Why I am a Christian (25)

Atheism Offers Nothing, Transforms No One and Leads Nowhere

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

Since January this year I have already covered themes from the realms of science, philosophy and theology before looking at five different facets of Jesus. Then I looked at the inspiration, invincibility and influence of the Bible. Finally, there were six posts about experiences, mostly personal to me. Taken together, those first 23 reasons make the case for why I am a Christian and they are based on (a) what I think and (b) what I have experienced.

These last three posts (24, 25 and 26) are about why I cannot accept the three major alternatives to being a Christian; agnosticism, atheism and alternative religions.

If agnostics are probably the most numerous of those three in the U.K., then atheists are surely the most vocal. Indeed the BBC journalist John Humphrys noted that, of all the people he met in the production of his acclaimed 2006 series Humphrys In Search Of God, the atheists were quite the most dogmatic and opinionated.

Of course, every sane man, woman and child agrees that twenty Muslim fanatics hijacking airliners and flying them into buildings is an outrage. But the wave of anger those attacks provoked gave birth to a mood among many since then that has tarred the likes of good Christian people like Desmond Tutu, Billy Graham, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King with the same brush. 

In the decade following that terrorist atrocity in the USA there was a spate of books published that discredited religious faith of any kind and attacked it as derisible, delusional and dangerous. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking The Spell are perhaps the best known and have become hugely influential. These books, arriving more or less simultaneously, gave rise to the expression “the new atheism”.

This atheism was not a defensive or introverted version, content to not believe in God and beg to differ with those who do. Before 9/11, I felt that most atheists regarded my faith as more or less inoffensive - if misguided. A bit annoying at worst. But the tone of the new atheism is assertive, argumentative and condescending. It considers all religious belief as humankind’s most malicious enemy and feels compelled to eradicate it. To me, this feels like a noisy campaign to permanently ban football because of the occasional incidence of hooliganism. Such is the contempt for religious faith that the notion of parents passing on their Christian values and beliefs to their children was condemned in The God Delusion as worse than child sexual abuse. Yes, worse.

In a way there is nothing novel about this "new" atheism. It mirrors the anticlerical backlash in the 18th Century that was the French Revolution; an avowedly atheist uprising. The famous slogan "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest" was attributed to Denis Diderot who died shortly before the Revolution but his passionate oratory was one of the driving forces behind it.

In more recent times the dogma of the East German Communist Party used similar rhetoric. The Stasi's programme of certifying church pastors (amongst others) as insane and subjecting them to forced labour or mental health institutions or summary execution was powered by a conviction that upholding Christian values and beliefs is bad for society and must be stopped at any cost. Children were forcibly removed from their Christian parents and indoctrinated against them. Now that is a crime comparable to child sexual abuse.

Of course, none of the new atheists mentioned above would advocate cruelty such as the examples I have just cited and I am not seeking to begrime their reputations by suggesting that they would. But their ideas, and the tone in which they are expressed, are an ideological pestilence when fed to the minds of people with total political control such as Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Nicolai Ceausescu, Mao Zedong and Kim Jong Il.

This is a point the new atheists fail to concede to their shame. Richard Dawkins displays his naivety when he writes in The God Delusion “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame.” But Professor Dawkins’ undisputed expertise in the field of biology does not extend to his having even the most basic awareness of history - as the people of East Germany and North Korea among many others would readily attest. They would tell him for example of how their avowedly atheist states dynamited the Paulinerkirche in Leipzig and bulldozed churches in Pyongyang to make way for secular buildings if he would incline his ear.

But if only it were only a matter of razing the odd church building to the ground. Alas, so unvaryingly appalling is the track record of institutionalized atheism on the lives of those who dissent from it that Christopher Hitchens, for example, has sought to wriggle out of the embarrassment by suggesting that the atheism that spawned the Soviet Gulag, the Cambodian Killing Fields and the Chinese Cultural Revolution Purges is not really atheist at all but essentially religious in nature. If that is not living in denial it is just crass. It is as laughable as claiming that the 9/11 terrorists were not really radicalised Muslims, but actually treacherous Jedi knights who had turned to the Dark Side.

One of the tactics of the new atheists is to compare and contrast the best of moderate atheism with the worst of extremist religion and say "Look how awful religion always is compared to rational, peace-loving, tolerant, educated atheism!"

The truth is of course that there is extremist, fundamentalist religion and there is extremist, fundamentalist atheism. Give either enough power and they will both tend to exterminate dissenters in equal measure and with similar unconcern, convinced they doing humanity a favour.

Then there is tolerant, moderate religion and tolerant, moderate atheism. Both are usually basically civilised and humanitarian, though I would argue that far more good in the world is done in the name of Christ than for any other cause.

Atheist journalist Matthew Parris wrote a now famous piece in The Times in 2008 (here reproduced in full on the Archbishop Cranmer blog) in which he had the guts to admit that Christianity, not atheism, has been a greater force for good in Africa than anything else. Here is a short extract, edited for the sake of brevity:

“Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts… In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

“…It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it.

"I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith. But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock.

“…We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.”

Is this Christianity the driving force that, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, “poisons everything”? To slightly misquote Shakespeare, the gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.

The opposite charge is surely more persuasive - and backed by hard evidence - that it is atheism that poisons everything precisely because of its absolute refusal of any accountability to a higher authority.

For example, Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and the Soviets and made the point that it was an atheism that feared no final reckoning, not religious belief, that was responsible for those regimes being as insatiably murderous as they were.

In The Discreet Charm of Nihilism he wrote "A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. The Marxist creed has been inverted. The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please."

Nor do I agree that atheism is a new, enlightened, grown up way of thinking, which has left the childish era of belief behind in the dark ages. This is a widely held view in the West today. I contend that it is false. Atheism is not new at all. 1,000 years before Christ the Bible twice declared: "Fools say in their hearts that there is no God" (Psalm 14.1 and Psalm 53.1).

I reject atheism because I dissent from its belief that there is no God. This is what I defended in Reasons 1-23. 

But I also reject atheism because it offers nothing, transforms no one and leads nowhere.

It offers nothing. Atheism is simply a belief that there is no God. The God revealed in Jesus Christ offers spiritual salvation, unspeakable joy, profound peace, healed relationships, new purpose, transformative forgiveness, real community, eternal life and more. But atheism denies that there is a God, so it refuses its adherents all of what God freely gives. Atheism offers nothing.

It transforms no one. I know former drug addicts who were delivered from their addiction when they converted to Christ. I know former serial offenders who became responsible husbands and fathers earning an honest wage after they became Christians. I know former cranky, vain, self-absorbed people who became givers with a love for the poor when they encountered Jesus. But I have not yet met an atheist with a testimony. Yes, I know atheists who used to be believers and lost their faith. But I never hear anyone say “I used to be a born-again Christian and my life was empty. I had no sense of purpose. But then, oh happy day, I became an atheist and my life has changed. I am now so full of joy. I finally know where I’m going in life and I have started to serve hot meals to homeless people in the town centre every Saturday.” I'm not holding my breath. Atheism transforms no one.

And it leads nowhere. Atheism is a protest movement that doesn’t deliver any credible alternative. The nearest atheism gets to offering something positive instead of just attacking something else is the 2009 London bus advert campaign. Buses carried adverts with the slogan “There's probably no God... now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” But I don't know any worried, anxious Christians whose miserable lives would suddenly get better by ceasing to pray and go to church. Who was this silly campaign aimed at? It cost £140,000. Wouldn't the money have been better spent providing safe drinking water for hundreds of villages in Africa? Yes. Atheism does nothing to change the world – it leads nowhere.

As Francis Spufford wrote in the extended open letter rant to atheists that is his book Unapologetic:

“For many of you, the point of atheism appears to be not the non-relationship with God but a live and hostile relationship with believers. It isn’t enough that you yourselves don’t believe: atheism permits a delicious self-righteous anger at those who do. The very existence of religion seems to be an affront, a liberty being taken, a scab you can’t help picking. People who don’t like stamp-collecting don’t have a special magazine called The Anti-Philatelist. But you do… It’s as if there is some transgressive little ripple of satisfaction which can only be obtained by uttering the words ‘sky fairy’ or ‘zombie rabbi’ where a real live Christian might hear them.”

I am not sure I like the tone if I'm honest but I do share the exasperation.

I have thought about it long and hard and found that, not only is atheism profoundly mistaken on the existence of God, I agree with Matthew Parris; it just doesn’t deliver.

Here's what I mean by "deliver." Kirsten Powers is a political commentator with Fox News. A few years ago, she was an avowed atheist who held evangelical Christianity in particular contempt. But now she is... an evangelical Christian. This is part of her story.

“When I moved to New York, where I worked in Democratic politics, my world became aggressively secular. Everyone I knew was politically left-leaning, and my group of friends was overwhelmingly atheist… I derided Christians as anti-intellectual bigots who were too weak to face the reality that there is no rhyme or reason to the world.”

She started dating a Christian boyfriend who invited her to his church in Manhattan led by Tim Keller, She went along.

“Each week, Keller made the case for Christianity. He also made the case against atheism and agnosticism. He expertly exposed the intellectual weaknesses of a purely secular worldview. I came to realize that even if Christianity wasn't the real thing, neither was atheism.”

After some time and following a strange but vivid dream about Jesus she agreed to attend a midweek discussion group.

“I had a knot in my stomach. In my mind, only weirdoes and zealots went to Bible studies. I don't remember what was said that day. All I know is that when I left, everything had changed. I'll never forget standing outside that apartment on the Upper East Side and saying to myself, ‘It's true. It's completely true.’ The world looked entirely different, like a veil had been lifted off it. I had not an iota of doubt. I was filled with indescribable joy.”

"Indescribable joy" she said. That’s what I felt when I became a Christian in 1979. I still have flashes of it now through Christian friendships, in prayer and worship, even in times of pain. 

“It's true. It's completely true” she said. That’s what I thought the day I gave my life to Christ. I still think it is. Some days it seems so obviously true that I wonder how anyone could arrive at any other conclusion. That’s why I am not an atheist. It’s the 25^th reason why I am a Christian.

* If you are troubled by or persuaded by the new atheists, I would like to recommend two YouTube films where Richard Dawkins debates with John Lennox and Christopher Hitchens debates with William Lane Craig. Google will take you there. These are not sound bite videos. They are quite long. The case for atheism, so engagingly made in the new atheist books, is given a rigorous critique and a proper run for its money. People will come to different conclusions about which argument comes out best. But certainly these debates expose the “Christians are deluded and brain-dead” narrative as the shameless propaganda it is.

* If you’ve read The God Delusion or something similar and are looking for a book that will present a solid counter argument so you can weigh the two, I would recommend John Lennox’s more weighty Gunning For God or David Robertson’s more accessible The Dawkins Letters.