Tag: Why I am not a Christian

Why I Am Not A Christian – 2

In my blog post “Is there a God?“, I pointed out some of the weaknesses in Stephen Hawking’s reasoning for saying there is no God. I suggested he should have stuck with science, where he had expertise, instead of commenting on areas where he was out of his depth. But I made the rash commitment of responding to the arguments of two philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Richard Carrier on why they were not Christians. Philosophers being trained in argument and logic are obviously going to be a tougher challenge. I responded to Richard Carrier HERE. This post is in response to Russell’s essay “Why I Am Not A Christian“.

“Why I am not a Christian” was initially given as a lecture by Bertrand Russell in 1927 and subsequently written and published as an essay, along with other essays in a book entitled “Why I Am Not A Christian”. At least Russell avoids the arrogance of Carrier, who claimed to have conclusively shown that God does not exist and that Christianity is false. Russell limits himself to saying why he is not a Christian.

Quite rightly Russell starts with a definition of a Christian. Unfortunately he gets it wrong. He defines a Christian as someone who believes in God and who believes that Jesus, if not divine, is at least the best and wisest of men. A Christian very simply is someone who believes that Jesus is the Son of God and came into the world to save it. Starting with his incorrect description, Russell gives his reasons for not being such a person. The following is my critique of his reasons for not being a person such as he describes.

Belief In God

Russell could just have said that he didn’t believe in God and saw no reason for doing so. But he starts with disagreeing with attempts to “prove” the existence of God. But why bother? Nobody has ever conclusively “proved” the existence or non-existence of God. Those who believe in God tend do so because of personal experience and those experiences will differ from person to person.

Suffice it to say that the Holy Bible promises that “ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find and knock and the door will be opened”. If people do not bother to ask, seek or knock, they may never receive. However, in my own case, I really didn’t do any of those things and was given faith anyway. I thank God for his amazing Grace, because it happened shortly before discovery of my brain tumour.

The Nature Of Jesus

Russell then sets out to say why he doesn’t consider Jesus the “best and wisest of men”, which he started out by erroneously suggesting is a requirement to call oneself a Christian.

What he does is deliberately misinterpret some of Jesus’s sayings and then use his misinterpretation against Jesus. He also mentions areas in which he considers that Christians do not follow what Jesus said. Whic is surprising for a philosopher to bring up as an argument against Christianity because it is totally irrelevant. Following are some examples:

He told a rich man to sell up everything and give it to the poor and follow Him. Russell misinterprets this as applying to everyone and criticising Christians for not doing that. The correct interpretation is that this man, asking Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life, loved his wealth too much to give it up. Jesus perceived this and so said what he said. By no stretch of the imagination is it an instruction to all wealthy people to sell up and give everything to the poor. In reality, there have been and are many wealthy Christians who have used their wealth to provide employment and have given from 50% to 90% of their income to charity. In this way their wealth does much more good than if they were to give it all up in one go. There is a good article on such philanthropists HERE.

In the same way he misinterprets Jesus’s statement “If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire” (Matthew 18 v.8)). This is clearly metaphorical in that most of us have accumulated some baggage, some habits, whatever, prior to conversion, that we have to shed in order to follow Jesus. And we have the Holy Spirit, the Divine Helper, to help us to do that. It is astonishing how many people, on receiving Jesus, instantly stop drunkenness, smoking, swearing or whatever it is that is holding them back.

He also misinterprets “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7 v.1) as implying that Christians who are judges in court are going against their faith. It doesn’t mean that at all. It refers only to judging people with respect to their morality in respect of God’s law and God’s expectations and has nothing to do with society’s laws, whether civil or criminal. I don’t know Russell’s motivation for what can only be deliberate misinterpretations. They don’t do his argument any good.

Conclusion

Russell’s failure is simply to take bits of the scripture and misinterpret them instead of looking at them as a whole. Interestingly, we just covered a passage in our Bible study that has a bearing on this – 2 Corinthians 4 v.4 “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God”. The god of this age, meaning the devil, has effectively blinded the minds of unbelievers to the Gospel. This is evident in that atheists who have made up their minds that God does not exist are completely blinded to the fact that he does and mock the experience of those who believe, whereas those who keep an open mind are not blinded and are more likely to come to understand the beauty and simplicity of the Gospel.

What surprise me so much about many atheists is that they are so determined in their belief that God does not exist. Make no mistake that it is a belief just the same as belief that God is. That passage from the letter to the Corinthians above can be the only reason that they are so bigoted – an accusation often unjustly directed at Christians.

Addendum – Hell

Since writing this, I have taken an interest in Biblical Greek. I took Greek O-Level some 65 years ago and actually passed, much to my teacher’s surprise. I have to admit that I really didn’t enjoy it and never got to grips with it. If not always bottom of the class I must have been near it. Strangely, I was always top of the class, or near it, in Latin. But really the Classics were not for me. Maths and Physics were what I enjoyed. Anyway, now that it has a purpose, I am eager to understand Koine Greek (Κοινη) which is the language of the New Testament (most, if not all). Add to that, I am reading that probably much of Jesus’s ministry was likely in the Greek language.

This new-found interest in Greek has got me interested in the original meanings and use of words for Heaven, Hell and Paradise. I am doing more research on this and plan to document my results, either online or in a book, depending on how substantial it is.

Anyway, it is relevant to this post because one of Russell’s criticisms of Jesus is his warning some people they are destined for “Hell”. So I wanted to discover whether it was true and what it really meant. So I went back to the original Greek. The word translated as Hell is γέεννα, anglicised as Gehenna. Gehenna was actually Jerusalem’s rubbish dump, where fires were kept burning to control pests and disease. It is widely taken as a metaphor for “Hell”, being a fiery place where souls are tortured for eternity. Perhaps it is not such a metaphor after all. Perhaps it is a way of saying that those who have spent a life opposing God will be ended and discarded.

In common with a lot of people, whether God-loving or God-hating, I think that an eternity of torture is a bit harsh for a lifetime of disobedience. If God created mankind as an immortal soul, then God is the only one who can undo that immortality – by metaphorically throwing them onto a fiery rubbish dump, so suffering briefly, not eternally. This is pure conjecture at this point and I need to do more research.

The reason that I am mentioning this is that “orthodoxy” may not necessarily be correct. It is not that I spend any time on pondering what happens after death, even though closer than many as an 80-year-old with cancer. My belief is that, however we lived our lives, we will accept God’s judgment as just, when it comes to the time. I actually have a distaste for statements too often made that someone is destined for Hell, or even for Heaven. I imagine that God doesn’t like people pre-judging what He will do either.

Why I Am Not A Christian – 1

In my addendum to my blog post “Is There A God?” I set myself up for the challenge of responding to two works titled “Why I Am Not A Christian” by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Richard Carrier. I have now acquired both as audio books from Audible, but have only listened to Richard Carrier’s so far. These are my comments on his work. I shall respond to Bertrand Russell later. Bear in mind that these are books and my comments are limited to a blog post, so I can only address the main points.

The full title of Carrier’s book is “Why I An Not A Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons To Reject The Faith“. Obviously not conclusive in that they didn’t shake my faith, though it is reasonably well argued, but in the case of the audio version, not very nicely read by Carrier himself.

His four “conclusive” reasons are:

  • God’s silence,
  • God’s inaction,
  • The lack of evidence, and
  • The way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would, even down to its very structure.

Basic problems are that he is arguing from the wrong premise and so, in my opinion, reaching the wrong conclusion. As any scientist and philosopher will tell you, if you start with the wrong assumptions, you will reach the wrong conclusions. Carrier frequently uses the phrase “Christian God” but I shall call him God for the sake of brevity.

God’s Silence

His first mistake is to base his argument on the description of God by C.S.Lewis in his book Basic Christianity. He really ought to go back to the source, the Holy Bible. To argue that God is not like a man’s description is meaningless.

His second mistake is thinking that God should act the way he thinks God should act if he matches C.S.Lewis’ description. So that is adding his thoughts and interpretations on top of C.S.Lewis’ thoughts and interpretations.

His basic argument is that God does not exist because he does not clearly tell everyone in no uncertain terms what they need to do for their salvation, and leaving it up to them whether they take notice or ignore it. Instead he says that we are bombarded with a plethora of confused and contradictory messages from mere humans rather than the truth directly from God unambiguously so that everyone could agree what the message was.

That kind of ignores that God has already spoken to us unambiguously and in no uncertain terms in the Holy Bible. Namely “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and, “Love your neighbour as yourself”. As Jesus said “Do this and you will live”. (Luke 10 v.27-8)

Carrier makes the point that chemists agree on the fundamental facts of chemistry, doctors agree on the fundamental facts of medicine and engineers agree on the fundamental facts of engineering, but mistakenly says that people are confused about the facts of salvation. But there they are in black and white for all to read. What more does he want?

Carrier makes the point that believers of all religions claim to be hearing the word of God and that they are hearing different messages. So he concludes that if God is telling people different things, then he really isn’t telling them anything and the reality is that there is no God and they are just hearing their “inner voice”. That is a difficult statement for me to refute because, as a Christian, I do not know what people of other religions are hearing, if anything. I have read most of the Qur’an and it left me unmoved and I have also read “I Dared To Call Him Father” by Bilquis Sheik, a Pakistani Muslim woman who converted to Christianity, against all the odds. That book left me in no doubt that God talked to her through his Holy Spirit. I don’t say that Christianity is the only way to salvation and that everyone who is not a Christian will die, because that is not what the Bible says. Refer to what Jesus said above.

Digression

A lot of Carrier’s argument is based on what he thinks God could or should do, or what he would do if he had God’s power.

For example, he says that God does not behave as a father should in not giving his children guidance as soon as they go astray. But they have that guidance any time they want in the Holy Bible, which also assures them of God’s love. Just as a parent cannot speak to their child if that child completely rejects them and moves away, so God says little or nothing to those who reject him. But, like a parent, he is always there if the child comes back. See the Parable of the Lost Son as an example (Luke 15 v.11-32)

Another thing is that we cannot fully know God’s mind. We only get glimpses. However, there is reason to believe that he is taking a relatively “hands-off” approach to his creation. As an example see The Parable of the Tenants, Matthew 21 v. 33-41. Very briefly a landowner (God) creates a vineyard and lets it out to tenants (us) to manage while he goes off elsewhere. He sends them his servants (prophets) whom they beat or kill, and he finally sends his son (Jesus) and they kill him too. The implications then are that there will be a day of reckoning.

That is not to say that God has deserted those that love him, but only to say that he does not intervene in every single thing that is wrong with the world. And everything that is wrong is man-made and the price of having free-will. We have guides as to how to use that free-will, but we have abused it. And we are paying the price. I don’t want to get into the realm of politics, but would say that there seems to be an increasing expectation, world-wide, that governments will pick up the pieces of people’s mistakes. Carrier expects God to do the same. Whereas Christianity is about our personal responsibility towards God and towards our neighbour.

Digression over, back to Carrier:

God’s Inaction

So Carrier’s expectation is that God would cure all the world’s ills. He would eliminate all disease, would eliminate all weapons, would eliminate poverty, would provide enough for everybody. He sees that as what any “good” God would do, and so he takes the fact God doesn’t as evidence that God does not exist.

It is a good point of course, but an equally good point is that if we all turned to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then all these things would be done. By us. The choice is ours. Who are we to say that God is not good or does not exist because he does not save us from the consequences of our actions? He has given us the solution. What more does Carrier want? Spoon-feeding?

The Lack Of Evidence

Carrier says that there is a lack of evidence that God exists. Christians believe that there is evidence, but much of it is personal experience. Things in our own lives and the lives of others convince us that God indeed is, but we are well aware that does not meet the standards of scientific proof.

But then Carrier’s arguments for the non-existence of God do not meet the standards of scientific proof either. His conclusions (and his book contains many of them) that God does not exist are defective.

Carrier also makes the point that there is no evidence that faith in Jesus leads to eternal life. There isn’t, but so what? Christianity is so good for us and for the world in this life, that the next life is not really an issue. Christianity is so full of joy and freedom, and comfort when we need it, that eternal life is not really a a factor in our Christianity. It is a lovely promise, but definitely not something we need to prove.

Jesus kind of makes it clear that we are not going to get any proof. He is repeatedly asked for a sign from Heaven and he repeatedly refuses. When Thomas was told of Jesus’ resurrection, he doubted its truth, saying he needed to see for himself. Later when Jesus appeared to Thomas, he said to him: ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe’. Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’. Then Jesus replied, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ (John 20 v.27-9)

Wrong Universe

Carrier claims that the universe is exactly like a godless universe would look and not at all like a Christian universe would look. He makes the good point that with so many suns and planets in the universe, there is bound to be one conducive to life and that life will evolve as we know it can. But so what?

This again is Carrier playing God and saying that if there were a God, he would do it differently. It is really a rubbish argument to say that God would do it differently, therefore he doesn’t exist.

Conclusion

Carrier’s conclusion is quite interesting.

He repeats his four reasons as proving “conclusively” that Christianity is false and that there is no God. He claims that Christianity makes numerous failed predictions, which is not true. Christians may make predictions that are wrong, but that does not mean that Christianity makes failed predictions. The other failed predictions he refers to are what he thinks Christianity predicts, e.g. a different universe, so not surprising they are failed predictions. There is not much value in making things up so that you can trash them.

Interesting though that he continues with the question “So what do we believe?”, which he answers in another of his books “Sense And Goodness Without God”. I certainly will not buy it, but will read it if the opportunity arises. He summarises that book as since this world isn’t the way we want it to be, we have to make it the way we want it to be. Scary! He goes on to say good things like we need to create justice, care for each other, we have to find and give and receive love for each other etc.

But who says we have to do that? It is just his opinion of what a nice world would be. Hitler had another view of what a nice world would be. Who is right – Hitler or Carrier? It is purely subjective. You could argue that in Hitler’s world, there wouldn’t be a problem with over-population and there wouldn’t be any racial strife. Certainly Carrier’s view is closer to the Christian view, but if Christianity is false, as he would have us believe, what evidence is there that this is the right view?

And how is Carrier going to bring about this world that he says we “have to” try to bring about? Politics? I think there is enough failed politics around the world, including in Carrier’s home country, to know that that won’t work. World Government? That’s an even scarier idea with all the problems of the European Union on a larger scale.

I’ve got a better idea! Let’s do what we can to promote real Christianity, where people take personal responsibility for being and doing better. And where we have an objective standard of good and bad.

Here’s another idea for Carrier to make the world better. Stop going on about Christians and just leave us to our faith. He is not going to convert us and we are not going to convert him, so there really is not much point.

Is There A God?

I have taken the title of this post from the title of a chapter in Stephen Hawking’s last book, which I have just read – “Brief Answers to the Big Questions“. This book was published posthumously. It is quite a good read in spite of our difference in knowing of God’s existence. He looks at the question from a scientific point of view. Seemingly, in my opinion, he starts out with the negative view and then tries to justify it scientifically.

It would probably take a whole book to refute all his arguments. I am rather left with the feeling that if that is the best an atheist can do, even someone with a brilliant mind like Stephen Hawking, then it adds to the probability of God’s existence. Kind of like I felt after reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.

In matters of science, I have to accept what Hawking says. I don’t know enough to be able to refute his scientific statements, but I can detect the gaping holes in his reasoning.

Beginning of the Universe

His belief, currently widely accepted, was that the universe started as a “singularity” which is a point of no size and infinite density. Think of it as a tiny object that has lots and lots and lots of mass (mass is what causes things to have weight in the presence of gravity – feathers don’t have much mass, lead weights do). Apparently the mass of the known universe is often quoted as 1053 kilograms (that is a number 1 with 53 zeros behind it). Then this singularity exploded with a Big Bang to form the universe as we know it. Observation shows that it is still expanding and this led to the idea that it was all together at some point billions of years ago.

Hawking states that time does not exist within a singularity.

I have no reason to dispute these “facts”, nor do I need to.

First Error – Laws

I quote from his chapter “Is There a God?”: “The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws …..These laws of nature will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all. ……… Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot be broken“. He then goes on to say: “These laws may, or may not, have been decreed by God, but he cannot intervene to break the laws, or they would not be laws.”. The big problem with this is his huge assumption that God is subject to the laws that he made for the universe.

Looking at it from a Christian point of view actually makes more sense. If there are “laws of nature” they were established by God to govern the creation and evolution of the universe. The fact that God made laws to govern the universe does not at all mean that He made any laws, of nature or anything else, to govern His own actions. God is a free agent not constrained by any imaginary laws. He is perfectly free to intervene in any way He pleases. The beauty, elegance and consistency of the “laws of nature” is more of an argument in favour of God’s existence than against it. Many scientists believe in God.

Hawking then makes the assumption that everything since the Big Bang is governed by the laws of nature and that there is therefore no need for God because Hawking thinks Him constrained by those same laws. This is of course a nonsense and completely denies reality.

The second part of this error is Hawking’s questioning whether “the laws of nature will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all“. How can you question whether the laws that God made tell us whether we need God? If God didn’t make the laws of nature, how were they made? Bearing in mind that nothing existed prior to God, how could there be laws that governed matter and energy and the relationship between them before they existed, unless He made them?

Hawking would either have us believe that the laws that govern the universe were spontaneously created at the same time as the universe, or that they existed before the universe, even though there was nothing for them to govern prior to creation. I think that is much more of a stretch than believing that there is a God.

Second Error – Time

As stated above, time does not exist within a singularity. So Hawking leaps to the conclusion that there was “no time before the Big Bang ……….. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator because there was no time for a creator to have existed in.“. Absolute nonsense! There is no time within the singularity, but that is not to say there isn’t time outside it for God to “exist in”. For proof just look at black holes. As Hawking says, at the heart of a black hole is a singularity and there is no time within them, but we know there is time outside them because the rest of the universe goes on regardless and we couldn’t observe them if it didn’t. By extension, this means that there was as much time as the creator God wanted to “exist in” prior to the Big Bang, because He was obviously outside the singularity. Hawking’s argument just doesn’t hold water.

Conclusion

So as I see it, these are the two glaring errors. There is plenty more to disagree with in his “answer”, but that would take too long and someone more patient and painstaking than I. On a personal note, I was surprised that Hawking’s reasoning was so weak. He did try, whereas some atheists, realising the futility of trying to prove that God doesn’t exist, demand that we prove He does. We have no need to.

At least Hawking limited his reasons for not believing in God to one chapter, whereas Richard Dawkins found it necessary to write a whole book of bad argument and non sequiturs to state the reasons for his atheism. It seems to me that scientists would be better to limit themselves to studying the wonders of God’s creation rather than trying, and failing, to explain that it wasn’t His creation. Slightly ironic that Hawking’s ashes reside in Westminster Abbey, a place dedicated to the glory of God.

There is obviously a problem that we cannot prove or disprove the being of God with repeatable experiments, which are what science demands. So we look at the evidence. Jesus repeatedly rejected the requests of sceptics to show “proof” of who He was. He left them to consider the evidence for themselves. Christians believe there is plenty of evidence. We find our own experience and others’ experience of the Holy Spirit compelling. We see miracles and answers to prayers rather than coincidences because there are so many of them. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus, not just because the Holy Spirit and scripture tell us so. Even after this length of time and with no contemporary news reports, we do know that His crucifixion left his disciples fearful and demoralised, and then His resurrection and the Holy Spirit energised them to preach the Gospel and even die for it. People are not generally prepared to suffer and die for something they don’t know to be true.

As Gamaliel said to the Sanhedrin “But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God” (Acts 5 v.39) . And that was 2,000 years ago and the Gospel is still going strong, in spite of the many attacks against it. It is worth reading the whole chapter because he describes sects that vanished when their leaders were killed, and therefore the expectation that Christianity would vanish unless it were from God. Paul experienced a miraculous conversion and got to know the disciples and wrote about it in his Epistles, and Luke travelled with Paul and wrote about it in the Acts of the Apostles and was motivated to write the Gospel account that bears his name .

And as Paul so succinctly put it in one of his letters: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3 v.19). Which is one way of saying that God is immeasurably more powerful and wise than we are. Atheists using their “wisdom” to argue that He doesn’t exist would do well to bear this in mind. He created the universe and all the “laws” that govern its evolution. Awesome!

You will note that I have steered clear of Biblical creation as outlined in Genesis, because all I set out to do was demonstrate Hawking’s faulty reasoning. I am inclined to accept the Big Bang, or something like it, as the beginning of the universe. In fact, it completely blows my mind to think that God could create a singularity from which our planet evolved with all the life and resources that we need. Sad to say, we are not very smart and are in danger of mucking it all up even more than we have already.

I realise that faith has more to do with our receptiveness and the Holy Spirit than with intellectual argument. The best that argument can do is open someone’s mind to a point where they search for themselves and ask for help – “So I say to you: ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11 v.9).

Addendum

I am reading Hawking’s book “A Brief History Of Time” and interesting it is too. I mention this as an addendum here because he essentially contradicts what he wrote in his answer to the question “Is There A God?”.

One of his arguments is that the Big Bang was the beginning of time, so there was no time before it for God to exist in. But in “A Brief History Of Time” he plainly states that there was time before the Big Bang, and only that the Big Bang is taken to be the beginning of time because it coincides with the beginning of the universe and that what happened before is not relevant to the mathematical and physical analysis of the universe.

Therefore taking the beginning of the universe as the beginning of time is a purely human construct for human convenience, because we know nothing of what went before. To then conclude in a different book that there was no time in which God could exist is patently ridiculous.

Hawking should really have limited himself to the mathematics of God’s creation. He was certainly no philosopher if even I can pick holes in his logic. Richard Dawkins is equally ignorant of philosophy, which is why his book “The God Delusion” is such rubbish.

On the other hand, Bertrand Russell was a philosopher, and he wrote “Why I Am Not A Christian”. Looking where to buy that book, I came across another with the same title by another philosopher, Richard Carrier. So I seem to have set myself the challenge of reading their books and seeing whether their arguments hold water.

I certainly believe my faith is up to this challenge – and I couldn’t have confidence in it if it wasn’t. I’ll keep you posted!

On the other hand, I wouldn’t want it thought that faith is an intellectual exercise, because it most definitely isn’t. But if men are going to use their intellect to challenge it, then they need to be challenged.