'Christianity is evil'

In Matthew 12.22-37, Jesus is accused of working his miracles and casting out demons by using dark arts, black magic, in particular by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.

The shock of finding the Son of God vilified as being in league with Satan, the best man who ever lived being accused of being evil, should perhaps prepare us to meet the recent upsurge of anti-Christian rhetoric in our own time.

Among some of the best known books that portray Christianity as evil are: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God is not Great by Christopher Hitchins; Against all gods by A.C. Grayling; and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert.

In what follows I will be using material found in Peter S. Williams’s brilliant and scholarly book, A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism*. Williams’s book is intellectually strong, sometimes difficult, especially on important philosophical issues, and unapologetically hard-hitting.

Not since Victorian times perhaps has there been such a passionate debate about religious belief. Religion is back on the agenda. It’s been back on the agenda for many scientists since the Big Bang theory; it’s been back on the agenda for many philosophers for the last 30 years since the demise of logical positivism; and it’s been prominent on the political agenda in Europe since 9/11 and the rise of a new militant Islam. The reaction to all this has been fast and furious.

Pullman

A short while back, Bel Mooney interviewed Philip Pullman, author of the famous children’s books where the church is the evil power that abuses children and ‘God’ is a fake, an extremely old angel who came into existence as a throw-up of evolution, pretended to be ‘God’ and has to be preserved in a block of ice by other angels. The great deliverance is to be freed of the idea of God and then everyone is free to go on into non-existence when they die. The books in my view attempt to force-feed children with atheism and Pullman has put on record his wish to kill God in the minds of children.

During the interview Mooney asked Pullman why he is so vehemently anti-organised religion. He replied with the usual litany about the Catholics burning heretics and the Puritans hanging witches.

‘Well’, Mooney objected, ‘but all the clerics I meet are decent, bearded chaps in half-empty churches, doing good works and bringing comfort to pensioners. They’re not burning witches.’

Pullman responded, ‘Not any more. They wouldn’t get away with it now’.

‘They wouldn’t want to’, Mooney said. ‘No’, said Pullman, ‘not the nice gentle ones who have half empty churches. But the ones who have churches that are full — the evangelicals, the fundamentalists — are full of hell fire and damnation and fury and vengeance on anyone who disagrees with them.’

Grayling

Another fierce opponent, A.C. Grayling, author of Against all gods, believes Christians should be coerced, if necessary, into keeping their religion out of the public square. By implication religion is only to be practised by consenting adults behind locked doors. He claims the right to be free of attempts to convert him and other people to Christianity while exercising, of course, his own right to publish books and articles to convince people of his own atheism.

Peter Williams says that Grayling’s book Against all gods is one of the philosophically weakest but most politically radical polemics to emerge from the New Atheist movement to date.

Their voices are shrill, their language intemperate and their anger increasingly undisguised. We might think this is a sign of their strength but it is in fact a sign of their weakness.

Scientist-theologian Alister McGrath calls this ‘a fascinating glimpse of the crisis of confidence ... gripping atheism at the moment... Until recently Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident’. The renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel, who is himself an atheist, laments Richard Dawkins’s ‘amateur’ attempts at philosophy.

And one distinguished anthropologist, Scot Atran, showing a gift for the put-down, says: ‘I just don’t think scientists, when they step out of science, have any better insight than the ordinary schmuck on the street. It makes me embarrassed to be an atheist’.

Peter Williams lines up an impressive array of philosophers who are themselves atheists or agnostics but protest against the poor philosophy in The God Delusion. One philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse, well known for his work on the creation/evolution controversy and the demarcation problem in science, commits himself to saying: ‘I think Dawkins is ignorant of just about every aspect of philosophy and theology and it shows’ (in Williams, p.44).

Even some prominent humanists are protesting. In the magazine The New Humanist, Richard Norman complains: ‘In the “religion” that Dawkins and Hitchins relentlessly attack I simply do not recognise the many good, sensitive, intelligent and sometimes wonderful religious people I know’.

The reply of Christopher Hitchins to that sort of objection is typical of his circular arguments. He says that religion poisons everything; if you object, ‘What about the good things done in the name of religion?’, he simply responds that if they’re really good that just shows they’re not really religious!

Science and religion

People are being given the idea that no self-respecting scientist could ever be religious or believe in God. But thousands of scientists know better. Science has never been the enemy of religion: all truth is God’s truth and in recent years the compatibility of religion and science has become increasingly recognised. Two discoveries, in particular, have had a great effect on the thinking of many.

The scientific discovery of a cosmic beginning in the ‘big bang’ has replaced the Greek idea of an eternal universe; it demonstrates that the universe had a beginning after all — so how it came into existence is again a serious question.

Secondly, cosmologists have discovered that life depends upon a finely-tuned set of physical laws, a ‘just-right’ combination, which many interpret as evidence that our universe was designed for life. These two facts have done much to strengthen Christian believers’ testimony in the scientific world and to open the thinking of many others to the possibility of God.

One scholar and writer, Terry L. Meithe, who has no less than three doctorates, including one from the University of Oxford, and is a member of eight national and international scholastic honour societies, and engages in debate at a high level with Christianity’s critics, observed: ‘Many philosophers are today talking about the collapse of modern atheism, not necessarily that there are less atheists, but that there is less reason for being one ... because of the philosophical, scientific, and ethical evidence for the existence of God’ (Terry L. Miethe in Williams, p.20).

Flew

The scene has changed dramatically in some parts in my lifetime. When I was a student in the 1960s, one of the most well-known and influential philosophical books written against the idea of God was edited by Antony Flew and Alistair Macintyre, New Essays in Philosophical Theology. For over 50 years, Antony Flew was the English-speaking world’s most intellectually serious public atheist.

Then, in January 2004, the scholar who was dubbed the world’s most influential atheist announced that he had come to believe in a God, because ‘the case for a Being of power and intelligence was stronger than it ever was before’. Faced with the upset it was causing, he replied: ‘That’s too bad ... My whole life has been guided by the principle ... Follow the evidence’.

Flew had not become a Christian, he had not been converted, his was not a deathbed conversion, but after 50 years of systematically arguing his case he knew that the arguments against the existence of God in his own field of philosophy had been soundly critiqued and found wanting.

Unfortunately, prominent atheists (including Richard Dawkins and Roy Hattersley) responded to Flew’s apostasy from their ranks with very down-market assertions about losing his marbles in his dotage, or about hedging his bets with respect to the afterlife.

Richard Dawkins said, and I quote one of his articles: ‘The threat of eternal hell is an extreme example of child abuse, just as violent sodomy is an extreme example of physical abuse’. But, as Peter Williams puts it: ‘Like an anti drink-driving advert showing the intrinsic consequences of drink-driving, the doctrine of hell should not be understood as a threat but as a warning about intrinsic consequences of rejecting God. Warning children not to stick their fingers into electricity sockets doesn’t constitute child abuse; neither does warning children about the consequences of rejecting Jesus (according to Jesus himself)’.

Peter Lewis is the Senior Pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Church, Nottingham.

Peter S. Williams is a Christian philosopher and apologist working for the Damaris Trust UK.

* A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism by Peter S. Williams, published by Paternoster, 312 pages, £12.99, ISBN 978 1 842 276 174.

Peter Lewis assesses the accusations of New Atheism

Pullman

Grayling

Science and religion

Flew

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