To understand, to the degree that we can, the context for and the content of the objection and the claim. That oftentimes, most times even, these are not theoretical and ivory tower objections that people have to Christianity. They are rooted in experiences.

And people, sometimes they're not even aware of the degree to which those experiences are formative and informative, but it's stunning to engage with somebody and to interact and then later in the conversation to learn the kind of abuse or the kind of evil that has been behind this. That really, the degree to which we are able to spend the time listening and understanding – empathy, compassion, sympathy, those Christian virtues – to speak the truth in love, as simplistic as that sounds, to do that really well. Truth and love.

I mean a simple illustration, but I have a grandmother, on my wife's side, now passed away, who had a very low tolerance for Christianity, because she had a father who claimed to be a Christian, attended church, did all the Christian things. But in terms of the way he treated his wife and his daughter, awful. And so, basically, underneath her view was, "If that's how Christians treat people, I don't want anything to do with it."

And if that happens, then why should you be surprised they don't understand the Christian faith, or that they have this or that view when it's popularly what's circulating about Christianity in the public square, those kinds of things.

So, okay. Well, now, let's turn our attention to these, and let's deal with the easiest one first, which is surely the problem of evil – you know, something that every person who has lived – who lives in a fallen world deals with on a regular basis. So, what ways into this discussion would you commend?

But sometimes, to jump too quickly, to finding good in bad, to find light in darkness means that we minimize and really dismiss the horror of evil. Because evil is real, and it's – it is horrific, and it's unexplainable. And, in a real sense, it is unexplainable and beyond our ability to understand.

The other boundary marker that must be part of our response is we must never attribute the cause of evil to God, and that there are prominent Christian leaders who have crossed that line recently, and out of a view of God's sovereignty that says, "If God is sovereign, then God must be the cause of everything that happens."

What we have to affirm is God's goodness, and that God is sovereign means that evil happens as part of his sovereign plan. That he knows that evil is happening; that he is not unaware; that he has the power to stop it. But for reasons known only to God, he often doesn't. But we don't put the gun in God's hand and put his finger on the trigger. We hold the human responsible for the evil that was – that existed.

And then that leads me also to say – then there's the whole other fallen world, natural disasters, which are, from our perspective, are a result of the world having been cursed, and the world is in rebellion against her Creator. But again, that God's not – God doesn't normatively send hurricanes and floods, etcetera.

Now might he? Yes. He has done those kind of things in the biblical story, but unless we have some information from God, some secret word from God –

Because if there is no God, and if we just simply coexist, etcetera, then evil exists, but there's no ground for it. There's even no ground for, in some ways, for discussing how it operates as one element of the equation.

But the appeal to survival, the appeal to life, the appeal to an evolutionary progress is an attempt to respond to the apologetic you just provided. And I don't want to be completely dismissive and simply dismissive of that argument. But eventually we have to come back to it, and I think the way to address it is not through the real extreme cases – those are obvious – but to get into the real nitty-gritty and nuts and bolts of, "What does this look like in the way we live our lives? And how would we – how would we argue that it's – that this is the right thing or the wrong thing to do in this situation."

Maybe this is a matter of personal taste. So, for example, the easy case is that almost nobody would defend the brutalization of children, which is why there's this worldwide horror at the extremes of what ISIS is doing with children, or with animals. I haven't watched any of those videos; I don't need to see that.

By accident, a video popped up and started to run on Facebook, where a warrior cut the head off a dog as the dog – I'm still – that's a horrifying – 'cause I think there is something deep inside of us that recognizes that this is just wrong.

Most pastors who find themselves in the midst of ministering pastorally, in the midst of tragedy, when the mother asks, "Why did this happen to us," are quite honest and say, "That's a question I can't answer."

And it brings us right back to the heart of the Gospel story, that the Creator of the universe cares for this world. He loves this world, and he loves it to the extent that he has taken upon himself, in Jesus of Nazareth, all the effects of sin, death, and Hell, and has conquered them through the resurrection of the dead and provides, through that, the hope that we, too, will be resurrected, and all will have been made new.

And the problem of – I think it's easy for us to get stuck in trying to provide answers to questions we really can't answer, and that that conversation needs to be taken to the place where we proclaim and encourage people to believe in the hope of the Gospel.

Well, obviously, we could keep talking about this one, and we have four more to go, and we're almost to the end of the first segment. So, why don't you state the second issue, and we'll just set it up to come back to?

So, the pretty standard objection is if Christianity is true, then why do Christians not agree with one another? Why is there such diversity among Christians, and why is there such diversity among Christians, and why is there the degree of inflammatory rhetoric and criticism of other Christians as well? That maybe you ought to be able to get along with one another if you want me to be part of you.

I can have people criticize me anytime. I don't have to go to church to hear that kind of thing.

A second, perhaps more subtle one is the way in which religion has acted and functioned I the world, the association with religion with violence. In particular is another element of this. And then a third part of it is – so, I guess we got a trinity on how religion is an issue here – has to do with the claim that Christianity makes that it's true. But then the variety within Christianity and the way Christians interact with each other in the midst of that.

So, this is a little too neat and clean, 'cause this all gets mixed together. But let's go through those one at a time let's start first with just the variety of religions that we're dealing with and how to think about that.

You've already made the statement that they can't all be simultaneously true. There's no way that can work. So, where do you go from there?

I think a significant factor there has been the approach, whether explicitly, or implicitly, that has argued Christianity is right, and every other religion is wrong. That we have everything about Christianity and everything Christians say is true, and everything about other religions is false. It's John Hick's testimony, and it's very similar to mind, having been taught that people who are not Christians eat their babies, and they're evil people all the time. This is just crazy.

When you actually meet – and again, this was his testimony – to meet people of other religions and to observe they're not more or less moral than Christians are, that Christianity had been equated with morality.

The other factor that I think is important is the value of postmodernism, that there is religion – that there's truth found in a variety of religions. And it's not it's all right and all wrong, but there's a mixture of truth and error, a mixture of good and bad in the practice of every religion.

And I think it's important for Christians to acknowledge that we have been – we, corporately, have sometimes been on the side – on the wrong side – we've been on the side of oppression and – I mean it's true that our treatment of Native Americans and slavery is not a shining light in our history.

But it's not just a corporate historical – I tell people all the time, in teaching, that it's easy for me to perform for 50 minutes, for an hour and 15 minutes. You wouldn't like me very much if you spent time with me all the time. That they're – that we're all sinners, that we are all flawed.

And to address the claims of other religions, from a posture of humility and compassion, it seems to me is an appropriate and helpful one, but to address the claims of exclusivity and to point out to people that this exclusive claim and that exclusive claim can't both be true, and that a choice is necessary. Either Jesus is the only way, or he's not; there really is no other possibility, no other option.

I like to tell people the ancient world was very religious. They had 150 holidays – religious holidays every year. And then I make a joke about, "We ought to adopt that calendar; that would be nice." And so, religion, in this sense of the other, is with people no matter what faith they have.

So, part of engagement, it seems to me – this is actually the lesson of Acts 17 – is touching on that instinct that people have built into them, because they're made in the image of God, that there is something else out there, and that there is something that should make sense out of the lives that we have, that has a purpose and a direction, which most people, I think, instinctively sense and have to suppress.

And that when – in response to these other religions, Paul, without ever using the Bible, instead engaging the culture by quoting pagan poets –

Well, that's one facet. Obviously we're not gonna exhaustively deal with all these. But the second one is the idea of the association with religion with violence. And this is one that, in my mind, in many ways, you simply have to own up to, to some degree. That there are things that have been done in the past, in the name of religion, that don't reflect the best of what religious faith is supposed to be about.

It reminds me of something else, in combining it with the previous idea that there are instincts in people, is that I will meet people of other faiths who can be perfectly good and generous and compassionate hosts.

I remember our trip to Turkey, where – oh, when I first said to Sally, "On this sabbatical we're going to go to Turkey," and she says, "You're going to Turkey." And her reason was particularly she didn't have any interest in diving into the middle of a predominantly Islamic culture.

Well, in fact, we made the trip, and she went. We were wonderfully hosted by many people. And a fascinating conversation. If you talk to her today, she'll say it's one of the most enlightening, eye-opening trips I've ever taken in my life. And what she was meeting were people who reflected, if I can say it this way, the best of this other faith. And in the midst of that, recognized there are ways to interact and relate that are potentially very healthy that comes out of that context.

So, I put that all together to say that on the one hand we have to own up to the places where we have not lived up to the standards that we have set religiously, and on the other hand, I think it's worthy being able to recognize and see when other people do move towards at least some of the best of the moral standards that are reflective of their own faith.

And then there's a great deal of diversity in the way Christians live out that faith, and that rather than diversity being a problem, I think unity, in the midst of diversity is, in fact, at the very heart of the biblical story. I think God loves diversity. I think God enjoys diversity. And we might say, "But God didn't create all of that diversity."

But that's also a demonstration of the way God responds to rebellion and sin, that the diversity of cultures came out of his judgment at the Tower of Babel. I'm not calling cultures judgment; I'm calling them a great gift from God that comes in the midst of –in the midst of that judgment.

I think God loves diversity, and he loves seeing people of various tongues and tribes and nations worshipping him together. I don't think God is troubled that some people like guitar music and some people don't. I think God loves that diversity.

And I'll just give you one example. It changes everything if we read the Flood narrative as the picture of an angry God who lost control and just flew off the handle and destroyed everyone.

At the end of the day, God is still responsible, God is still accountable. But I do think it is important to distinguish between that which God actively does and that which God allows. But I think it also is important that we acknowledge that God is not capricious; he is not – he is not an angry God that loses control of himself. That's a judgment that God brings on the Earth.

The judgment that God brings on the Earth is almost always – I'm trying to think of a counter example – it's almost always after a long period of warning and of – even the Canaanites is 400 years after the event in Genesis 9, where the Canaanites are cursed. And even in the midst of the conquest, there are great acts of grace on behalf of the Canaanites.

So, I think the whole story has to be told. But again, back to honesty, we don't just say those stories didn't exist, and we don't revert back to the Marcionite heresy and say, "That was a different God. The New Testament God is a different God."

We actually have to – and this would be my bottom line, "Let's – instead of just dismissing the story like – as if you understand it, let's actually talk about this text, and let's have a conversation about it. I've listened to your arguing against Christianity. Could we actually now talk about this and to spend the time –"

That might be one of my constant mantras, that it takes time to engage people well. It takes time to have these kind of interactions. It takes a great deal of time.

And so, facing up to the idea of accountability is important. The flipside of this is a sense of entitlement that principal tend to feel that, "God owes me," in one way or another. And so, if God acts against human beings, that somehow that is inherently unjust when it may not be. That's why putting some of these stories in context is important.

I remember, in thinking about genocide, which always troubled me, and I think the stories of genocide, no matter where they appear, should trouble people. But in reading the Pentateuch, as we worked up to this unique and as the other part of the genocide story in the Old Testament, this was a unique thing that God was doing at the time, much like the flood was unique. When the flood was over, God said, "I'm not doing that again."

And God says, "I'm gonna try and wipe the slate clean here through what it is that I'm asking you to do." So, those are features that don't remove all the pain, but they certainly help to explain what's going on as oppose to just this random, violent act, which is the way it tends to be portrayed.

And so, the bottom line here is is that if there's a Creator and we're creatures, and he has created a moral world in which we are to be responsive to him, we're all accountable to that God. And we can't forget that bottom line.

And Yancy concludes that life in a fallen world – with the horrific evil that exists in it, that doesn't work the way it was designed to work – inevitably leads to our disappointment with God. He calls us not to deny that, but to admit it and to – and really to embrace the reality of life in a fallen world and that struggle, and then says, "But at the end of the day, as difficult as it is to deal with disappointment with God as a believer, it is infinitely worse to do it as a non-believer."

I'm virtually certain all of us have had conversations, in one way or another, in which these kinds of arguments and discussions have come up, sincerely raised, and therefore needing to be sincerely addressed. So, I thank you for coming in and helping us with this.

Again, we thank you for being a part of The Table, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.