More Than a Carpenter (6 page)

The other method of proof, the
legal-historical proof,
is based on showing that something is a fact beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, we reach a verdict on the weight of the evidence and have no rational basis for doubting the decision. Legal-historical proof depends on three kinds of testimony: oral testimony, written testimony, and exhibits (such as a gun, a bullet, or a notebook). Using the legal-historical method to determine the facts, you could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you went to lunch today. Your friends saw you there, the waiter remembers seeing you, and you have the restaurant receipt.

What Do You Think?

What are the advantages of using the scientific method to “prove” something? What are the disadvantages? What are the advantages of using the legal-historical method of proof? Do you find yourself using one method over another more frequently?

The scientific method can be used to prove only repeatable things. It isn’t adequate for proving or disproving questions about persons or events in history. The scientific method isn’t appropriate for answering such questions as: Did George Washington live? Was Martin Luther King Jr. a civil rights leader? Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Does Barry Bonds hold major league baseball’s one-season home run record? Was Jesus Christ raised from the dead? These questions are outside the realm of scientific proof, and we must place them in the realm of legal-historical proof. In other words, the scientific method—which is based on observation, information gathering, hypothesizing, deduction, and experimental verification to find and explain empirical regularities in nature—cannot uncover the final answers to such questions as: Can you prove the Resurrection? Is science at war with religion? Has science somehow disproved the existence of God? In the next chapter my son, Sean, examines the claims of the “New Atheists”—who believe that very thing.

Chapter 5: The Challenge of the New Atheism

As I (Sean) sat down at the local coffee house to sip my iced vanilla latte, I looked across the room and noticed a young woman reading a book with a very provocative title. The silver letters jumped out from the bright yellow background:
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,
by Christopher Hitchens. Intrigued by the bold title, I decided to ask her what the book was about. She proceeded to give me an enthusiastic, lengthy lecture about how religion has been the greatest force of evil in world history, how science has disproved any basis for rational faith, and how people can be good without God.

Was this young woman right? Is religion the bane of human existence? Has science somehow disproved God? Would the world be better if we all embraced atheism?

Atheism is certainly not new. About 1,000 years before the coming of Christ, King David described a person who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). There have always been people who deny the existence of God, and there probably always will be. While atheists have often been vocal about their beliefs, their pop-cultural influence has been minimal. Until now.

Recently a group of articulate, enthusiastic, and militant atheists have exploded onto the public scene. The audience they have commandeered is unprecedented in the history of atheism. In just over a year, three of their books hit the shelves. Sam Harris began the assault with the release of
Letter to a Christian Nation
(2006), followed by Richard Dawkins’s
The God Delusion
(2006), and finally Christopher Hitchens’s
God Is Not Great
(2007). All three books quickly experienced explosive sales, spending months—not weeks—on multiple best seller lists.
God Is Not Great,
for example, debuted at number 1 on the
New York Times
hardcover nonfiction best seller list within a month of its release. Nearly 300,000 copies were in print by its seventh week.

What Do You Think?

Why do you think the New Atheists have recently commanded such a significant following?

The influence of these so-called New Atheists has gone far beyond the publishing world. They have written articles, spoken on college campuses, participated in debates, been interviewed on radio and TV, and posted countless videos on YouTube. They have confused seekers and rocked the faith of many believers. Recent polls indicate that an increasing number of Americans identify themselves as atheists and agnostics. The goal of the New Atheists is simple: to eradicate any rational grounds for religious belief and to persuade theists to walk away from their faith. Are they on to something new? Have they uncovered some fresh evidence that disproves God? What makes the new atheism
new
?

Same Ol’, Same Ol’

Renowned British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once said that all news is nothing more than new people experiencing old things. Things may
seem
new, but that hardly means they really
are
new. When it comes to the New Atheism, there are no fresh discoveries in science, philosophy, or history that undermine Christianity. Most arguments of the New Atheists are recycled from older atheists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Bertrand Russell. Still, there are a few characteristics that make the New Atheists unique.

First, the New Atheism is less costly. Atheists of the past were well aware of the consequences of denying God. They realized that without God we inhabit a cold, dark, pointless universe. Many older atheists mourned the death of God because they realized it undermined the foundations of Western culture. Existentialist Albert Camus admitted that the death of God meant the loss of purpose, joy, and everything that makes life worth living.

By contrast, the New Atheists actually celebrate the death of God. They think life can continue as normal (and even improve) if we simply abolish religion. Such “soft” atheism, says Professor John Haught of Georgetown University, fails to take atheism seriously:

The new soft-core atheists assume that, by dint of Darwinism, we can just drop God like Santa Claus without having to witness the complete collapse of Western culture—including our sense of what is rational and moral. At least the hard-core atheists understood that if we are truly sincere in our atheism the whole web of meanings and values that had clustered around the idea of God in Western culture has to go down the drain along with its organizing center.
¹

Second, in contrast to older forms of atheism, the New Atheists have no tolerance for religious faith. They believe that not only is religion man-made, but that it poisons everything and therefore needs to be eliminated. In
Letter to a Christian Nation,
Sam Harris says that “the respect [the Religious Right] demands for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths.”
²
While Harris recognizes that liberals and moderates do not fly planes into buildings, he believes their tolerance lends support to such extremism. Therefore, it needs to be eradicated. If the New Atheists get their way, freedom of religion will be a relic of the past.

Third, the New Atheists reserve their most venomous attacks for Christianity. While they do criticize Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, and other religions, their target is clearly the biblical God. Richard Dawkins acknowledges, “Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind.”
³

If you’ve read any of the New Atheists, it’s important to keep the words of King Solomon in mind: “The first to speak in court sounds right—until the cross-examination begins” (Proverbs 18:17). In other words, when only one side of a case is heard, the evidence often seems convincing. Yet when the whole story is in, the initial case often crumbles. The New Atheists are convincing—until the other side is heard. Here is the other side.

Is Atheism More Reasonable?

The New Atheists firmly believe that atheism holds the rational higher ground. According to Hitchens, religion is based upon “faith alone,” whereas atheism requires no faith commitment since it relies primarily upon the empirical evidence of science.
⁴

We will explore the question of whether atheism or theism best accounts for the scientific data, but first we need to consider a more basic question: why does the natural world make any sense to begin with? Einstein once remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

Einstein understood a basic truth about science, namely, that it relies upon certain philosophical assumptions about the natural world. These assumptions include the existence of a real external world that is orderly and knowable, and the trustworthiness of our minds to grasp that world. Science cannot proceed apart from these assumptions.

But this raises a particularly thorny dilemma for the atheist: If the mind developed through the blind, material process of Darwinian evolution, then why should we trust it at all? Why should we believe that the human brain—which was the outcome of an accidental process—actually puts us in touch with reality? Science cannot be used as an answer to this question, because science itself relies upon these very assumptions.

Even Charles Darwin was aware of this problem: “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
⁵
The New Atheists place enormous trust in their own powers of reason, but their atheistic worldview undermines any basis for such confidence. In fact, if Darwinian evolution is true, we should distrust our cognitive faculties since they are the result of an unguided, irrational process.

Templeton Prize–winning physicist Paul Davies said, “Science is based on the assumption that the universe is thoroughly rational and logical at every level. Atheists claim that the laws [of nature] exist reasonlessly and that the universe is ultimately absurd. As a scientist, I find this hard to accept. There must be an unchanging rational ground in which the logical, orderly nature of the universe is rooted.”
⁶

Atheism provides no such rational ground. In fact, atheism undercuts it. Theism, however, provides such a foundation. It’s not simply that the rationality of the universe fits better with theism. The level of connection goes deeper. A rational universe is what we would expect if God exists.

What Do You Think?

Why would we expect the universe to be rational if God exists? How, exactly, does atheism undercut the basis of rationality?

Is Science at War with Religion?

Science has been at war with religion for centuries. At least that’s what the New Atheists want you to think. Although widely believed, it is a myth that religion has been impeding the growth of science.
⁷
It’s actually the Christian worldview—with its insistence on the orderliness of the universe, its emphasis on human reason, and its teaching that God is glorified in our understanding of his creation—that laid the foundation for the modern scientific revolution.

Most early scientists were compelled to study the natural world because of their Christian worldview. In
Science and the Modern World,
British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concludes that modern science developed primarily from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.”
⁸

Modern science did not develop in a vacuum, but from forces largely propelled by Christianity. Not surprisingly, most early scientists were theists, including pioneers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Louis Pasteur (1822–95). For many of them, belief in God was the prime motivation for their investigation of the natural world. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God intended for us to explore. Kepler described his motivation for science: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
⁹

Hitchens discounts the religious convictions of these scientific pioneers, arguing that there was no other live alternative for an intellectual of the time.
¹⁰
But this puts Hitchens in a curious position. If religious believers get no credit for the positive contributions they made to society (e.g., shaping modern science) because “everyone was religious,” then how can religious believers be blamed for the atrocities committed in the name of God? This is a clear double standard. The New Atheists want to deny religious believers any credit, yet give them all the blame. To make the case that “religion poisons everything,” Hitchens has to overlook all evidence to the contrary. And he is happy to do so.

Is Atheism More Scientific?

The confidence of the New Atheists stems from one central fact: they believe science is on their side. Sam Harris says, “Belief in the biblical God finds no support in our growing scientific understanding of the world.”
¹¹
And according to Hitchens, the more science develops, the less room there is for God.
¹²
But is this the whole story? While the New Atheists would like us to believe that God can only be inferred from the “gaps” in our scientific knowledge, in reality, the scientific evidence for design has exploded in recent years.
¹³
In fact, one of the most influential atheists of the past five decades—Antony Flew—recently changed his mind about God for this very reason.