Gunning for God (22 page)

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it,
nor any justice
. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
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Neither justice nor morality then! This is the nearest that Dawkins gets to the kind of “hard” atheism of which Friedrich Nietzsche would have approved. David Bentley Hart writes (of Nietzsche):

His famous fable of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists — those who merely do not believe — to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become.

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naiveté, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

For Nietzsche, therefore, the future that lies before us must be decided, and decided between only two possible paths: a final nihilism, which aspires to nothing beyond the momentary consolations of material contentment, or some great feat of creative will, inspired by a new and truly worldly mythos powerful enough to replace the old and discredited mythos of the Christian revolution (for him, of course, this meant the myth of the
Übermensch
).

Perhaps; perhaps not. Where Nietzsche was almost certainly correct, however, was in recognizing that mere formal atheism was not yet the same thing as true unbelief. He writes: “Once the Buddha was dead, people displayed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave, an immense and dreadful shadow. God is dead: — but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millennia yet where people will display his shadow. And we — we have yet to overcome his shadow!”
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Nietzsche and Dawkins are right, of course — provided only that their atheism is true. If there is no judgment after death, then it is a matter of elementary logic that the vast majority of victims of injustice will never have their legitimate grievances put to rights. Not only that: their tormentors, the perpetrators of evil, will mostly get away with their crimes. The terrorist who murders thousands of people, or the dictator who destroys millions, simply has to put a gun to his head if he feels threatened. On the atheist view, the suicide bombers of 9/11 will never face justice.

No God, no shadow of God; and so no purpose, no justice, no evil, and no good. This, then, is the brave new world to which the New Atheist bus is inexorably driving us. This is the price that has to be paid for endorsing their philosophy: the admission that the very deep sense of justice embedded in the human psyche is sheer illusion.

Earlier in this chapter I said that the problem of evil and suffering is the most difficult that we face. The atheist “solution” is to deny the existence of God. But what, exactly, have they solved by taking this route? They certainly have got rid of the intellectual problem: evil for them is just part of the way the world is. Indeed, what they might now be hard put to explain is why there is any good at all, let alone so much of it. Why are they protesting against evil, since they don’t actually believe that it exists?

But atheism has not got rid of the suffering and the evil. They are still there. Moreover, atheism’s “solution” to the problem of evil has got rid of something else — hope. Atheism is a hope-less faith. Indeed, by removing hope, atheism can be seen to make the suffering much worse.

We have reached a strange juncture in our argument. Atheism imagines that it has got rid of the problem of evil; yet as a Christian I face the problem. On the other hand, atheism has got rid of hope; yet I as a Christian have hope, even in the face of suffering and evil. Not only that but, according to Christianity, criminal fanatics, terrorists, and the like are not forever going to get away with their evil. Human conscience and desire for justice are not a delusion. It is the atheism that denies ultimate justice that is the delusion.

But how can we know that this is true? How can we know that death is not the end, and that there is to be a final judgment when perfect justice will be done in regard to every injustice that has ever been committed, from the beginning of human history to its end? We can know on the basis of the historical, bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

The resurrection, it should be noted, is a central pillar of Christianity. The first history of the growth of the Christian church, the Acts of the Apostles, records the famous occasion on which the Christian apostle Paul addressed the philosophers at Athens in their Areopagus School, on their inconclusive musings about God. Among his hearers were some Epicurean philosophers who, as we have seen, were forerunners of the New Atheists, in that their materialistic atomistic belief rendered notions of a final judgment ludicrous. Paul told them: God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
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The Christian apostle Paul connected the final judgment with the resurrection of Jesus because it is the supreme evidence that Jesus is to be the final judge.

Laughter rang out around the court, from the Epicureans in particular. But not only from them, for, although the notion of survival of the soul was a respectable doctrine to some of the Platonists who were present, no one, just no one, believed that a body could physically “stand up again”.
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But then, as now, there were others who were sufficiently interested to hear more; and there were some men and women who were convinced by Paul’s presentation — among them Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, and Damaris.

Not surprisingly, the New Atheists find the resurrection as laughable as their Epicurean antecedents did. At the culmination of the “God Delusion” debate in Alabama, when I mentioned the resurrection, Richard Dawkins responded in amazement at what he thought was my naiveté: “So we come down to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s so petty; it’s so trivial; it’s so local; it’s so earthbound; it’s so unworthy of the universe.”

I found this an astonishingly illogical outburst, for the naiveté was not mine. If Dawkins had simply affirmed his belief that Jesus did not rise from the dead, I would have understood it. However, to say that the resurrection is petty, trivial, and earthbound is to betray a profound failure to grasp what the resurrection is and what it implies. Petty, trivial, and earthbound are exactly what the resurrection isn’t — if it happened. It is atheism, with its oblivion at death, that makes us earthbound, petty, and trivial. If Jesus rose from the dead, it demonstrates that he is very much not earthbound but God the Creator incarnate. As for “unworthy of the universe”, the question should be: is the universe worthy of him?

THE CRUNCH

We have now reached the crunch issue. If death ends everything then the biblical worldview is false; and, since there is therefore no ultimate justice for anyone, any further discussion of the destruction of the Canaanites (or of anyone else, for that matter) is pointless. However, if death is not the end, and there is to be a final and fair judgment, then matters appear in a very different light.

But did Jesus rise from the dead? Many will say — and perhaps this is what Dawkins had in mind — that the resurrection is not worth considering, since: a) miracles are impossible, as Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out a long time ago; and, b) there is not enough evidence, as Bertrand Russell once said.

These are such important issues that we shall devote the next two chapters of the book to them. However, before we do that, we must consider the Christian response to the problem of moral evil in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The litany of unmitigated evil in our world seems never ending. Day by day thousands of innocent people die, among them many infants and children. The objection is that, if there is a God, he must therefore take ultimate responsibility for their deaths. The question is: how could one possibly believe in a God like that?

My answer is: I couldn’t, if I thought that death was the end and that there was no ultimate justice. However, I believe that death is not the end, and that
God is a God of compensation.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ demonstrates that there is to be a final assessment at which God will not only be just, but will also be seen to be just. It also validates the biblical claim that there is an eternal realm where there is no pain, no death, and no hunger: a world that is filled with the joy of the immediate presence of God and of Christ, its king. Yes, I am talking about heaven — and I haven’t forgotten that I am a scientist.

C. S. Lewis once wrote words that are as apposite today as when he wrote them:

A book on suffering which says nothing about heaven is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the scale against the suffering of earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky”… but either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced…
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And so must its implications. The pioneer Christian apostle, Paul, wrote: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed… For I am sure that neither death nor life… nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
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These are not the words of an armchair philosopher but of a man who had seen and experienced life at its rough end, unjustly suffering frequent beatings and imprisonment, and experiencing much deprivation and hardship.

At times I try to imagine what that glorious realm is like, and the question arises within me: if the veil that now separates the seen and the unseen world were to be parted for a moment, and we could see how God has treated, say, the myriads of innocent children who have suffered from the horrendous evil perpetrated by immoral governments, war lords and drug barons, or who have been the innocent victims of natural disasters, is it just possible that all our concerns about God’s handling of the situation would instantly dissolve?

But we cannot yet see that realm; and so we are left with many ragged ends, many burning problems of injustice. In light of them, another question looms large: is there, nevertheless, enough reason to trust God with the ultimate outcome? Indeed, did it really have to be like this in the first place? Surely a God who is all-powerful could have prevented all this horrendous evil and suffering, simply by creating human beings incapable of doing evil?

Well, he could surely have made
beings
like that. But they would not have been
human
beings, would they? Let me try to explain. An essential and wonderful part of being human is that we have been endowed with the capacity to love. Love involves saying “yes” rather than “no” to another, and would be rendered meaningless if the capacity to choose between those two alternatives did not exist. In other words, the ability to love is intimately linked with the possession of what we call “free will”. We are aware, of course, that the freedom implied is not unlimited: we are not free to do everything. For instance, I am not free to run at 60 miles per hour! Nevertheless, for a being to be free to say yes, it must be free to say no; to be free to love, it must be free to hate; to be free to be good, it must be free to be evil.

God could have removed the potential for hatred and evil at a stroke by creating us as automata, mere machines doing only that which we were programmed to do. But that would have been to remove all that we ourselves value as constituting our essential humanity. There is inevitably a built-in risk with creating beings with real powers of choice. We humans should know that, since we do something similar when we have children. We know that any children we generate could grow up to love us; we also know that they could turn out to reject us. Why, then, have children? For most of us, the hope and desire for the love of children far outweighs the risk of their rejection of us.