Andrew Fountain - Answering Atheists

Full sermon notes - Answering Atheists

• I want to move from the resurrection specifically and look more generally at “The New Atheists”

1. Christians are not well equipped to answer them because they are only used to answering from the Bible
   • This is not effective against Muslims or atheists
2. We learn Christianity when we are very young. It tends to be “crayon Christianity”, super-simplified
   • But many of us never outgrow this and our young people go to university without being better equipped
   • They try to drive a wedge between the mind and the heart

• But all these values came into the west because of Christianity
  • How can we tell? Simply look at other cultures, e.g.—
  • Compassion (Universal, as in the brotherhood of mankind)
• not in many cultures:

• Indian proverb “The tears of strangers are only water”
  • This is actually a universal way to feel—we have an affinity for our own
  • If someone from another group has a problem, hey, I wish him well, but it’s not my problem!
  • The idea of compassion, in the west, is a Christian idea
• The other way of finding if an idea is a Christian one is to go back before Christianity and see if you can locate it
  • If you go back to Greek or Roman cultures you can see if it existed before Christianity
  • Aristotle makes a list of the virtues: Compassion does not appear
    • The closest, pity, is more of a vice
• The dignity of human life
  • Spartans, unwanted babies dead in the morning
    • Plato, Socrates, Aristotle knew about it, but it was no big deal!

• Slavery: It is a universal practice in every culture, from China to India to Africa, American Indians
  • Only in one civilization did it start to become controversial—the Christian-influenced West
  • What is unique to Christian culture is opposition to slavery in principle
    • It comes right out of the Biblical notion that we are created equal in the eyes of God
    • All Christians have always believed that spiritually we are equal
      • but some began to reason that this should therefore apply to this life, and this gave birth to the anti-slavery movement
      • Not all Christians came to see this immediately, but the idea that all slavery was wrong came from within Christianity
    • No man has the right to rule another man without consent.
      • Also became the moral basis for democracy
• So when we enumerate secular values, they don’t stand by themselves

• Ancient man sees things he can’t explain, like lightening and thunder, so he makes up gods to explain them
  • But now we understand, so we don’t need gods
  • This rests on three dubious historical examples
• At a distance, these look like good arguments, but when you zoom in, they are problematic
• What about the idea that Christian society believed the earth was flat
  • And science came along and proved them wrong

• The answer to this is actually very interesting!
• Medieval Christians pretty much universally believed in a spherical earth
  • The book Dante’s Divine Comedy is based on a spherical earth
• In Christ’s time, educated people knew this
• 500 years B.C. the Greeks knew from the shadow of the earth on the moon in eclipses
  • This idea is an invention, made up by some atheist propagandists in the 19th C

• But what about Science advancing and Christian retreating?
  • How come they don’t use any examples from modern science, which has progressed far faster?
  • All the things that have radically changed our conceptions of the universe have come in the 20th C
    • Relativity, the size of the universe, DNA, quantum physics, massive medical advances
  • These new discoveries, instead of providing evidence against God, seem in eerie ways to provide support for Christian beliefs
    • This has been a massive embarrassment to modern atheism
    • Here is a single example:
• In the last few decades, leading scientists have asked some interesting questions, like “why does our universe have the numerical constant values that it does”
  • The acceleration rate of gravity, the speed of light, forces within atoms
  • The physicist, Lee Smolin, says it is like God is sitting at a desk with 100 different dials, and each dial is calibrated to a very specific number
    • What if someone could sneak into the room and move just one of the dials, say the speed of light, just a tiny bit
    • Just to make the universe a tiny bit different.
    • Stephen Hawking in A brief history of time says that if you move just one of the dials,
      • not 10%, not 1%, but 1 part in 100 thousand million million, you would have no universe, not only no life
  • This problem has put modern atheists completely on the defensive
    • Hawking’s latest book is devoted to trying to answer this problem. He speculates that there are trillions of parallel universes, each with a different set of numbers, and we happen to be in the only one that works
    • The problem with this is that there is absolutely no evidence, that there is even one other universe
      • And physicists agree that there will never be any evidence, because by definition they are a different kind of reality
      • So you can only believe in them by faith
    • So to abolish God, the modern atheist has to make up an infinity of invisible universes

• There is one tiny bit of truth: the radical Muslims do do what they do in the name of God—that’s true
  • But the fact is that that kind of behaviour is unique to certain branches of Islam
  • Where are the Buddhist suicide bombers?
• They are trying to tar everyone else with the same brush
• But why are the Israelis fighting the Palestinians? —are they fighting about God? no!
  • They are fighting about land
  • India and Pakistan are fighting about Kashmir
  • In Northern Ireland they are not fighting about transubstantiation or any other theological difference, its a fight about who gets to rule.
• Religion and Christianity are implicated in historical crimes, but in the scale of these things, they are relatively minor
  • The Inquisition—the greatest blot on Catholic history
    • The Spanish Inquisition killed on average about 6 people a year. Not even a blip in history
  • The Salem witch trials, constantly mentioned. Killed 19 people in total
  • If you are looking for really really big genocides, you have to look to atheists
• the atheists have to go back hundreds of years and find very small numbers,
  • You might think of Mao in China, or Hitler in Germany, or Stalin in Russian, but that is just the tip of the iceberg
  • Its true that those three regimes wiped out close to 100 million people, but that is not even it
• Just look at all the recent atheist leaders around the world
  • e.g. Pol Pot, a junior league atheist
  • After the Vietnam war, his government called the Khmer Rouge, managed in about three years to wipe out 2 million people.
    • Even Bin Laden, in his wildest dreams, has not even come close
  • atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history

• But actually if you don’t believe in something because there is no evidence for it, say the sasquatch
  • You just ignore it. You don’t carry on a campaign against it

• I don’t believe in unicorns, but I have not authored any books called The Unicorn Delusion, The End of Unicorns, Unicorns are not great
  • I just live my life not even thinking about them
• But atheists seem to spend a lot of time thinking about God, duelling with him
• So how are we to respond to the new atheists?
  • For the last 50 years, Christianity has focused almost exclusively on our experience.
  • “Let me tell you what Jesus has done in my life” —which is good, but only goes so far.
    • That’s OK for you, but he hasn’t done anything for me!
  • We are now living in a much more secular age
  • We tend to be far too wimpy
  • The atheists come with a huge gun to fire at Christians, but the bullets are not actually very damaging
  • We need to have the courage to stand up against them, and a few simple arguments like these can be very effective

• Praise him!

Updated on 2012-04-08 by Andrew Fountain