- I want to move from the resurrection specifically and look more generally at “The New Atheists”
- 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
- 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
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
- 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:
Tears
- 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!
- Spartans, unwanted babies dead in the morning
Spartan Baby
- 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
Cosmic Turtle
Over the edge
- 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
Parallel Universes
- 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 Inquisition—the greatest blot on Catholic history
- 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
Stalin
Bertrand Russell
Sasquatch
- 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
Unicorn
- 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!