Foolish Things
Answering the Atheists
Let's face it: Atheism is in. Not since Nietzsche have disbelievers enjoyed such a ready public reception to their godless message—and such near-miraculous royalties. But even that hasn't put them in a good mood. Snaps Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (although not, presumably, the pronouncements of atheists), "Many of the teachings of Christianity are, as well as being incredible and mythical, immoral." A feuding Richard Dawkins suggests that believers "just shut up." Apparently, they didn't get the tolerance memo.
Other authors—including Douglas Wilson and Francis Collins—have quite capably refuted the new atheist shtick. But remembering Bertrand Russell's famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Christian," here is a Reader's Digest version of why I am.
Creation: The universe, far from being a howling wasteland indifferent to our existence, appears to be finely tuned through its estimated 13.7 billion years of existence to support life on this planet. Tinker with any one of scores of fundamental physical laws or the initial conditions of the universe—such as gravity or the cosmological constant—and we would not be here. As physicist Paul Davies has admitted, "I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact."
Beauty: Beethoven's Ninth, a snowflake, the sweet smell of a baby who has been sleeping, and a sunset beyond the dunes of Lake Michigan all point to a magnificent and loving Creator. And isn't it interesting that we have the capacity—unlike mere animals—to gape in awe, to be brought to tears, before them? Truly did David say, ...
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Foolish Things
Stan Guthrie
Stan Guthrie is an editor at large for Christianity Today and author of Missions in the Third Millennium and All That Jesus Asks. His column, "Foolish Things," ran from 2006 to 2007.
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Steve Schlicht
I'm an atheist because there has not been any evidence to support the existence of any one of them. Despite continued claims of religious adherents throughout history that Gods, Goddesses and their respective antagonists exist in the shadow realms beyond space and time, there still hasn't been the first shred of empirical evidence that proves these claims. Christians are simply one more class of believers in talking snakes, human sacrifice, virgin births, water-walking wizards, incestuous heroes and genocidal tyrants who love only their special tribe that have presented themselves over the history of humankind. In time we'll learn that Oz never gave nothing to the tin man that he didn't already have.
NKNWN
TO ALL NONBELIEVERS: Don't just say, "There is no GOD." Dare to dig in for "Yourself" and really, really, really prove, "There is no GOD." In the name of JESUS. AMEN.
J. J. Ramsey
Some of these arguments are bad arguments, and some of them are non sequiturs. The fine-tuning argument was dealt with above, so I'll deal with some of the Scriptural arguments: * Yes, we have a lot of copies of the NT. This doesn't help if the original manuscripts were filled with half-truth or worse to start with. Even if you get past the apologetics, the texts still show serious errors in chronology and geography. So why should we rely on their more extraordinary claims? * "the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly of its heroes." It does not follow that we should believe that David slew Goliath because the author who tells us this also tells us that he committed murder by proxy and adultery.
LetUsRatiocinate
Joe Taylor writes, "Can you at least make it fair and try to understand Christian theology? Most of you profess to be smarter than the "ignorant, childish Christians". It's kind of amusing when you take that stance and then ruin the illusion by using an argument against Christianity that has been refuted over and over again." I would be quite interested, Joe, in your alleged refutation of an argument against Christianity. Could you share one with me? Also, in my experience, there are many more atheists who promoted themselves out of the christian quagmire because they FULLY understood christian theology than those who started out as nonbelievers. I would go so far as to say many, if not most atheists, know christian theology and history much better than most professing christians. That's why we left christianity behind. RE: an earlier comment: Doubting your doubts is a cool phrase, but not a rational one in the absence of credible abrogating evidence as a reason to doubt your doubts.
Happy Skeptic
non-apologist ken writes: >>Without Christians, a whole bunches of schools and hospitals day-care centers wouldn't even exist. How many of those had been established from atheists?<< Probably very few. Christians are massively organized and funded -- which is possible because they have a relatively coherent identity. Atheists have no coherent identity. The single defining characteristic that atheists share is we are certain the christian god does not exist and have exceedingly strong doubts about any other gods. We are everywhere, but not organized like churches are. There are no churches for atheists that found orphanages. Each of us takes on charitable tasks as we are able. Last Saturday, when I was volunteering (for a christian-founded social service agency,) I told the folks my group was helping that I was merely "doing my atheistic duty." It would be erroneous to assume atheists do not care about anyone but themselves just because we don't have Atheist Mercy hospitals.