Thinking Christian

Christopher Hitchens, near the close of his debate with Frank Turek, offered this brief, masterful moment of apparently oblivious self-rebuttal:

Religion works for most people because people in a sense horribly do want it to be true, that they are supervised, that God looks out for them, that they might be rewarded, or they might be punished. It has this terrible servile advantage. That’s why I consider it to be morally superior to be an atheist, to say I would rather live without that ghastly master-slave mentality…. I can only say that I am very relieved to find, having studied the best evidence … very relieved to find there’s no evidence for it at all. If I thought it was true, I would consider myself condemned to live under a tyranny.

(You can find this at at the 1:52:50 point in the debate.) Religion thrives, he says, because people want it. Then he goes on to explain why he wants atheism.

Attempts to explain religion away as some kind of psychological aberration have been with us since Freud and even earlier. Schopenhauer and Feuerbach called it wish fulfillment. The fallacy there has been pointed out repeatedly: wish fulfillment can work both ways, for there are many who do not wish for there to be a God.

This is not a new issue, but rarely has it been caught in such a convenient little package. If Hitchens thinks he can explain religion away by its fulfilling some person’s desires, I can as easily explain his atheism away by how obviously it fulfills his own desire, his wish to be free of accountability before his creator.

Frank Turek’s final comment is most appropriate in light of Hitchens’s desires:

Christopher Hitchens thinks there is no God, and he hates him. God thinks there is a Christopher Hitchens, and he loves him.

(Regarding “no evidence for it at all,” see here, among the comments following my earlier post on this debate),

(Note added 9/3/08: Comments are closed here, but the discussion remains open. See the final comment on this thread for explanation.)

The real question Christopher Hitchens was trying to get readers focused on here (as opposed to the one he said he was answering), was something like this:

“Why should we think people who believe in God behave better than those who do not?”

He goes on to tell about Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses whose behaviors are less than exemplary, and he insists (quite rightly) that atheists most certainly do good things. I have several brief responses from a Christian perspective.

1. Christians are by no means committed to believing that belief in God or gods taken generally is good, or that it leads to ethical actions. The Bible is full of people who believed in a God or gods, and yet sacrificed children to their gods, practiced temple prostitution, and committed other abominable acts. Christians believe there is but one God, revealed in Jesus Christ, that contradictory beliefs are in error, and that there is no reason to expect extraordinary good to come from believing in any other religions.

2. This may come as a surprise to some readers, but Christianity is not committed to the belief that Christians are more ethical than others. The explanation for this comes in three parts.*

a. Following Jesus Christ with one’s whole heart, in a supportive context and practicing the normal disciplines of the Christian life, will certainly lead to growth in one’s character, with outwardly visible effects. Christianity is quite committed to this belief. If followers of Christ came from a representative portion of any population, the difference in our lives ought to be apparent for all to see.

b. But Christianity is not committed to the belief that followers of Christ come from a random, representative sample of any population. We’re a bunch of sinners. That means me, and it means any other Christian reading this. It includes Billy Graham and the Pope, and it includes anybody who does not yet believe in Christ, but knows they are not perfect. We do not come to Jesus Christ, and we do not (or should not) present ourselves to the world, as any better than anyone else.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Consider what Jesus said about the Pharisee, who was a model of ideal behavior, and the tax collector, who represented greed, thievery, and betrayal of his people. It was the tax collector who “went home justified.” Jesus was considerably more comfortable with those who misbehaved than he was with the Pharisees, who were outwardly the party of the perfect. He came to call not the righteous, but sinners, to follow him.

c. Therefore even if Christians grow in character through following Christ, we may very well just be catching up with the rest of the world in our outward behavior.

3. Nevertheless, there is good sociological evidence that followers of Christ are, on average, are doing okay with respect to character and ethics, in comparison with social peers.

*Credit goes to Timothy Keller for bringing this to light.

Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.