The Dubious Business of Binary Belief
An Empty-Minded Agnostic’s Review of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
Introduction
A good friend of mine recently told me he’d read I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, which is heralded by many as the definitive piece of Christian Apologist literature. He told me that the book had been effective in reigniting his faith. I was happy for him that the book had been so helpful and began to wonder whether it could have a similar effect on me. It’s been well over a decade since I identified as a Christian. I was raised in the church and have nothing bad to say about it or anyone I met in my time there, but as I grew older, I moved away from it and the faith entirely. By my mid-twenties, it was long gone and for the most part, it remains so today.
But despite my distance from Christianity (and from all religions), I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, there’s a growing sense that maybe I got it wrong back then when I struck out on my own and away from the church. In those early years with Christianity in the rear view, I strongly believed that there was nothing of real value to be found within it. Like many others, I made a habit of unfairly conflating many of the shortcomings of Christianity with its foundations. I believed that all religions, being constructs of Man, are prone to inevitable mistakes, failures, and the same downright evil that Man is prone to. I believed that Man was not created in God’s image, but rather that God had been created in Man’s image (ooh so edgy and clever). There’s a sizeable piece of me that still believes that, but the snide, young adult angst that informed it makes my stomach curdle a bit.
As the years went on and I got older, it became more and more evident that, despite all of the negative aspects of Christianity (and there are many), the foundational teachings and tenets do hold a massive amount of wisdom and value. While I still roundly reject the literal truth to most of it, I believe that, as a teaching instrument, the Bible contains a vast wealth of knowledge which can be used and referenced to orient oneself in the world. The teachings of Jesus are undeniably good, regardless of whether he was the Son of God incarnate or not. The lessons found in abundance throughout the Bible have informed millions of nobly-led lives throughout history. If I believed that, I reasoned, maybe the whole thing is worth taking a second look at. Maybe I’m missing something, some crucial element that would allow a critical mind like mine to accept Christianity as truth, rather than one of many in a long line of cookie-cutter religions. It became clear to me that, upon a game-changing discovery of that sort, I would not try to suppress or deny whatever came next. I was, and am, open to persuasion, and I even welcome the thought of a juicy revelation that would recontextualize Christianity for me.
So I agreed to read I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Interestingly, I had just finished a reread of Cat’s Cradle, my favorite Vonnegut book, which I’m currently in the middle of dissecting and writing about. One of the major themes of that book is that Man’s nature requires his endless pursuit of meaning wherever it can be found. This instinctive pursuit results in the assignment of meaning to objectively meaningless phenomena, as well as to the formulation of complex explanations to fill in the otherwise unknowable gaps in Man’s understanding. Religion might be the most obvious example of this.
“Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
This quote from Cat’s Cradle exemplifies Man’s innate compulsion to arrive at understanding for any “Why” that is thrown at him. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Shortened to Faith, from here on) finds the authors detailing their defense of Christianity as The One True Religion. Both authors, Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, are products of the same school, Southern Theological Seminary. They are respected figures in the field of Christian Apologetics. I was (foolishly) optimistic in thinking that they may have been able to formulate an argument or explanation that made sense and which might persuade me to rethink my rejection of the truth and validity of Christianity relative to other religions. They did nothing of the sort.
Forgive Me, Reader, For I Have Sinned
Before we get any farther, it’s important to note (admit) that I haven’t finished their book. I know. I rage-quit around the 150 page mark. I spent hours highlighting, note-taking, and detailing my issues with their arguments to that point, but around 150 pages in, it began to feel less like a worthwhile pursuit and more like an exercise in futility.
Early on in my reading, I hoped the absurd, reductive arguments would taper off as I moved from broad topics (“What is Truth”) to the more specific aspects of Christianity. The book is structured so as to predicate all subsequent chapters on those that came before. It starts macro and gets progressively more micro, and it assumes that the reader is on board with everything asserted on the pages they’ve already turned.
At the 150 page mark in the book, the authors had recently employed the above graphic of Mt. Rushmore next to the Grand Canyon to illustrate the difference between intelligent design and natural design. Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I think anyone who can read a book, let alone a book of this sort, shouldn’t need that kind of elementary assist from the authors to comprehend an insanely basic concept. Maybe if the graphic was drawn in crayon and credited to one of the authors’ children it could be given a pass, but no.
Then, a few pages later, they laid on a thick helping of pseudoscience while they explained their version of the difference between micro- and macro-evolution. Their point was that interspecies evolution (ie. among types of dogs) is real, but that intraspecies evolution (ie. a chicken evolving into a leopard) is not. They tried to use this joke of an argument to reason why the diversity of species on Earth could not possibly have been the result of evolution, willfully ignoring the fact that their intraspecies argument is complete nonsense and not at all consistent with actual evolutionary science, which asserts that the differentiation between and across species is the result of a single evolutionary ancestor which, over time, adapted in myriad ways to yield the diversity we see today. This kind of misdirection (they know they’re misleading, they’re obviously smarter than that) leads me to believe that they are doing so with the intention of deceiving and/or misinforming unsuspecting readers.
You Talkin’ To Me?
The most important question you have to ask yourself about Faith is “who is the target audience?” While at the onset it might seem pretty inclusive, it becomes decidedly less-so once you get into the meat and potatoes of the book. Let’s start with the title of the book itself: I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Well, neither do I. I belong to the increasingly populated religious nether-regions inhabited by Agnostics. Out here, we admit that we know enough to know that we don’t know (about God, remember this distinction). Should I have never picked up the book in the first place because I agree with the statement made in the title? Well, no, because I don’t have enough faith to be a Christian either. This dilemma exemplifies the most infuriating issue in the early-going in Faith.
This book makes clear the implicit reality of many religions, belief sets, political view points, et cetera that leads to so much contentiousness. You must either believe in their God, or you must believe there is NO God. While, at first, this feels insultingly simplistic, it becomes a little easier to understand, or at least forgive, when you consider the point of view of the authors. As Christians, they believe that unless you believe in the God of the Bible, there is no hope whatsoever for your soul. In their eyes, there’s no room for any kind of “gray area”. Being Agnostic and being Atheist are ostensibly the same thing, as both groups are hell-bound in their eyes. Were I to share their belief, I might be tempted to approach the issue similarly. This, again, begs the question “who is the book written to persuade?”
If the book is written for Christians who already believe, but who might have some “nagging doubts” about specific aspects of their faith, then perhaps this binary approach makes sense. People comprising that audience have already overcome the major obstacles to faith and are looking to find fortification in their belief. They’re looking for ammunition to employ in defense of their belief. This is a noble endeavor and one which any honest believer should engage in.
“...always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3:15
Nothing wrong with that!
But the authors claim to welcome skeptics to their readership and dubiously encourage scrupulous evidence-seeking. They imply that they’re glad to have you, and that the evidence presented in their book will go a long way to convincing you to take the leap of faith into Christianity. While the gesture might be enough for some, I found the content to be consistently disingenuous.
Evidence
Evidence is a tricky word. Google defines it as “the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.” Facts are facts and they’re not up for debate. Information, on the other hand, is a bit more open to interpretation. In Faith, “evidence”, as the authors employ it, is frequently taken to mean “the only conceivable alternative” or “the only other explanation”, when all else has been ruled out. The only way that claiming that these instances constitute evidence, is if the authors know everything that could ever be known. If they know everything that we know now, as well as all yet unattained or undiscovered knowledge, and their “evidence” remains the most viable explanation, then great! But, and this might sting their egos a bit, they DON’T know everything that will ever be known. They even seem to have a tenuous grasp on the things we DO know (ie. the micro- vs. macro-evolutionary bungle).
There are a number of reasons why Christians, as well as countless other groups throughout history, have definitively shunned the inevitable future accrual of information when arriving at their conclusions and beliefs. In my mind, there are three main reasons for this. One, is fear. Admitting that we really know so little about the true nature of the universe and the things inside it is undeniably intimidating. The assertion that we what we know in the present constitutes all of what is ultimately “knowable” is a defense for the nakedness we feel when confronted with our ignorance relative to that which has yet to be discovered.
The second reason is arrogance. Some will claim that the present body of human knowledge is sufficiently robust and complete. They’d argue that, while we’ll likely make future discoveries, what we know now is enough to justify ruminating over the nature of the universe with an acceptable degree of certainty. This might sound reasonable until you recognize that every generation and civilization before us held that same exact viewpoint with comparable levels of confidence. In fact, as technology evolves and we become more advanced as a civilization, the illusion that we know everything becomes stronger, when in reality, there’s no reason to assume that we’ve scratched the surface at all. We do, obviously, know way more than we ever have, but to equate that with knowing everything, or even most things, is outrageous. Thirty years ago the internet was a rumor and sixty years ago computers were the size of classrooms. In the blink of an eye, these things have fundamentally changed almost every aspect of human life. To believe that our current body of knowledge is sufficient to preclude the revolutionary nature of inevitable future discoveries is among the most arrogant viewpoints imaginable.
The third major reason for ignoring the inevitability of yet undiscovered information and knowledge is simply ignorance itself. It’s easy to get lost in the advanced civilization we find ourselves in and unwittingly ignore the reality that time does not stop when we die. It continues and future generations will continue to make groundbreaking discoveries which will forever change the way subsequent generations view everything. A thousand years from now, its not unreasonable to assume that our state-of-the-art, cutting edge, hyper-advanced society will be an antiquated relic of the past, long ago rendered obsolete by discoveries that future generations will make. There’s no requirement to consider that likelihood as we go about our day-to-day lives. There are very few practical reasons to consider it at all, except when critically analyzing what you should and shouldn’t believe. Ignorance to this concept is not a sin or even necessarily a shortcoming. But it does prevent you from contextualizing the present appropriately. And a failure to do that leads to an unrealistic basis for forming beliefs.
But What About Me?
According to Faith there are “Three Major Religious Worldviews”, which are Theism (“god made all”), Pantheism (“god is all”) and Atheism (“no god at all”). This cheeky illustration is included in case that concept was over your head.
I know it seems petty and a bit dickish to keep decrying these diagrams (and it probably is), but they’re a prime example of who the true target audience of the book really is: someone who would find the illustrations necessary, enlightening, or otherwise revelatory, and not someone who can wrap their heads around basic concepts and exceedingly simple information like this on their own.
Agnosticism is relegated to a postscript afterthought and defined as “someone who’s unsure about the question of God.” True that, and I’ll grant that Agnosticism isn’t one of the “major” religious worldviews. But it’s mine, so seeing it represented as an afterthought was a bit disheartening. After all, we Agnostics are much closer to the authors’ side of the aisle than the Atheists are. But, no luck, it’s made clear from the get-go that the authors have no intention of “targeting” the uncertain Agnostic at all. This suspicion would be confirmed on nearly every page that followed.
The above describes an implicit dismissal of the Agnostic viewpoint. There’s also an explicit dismissal on page 32:
“In light of the evidence, we think Agnosticism is a decision to be empty-minded.”
Great! Wonderful! Nothing like calling your reader an idiot to lube up their willingness to listen to you. There’s a sense that the authors would just as soon banish us idiot Agnostics to the kids’ table so that the grown-ups who are willing to staunchly entrench themselves on one side or the other of this binary debate can duke it out. I have long felt exactly what the book’s title suggests: I DON’T have enough faith to be an Atheist. Not by a long shot! And in many ways, it would seem to me that it does, in fact, require more faith to be an Atheist than to ascribe to a religious belief set. But, as is so often the case in binary debates, nuance and middle ground are swept aside in favor of the fundamental “enemy” on the other side of the battlefield.
On the very first page of the foreward for Faith, which is written by David Limbaugh (ie. not necessarily to be conflated with the views of the authors), the book casually states:
“As we know, the intellectual obstacles (to faith in Christianity) are usually just an excuse for nonbelievers, but when you remove the substance of their excuse they are left naked to confront their real obstacles, their real demons.”
As a skeptic looking to this book for possible new insight that would draw me closer to Christianity, this opening statement is a linguistic kick in the nuts.
Because it’s not the authors that wrote it, I won’t go at it too hard, but the substance of the statement just cannot be ignored. To equate nonbelievers’ intellectual obstacles with excuses keeping us from coming into the fold is unbelievably telling. This implies that an intellectual obstacle has no more merit than a petty excuse like, “it’s childish” or “all religions are the same” or “priests are pedophiles”. Much more importantly, it implies that a believer who espouses this viewpoint (like Limbaugh, and possibly Geisler and Turek) would perceive any intellectual obstacles they might have as being either an excuse which they, if they’re worth their salt, should be able to suppress or ignore, or as a “personal demon”, which implies a slew of negative connotations that automatically discredit it entirely. The book itself is the attempt to “remove the substance of (the) excuse”, but it’s done so in such bad faith that it does nothing but reinforce the validity of the intellectual obstacles in the first place. This statement tells me explicitly that in order to be a Christian, intelligent contemplation, honest questioning and all varieties of doubt must be tossed out the window and replaced with faith. It also implies that the book to follow won’t engage in any critical thinking or objective investigation, but will rather dubiously buttress the beliefs it has set out to defend while disregarding any intellectual obstacle it comes across which might actually discredit them.
No God, No Meaning?
Thankfully Limbaugh’s input is limited to the Foreward. We return to the Introduction, where Geisler and Turek take over, laying out their gameplan for the book. On page 20, they bring the reader’s attention to “the five most consequential questions of life.”:
Origin: Where did we come from?
Identity: Who are we?
Meaning: Why are we here?
Morality: How should we live?
Destiny: Where are we going?
Immediately following this list is the following paragraph, which I’m going to include in its entirety so there’s no question of whether I’m cherrypicking quotes and/or omitting context.
“The answers to each of these questions depend on the existence of God. If God exists, then there’s ultimate meaning and purpose to your life. If there’s a real purpose to your life, then there’s a real right and wrong way to live it. Choices you make now not only affect you here but will affect you in eternity. On the other hand, if there is no God, then your life ultimately means nothing. Since there is no enduring purpose to life, there’s no right or wrong way to live it. And it doesn’t matter how you live or what you believe--your destiny is dust.”
While there’s not much to take issue with in the non-underlined portion of the above paragraph, the underlined portion is a blatant and absurd presupposition. It’s only “believable” if you already ascribe to Christianity. Otherwise, it’s an insulting dismissal of your ability to conduct yourself nobly here on Earth. The statement asserts that the only way to find meaning in life is through belief in God. While that may well be the case for many believers, it implies that everyone else’s lives are intrinsically meaningless. To suggest that belief in God is the only source from which to derive meaning or that a meaningful life is impossible without a belief in God is simply ridiculous.
Let’s reword the underlined portion of the selection like this instead:
“On the other hand, if there’s no God, then meaning in life will have to be derived from other sources. Since there is no guarantee of life after death, the importance of life becomes even greater. It is up to the individual to seek and serve a worthwhile purpose on Earth. The distinction between right and wrong is to be determined by individuals comprising a global society based on innate human nature and experience, and must be developed, improved and distilled across time with the ultimate goal of achieving the best possible world for all mankind. Because we are all likely destined to become dust when we die, that which we do in this life carries the utmost importance.”
Truth vs. Belief
In Chapter 1, Geisler and Turek aim to prove the unequivocal existence of absolute truth. On pages 46-47, after asserting that, at least legally speaking, religious tolerance is important to maintain, they qualify that need by explaining:
“that doesn’t mean that personally we ought to embrace the impossible notion that all religious beliefs are true. Since mutually exclusive religious beliefs cannot be true, it makes no sense to pretend they are.”
This is an example of the authors’ affinity for wrapping up absolutely basic knowledge in shiny paper with a pretty bow. Case after case of this can be found throughout the first 150 pages (and likely the rest) of the book. Common sense, no-brainer statements like this are presented as astute observations, while overlooking the glaring alternative interpretations.
In this example, they’re right, mutually exclusive religious beliefs cannot be true, and no, it doesn’t make sense to pretend that they are. DUH. Yet it’s presupposed that Christianity is somehow exempt from the other religions’ mutual exclusiveness. They assert that all other religions must be wrong because their tenets conflict with Christianity without acknowledging that, objectively, there’s no reason to assume truth in Christianity over any of the others. (I know, I know, if I keep reading, they’re going to explain to me why they can make that assertion and why it’s not as asinine as it looks on the surface. But unfortunately they did far too little to instill trust in me that they will present anything resembling a convincing argument later on. )
Additionally, there’s no real reason to assume that any of the world’s religions are true. The authors attempt to allay this doubt by delving into a cursory explanation of the Big Bang as proof of God’s existence. They explain that certainly “nothing” does not beget “everything”, thus God must have existed prior to the Big Bang and intelligently instigated the creation of the universe via the Big Bang. They’re mistaking the only explanation they can wrap their heads around for fact. They also cite the ineffable complexity of our universe, our planet, and our anatomy as incontrovertible evidence for God. Why do we Agnostics have such a hard time finding comfort in these things? Because we know that we don’t know what we don’t know! There’s no reason whatsoever to assume that a species (us) that was essentially primitive a few thousand years ago should have a comprehensive grasp of reality in its entirety. The Romans and Greeks were, at their respective peaks, the absolute pinnacle of human understanding and civilization. Today, many, though certainly not all, of their “truths” are patently false. Our species has been filling in the gaps in knowledge with mythology and science, among many other things, as long as we’ve been here. Things which were held to be infallible truths in our extremely recent history are now accepted for what they really are: ridiculous stories or laughable theories which have been long since disproven.
The kicker is that these long dismissed tenets were disproven through the advent of increasingly modern tools that subsequent generations have developed and wielded in an effort to extract reason, meaning, and understanding from the world they found themselves immersed in. But the catch-22 is that all of the now-laughable tenets of the past were arrived at by employing the state-of-the-art tools of the time. We, in the present, lie to ourselves if we believe that the things which we hold to be unassailable truths now will remain unassailable truths in a hundred years, let alone a thousand. If history has shown us anything, it’s that humanity’s endless pursuit of knowledge and understanding will always lead to new discoveries, new modes of experiencing our existence and new “truths.”
Whether you choose to believe that notion or not is entirely up to you. To me, it seems hard to deny or contradict, but what do I know? I’m looking at the scope of what’s known to me and forming an assumption, a conclusion, a belief, based on that knowledge within which I can orient myself. Assuming I’m right (and maybe I’m not), it’s not difficult to understand why this notion isn’t embraced by the masses as quickly or eagerly as a promise of eternal life. To acknowledge just how little we are, just how little we know, just how inconsequential we might be in a cosmic sense--these are daunting things to consider, let alone accept, and they do have massive implications for how we live our lives.
Geisler and Turek interestingly chose to include a quote from Blaise Pascal at the beginning of Chapter 2. The quote is this:
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive.”
Amen, brother.
I hesitate to call that quote a “truth”, as I’ve seen that word get ravaged lately, both in this book and in our culture. No one seems to know what it means anymore and, as a result, it’s meaning has become diluted. At the very least, I would say that Pascal was possessed of some clever insight to acknowledge that people are drawn to believe in things that they find attractive. And before we put up our defenses and argue this point, why can’t we just admit that it’s accurate? What’s wrong with gravitating toward the things which you find most attractive? Sounds like human nature to me.
(Road) Running Yourself Over
Another unignorable and infuriating feature of Faith is the authors’ reliance on their beloved “Road Runner Tactic”, named after the cartoon show, which they describe as “the process of turning a self-defeating statement on itself.” For example, if I were to assert that “there’s no such thing as truth”, they would rightly point out that my statement can’t possibly hold any weight because in order for it to be true, it needs to be false (if there’s no such thing as truth, then a statement asserting that there’s no such thing as truth can’t be true).
It becomes clear early on that the authors get a kick out of employing this “logical” trump card with people they’re debating or pitching. There are several anecdotes which portray one author or the other employing the Road Runner Tactic against professors or debate opponents. This tactic, while undeniably viable in certain instances where it is employed appropriately, is regularly misapplied by the authors in situations where semantics delegitimize it. The authors believe they can pull a fast one on the reader and that we won’t notice the difference between legitimate cases and illegitimate ones.
Geisler relates a story where he and a fellow member of his church went door-to-door evangelizing. They came to the house of an unsuspecting man named Don. Geisler smugly celebrates the quick turnaround he and his partner affect on Don as, within a minute, they get him to realize that he’s not actually an Atheist, as he previously thought he was, but an Agnostic. Don humbly changes his assumed title when the difference between the two are explained to him. Then he’s informed that there’s actually two kinds of Agnostics (Ordinary and Ornery, no bias in those designations at all /s), to which he supposes that he’s the Ornery type, that is, he believes you can’t know anything for sure (as opposed to Ordinary Agnostics, who believe they don’t know anything for sure). Geisler and his partner are licking their chops, seeing a self-defeating statement (which they fed to Don) primed for their precious Road Runner tactic. Geisler asks him “if you say that you can’t know anything for sure, then how do you know that for sure?” Poor Don, head spinning, admits that he supposes that there are some things you can know for sure. Geisler buries the Road Runner tactic in Don’s skull, explaining that “you can’t be a skeptic about everything because that would mean you would have to doubt skepticism.”
"What it really is, though, is an example of how semantic nuance, when unleashed by strangers on unsuspecting men in the doorways of their own homes, can confuse them into agreeing with you."
This interaction is lauded by Geisler as a victory for the Road Runner tactic. What it really is, though, is an example of how semantic nuance, when unleashed by strangers on unsuspecting men in the doorways of their own homes, can confuse them into agreeing with you. The ideas of being Agnostic about God and of being skeptical about EVERYTHING are maliciously conflated here in a way that’s honestly indefensible. These word games and “gotcha” moments are touted as victories for the truth of Christianity but they are simply evidence of how flimsy the arguments really are. They rely on misdirection and deception rather than honesty and transparency.
As a bit of a quick aside: when I first read about the interaction between Geisler and Don, I was frustrated and honestly upset that Geisler and his partner had essentially conned Don into adopting Christianity. Faith details the aftermath of their fateful doorway conversation, remarking on a turnaround for Don as he joined their church and became a believer. After taking a moment to chill out, (and I know I’m about to sound superior here, but I don’t mean to) I realized that if that kind of smoke and mirrors and weak logic was all it took to get Don to go to church, accept Christ into his heart, improve his life and become a better man, then what is there to be mad about? Nothing! Don was able to become a believer because that alternative was more attractive to him than the life he had before. Christianity arrived in his life and became a more sturdy infrastructure upon which he could operate and, I’m sure he’d tell us, his life improved after that. So what’s the problem?
While some of these objections might seem petty on the surface, they just cannot be overlooked. The most obvious reason why they have to be addressed is that if a Christian Apologist is resorting to tactics as duplicitous and casuistic as these in order to justify their beliefs to themselves, then what reason is there, other than fear of the unknown, to justify adopting their beliefs for ourselves? These guys are not stupid. That means they are either intentionally deceiving people through the use of faulty logic, or worse, that they really just can’t see why the logic is faulty.
Apologetics is a strange pursuit. On many levels, it is a worthwhile endeavor to create a tangible and dependable understanding of one’s faith that can be used to formulate arguments in defense of it. But it’s also inherently odd in that it’s seemingly trying to close, or otherwise reconcile, the gap between fact and faith. The point of Christianity (and most other religions) is that it requires a certain amount of faith which some people have the capacity to embrace while others do not. To me, it seems as though the effort to rationalize, justify and explain the Christian faith with logic, facts, and science (which is embraced when it’s convenient and dismissed when it’s not) is actually counterproductive and exposes some of the gaping vulnerabilities endemic in the religion itself.
The Dubious Business of Binary Belief
The problem with this book and its use of logically and factually confounded arguments to reinforce the perceived validity of Christianity is that the authors are precluded by their beliefs from acknowledging the shortcomings in their case, which, it’s fair to assume, is as strong as they could make it. For better or worse, Christians are not afforded the latitude to admit the merit of alternative explanations or admit that their best defenses are not without holes of their own. Christianity, here acting as a stand-in for any belief set that demands absolutism, collapses the instant it begins to admit that other explanations make more sense or that their own explanations have fundamental, irreconcilable problems. This is why the authors shy away from addressing the core Agnostic mantra, “we don’t know what we don’t know”. This question cannot be addressed by Christian Apologists because they have filled in the gaps in human understanding and knowledge with faith, which, while it may be sufficient for them, does little for the rest of us.
Because of the absolute nature of the Christian belief set, a binary mode of understanding the world becomes unavoidable for practitioners. If anything that does not jive with your explanation of things is punishable by eternal damnation, you are left with no choice but to vehemently dismiss it. While there’s always an opportunity to bash heads against an Atheist at a debate, there is zero tolerance for internal debate or acquiescence to any personal intellectual obstacles that pop up. These things cannot be accepted because, if they were, the whole thing would collapse in on itself and be kaput.
Lest This Be Misconstrued…
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” - Nietzsche
While this essay is unquestionably critical of Christian Apologetics, it’s not my intention at all to be critical of people who make the decision to be Christians. I believe very strongly that there’s nothing wrong with cultivating a personal Christian relationship with God that provides your life with structure, purpose and meaning. This is not a condemnation of believers or an attempt to belittle those who ascribe to the tenets of the Christian faith. The underlying motivation for choosing to follow any religion is that it diminishes the amount of uncertainty that permeates life as a human on Earth. This isn’t something I scoff at. To stare the potential reality of nothingness in the face is a sobering experience, to say the least. The almost inevitable lack of comprehension regarding nearly every aspect of our existence is something that, historically, most are not compelled to wrestle with. The presence of religions dating back to the earliest humans is evidence that it is a viable defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality and all the uncertainty that comes with. I will never judge someone for choosing to believe in Christianity or any other legitimate religion (looking at you Scientology).
The divide between religions and between the religious and non-religious won’t be going anywhere any time soon. People should believe the things that are most attractive to them, or else what’s the point? If someone can be swayed from a flimsy position of non-belief to an acceptance of Christianity, even through the use of flawed logic and sophistry, good for them, honestly. What does it matter if I think the means to the end of their spiritual journey is illegitimate? They’re the ones living it, not me, and if they’re right and I’m wrong, they’ll certainly get the last laugh.
As non-believers, it’s important to resist the urge to respond to goading lines, like the ones found in abundance in this book, with anger. We can be content in our non-belief just as believers are content in their belief. There’s a time and a place to get riled up about this stuff. To try to convince a Christian that they’re “wrong” is a waste of time, and it’s an exercise in bad faith. If they are satisfied spiritually, then an attempt to rob them of that satisfaction is malicious. Us Agnostics are blessed with the privilege of nuance and reason. Don’t take them for granted.
