I am not a Christian because it makes logical sense or because I can prove the message to be true. I am a Christian because the teachings and life of Jesus seem to me to be the best and most compelling guide to living a good life.
A few years ago I read lots of apologetics of various sorts.
It started with me reading some of the New Atheist writers - Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Shermer - who were getting a lot of airplay. With the exception of Shermer, these learned gentlemen all have a great certainty that religion is an ancient anachronism. However, their efforts to refute religion are compromised by their failure to actually learn anything about the religions they are attempting to disprove. Nuanced, mature faith just seems like a mystery to them - Harris even suggests that religious 'moderates' are dangerous because they provide cover for fundamentalists. Dawkins seems to believe that if he can disprove young earth creationism he has therefore disproved religion. Shermer, at least, is humble enough to use the word 'perhaps' in his alternative naturalistic explanations of spiritual phenomena.
Of course lots of Christians have written considered defences of religion in general and Christianity in particular. For instance, John Lennox talks about the mathematical improbability of life arising by chance. William Lane Craig mounts a complex, detailed argument in favour of the proposition that whatever has a beginning must have a cause - given that the universe appears to have a beginning, it must also have a First Cause. All of this may be true, or it may not, but at most it tells us there there is a Something behind the universe. It is a long journey from this to the specific God of Christianity. Indeed, Craig's argument is called the kalam argument, an Arabic word which Craig traces back to the medieval Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali. Good Evangelical that he is, is slightly rueful about the fact that modern Islamic scholars have made use of his work.
It seemed to me that the closer the apologists got to trying to demonstrate the specific truth of Christianity, the weaker and more circular their arguments became. For instance, CS Lewis' much quoted 'lunatic, liar or Lord' argument only carries any force, Lewis' prose skills notwithstanding, if you accept the accuracy of the New Testament stories, in which case you will be a Christian in any case. The same goes for the argument about the historical veracity of the resurrection accounts.
It seemed to me that the exercise was futile. You can neither prove nor disprove the truth of Christianity by this path. In the end, the wisest words I read in this quest were from Karen Armstrong in her badly mis-named book The Case for God. She suggests that the problem is we are trying to apply logos, rational intellectual knowledge, to questions which require mythos, the contemplation of mysteries and spiritual stories which are beyond rationality.
Perhaps if I had read Karl Barth a little earlier in my journey I could have short-circuited the process somewhat. Barth is regarded by many as the leading theologian of the 20th century, rescuing theology from the dead-end of liberalism which was proved so bankrupt during the Second World War.
My problem is that Barth's major work, Church Dogmatics, is over 5,000 pages long. Recently I saw a copy of Volume 4 in a second hand book-shop, 1,500 pages of tiny print carefully covered by its previous owner (I'm guessing a theology student) but clearly rarely opened if at all. I briefly considered buying it, but realised it would eventually return to some other second hand shop in much the same condition I found it.
However, last year I found an easier alternative, a slim volume called Dogmatics in Outline. It consists of a series of lectures Barth delivered in Bonn in 1946 in the bombed out ruins of the university. He describes how the lectures would start at 7.00 am and end somewhere around 8.00 when the noise of the demolition crew made further lessons impossible. His subject is the Apostle's Creed, which he dissects phrase by phrase across 24 short chapters.
In the third chapter, 'Faith as Knowledge', he says this.
Christian faith has to do with the object, with God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, of which the Creed speaks. Of course, it is the nature and being of this object...that He cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensible and apprehended solely because of His own freedom, decision and action. What man can know by his own power according to the measure of his natural powers, his understanding, his feeling, will be at most something like a supreme being, an absolute nature, the idea of an utterly free power, of a being towering over everything. This absolute and supreme being, the ultimate and most profound, this 'thing in itself', has nothing to do with God. It is part of the intuitions and marginal possibilities of man's thinking, man's contrivance. Man is able to think this being, but he has not thereby thought God. God is thought and known when in His own freedom God makes Himself apprehensible.... There is a perfectly clear division there already, epistemologically, between the true God and the false gods.... Knowledge of God takes place where there is actual experience that God speaks, that He so represents himself to man that he cannot fail to see and hear Him, where, in a situation he has not brought about, in which he becomes incomprehensible to himself, man sees himself faced with the fact that he lives with God and God with him, because it has so pleased God. Knowledge of God takes place where divine revelation takes place....
It would be hard to find a clearer statement of the futility of apologetics. We can't find God. It's impossible for us, beyond our puny intellectual capacities. We may reason our way to some sort of god but it will be a false god, a god of our own creation, an idol. We can only know the true God because He chooses to reveal Himself to us.
This takes the question further than Armstrong. Her mythos, while not the logical reason of our modern apologists, is still a form of human reason, a process of spiritual insight. It is perhaps what Barth means when he says 'Christian faith is concerned with the illumination of the reason'. He doesn't see us wandering in a nebulous cloud. Yet our reason can't illuminate itself, it will only be illuminated by the light of God's revelation. It is, in a sense, a take it or leave it proposition. You will come to faith when you hear God speak to you, and not in any other way.
This perhaps explains why, for instance, William Lane Craig sees young people converted as a result of his presentations of apologetics. Craig's arguments are nowhere near as convincing as he thinks they are, but both he and his students hear, through this means, the illumination of God's revelation. This comes despite, not because of, the intellectual arguments he presents, which lead to Barth's 'supreme being', 'absolutely free power' or other such false gods.
It may also explain my own experience. My deepened appreciation of the limitations of apologetics left my faith largely untouched and, if anything, clarified. I am not a Christian because of any kind of compelling evidence for the existence of God, or because of some supposed proofs of the Resurrection of Christ. I am a Christian because, in my teenage years, I fell in love with the message of Christ. My faith has changed over the years but this love has remained, and Christ's words and deeds remain the compass by which, through many failures, I try to guide my life. The rest I am happy to let be.
Not long after I read Barth's lectures, I read a series of essays by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman called The Accidental Universe. This book deals pithily and eloquently with different aspects of cosmology - the origin of the universe, its likely end, its amazing symmetry, huge scale, predictability and sheer strangeness.
The third of his essays is called 'The Spiritual Universe', and discusses the question of religion.
I will put my cards on the table. I am an atheist myself. I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree...that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations....
Finally, I believe there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of 'right' and 'wrong'. We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all....I cannot prove that the central doctrine of science is true....
Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves.
If we take Barth seriously, it would make no sense to argue with Lightman. Perhaps we could convince him, per Craig, that there is indeed a 'Being who lives beyond matter'. Probably not, but if by chance we could we would only be leading him to a false god, an entity of our own creation. Indeed, Lightman does already believe in a version of this, 'something larger than ourselves', a gargantuan, mysterious universe about which we can know many things, but before which we gasp in awe. A move towards the gospel from here is in the hands of God, who chooses to reveal himself to us.
Yet here is also a kind of convergence. For Barth, the knowledge of God is beyond our logic or investigation and can only come to us as a free gift which illuminates our understanding in a way we could not have done for ourselves. For Lightman too there are things beyond our rationality, for which evidence is nonexistent or meaningless. These things are not trivial, for humans they are often the things that make life worth living.
So there we are. I stopped reading books on apologetics without any serious regret. It was an interesting and intellectually stimulating pursuit, but ultimately futile. Now I know that, not surprisingly, I am not the first, nor the smartest, to reach this conclusion. Once we accept this we can move on to more important things.
A few years ago I read lots of apologetics of various sorts.
It started with me reading some of the New Atheist writers - Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Shermer - who were getting a lot of airplay. With the exception of Shermer, these learned gentlemen all have a great certainty that religion is an ancient anachronism. However, their efforts to refute religion are compromised by their failure to actually learn anything about the religions they are attempting to disprove. Nuanced, mature faith just seems like a mystery to them - Harris even suggests that religious 'moderates' are dangerous because they provide cover for fundamentalists. Dawkins seems to believe that if he can disprove young earth creationism he has therefore disproved religion. Shermer, at least, is humble enough to use the word 'perhaps' in his alternative naturalistic explanations of spiritual phenomena.
Of course lots of Christians have written considered defences of religion in general and Christianity in particular. For instance, John Lennox talks about the mathematical improbability of life arising by chance. William Lane Craig mounts a complex, detailed argument in favour of the proposition that whatever has a beginning must have a cause - given that the universe appears to have a beginning, it must also have a First Cause. All of this may be true, or it may not, but at most it tells us there there is a Something behind the universe. It is a long journey from this to the specific God of Christianity. Indeed, Craig's argument is called the kalam argument, an Arabic word which Craig traces back to the medieval Islamic philosopher al-Ghazali. Good Evangelical that he is, is slightly rueful about the fact that modern Islamic scholars have made use of his work.
It seemed to me that the closer the apologists got to trying to demonstrate the specific truth of Christianity, the weaker and more circular their arguments became. For instance, CS Lewis' much quoted 'lunatic, liar or Lord' argument only carries any force, Lewis' prose skills notwithstanding, if you accept the accuracy of the New Testament stories, in which case you will be a Christian in any case. The same goes for the argument about the historical veracity of the resurrection accounts.
It seemed to me that the exercise was futile. You can neither prove nor disprove the truth of Christianity by this path. In the end, the wisest words I read in this quest were from Karen Armstrong in her badly mis-named book The Case for God. She suggests that the problem is we are trying to apply logos, rational intellectual knowledge, to questions which require mythos, the contemplation of mysteries and spiritual stories which are beyond rationality.
Perhaps if I had read Karl Barth a little earlier in my journey I could have short-circuited the process somewhat. Barth is regarded by many as the leading theologian of the 20th century, rescuing theology from the dead-end of liberalism which was proved so bankrupt during the Second World War.
My problem is that Barth's major work, Church Dogmatics, is over 5,000 pages long. Recently I saw a copy of Volume 4 in a second hand book-shop, 1,500 pages of tiny print carefully covered by its previous owner (I'm guessing a theology student) but clearly rarely opened if at all. I briefly considered buying it, but realised it would eventually return to some other second hand shop in much the same condition I found it.
However, last year I found an easier alternative, a slim volume called Dogmatics in Outline. It consists of a series of lectures Barth delivered in Bonn in 1946 in the bombed out ruins of the university. He describes how the lectures would start at 7.00 am and end somewhere around 8.00 when the noise of the demolition crew made further lessons impossible. His subject is the Apostle's Creed, which he dissects phrase by phrase across 24 short chapters.In the third chapter, 'Faith as Knowledge', he says this.
Christian faith has to do with the object, with God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, of which the Creed speaks. Of course, it is the nature and being of this object...that He cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensible and apprehended solely because of His own freedom, decision and action. What man can know by his own power according to the measure of his natural powers, his understanding, his feeling, will be at most something like a supreme being, an absolute nature, the idea of an utterly free power, of a being towering over everything. This absolute and supreme being, the ultimate and most profound, this 'thing in itself', has nothing to do with God. It is part of the intuitions and marginal possibilities of man's thinking, man's contrivance. Man is able to think this being, but he has not thereby thought God. God is thought and known when in His own freedom God makes Himself apprehensible.... There is a perfectly clear division there already, epistemologically, between the true God and the false gods.... Knowledge of God takes place where there is actual experience that God speaks, that He so represents himself to man that he cannot fail to see and hear Him, where, in a situation he has not brought about, in which he becomes incomprehensible to himself, man sees himself faced with the fact that he lives with God and God with him, because it has so pleased God. Knowledge of God takes place where divine revelation takes place....
It would be hard to find a clearer statement of the futility of apologetics. We can't find God. It's impossible for us, beyond our puny intellectual capacities. We may reason our way to some sort of god but it will be a false god, a god of our own creation, an idol. We can only know the true God because He chooses to reveal Himself to us.
This takes the question further than Armstrong. Her mythos, while not the logical reason of our modern apologists, is still a form of human reason, a process of spiritual insight. It is perhaps what Barth means when he says 'Christian faith is concerned with the illumination of the reason'. He doesn't see us wandering in a nebulous cloud. Yet our reason can't illuminate itself, it will only be illuminated by the light of God's revelation. It is, in a sense, a take it or leave it proposition. You will come to faith when you hear God speak to you, and not in any other way.
This perhaps explains why, for instance, William Lane Craig sees young people converted as a result of his presentations of apologetics. Craig's arguments are nowhere near as convincing as he thinks they are, but both he and his students hear, through this means, the illumination of God's revelation. This comes despite, not because of, the intellectual arguments he presents, which lead to Barth's 'supreme being', 'absolutely free power' or other such false gods.
It may also explain my own experience. My deepened appreciation of the limitations of apologetics left my faith largely untouched and, if anything, clarified. I am not a Christian because of any kind of compelling evidence for the existence of God, or because of some supposed proofs of the Resurrection of Christ. I am a Christian because, in my teenage years, I fell in love with the message of Christ. My faith has changed over the years but this love has remained, and Christ's words and deeds remain the compass by which, through many failures, I try to guide my life. The rest I am happy to let be.
Not long after I read Barth's lectures, I read a series of essays by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman called The Accidental Universe. This book deals pithily and eloquently with different aspects of cosmology - the origin of the universe, its likely end, its amazing symmetry, huge scale, predictability and sheer strangeness.The third of his essays is called 'The Spiritual Universe', and discusses the question of religion.
I will put my cards on the table. I am an atheist myself. I completely endorse the central doctrine of science. And I do not believe in the existence of a Being who lives beyond matter and energy, even if that Being refrains from entering the fray of the physical world. However, I certainly agree...that science is not the only avenue for arriving at knowledge, that there are interesting and vital questions beyond the reach of test tubes and equations....
Finally, I believe there are things we take on faith, without physical proof and sometimes without any methodology for proof. We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of 'right' and 'wrong'. We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all....I cannot prove that the central doctrine of science is true....
Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves.
If we take Barth seriously, it would make no sense to argue with Lightman. Perhaps we could convince him, per Craig, that there is indeed a 'Being who lives beyond matter'. Probably not, but if by chance we could we would only be leading him to a false god, an entity of our own creation. Indeed, Lightman does already believe in a version of this, 'something larger than ourselves', a gargantuan, mysterious universe about which we can know many things, but before which we gasp in awe. A move towards the gospel from here is in the hands of God, who chooses to reveal himself to us.
Yet here is also a kind of convergence. For Barth, the knowledge of God is beyond our logic or investigation and can only come to us as a free gift which illuminates our understanding in a way we could not have done for ourselves. For Lightman too there are things beyond our rationality, for which evidence is nonexistent or meaningless. These things are not trivial, for humans they are often the things that make life worth living.
So there we are. I stopped reading books on apologetics without any serious regret. It was an interesting and intellectually stimulating pursuit, but ultimately futile. Now I know that, not surprisingly, I am not the first, nor the smartest, to reach this conclusion. Once we accept this we can move on to more important things.
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