The heart and foundation of Christianity is belief in a God who is worthy of worship: in the words of Anselm, that being than which none greater can be conceived. And so, when the Bible depicts God as acting in a manner that appears to be less-than-perfect, this creates a challenge for the Christian reader. There is perhaps no more glaring an example of this problem than God’s command to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 20:16-17:

“16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”

The problem, to put it bluntly, is that it looks like God is here commanding genocide. Needless to say, genocide is widely recognized to be an unconscionable evil, a crime against humanity. And no perfect being worthy of worship would command people to carry out an unconscionable evil.

Christians have offered many solutions to resolve this difficult issue but in this article I will focus on an approach that is currently quite popular: I call it the Just War Interpreter. According to this position, while the texts might appear at first blush to entail genocide, a closer reading warrants the conclusion that God was actually commanding actions consistent with just war.

Just War Interpreters offer several arguments for their position. For example, they claim that the language of Deuteronomy 20:16 -17 should be interpreted as hyperbolic. Further, they assert that the cities such as Jericho and Ai which are the primary targets for mass killing were, in fact military outposts serving a largely rural population. And finally, they argue that the primary directive within the text is not eradication but rather removal of that rural population: in other words, God’s primary intent was always to drive the Canaanites out of the land rather than to kill them en masse. In this article, I am going to offer a rebuttal to that third argument, the one that appeals to the theme of displacement. I will argue first that displacement still entails another war crime, that of ethnic cleansing. Second, I will argue that a closer consideration of the act suggests that it still qualifies as genocide even when the primacy of the language of displacement is taken into consideration.

Genocide and Driving Out

Let’s begin with a definition of genocide. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide offers the following legal definition of the concept in Article II:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” (link)

It certainly appears that the command in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 to “completely destroy” these people groups such that no members are left alive would meet the first and most overt example of genocide, that of killing members of the target group on the basis of their identity as group members.

However, the Just war Interpreters offer a different view. As I noted, they argue that the language of total eradication in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 should be interpreted in light of the central theme of expulsion. For example, in his book God Behaving Badly, David Lamb writes that “the primary image to describe the Canaanite conquest is not of slaughter.” Rather, “Yahweh tells the Israelites that he will drive out the people of the land….”¹ Similarly, Paul Copan and Matthew Flannagan argue that the language of displacement is predominant in Deuteronomy and Joshua: “Israel’s chief responsibility was to dispossess or drive out the Canaanites rather than kill them.”² And as Joshua Ryan Butler observes, “Being ‘driven out’ is the language of eviction, not murder.”³ Underlying the entire account is an assumption that the Canaanites were illegitimate squatters who had no right to live on the land.

We should keep in mind that the question before us is whether the actions of the Israelites meet the above-cited definition of genocide which is operative in international law. With that in mind, we can set aside attempts to justify the action based on God’s command because divine commands are not relevant considerations in international law. To put it simply, whether or not you believe God commanded the action is not the issue: the issue, rather, is whether said action would be recognized as genocide by way of established definitions in international law. So do the Just War Interpreters succeed in recasting the directives as being actions consistent with international law?

Ethnic Cleansing

Let’s begin with the concept of ethnic cleansing. While this term has been much discussed in recent years, it only entered common usage in the early 1990s during the conflict in Yugoslavia. While the term as yet lacks a formally recognized legal definition equivalent to the definition of genocide cited above, Klejda Mulaj provides a helpful working definition:

“Ethnic cleansing is considered to be a deliberate policy designed by, and pursued under, the leadership of a nation/ethnic community or with its consent, with the view to removing an “undesirable” indigenous population of a given territory on the basis of its ethnic, national, or religious origin, or a combination of these by using systematically force and/or intimidation.”⁴

So here is our first question: does the Just War Interpreter’s account of driving out of the land satisfy Mulaj’s definition of ethnic cleansing?

Note first that at the time of the conquest, the Canaanites would have been resident in the land for several centuries. That would be sufficient to describe them as an indigenous population. Moreover, they are then targeted for expulsion because of their cultural-religious identity, and this expulsion comes through a military invasion that involves targeting population centers like Jericho and Ai, driving out the rural population (Deut. 7:1), and destroying their cultural products: “This is what you are to do to them: Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire.” (Deut. 7:5)

To conclude, this picture of driving out an indigenous population by force and destroying their remaining cultural products would indeed appear to be a textbook instance of ethnic cleansing by Mulaj’s definition. While ethnic cleansing may not be quite as morally problematic as genocide, it still is a war crime. And it still appears deeply problematic to construe a perfect God as commanding war crimes.

Genocide Revisited

Ethnic cleansing is bad enough, but a closer look suggests that the Just War Interpreter’s focus on expulsion fails to exempt the Israelite actions from qualifying as genocide. To see why we can begin by noting that the Just War Interpreters tend to avoid a very important question: what happened to the rural Canaanites who failed to outrun Israel’s advancing armies? The answer provided in texts like Deuteronomy 7:2 and Joshua 6:21 is that they would have been slaughtered.

With that grisly detail in mind, we can now put together the picture provided by the Just War Interpreters. While the Israelites did not enter the land intent on killing every single Canaanite, that intent is not required for an action to qualify as genocide. However, they did enter intent on forcibly driving out the Canaanites, slaughtering every Canaanite who remained, and destroying every manifestation of Canaanite culture to the end of destroying Canaanite identity as such. The assertions of the Just War Interpreters to the contrary notwithstanding, these actions clearly do conform to the definition of genocide in Article II (a-c). Just imagine a contemporary situation where one religious-ethnic-cultural group attacked another to the end of displacing the other group, killing members of that group based on group identity, and destroying all aspects of the target group’s culture. Would anyone seriously dispute that these actions would qualify as genocide?

There is one final point to note, a point that is regularly overlooked by Just War Interpreters. Ask yourself: in any given society, which residents are the least mobile? The answer is the poor, the elderly, the very young, and the mentally and physically handicapped. In other words, the Canaanites most likely to escape the advancing Israelite armies would be the rich, powerful, and influential while those most likely to be left behind to face mass slaughter at the hand of the Israelites would be the weakest and most vulnerable. Does that sound like a just, wise, and merciful policy from a perfect God?

Conclusion

To conclude, the Just War Interpreters offer some important caveats when reading the biblical text, not least of which is their attention to the primacy of the language of displacement over that of eradication. Nonetheless, it must be said that their argument ultimately fails to justify reclassifying the directives as being consistent with principles of just war. Rather, those actions continue to look very much like not one but two distinct war crimes: ethnic cleansing and genocide. That would suggest that a more radical approach to the problem may be required.

(This article is a brief synopsis of one topic I address in chapter 9 from my book Jesus Loves Canaanites: Biblical Genocide in the Light of Moral Intuition.)

There is a popular notion that doubt and skepticism are specially linked to atheism. But is that borne out by the evidence or is it just a bit of branding based on a limited selection of doubt?

It is also very common to find atheism being linked to skepticism. There is a popular narrative that traces the origins of skepticism back to ancient Greece when philosophers first began to doubt the existence of the gods as they had been popularly understood. One finds a reflection of the intimate link between skepticism and atheism in the fact that Jennifer Michael Hecht founds her book Doubt: A History on the theme of specifically religious doubt. She writes, “There are saints of doubt, martyrs of atheism, and sages of happy disbelief who have not been lined up as such, made visible by their relationships across time, and given the context of their story.”¹ This link between skepticism or doubt and atheism carries through in Hecht’s “Scale of Doubt Quiz” which is intended to chart the reader’s degree of skepticism in thirteen questions. Included in the list are questions about whether one believes a particular religious tradition includes correct information about the nature of ultimate reality (question 1), whether an intelligent being created the universe (question 2), whether prayer is effective (question 4), and whether the experience of love and morality points to a dimension of existence beyond biology, social patterns, and chance (question 11). Answering all the questions negatively places you at the high skeptical end of Hecht’s scale meaning that “you’re a hard-core atheist and of a certain variety: a rational materialist.”²

Note that Hecht’s quiz is structured so as to assume that assent to a robust system of religious doctrine is equivalent to “belief” while failure to accept the various doctrines that tend to comprise that system is equivalent to “doubt.” Insofar as people tend to equate a higher degree of skepticism with higher rationality, the result is to equate higher rationality with stronger doubt of religious doctrine and diminished rationality with stronger belief in religious doctrine.

Perhaps an even bigger problem here is that Hecht’s so-called “Scale of Doubt” fails to recognize that a negative answer to each of her questions counts as belief in what she calls rational materialism. In short, to answer “no” to particular beliefs entails a yes to other beliefs. For example, consider this entry on the Scale of Doubt: “Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?”³ If one answers “no” here, then one is in effect saying yes to scientism by affirming that the world is completely knowable by science. But why doesn’t doubt of scientism count in placing one higher on the Scale of Doubt, particularly when the thesis is highly contentious among philosophers?⁴

Let’s put it another way. By simply rewriting Hecht’s questions, we could refashion the Scale of Doubt so that doubt counts when it is directed at materialist rather than theistic or religious claims. In that way, the atheist materialist would suddenly be labelled the credulous believer in such things as scientism while the theist would be considered the rational doubter because she doubts those same claims.

To be sure, neither one of these alternative scales is a fair measure of doubt, still less of rationality. And I would think that the ultimate goal of skepticism and doubt presumably is the pursuit of rationality. Skepticism and doubt are not ends in themselves. They are only of value insofar as they are part of what it means to believe in accord with reason. With that in mind, we need to appreciate that the most doubtful person is most certainly not the most rational person. To illustrate, picture the person who seeks to be maximally skeptical and so they doubt the testimony of every person they meet, they doubt the reliability of their memory, they doubt their sense perception, and their reasoning faculties. From there they could go on to doubt the existence of the external world, other minds and, if they were really keen, even their own existence.⁵ But there comes a point in all this doubting when you shift from being a paragon of rationality to being a person in need of professional counselling. Unremitting doubt of all things is not the path to rationality.

The lesson, as has oft been observed, is that while there is a place to believe our doubts and doubt our beliefs, reason also calls us to believe our beliefs and doubt our doubts. You see, rationality is not one-sidedly aligned with doubt. Rather it seeks the proper balance between the two. Philosopher Anthony Kenny describes reason well by understanding it in the terms of the Aristotelian concept of virtue as the balance between two vices: “The rational human being is the person who possesses the virtue that is in contrast with each of the opposing vices of credulity and skepticism.”⁶

Even if belief is a critical part of reason, the public perception remains that skepticism (and doubt) are closely linked to rationality and, even more importantly, to atheism. At a cultural level, this perception might seem to be vindicated by the fact that pro-skeptic organizations like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry; (CSI; formerly CSICOP: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and the Skeptics Society seem to have a close alliance with the atheistic community.

Since Paul Kurtz cofounded CSICOP in 1976 the organization has cultivated a well-earned reputation as a bastion of critical thinking. Key to CSI’s current mandate is to investigate and debunk various tendentious claims including those of faith healers and so-called prayer experiments which seek to validate the value of petitionary prayer. These endeavors have helped perpetuate the perception among many that skepticism is inimical to theistic belief.

As for the Skeptics Society and its flagship publication Skeptic magazine, these too are commonly associated not simply with skepticism but with outright atheism. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that Richard Dawkins, widely reputed as the leading atheist in the world, is on the editorial board of Skeptic.⁷ And Dawkins himself certainly does see a tight connection between rationality and atheism. In addition, Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic, has been an outspoken defender of atheism.

The way that skepticism seamlessly unites with atheism is evident in my atheist friend (and coauthor) Justin Schieber,⁸ who is described online as focusing on “promoting critical thought, more specifically, a friendly yet firm skepticism towards religious claims.”⁹ Note how Schieber links skepticism with an attitude toward explicitly religious claims, a casting of skepticism as specially directed toward religiously claims. This seems to echo Hecht’s Scale of Doubt.

While groups like CSI and the Skeptic Society might appear to bind atheism to skepticism, this association does not hold up to scrutiny. Where CSI is concerned, we can note the case of Martin Gardner. A mathematician, philosopher, and magician, Gardner committed much of his life to promoting the values of skepticism and critical thinking while deftly exposing instances of pseudoscience in the wider culture. He first rose to prominence in 1957 with the publication of the phenomenally popular book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.¹⁰ Later, in 1976 Gardner joined Paul Kurtz as one of the founders of CSICOP.

While he was among the preeminent skeptic debunkers, Gardner also remained a theist throughout his life. To be sure, he rejected all religious traditions, so in that sense, his skepticism was well on display. Nonetheless, he maintained a belief in a supreme divine intelligence that governed the universe. Gardner described his views at some length in his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.¹¹ And he readily acknowledged that some skeptics found his theism to be an idiosyncratic fit with his skepticism. He writes: “My atheist and agnostic friends never cease to be amazed and dismayed over how I manage to be such a thoroughgoing skeptic of the paranormal and still retain a belief in God. It’s as if they think that anyone who doubts Uri Geller’s ability to bend spoons with his mind must also doubt the existence of God!”¹² Gardner’s point is well taken. A person can be a wise skeptic of the spoon-bending showman who makes a fortune off his alleged telekinetic powers and at the same time one can find reason to believe in a necessary divine agent who created and sustains the universe. (Or, to put it another way, one might doubt both the magician who purports to bend spoons with his mind and the atheist who insists that the universe came to exist uncaused.)

Once we reject Hecht’s equation of skepticism and doubt with acceptance of one particular set of beliefs (e.g. those of the atheistic materialist) we are reminded that just as one skeptic can accept scientism (for better or for worse) so another skeptic like Gardner is free to accept theism. If I may take the liberty of reworking an oft-repeated quote from Stephen Roberts, the theist may reply to the skeptic, “I contend that we are both skeptics, I just believe in one more god than you do.”

Gardner may provide a visible reminder that CSI is not necessarily atheistic, but what about the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine? After all, as we saw, Richard Dawkins is on the board of Skeptic and he is certainly no friend of theism. And don’t forget Michael Shermer who has been a frequent critic of God and religion.

However, here too a closer look reveals the lines of demarcation are not quite as stark as many believe. Back in 1994 conservative talk radio host Laura Schlesinger was invited to join the board of Skeptic. The invitation was given before Dr. Laura converted to conservative (and later Orthodox) Judaism. However, the critical point to note is that her later religious conversion had no negative impact on her ability to serve on the board of Skeptic. But this is not to say that everyone was comfortable with the role of a theist on the board. In his book How We Believe Michael Shermer recalls how he received expressions of concern from supporters of the Skeptics Society about Schlesinger’s role with the magazine. One writer expressed concern based on the fact that Schlesinger regularly appealed to the Bible as an authority on her radio show: “I didn’t know that skeptics relied on authority to settle disagreements over morality.”¹³ Nor was that the only objection to Schlesinger. Shermer notes that he received several more letters, faxes and emails in 1996 and 1997 protesting Schlesinger’s continued membership on the board.

However, in a triumph of true intellectual freedom, Shermer steadfastly defended Schlesinger’s role on the board. As he put it,

We explained that membership or involvement in any capacity with the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine is not exclusionary. We could not care less what anyone’s religious beliefs are. In fact, at least two of our more prominent supporters—the comedian and songwriter Steve Allen and the mathematician and essayist Martin Gardner—are believers in God. Other members of the board may believe in God as well. I do not know. I have never asked.¹⁴

Shermer goes on to insist that the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine have no objection per se either to theism or to religious commitment. Rather, their concern arises only when individuals or groups make claims that are open to rational investigation whether the topic involves Uri Geller’s spoon-bending, climate change deniers, or a religious claim involving the Shroud of Turin, faith healing, or the young earth creationist’s reconstruction of earth history. As Shermer puts it, “If, in the process of learning how to think scientifically and critically, someone comes to the conclusion that there is no God, so be it—but it is not our goal to convert believers into nonbelievers.”¹⁵

Doubt and questioning are a part of the Christian faith. In Randal Rauser's new book, Conversations with My Inner Atheist, the Christian theologian and apologist explores his own doubts and questions by way of an internal conversation with his own inner atheist, Mia (i.e., "My Inner Atheist.") This article is a chapter drawn from the book in which Randal and Mia explore the question of how one can identify the God of the philosophers with the God described in the Bible.

Mia: I have a feeling you just danced around that last question but fine, whatever: here’s another problem. And this one goes to the heart of what Christians say about God.

Randal: Sounds good, I’m ready.

Mia: Okay, here goes. The God of the Bible is a being who has emotions (John 3:16; Psalm 5:5), he grows angry (Psalm 106:40), learns (Genesis 18:21), changes his mind (Jonah 3:10), has regrets (Genesis 6:6), has a body and face (Exodus 33:18-20), and sits on a throne (Psalm 103:19). That’s how the Bible describes God.

But then theologians and philosophers come along and say, oh, no, wait, God doesn’t actually have emotions, he doesn’t really grow angry. He doesn’t learn or change his mind; in fact, he has no regrets, no body, face or throne on which he sits. Instead, here’s what God really is: he is an impassible, eternal, non-physical, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent being. Yeah, that’s it!

In other words, he’s completely different from the being actually described in the Bible.

Forgive me, but it looks like you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. When you have two completely different descriptions the only conclusion is that these aren’t the same being at all.

How can the God of the Bible be the same being as this God of the Philosophers? You need to choose!

Randal: Yes, many people have sensed that tension. Your framing is well chosen, too: the great French philosopher Pascal famously attributed a mystical experience he had to “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of the Philosophers.”

Mia: Great minds think alike.

I’ll level with you here: it seems to me that the reason theologians and philosophers gravitate to the God of the Philosophers is because they are embarrassed by the God of the Bible. They don’t know what to do with him. He isn’t sophisticated and respectable.

He appears capricious, mean, and unpredictable. He’s a finite being, located in spacetime and he has a body and learns and has regrets: in other words, he is little more than a glorified human being, no different in that respect than the gods of ancient Greece.

Randal: I understand that that may be your perception, but maybe I can help you with your incredulity. Imagine, for a moment the response of an average man when he first learns that according to the scientists, the heavy oak chair on which he is sitting is composed of vibrating packets of energy in empty space. Picture his incredulity. No doubt, he’d be thinking how can you possibly hope to unify these two utterly incompatible pictures of reality? A heavy oak chair that is somehow also vibrating packets of energy in empty space? It makes no sense. Obviously these are really just two different things, right?

But of course, it does make sense if one can understand that these are both legitimate descriptions and that they operate at different explanatory levels. The description of a heavy oak chair captures the everyday experience while the description of vibrating packets of energy provides the physicist’s description of that same reality.

By analogy, the God who acts in history, who learns, changes his mind, grows angry and the like may capture the perception of the everyday Christian. At the same time, the theologian describes God as having particular attributes such as eternality, impassibility, and omnipresence.

Mia: I have no problem with the basic idea of how a physicist arrives at her description of the oak chair. But how do you justify moving from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to that abstraction debated by theologians and philosophers?

Randal: The first thing you need to recognize is that theology is not simply a product of reading the Bible and counting up the verses that support your view. Rather, it is a matter of reading the Bible in a complex process of reflective equilibrium.

Mia: Reflective what?

Randal: You reflect on Scripture in light of your rational and moral intuitions and reasoning, the reading traditions of your background community—like the priority of John 3:16 in understanding salvation— and personal and communal experience. All of these sources inform theological reasoning and together we can see how they bring a theologian stepwise from the experience of the person in the pew to the technical description of God employed by the professional theologian or philosopher.

Mia: That all sounds nice, but unless you can fill in the details, I’m going to suspect you are merely trying to justify the fact that you want to ignore all the Bible’s embarrassing details.

Randal: Pardon me, but can you fill in all the details from the quantum description of the chair to the experience of the man sitting in it?

Mia: Who’s askin’?

Randal: Yeah, I didn’t think so. So maybe you could cut me some slack.

Mia: I don’t claim to be a physicist. But, uh, you do claim to be a theologian.

Randal: Touché. Okay, perhaps I can say a bit more about one specific topic of theology: metaphysics.

Mia: ‘Metaphysics’ as in crystals and gurus and auras?

Randal: Goodness no, I mean metaphysics as in the area of philosophy that concerns our basic convictions about the structure and nature of the world. Just as everyone engages in philosophical reflection so everyone has a metaphysic, a set of beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality. A very basic part of philosophical reflection involves turning our drive for conceptual clarification toward our basic metaphysical commitments. As I said, the fact is that everyone has a philosophy and a metaphysic whether we recognize it or not, and it is important to become aware of what our philosophical views are and how they shape our thinking. As Fergus Kerr observes,

“If theologians proceed in the belief that they need neither examine nor acknowledge their inherited metaphysical commitments, they will simply remain prisoners of whatever philosophical school was in the ascendant 30 years earlier, when they were first year students.” (Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 3.)

So it’s not like I’m reading the Bible through my philosophy and metaphysic while the guy who believes God literally experiences emotion and changes his mind is free of philosophy and metaphysics.

Rather, we’re both interpreting the text and engaging in theological and philosophical reflection as we go. As Alister McGrath puts it, philosophical theology is simply concerned with “the clarification of ideas.” (Christian Theology: An Introduction, 6th ed. (Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 91.) And we could all use more clarity in our thinking about God. So the question is not whether we shall think theologically and philosophically about these issues but rather whether we will do it well.

Mia: But I’m still not clear how you actually get to that philosopher’s abstraction based on the earthy and very human depiction of God in the Bible.

Randal: It might help to consider how we get to one big metaphysical claim in particular—the claim that God is perfect—because a lot flows from that one claim. The great medieval philosopher Anselm argued that when you reflect on the concept of God you arrive at a definition like this: God is that being than which none greater can be conceived.

Mia: Huh? What’s that even supposed to mean?

Randal: Put simply, it means that God is the greatest possible being, there is none greater. Now I have surveyed seminary students for almost twenty years by asking them “Do you think God is the most perfect being there could be?” Time and again, they agree.

In all that time, I’ve never had a single student say that God would be anything less than perfect. They might question our grasp of perfection, but they don’t question that God is perfect.

I think their intuitions in that regard are spot on. And that means that if we encounter passages in the Bible that depict God acting in ways that appear to be very far from perfect, we have one of two options: we can either revise our understanding of perfection or we can revise our reading of the passage in question.

So for example, the Bible depicts God changing his mind, having regrets, learning, growing angry, hating people, lashing out in rage, and so on.

Are these behaviors consistent with perfection? Christian theologians will disagree. But what I would hope we can appreciate is that when a theologian ends up with an understanding of God that looks rather different from some of the depictions in the Bible, she did not arrive at that picture by plucking it arbitrarily out of thin air. Rather, she reasoned to it carefully, informed by several factors including a basic intuitive conception of perfection read in critical dialogue with Scripture and informed by tradition, personal experience, and reason.

Thus, we can conclude that the one God that exists necessarily is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Just as the heavy oak chair is the same object as that particular collection of vibrating packets of energy so the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the same perfect being as is described by the philosophers.

The next step in each case is to explore various models to justify these identity claims and reconcile any tension between them. And that’s what systematic theology is all about.

Admittedly, that was a very quick summary, but hopefully you can at least get a sense of how one can unite these two seemingly incompatible conceptions of God.

Pick up your copy of Conversations with My Inner Atheist: A Christian Apologist Explores Questions that Keep People Up at Night.

“Atheism, we’ll say, for all we know may come at the beginning of religion rather than the end.” (173)

That is not the kind of quote you’d expect to find in a typical book defending an atheistic perspective. But then again, J.L. Schellenberg did not write a typical atheistic book. Progressive Atheism: How Moral Evolution Changes the God Debate (Bloomsbury, 2019) is a manifesto of innovative and iconoclastic atheist thought in the manner of Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God. 

Practically speaking, this means that Schellenberg is dissatisfied with many conventional atheistic positions. New atheism receives short shrift (and rightly so) as “an activist’s strategy” rather than “an intellectually serious option” (26). And naturalism, while a venerable and intellectually serious position, is nonetheless one which outruns the available evidence:

“Naturalism is an orthodoxy of intellectual culture today, and it is in the spirit of science to resist being constricted by it in our intellectual endeavors. Of course, it’s a huge compliment to science to insist that all of reality can be understood by means of scientific inquiry. But true science is humble, and will refuse the compliment.” (55-6)

Schellenberg’s atheism is, as the title suggests, “progressive”. But what is that supposed to mean, exactly? At the heart of the book lies a conviction that human beings have made enormous progress in scientific, moral, and prudential thinking over the centuries. And this should shape how we think about the God question. The first thing it helps us to see is that the common ways of framing the issue of metaphysical absolutes from within the categories of western monotheism is a historical accident and threatens “spiritual ethnocentrism” (54). We need to dare to think bigger.

But to get to those brighter pastures, we first need to hone the insights of our recent cultural evolution to drive home just how problematic is the traditional concept of God. Over three chapters, Schellenberg launches a series of arguments against the perfect God of western monotheism, i.e. a personal being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. This God cannot be reconciled to the data of experience including the problem of divine hiddenness (chapter 6), the existence of moral horrors (chapter 7) and the ubiquity of violence (chapter 8). A God who is truly the perfect embodiment of the virtues we admire would allow none of these things in the quantity and quality that we find them in the universe. And so, we have a good reason to conclude that this God does not exist.

But then what does exist? The final (and tenth) chapter, “Atheism’s Brave New World” seeks to survey a range of options. We begin with ietsisme, a Dutch term that may be translated “somethingism” (159). In short, while western monotheism may face critical objections, there still must be some ultimate reality. The search for that something more begins by recognizing that this reality would transcend the mundane domain of every day human experience. Furthermore, this reality must be important for human flourishing. Schellenberg suggests calling it “vital transmundanity” (161), a term that I suspect is too unwieldy to ever go viral.

This pursuit of that which transcends the mundane brings us to the concept of “triple ultimacy,” a reality that is the ultimate in terms of its facticity, its inherent value, and its depth of goodness (169). And that brings us back to the quote with which I began this review. It is a mere historical accident that religiosity is linked to western monotheistic religions. In Schellenberg’s vision, a rejection of monotheism may be the first step toward a truer, deeper religiosity as one pursues a greater understanding of the ultimate (non-personal? impersonal?) nature of that which is real.

J.L. Schellenberg is one of the leading intellectuals of contemporary atheistic philosophy. That should hardly be surprising given the ambition and originality of his vision in Progressive Atheism. No surprise, as a Christian theologian there is much with which I disagree in this book. In particular, I find his three arguments for atheism (hiddenness, moral horrors, violence) to be far from persuasive. Nor am I particularly moved by his critique of contemporary theistic philosophy in chapter 9.

But in fairness, Progressive Atheism is not intended as a rigorous and in-depth presentation of argument. Rather, as I said above, I take it as a sort of manifesto, a terse and focused introduction to and defense of a new program, one brimming with ambition and alive with new ideas. When I was doing my doctorate twenty years ago, the analytic philosopher W.V. Quine still dominated conversations. His famous essay “On What There Is,” (The Review of Metaphysics, 2(1) (1948), 21–38) treated metaphysics as analogous to packing for a two-week hike in the Himalayas: only pack what you need. It would be wrong to say Schellenberg has abandoned the basic commitment: after all, ideas still need to pay rent. Nonetheless, the distressingly austere Quinean universe dissolves here into a refreshing openness for a world far more ontologically rich than we can imagine.

I am grateful for Schellenberg’s well-placed critiques of the new atheism, antitheism, and naturalism. And even if I remain unpersuaded by his critique of theism, he definitely lands some punches and provides a valuable catalyst for deeper thinking. But what excites me most about Progressive Atheism is the possibility of dialogue between philosophers — theistic, atheistic and otherwise — who are together committed to pursuing a greater understanding of a world-transcendent reality. It may be too soon to speak of building ecumenical bridges, but Schellenberg’s expansive vision offers far more space for meaningful dialogue with the Christian philosopher than the snarky condescension of new atheism and the Quinean austerity of contemporary naturalism. And for that, I’m grateful.

I recently saw this on Twitter, and thought it worth discussing:

When people say atheism entails nihilism they're more than likely saying "I'll be really sad if I couldn't believe I'm immortal and will eventually live in paradise."

— Counter Apologist (@CounterApologis) January 13, 2019

I like Counter Apologist, but this is akin to saying “When people say ‘God doesn’t exist’ they’re more than likely saying ‘I don’t want to submit to God.'” Rather than engage in gratuitous armchair psychologizing, we should just take what folks say at face value.

So here’s the Nihilism Thesis:

(NT): Nihilism is false iff* theism is true.

Should we accept (NT) and if not, why not?

To grapple with this question, we should say something further about the two concepts, nihilism and theism. For the purposes of this discussion, these are my definitions:

Nihilism: The belief that there are no objectively true principles of moral value,  obligation, meaning, or purpose and thus life is objectively meaningless.

Theism: The belief that the ultimate necessary principle of all existence is a maximally great and perfectly good person who created and sustains all things and who is the objective ground of human meaning and purpose.

Based on those definitions, should we think that (NT) is true or false? Or should we be agnostic? And what about the definitions themselves? Are they adequate? If not, why not?

*In case you were wondering, iff is not a typo; rather, it is a nerd-abbreviation for “if and only if.”

NOTE: This autumn I will be presenting a qualified defense of apatheism at a conference. This is a draft of the paper I plan to deliver. It is in response to Jonathan Rauch’s important essay “Let it Be” in which he develops the concept of apatheism.

 
The link between 9/11 and the new atheism is well-established, but that terrible day also spurred another lesser known response to religious zeal. I speak of the apatheist celebrated by Jonathan Rauch in a pithy but very influential 2003 article in Atlantic Monthly simply titled “Let it Be.”¹Rauch begins this brief, 994-word essay in memorable fashion by recounting an occasion when he was asked to share his religious views:

“‘I used to call myself an atheist,’ I said, ‘and I still don’t believe in God, but the larger truth is that it has been years since I really cared one way or another. I’m’—that was when it hit me—‘an … apatheist!’”²

And thus was born “apatheism,” a portmanteau of apathy and theism. But what, precisely, does Rauch mean by apatheism? According to what I call the standard reading of this essay, Rauch’s apatheism reflects an ignoble attitude of intellectual laziness, of mere disinterest in matters of religious significance.

While I don’t dispute the fact that some people are becoming increasingly apathetic about religious commitment, in this essay I will focus my efforts on challenging the standard reading of Rauch’s concept of apatheism. Instead, I’ll argue for what I call the charitable reading according to which apatheism reflects an admirable attempt to chasten the human tendency toward fanaticism as expressed in anti-social behavior such as zealotry, bigotry, and affrontive expressions of proselytism and disputation. When viewed from that perspective, we can see that far from representing an ignoble fall into intellectual sloth, Rauch’s particular brand of apatheism reflects an admirable attempt to constrain public conduct. And for that, it should be respected, if not celebrated.

The Standard Reading

Let’s begin with the standard reading. Several Christian apologists and theologians have interpreted Rauch’s essay as conveying a deeply troubling intellectual apathy toward metaphysical and theological questions. For example, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Rauch’s apatheists “don’t care” whether God exists and that they are, in effect, practical atheists “because their ignorance and indifference amount to a practical rejection of God’s role in the world.”³

While D’Souza makes reference to apatheism only in passing, Douglas Groothuis offers a far more extensive treatment of Rauch’s essay in his book Christian Apologetics. For that reason, I will focus on Groothuis’ treatment to represent the standard reading.

Groothuis says that the apatheist of Rauch’s essay has a “relaxed attitude” toward religion, a “benign indifference” in which one refuses “to become passionate about one’s own beliefs or the beliefs of others.”⁴ Importantly, Groothuis recognizes that apatheism, like new atheism, is an intentional response to the danger of fanaticism. However, while the new atheists responded to religious fanaticism with their own secular version,⁵ Rauch’s apatheism targets all fanaticism, whether it be religious or secular. As Groothuis puts it, Rauch is seeking to provide a “tonic to incivility” that exudes the virtue of tolerance.

While Rauch’s apatheist seeks to avoid fanaticism, Groothuis insists that Rauch thereby places “tranquility above truth.” In short, Rauch’s misbegotten pursuit of civility is only secured at the cost of setting aside a swath of theological, metaphysical, and ethical questions. And this attitude, so Groothuis says, “is antithetical to the teaching of all religions and sound philosophy: that we should care about our convictions and put them into practice consistently.”⁶ In short, Groothuis charges Rauch with a toxic attitude which dissolves into a fundamentally anti-Christian intellectual sloth.⁷

The real cost of Rauch’s misguided response to dogmatic incivility is a failure to love either God or neighbor. Groothuis makes the point by quoting Rauch’s observation that his Christian friends “betray no sign of caring that I am an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual.” As Groothuis soberly observes, “For the serious Christian, however, an attitude of apathy over the eternal destiny of another human being is not an option.”⁸

Consequently, though apatheism may be borne out of a noble desire to avoid conflict, it sacrifices the pursuit of truth in the process and thereby becomes a textbook case of a cure that is worse than the disease.

The Charitable Reading

Now we turn to the charitable reading. This reading begins with the point that Groothuis himself makes: namely, that Rauch proposes apatheism as a way to avoid the dangers of fanaticism. It is also important to underscore the point that Rauch’s target is not religious fanaticism, per se. Rather, he targets fervent fanaticism generally, and it can be exemplified in atheistic or secular attitudes as surely as religious ones. As Rauch writes:

the hot-blooded atheist cares as much about religion as does the evangelical Christian, but in the opposite direction. “Secularism” can refer to a simple absence of devoutness, but it more accurately refers to an ACLU-style disapproval of any profession of religion in public life—a disapproval that seems puritanical and quaint to apatheists.⁹

Thus, Rauch has as little sympathy for the “hot-blooded atheist” as for the fire and brimstone street preacher. Both of these folk need to take an apatheistic chill pill.

At this point, it may help to illustrate the kind of behavior that Rauch is seeking to avoid. And to that end, I’ll briefly summarize two examples of fanaticism or dogmatic incivility, one religious, and the other secular.

We can begin with the religious example. When I was a teenager I was taught that we had to do street evangelism by going out and accosting people with this question: Do you know where you would go if you died tonight? I still remember two young women shaking off our religious invitation with a forceful riposte: “Leave us alone!” My companion, undeterred, followed them down the street calling out with increasing fervency, “But you have to believe!” As for me, I channeled my evangelistic fervor in another direction, by emptying a newspaper box holding copies of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! and tossing them in a dumpster. If we couldn’t win souls, at least we could prevent the JWs from damning them!¹⁰

That’s an example of the kind of behavior that Rauch would like us all to avoid, but as noted above, it is not limited to religious people. Just consider Barbara Ehrenreich’s description of growing up in a fervent secular household:

I was raised in a real strong Secular Humanist family—the kind of folks who’d ground you for a week just for thinking of dating a Unitarian, or worse. Not that they were hard-liners, though. We had over 70 Bibles lying around the house where anyone could browse through them—Gideons my dad had removed from the motel rooms he’d stayed in. And I remember how he gloried in every Gideon he lifted, thinking of all the traveling salesmen whose minds he’d probably saved from dry rot. Looking back, I guess you could say I never really had a choice, what with my parents always preaching, “Think for yourself! Think for yourself!”¹¹

Whether the issue is a Christian wannabe evangelist preaching repentance and destroying JW literature or a secular evangelist preaching freethought and stealing Gideon’s Bibles, the same fanaticism is on display.

We can identify the following disturbing traits in these cases. First, both teen Randal and Mr. Ehrenreich exhibited zealotry, the expression of excessive zeal in their beliefs. Second, this zeal expressed itself in bigotry, an intolerance toward the beliefs of others, particularly evident in the effort to censor alternative views (Awake! Magazine, the Gideon’s Bibles). And finally, both exhibited an affrontive style of proselytism and disputation whether it was teen Randal accosting people in the street with the threat of hell or Mr. Ehrenreich always preaching “Think for yourself!” (One can only imagine the fireworks if young Barbara had actually dared to think for herself by embracing religion.)

It’s also worth keeping in mind that the target of such fanatical behavior is not limited to members of an outgroup, for it can equally target in-group members. Indeed, sometimes the pursuit of group purity encourages an even more rigorous enforcement of group solidarity. Witness the irenic Philip Melanchthon who, late in life, sadly commented that he welcomed his impending death so that he might “escape ‘the rage of the theologians.’”¹²

Like Rauch, I applaud the move away from this kind of in-your-face fanaticism, whether it be religious or secular. And this brings me to the second point: Rauch’s apatheism is not simply a matter of becoming lazy about religious belief. Rather, it represents a determined commitment to chasten our own innate impulses toward fanatical zealotry, bigotry, and affrontive proselytism or disputation.

We’ve all heard the maxim “Never discuss politics or religion in polite company” and we all know why. Religion and politics are topics which are uniquely able to inflame passion and stoke division. And because human beings have a tendency toward conflict in these areas, this is precisely why Rauch proposes we determine to guard ourselves against a lapse into overly zealous, potentially intolerant, and excessively aggressive behavior. Rauch puts the point like this: “it is the product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset, and often of an equally determined personal effort to master the spiritual passions. It is not a lapse. It is an achievement.”¹³ This is a crucial point: Rauch’s apatheism, this chastening of our radical tendencies, is not mere laziness or sloth: rather, it is an earnest discipline.

Consider an example from that other incendiary field: politics. A married couple, Steve and Darlene, are traveling to the house of Steve’s parents for Thanksgiving just after the 2016 presidential election. While both Steve and Darlene campaigned for Hillary Clinton, Steve’s dad voted for Trump. As they drive, Darlene coaches Steve not to get into an argument with his dad about the president-elect: “Don’t take the bait, Steve. I don’t care if your dad wears his MAGA hat all through dinner. I forbid you to talk politics. You need to control yourself!”

The same advice that Darlene gives to Steve to avoid an incendiary topic and with it the risk of lapsing into fanatical behavior could likewise be given to the religious devotee with similar inclinations. Insofar as you have a tendency toward dogmatic zeal, bigotry, or affrontive proselytism or disputation, you should simply avoid these topics. This is not laziness. It is, rather, a careful discipline.

Finally, let’s turn to consider what Rauch says about Christians who are apatheists. This is a particularly important point because while some of Rauch’s statements here might appear especially damning, when read with the appropriate nuance I propose that they actually reveal admirable exercises of wisdom fully congruent with love of God and neighbor.

Here’s how Rauch describes apatheistic Christians: “Most of these people believe in God …; they just don’t care much about him.”¹⁴ This lack of care apparently extends to one’s neighbor as well. Rauch continues:

“I have Christian friends who organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with God, but who betray no sign of caring that I am an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual. They are exponents, at least, of the second, more important part of apatheism: the part that doesn’t mind what other people think about God.”¹⁵

Even if what I’ve said thus far about Rauch’s apatheism is true – that is, even if it largely consists of an admirable determination to constrain the tendency toward fanaticism on incendiary topics – surely at least this attitude is problematic, is it not? After all, a Christian is called to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love their neighbor as themselves. But Rauch appears to describe quite the opposite attitude with Christians who don’t particularly care about God orother people.

However, it seems to me that a closer reading of Rauch can defend him against this charge. While Rauch says that apatheistic Christians “just don’t care much” about God, he immediately adds that he knows many apatheistic Christians who “organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with God”. This presents us with a puzzle: how can it be that they don’t care about God if they organize their lives around an intense and personal relationship with him?

The answer, I would suggest, is that Rauch is using “care” in a very particular way with respect to public expressions of religious fanaticism. In other words, “care” is understood here to consist of visible displays of devotion and piety. But it should be clear to any Christian that such visible actions do not thereby constitute a truly devotional life; indeed, they may even run counter to it. For example, when Jesus instructs on the discipline on prayer he advises his listeners to pursue private devotion rather than grandiose, public displays (Mt 6:5-6). Thus, so-called publicly visible care has little to do with one’s fulsome love of God.

Fair enough, but what about the fact that Rauch says his own Christian friends “betray no sign of caring” that he is “an unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual”? Once again, we need to keep in mind Rauch’s very particular understanding of “caring.” These Christians may not “care” in the sense of engaging in public and visible displays whereby they confront and condemn Rauch’s beliefs and actions. But that hardly entails that they do not truly care about their non-Christian brother. Indeed, for all we (or Rauch) know, they may pray for him for hours a day.

Further, keep in mind that Rauch knows these individuals have deeply devout Christian faith. Their religion is no secret to him. Furthermore, it would presumably be commonly understood between parties that if Rauch had any questions about their faith, he’d be more than welcome to ask. We can assume that the door is open for further conversation, should he be interested. With that in mind, this essay gives no hint at present that Rauch is interested. So it should not surprise us that his friends have opted not to broach the subject at this time. Rather, they are simply sharing life together with their non-Christian friend while being sure not to repel him with off-putting displays of zeal, bigotry, or affrontive proselytism or disputation.

To be sure, you may not agree with the behavior of these apatheistic Christians or with the reasoning I’ve imputed to them. You may instead prefer the Christian to adopt a more confrontational expression of care toward the non-Christian. Even so, it still seems to me that the behavior Rauch describes is fully consistent with love of God and neighbor.

Conclusion

In this paper, I’ve sought to argue that the standard reading of Rauch’s apatheism is incorrect. Far from advocating for an ignoble intellectual sloth, Rauch instead makes an important point about chastening our own tendency toward radicalism. Within that context, he also offers a more balanced conception of devotional commitment to God and neighbor, one which is centered on the interior life rather than external, visible displays of piety and devotion.

Having said all that, I do want to extend an important olive branch to the standard reading. While I admire Rauch’s proposed discipline of chastening fanatical impulses, it does seem to me that his own present disposition is not a matter of exercising a discipline but rather of simply not caring. Indeed, that’s precisely what he says: “it has been years since I really cared one way or another.”

In short, it appears to me that “Let it Be” begins with one definition of apatheism – the state of not caring about the truth of religious or metaphysical questions – before Rauch then segues to a second definition of apatheism, one which describes the discipline of chastening fanatical impulses.

Thus, it would appear that the standard reading gets Rauch’s own disposition correct. Where it goes awry is in failing to recognize that Rauch conflates his own disinterest in religious and metaphysical questions with the principled chastening of fanatical impulses that he focuses on for the bulk of the essay. Given that these are, in fact, very different topics, we should ask how we might best disambiguate this unfortunate conflation. In response, I propose that we continue to use the term “apatheism” to refer to the sense described by the standard reading and exemplified by Rauch’s own religious disinterest. Meanwhile, we could refer to the latter concept of self-control with the Greek term enkrateia, a word that philosophers like Plato used to refer to an internal wisdom and self-control over the exercise of one’s passions. But one thing is clear: it is deeply misleading to refer to the latter attitude as apatheism.

I spend a lot of time criticizing contemporary Christian apologetics. Since I am myself a Christian apologist, that might seem a bit strange. But it is, in fact, simply a practical outworking of my commitment to what I call the 50/50 Rule:

50/50 rule: devote as much time to (a) defending the beliefs of your opponents and critiquing your own beliefs as you devote to (b) critiquing the beliefs of your opponents and defending your own beliefs. (Read more here)

In short, the 50/50 rule is an attempt to embody the Golden Rule in civil discourse by debating and dialoguing with others the way you’d have them debate and dialogue with you.

With that in mind, this article is focused on a type of self-critique, though in this case not specifically critique of my beliefs, per se, but rather of some weaknesses in current Christian apologetics more generally. And so, without further ado, I will now count down the top five problems with contemporary Christian apologetics.

5. Lack of imagination

I’ve touched on this problem before in the article “Apologetics and the Problem of the William Lane Craig Clones.” The basic problem is that there is an inordinate focus on a limited set of arguments and topics. For example, while I think the Kalam cosmological argument and the argument from intelligent design are both interesting and well worth debating, they both receive excessive attention at the expense of many other worthwhile arguments.

This is not a new problem: in the above-linked article on the “Craig Clones”, I make reference to a famous paper by Alvin Plantinga from more than thirty years ago in which he challenged Christian philosophers to explore more arguments and lines of evidence for theistic and Christian belief. And I’ve certainly tried to do that in my own works as in my defense of an argument from answered prayer (in God or Godless) and an argument from the mathematical structure of reality (in An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar).

One of the points I’ve often strived to emphasize is that the strength of arguments is always contextualized. I summarize the point in 59 seconds here. In that brief, 59-second treatment, I point out that good arguments must be accessible and persuasive. But both accessibility and persuasiveness are relative to individuals and that means we should be seeking to explore and develop more diverse arguments for our views. Most skeptics are already familiar with the Kalam and intelligent design arguments. So perhaps it is time to explore some other arguments that might find a more welcoming reception.

4. Excessive Focus on Debate

These days, so much of apologetics is focused on debates. When I first got into apologetics in the early-mid 1990s, it was primarily by way of watching VHS cassettes of William Lane Craig debates from our university library. Everybody loves a good dust-up, right?

Perhaps, but on the downside, the entire debate format tends to reinforce tribalism (more on that anon), competition, and spin-doctoring/motivated reasoning to the end of winning the debate. Set against that backdrop, is it any surprise that both sides often think they “won”? For further discussion of this problem, see my article “The Problem with Debates.”

3. Lack of Focus on Emotional Intelligence

I find that many amateur apologists focus a lot of effort studying arguments and evidence, memorizing various formal and informal logical fallacies. But they spend little time pursuing the emotional intelligence required to read a room, to identify the intended audience of an exchange, and to present oneself in a savvy and winsome manner so as to appear persuasive to that audience.

In my opinion, every apologist should put some readings on emotional intelligence and persuasion psychology on their reading list. What good is it if you win every argument but lose your audience?

2. Tribalism

Tribalism refers to heightened in-group loyalty to the point of discouraging critiques of in-group members and their arguments. Thus, time and again I encounter atheists and skeptics who are surprised that I devote significant time to critiquing various aspects of Christian apologetics. Consider, for example, my extensive and unsparing critiques of William Lane Craig’s defense of the Canaanite genocide or my critique of Andy Bannister’s claim that a recognition of human dignity requires belief in God.

While people are often puzzled that I would critique Christian apologists like Craig and Bannister, the fact is that Christian apologetics is not served by remaining silent when you disagree with the arguments of your fellow Christians. And when we challenge those on “our side” who offer dubious arguments, we undermine tribalism and raise our own credibility as honest and fair-minded people who really care about getting at the truth rather than merely reinforcing tribal boundaries.

1. Fundamentalism

This is the biggest problem, in my view. And it is exemplified in Josh and Sean McDowell’s recently published new edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict. (I review the book here.) In that review, I define fundamentalism as follows:

“When I use the term, I intend to signal a position that evinces a particular set of characteristics commonly associated with the Protestant fundamentalism that arose a century ago and which has remaind [sic] a significant force among North American Protestants for the last several decades. These characteristics include biblicism, biblical literalism, rationalism, triumphalism, and binary oppositionalism.”

In my experience, most (Protestant) apologists either lack any formal theological study or their only exposure to Christian theology is through fundamentalist theologians (e.g. Wayne Grudem) and conservative institutions (e.g. Biola University).

As a result, many of these individuals end up with a narrow understanding of the Christian tradition which is manifested in a tendentious understanding of “biblical inerrancy”, a skepticism of evolution and contemporary science, a simplistic soteriological exclusivism, a single theory of atonement (penal substitution) and posthumous judgment (eternal conscious torment), and so on.

And the next step is that these apologists often confuse and conflate their own Protestant fundamentalist tradition with the broader Christian tradition. (For a particularly telling example, see my review of the book An Introduction to Christian Worldview.) But the Christian tradition is far broader and more nuanced than many Christian apologists realize. In short, they have yet to understand, let alone defend, that which C.S. Lewis called mere Christianity.

Some years ago, a friend of mine told me how, after losing his wife to cancer, he encouraged his embittered young adult children to return to church. On their first visit to a small group, several people shared their recent answers to prayer — miracles, they said — while the two young visitors sat quietly. When they returned home that night, my friend’s kids asked one question: “Dad, if God answered all those prayers, why didn’t he answer ours?” In short, if God gives people miracles, why doesn’t he give everyone a miracle?

The Miracle

I want to back into that question with a miracle of my own.

When I was about ten years old, I was riding my bike home from school when I crossed the street just up the hill from our house … except this time I didn’t do my usual shoulder check for oncoming traffic. A second later I suddenly heard a car horn blast followed by the sickening squeal of tires. Then, just as I turned to my left I saw the grill of a large Buick as if it were hovering but a few terrifying feet away from me. You know how people talk about time slowing down when their life is in danger? That describes my experience. Though it was a mere split second, even now I can still visualize the grill of that Buick, frozen in time, looming in space mere feet away from me.

The next moment I was sent sailing through the air and rolling on the asphalt as the car came to a lurching halt on the graveled shoulder of the road. Here’s where the miracle bit takes center stage. Incredibly, I never felt the impact of the car. At the moment when I should have been making contact with a chrome grill, all I felt was a cushion of air. Even more incredibly, though I had been sent flying off my bike and skidding on the asphalt with no helmet or pads, I got up with no injuries at all, save a single scrape on my elbow.

Shortly thereafter, as I was wheeling my bike up the driveway, our Christian babysitter, Mrs. White, burst out the front door. She said that she had been sitting on the couch watching TV when God told her that I was in trouble and she needed to pray for my safety. So pray she did until she sensed God telling her that the danger had passed.

The Problem

These days I can’t share that story without acknowledging a range of additional issues that I never thought to ask when I was ten. Perhaps the most difficult one is this: for every child that God miraculously saves from a fatal injury, there are countless others he does not save. Why is that? The problem was memorably stated by the 19th-century skeptic, Robert Ingersoll:

“Only the other day a gentleman was telling me of a case of special Providence. He knew it. He had been the subject of it. A few years ago he was about to go on a ship, when he was detained. He did not go, and the ship was lost with all on board. ‘Yes!’ I said, ‘do you think the people who were drowned believed in special Providence?’ Think of the infinite egotism of such a doctrine.”

Frankly, it would be a lot simpler if God just never intervened on principle. But once he starts making exceptions, once he starts getting involved, once he spares the life of one child but not another, it’s difficult to escape the uncomfortable feeling that he’s playing favorites.

The problem is heightened for me as I consider another car accident near my childhood home when a young girl was run over and killed by a dump truck. If God reached down into spacetime to place an invisible divine finger between me and the front grill of a Buick, why didn’t he do something similar for this young girl? If God saves some children, then why doesn’t he save all of them? Again, it’d be one thing if it was God’s general policy not to get involved in the details: in that case, that’s just the way it is. But once he abandons a non-intervention policy in order to ensure that the grill of a Buick never comes into contact with one particular kid, the question looms: why doesn’t God intervene in other cases?

Looking for Answers

These are haunting questions, and over the last twenty years, I’ve invested a lot of time thinking about them. While there is much I could say on this very difficult topic, I’ll limit myself to four points.

First, if you believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, it follows that he must have some purpose in acting as he does. The fact is that as all-powerful, God could have stopped the garbage truck from hitting that girl. As all-knowing, he would have known the truck was about to hit that girl. And as all-good, he would never want any person to suffer without a morally sufficient reason. From this, it follows that when a terrible event like this occurs, it isn’t because it escaped God’s power or knowledge. And it certainly isn’t because God is less than perfectly good. Rather, it must be because God has a morally sufficient reason why he allowed that event to occur.

Second, while God has his reasons, when people are in the midst of suffering they typically don’t want to hear what those reasons might be. And they also don’t want to hear well-intentioned attempts to lessen the suffering with so-called “comfort words” that end up offering anything but comfort. A few years ago a friend of mine lost his daughter in a car accident. He noted that in the wake of the accident countless well-meaning Christians said to him “Well at least…” and then they would say things like “… she’s in heaven” or “… you’ll see her again.” No doubt, those folks meant well, but the words “Well at least” still ended up being salt in his wounds. The moment he heard them, he would automatically tune out Job’s comforters. With that warning in mind, what does one say to those in deep suffering? The simple answer is, when in doubt just say nothing. Instead, just be with those who suffer.

Third, while we will probably never know the reasons God allows terrible events, we can know that he doesn’t perform miracles because people somehow deserve them. If God opted to spare my life from a Buick while not sparing the life of that young girl from a garbage truck, it is not because of any difference in us. It isn’t because I had somehow earned the right to be saved as if I’d logged a few more brownie points for good behavior. Rather it must be due to God’s sovereign purposes alone, whatever those may be.

Now for my final point: what is the proper response of those who believe they experience a miracle? While I’ll be the first to admit that many questions remain, my conviction also remains that God did indeed intervene at a particular moment to spare my life. In light of that fact, the best I can do is to seek always to live in a way that honors the merciful gift of my life.

I know I said that was my final point, but there’s one more thing I want to say: even though I was spared, the fact remains that someday we all shall die. Even the greatest miracles experienced by God’s human creatures are at best a temporary reprieve from their inevitable demise. In that sense, a miracle now is but a promissory note on a future time when all shall be well.
 

 
This article is based on a section of my book What’s So Confusing About Grace? You can order the book here.

Over the years, I have often heard atheists pose the question, “What kind of evidence would it take you to give up your Christian belief?” In many cases, the assumption behind the question seems to be that the Christian should have some clear threshold of evidence in mind. And failure to state what that threshold is would call into question the rationality and intellectual seriousness of the Christian.

Atheists aren’t the only ones posing this kind of demand. I recently came across a similar view expressed by Christian apologist Max Andrews in the following tweet:

“When dialoguing with your interlocutor, ask them, “What must obtain so that your position be changed or that you’re convinced of my position?” If they fail to present conditions or claim that nothing will, discard the conversation and neglect the casting of pearls before swine.” (source)

I disagree strongly with Mr. Andrews’ sentiments and in this article I’m going to explain why by considering what it means to have an open-mind and whether the possession of an open-mind is essential for worthwhile conversation.

Does Having an Open Mind Require You to Know When it Would Change?

First up, Andrews, assumes that having an open-mind about a belief entails having the ability to state the conditions under which one would give up that belief. But I see no reason to think that is true.

Consider the example of Calvinism. After growing up a default Arminian, I became a Calvinist in 1999. Two years later, I rejected Calvinism and returned to an Arminian position, albeit a post-critical Arminian position.

While I am an Arminian once again, I certainly think I’m open-minded on this topic and I know many Calvinists who would agree with me. Despite that fact, I can’t say what exactly would persuade me to change my mind on the question: new exegesis of Romans 9? A novel argument in favor of soft determinism or perhaps the incompatibility of libertarian free will with divine foreknowledge? I’m not sure. Any one of these could change my mind, but without having the evidence presented to me, I can’t be sure.

I do suspect that if I were to change my mind and accept Calvinism again, it would likely come about as the result of a gradual process in which various arguments or lines of evidence would slowly erode my commitment to Arminianism leading to the moment when I suddenly come to realize, “Hey, I’m a Calvinist again!”

The fact is that this is typically how major belief conversions occur: slowly, over time, by way of multiple small steps culminating finally in one big change. But the ability to anticipate precisely the moment when that change would occur on a particular topic is typically something we don’t know.

To conclude my first objection, it seems to me that the ability to identify the point at which you’d abandon a belief is not an essential hallmark of open-mindedness.

Is a Conversation Only Worthwhile if Your Interlocutor has an Open Mind?

Now, let’s grant for the sake of argument that a particular individual is not, in fact, open-minded. Surely that person isn’t worth a conversation, so we should just move on, right?

Maybe, but then again, maybe not: and this brings me to my second point of disagreement. Andrews assumes that this conversation is only worthwhile if your interlocutor is presently open to changing her mind as a result of this conversation. But I disagree. Such openness is certainly valuable for worthwhile conversation, but it is hardly a requirement.

For starters, keep in mind that while your interlocutor may not be open-minded now, it hardly follows that they won’t be open-minded tomorrow. But if you cut off the interactions now, you’ll never get to tomorrow. And how can you know that even now you aren’t slowly eroding her convictions and opening up her mind? The fact is that changes in belief can be occurring well before we recognize they are occurring. So the surface closed-mindedness could be concealing a slow evolution in thinking that isn’t yet evident. And if you burn a bridge now, you may never get to that moment of belief change.

Is a Conversation Only Worthwhile if Your Interlocutor Eventually Changes Her Mind?

Finally, Andrews appears to assume that apologetic conversations are only worthwhile if they move your interlocutor toward changing her mind. I disagree with this as well. Even if your interlocutor is and will forever remain closed-minded, these kinds of exchanges can have all sorts of additional goods that make them eminently worthwhile.

For example, maybe you need to change your mind and this exchange with your conversation partner could help you do that. After all, nobody is right all the time. So whatever the mindset of your interlocutor, this conversation could be a powerful catalyst for your own intellectual development.

And while I’m talking about intellectual development, here’s another possibility: your interlocutor may not change your mind, but your exchanges with her could lead you to become more effective at sharing your views and fielding criticisms. This too is a boon that could make a conversation well worthwhile.

And here’s one more possibility. This one is radical, but please keep, ahem, an open-mind. What if you had conversations with people not simply to change their minds but because you wanted to cultivate a friendship with them and the amiable and spirited sharing of disagreement is part of friendship? In short, could friendship be a sufficient reason to have a conversation? Surely the question answers itself.

Conclusion

For all these reasons, I disagree with Andrews’ tweet. I don’t think that his conception of an open-mind is helpful. Nor, for that matter, do I think an open-mind is an essential criterion for worthwhile conversation.

In closing, I’d also like to address Andrews’ allusion to a famous porcine metaphor. My simple warning here is for the Christians: while I recognize that Jesus uses the vivid metaphor of casting pearls before swine (Mt. 7:6) it doesn’t follow that we too should use that same metaphor in our contexts.

Put it this way. Consider how you’d feel if your interlocutor characterized her exchanges with you as casting her pearls of wisdom before your cloven porcine hooves. I’m guessing that you probably wouldn’t appreciate the metaphor.

With that in mind, my suggestion is that if you really want to quote from Matthew 7 to inspire and guide our apologetic and evangelistic conversations, we should stick with verse 12:

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you…”

The existence of God is a topic that tends to elicit strong passions. People have their beliefs about whether God exists or not, but they also have their hopes. Many people hope God does exist, but some prominent voices express a hope quite to the contrary.

This idea that one might hope God doesn’t exist appears deeply perplexing from a Christian perspective, so it is perhaps understandable why a Christian might be inclined to assume such a hope is automatically indicative of sinful rebellion. But is that necessarily the case? Or might there be other reasons why a person might hope God doesn’t exist?

Before going any further, we should take a moment to define the topic under debate. As the saying goes, tell me about the god you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in that god either. The same point applies to hope: if you hope God doesn’t exist, there is a good chance that I  also hope God (as defined) doesn’t exist. So it is critically important that we start by defining God so as not to talk past one another.

With that in mind, we can define God as a necessary being who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good and who created everything other than God. If that is what we mean by God, is it possible that a person might reasonably hope God doesn’t exist?

You might think that the place to begin is with the new atheists, for they have surely been among the most vocal in expressing their opposition to the very idea of God. But I will turn instead to a much-discussed passage from Thomas Nagel’s 1997 book The Last Word. Nagel’s testimony is particularly relevant here because while the new atheists are populists with an iconoclastic ax to grind, Nagel is a deeply respected and sober philosopher, a professor at New York University and the author of such critically acclaimed books as The View From Nowhere and Mortal Questions. What is more, while the new atheists are unabashedly partisan in their critiques of God and religion, Nagel is measured and very fair. One can find evidence of Nagel’s objectivity in the fact that he has occasionally angered many in the broader atheist community, and endured substantial derision as a result, by endorsing positions or making arguments at odds with majority atheist opinion.¹

With that in mind, Nagel’s candid observations about atheism in The Last Word have attracted a lot of attention from theists. He wrote:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
 
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”²

It’s not surprising that this quote should have caught the attention of Christians committed to the Rebellion Thesis. After all, as already noted, Nagel is a leading philosopher and an independent thinker so his testimony immediately carries far more weight than your typical new atheist polemicist, Nagel speaks the truth as he sees it without lens-distorting party-line commitments. Moreover, after beginning with a reflection on his own state of unbelief, he then opines that many atheists share the same “cosmic authority problem.” Now that’s starting to sound promising. In the accompanying footnote, Nagel refuses to speculate on which sources, Oedipal or otherwise, might explain the genesis of this aversion. This, in turn, leaves it open for the Christian to attribute that opposition to sin, just as the Rebellion Thesis supposes.

Given the aura of this quote, it shouldn’t surprise us that several Christians have appealed to it as support for the Rebellion Thesis. Steven Cowan and James S. Spiegel draw attention to the passage in their book The Love of Wisdom: “Nagel, like others, has a problem with ‘cosmic authority.’ He doesn’t want there to be an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good deity to hold him accountable.”³ Even more significant, in his commentary on the quote, Douglas Groothuis opines that Nagel’s words harken back to Paul’s description of cosmic rebellion: “Nagel’s visceral disclosure resembles the apostle Paul’s description of those who, in opposition to the divine knowledge of which they have access, suppress the truth of God’s existence, fail to give God thanks, and thus become darkened in their understanding (see Rom 1:18-21).”⁴

Perhaps Cowan, Spiegel and Groothuis are on to something. It is true that the Rebellion Thesis doesn’t look quite as outrageous after considering Nagel’s quote. Add to this the self-described antitheist Hitchens as he gripes about “the prospect of serfdom” under God and you just might see a pattern emerging. So could it be that Nagel is demonstrating that this cosmic authority problem really does bring us to the heart of atheism? To put it another way, did Nagel inadvertently produce his own “47 percent” quote, one which lays bare the intransigent spirit of atheism?

As we consider whether Nagel’s quote supports the Rebellion Thesis, let’s start by noting that Nagel himself nowhere suggests that all atheism can be attributed to a “cosmic authority problem.” He merely speculates that many instances could be. He also suggests that there is nobody neutral about the existence of God.⁵ But one simply can’t support the Rebellion Thesis based on those comparatively meager results.

What is more, a careful reading of The Last Word suggests that Nagel provides at least one explanation for this aversion toward God which is not, in fact, driven by antitheistic hostility. In the following passage, Nagel offers a fascinating speculation on the ultimate source of this aversion and this source is not tied to any problem with cosmic authority per se:

“there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one. However, this may not be comforting enough, because the feeling that I have called the fear of religion may extend far beyond the existence of a personal god, to include any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and nonaccidental part. I suspect that there is a deep-seated aversion in the modern ‘disenchanted’ Weltanschauung to any ultimate principles that are not dead—that is, devoid of any reference to the possibility of life or consciousness.”⁶

Note that in this passage Nagel suggests that the aversion to God may, in fact, be sourced in a more fundamental aversion to, or even fear of, ultimate explanatory principles that are personal in nature. If Nagel is right about this then his problem, and that of other atheists like him, may not be that they are against God but rather that they have an aversion to unknowable or mysterious personal explanations.

Perhaps you’re not exactly clear about what Nagel is referring to here, so let me try an illustration to unpack his speculation a bit further. Imagine that there is an indigenous tribe living beside some sweeping sand dunes. Day after day there is a low, mysterious hum emitting from the sand dunes and the indigenous people attribute that hum to a supernatural cause, i.e., mysterious spirits that live in the dunes. Many western visitors to this community would not only be inclined to think there is a natural explanation, but they also might prefer there to be a natural explanation. Why? This could be for at least two reasons. To begin with, the westerners would prefer the parsimony (that is, the simplicity) and familiarity of a picture of the world in which novel phenomena can ultimately be attributable to natural causes. In addition, those westerners might simply find the notion of spiritual agencies wandering the dunes to be unsettling.

And why exactly is this unsettling? Well, consider another illustration closer to home. Indeed, it could be in your home. When I hear a strange bump in the night, I could attribute it to a ghost, but I’d certainly prefer to think it was the dog! The prospect of unknown (and perhaps unknowable) nonphysical personal agencies interacting in our world is indeed unsettling. It isn’t that the westerners are necessarily hostile to spirit beings humming in the dunes. But they hope such beings don’t exist just the same. In a very interesting passage in The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis locates this fear, this aversion with respect to Rudolf Otto’s conception of the numinous:

“Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room,’ and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked.’ This feeling may be described as awe and the object which excites it as the Numinous.”⁷

As Lewis points out, the fear of the ghost is quite different from the fear of the tiger. It is a fear that appears to overlap significantly with Nagel’s aversion to “ultimate principles that are not dead.” The key to recognize is that this aversion (which, in its purest form, Otto referred to as the mysterium tremendum) is not necessarily indicative of hatred or hostility. Instead, it is closer to that uncanny fear of the unknown, like Lewis’ ghost in the next room, or mysterious entities wandering the sand dunes.⁸

Speaking of those entities in the sand dunes, let’s return to that illustration for a moment. The indigenous people in the illustration represent a perspective that we can call the “enchanters” while the westerners represent the “disenchanters” position. Enchanters tend to be drawn to magic and mystery and mental agencies. Consequently, they seem to find ultimate personal explanations and the numinous to be appealing. By contrast, the disenchanters prefer natural and scientific explanations that appeal to matter, energy and forces. In their sociological study of atheism in America, sociologists Williamson and Yancey effectively contrast the two perspectives:

“For many believers [i.e., enchanters], this may seem a dismal thought — that there is no mystery, that there is no ‘other,’ and that there is no eternal father to protect and comfort them. For many nonbelievers [i.e., disenchanters], though, the idea is liberating: no fear of death and no fear of judgment, just a marvelous universe to experience and explore — empirically.”⁹

To be sure, the disenchanter’s perspective is consistent with some degree of active rebellion against God. The desire to avoid divine judgment, for example, could reinforce a predisposition to the disenchanter’s position. But the key for us is that we simply don’t know to what extent Nagel’s aversion toward God is generated by antitheistic impulses versus a more general aversion to the Uncanny side of life. It could be that Nagel maintains a preference for a simpler, predictable and familiar world which is reducible to certain fundamental material principles. And thus it is for that reason that he hopes atheism is true. Consequently, we simply don’t have enough information to count Nagel’s comment as evidence for the Rebellion Thesis.

Nagel gives us a bit more on what I’m calling the disenchanter position elsewhere in The Last Word when he ties this drive for disenchantment to the laudable desire to have explanations that we can understand. As he puts it, “the idea of God serves as a placeholder for an explanation where something seems to demand explanation and none is available . . . .”¹⁰ Further, he adds, “I have never been able to understand the idea of God well enough to see such a theory as truly explanatory: It seems rather to stand for a still unspecified purposiveness that itself remains unexplained.”¹¹ From this perspective Nagel’s aversion to God is an aversion to giving up the quest for further understanding. Once again, we see that we need not attribute his words to any divine rebellion.

When we draw all these points together we find that Nagel’s initial comment offers very little to support a robust Rebellion Thesis. It is true that Nagel speculates that many atheists may have a cosmic authority problem, but he never suggests that all do. Moreover, he also offers another plausible explanation for the desire that God not exist, one which is rooted not in an aversion to divine authority, but rather in the disenchanter’s drive for simplicity, predictability, and explanations that can be grasped by the human mind. And as Lewis illustrates, every one of us can sympathize with this impulse, at least to some degree. (I sure hope that thump in the next room wasn’t caused by a ghost.) To cap it off, Nagel also warns atheists about allowing preferences to color their reasoning. At one point he cautions, “it is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.”¹²

To sum up, while Nagel’s quote allows for the possibility that an indeterminate number of atheists may be in rebellion against God, it simply does not provide good evidence for the Rebellion Thesis. If I may be blunt, it seems to me that Christians who attempt to play isolated quotes like that of Nagel as a “47 percent trump card” to support of the Rebellion Thesis are engaged in little more than quote-mining. (And yes, quote-mining is as bad as it sounds.)

NOTE: This article is adapted from a section of my book titled Is the Atheist My Neighbor?: Rethinking Christian Attitudes toward Atheism.