Violence and Worldviews

With convincing clues to the existence of a creator we move on to looking for clues as to what our Creator has communicated about his nature and purpose.  More specifically, we will consider why Christianity rises to the top of all other notions about relating to God.  Before considering the positives, there is one criticism commonly raised that needs to be addressed first. The claim that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is the cause of more death and destruction than any other worldview.

Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian, “there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.” Philosopher Richard Rorty proclaimed religious belief “politically dangerous” with atheism as the only practical foundation for a “pluralistic, democratic society.”

Dinesh D’Souza in What’s So Great About Christianity, contrasts the Inquisition with the Soviet Gulag, asking why we still hear about the Inquisition 500 years later,  while merely 20 years after the collapse of godless Communism we no longer hear about the Gulag?

D’Souza then presents the numbers. Stalinist Russia: 20 million killed as a result of mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, and population relocation.  Adding to the Russian toll are the atheist Soviet dictators: Lenin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev.

Mao Zedong’s Communist China: Seventy million deaths.

Hitler: Ten million murdered, with six million Jews among them.

Then there are the less infamous but no less brutal atheist tyrants like Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Enver Hoxha of Albania, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, and Pol Pot of Cambodia.

We will finish this thought next time.  In Christ…

The Sun as Metaphor

Even if you allow that the secular view of the world is possible, it doesn’t make sense of all the facts as the view that God exists. Belief in God provides a better empirical fit, explaining and accounting for what we see and experience better than any alternative account of things.  No view of God can be proven, but if we accept that our brains really do work we can – we must - sift and weigh the justifications for various religious beliefs and find the most reasonable.

C.S. Lewis gives us an insightful metaphor: “as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”  Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. A far better way to learn about the existence, power, and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize that it sustains everything you see and even enables you to see. Here, then, we have a rational way forward. We do not try to “look into the sun,” as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs from God. Instead we “look at what the sun shows us.”

Given that God has left us clues pointing to his existence, as Christians we believe he gave us much more than just these clues. He gave us his Son as the main character in history. In our next Session we will continue our detective work and examine the clues for Christ.

In Christ...

Love and Beauty as Clues

C. S. Lewis puts our fourth and final clue in rather stark terms: “You can’t be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. If there is no creator, the wonders of love and beauty are not wonders at all.  They have no inherent transcendent qualities and are simply instinctual reactions without significance or consequence beyond instinctive biological responses.”

Molecular biologist Francis Crick writes in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis:

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Francis Crick fathered three children and was gifted with six grandchildren (he died in 2004). Did he really believe that that they were nothing more than a bundle of nerve endings? That their personalities, their affection for him, their memories, their ambitions, their smiles and giggles were “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”? This seems to me at best an inadequate explanation for what is really a clue to the existence of something beyond our capacity to immediately perceive.  If one is convinced empirically that love and beauty are real, then see them for the refutation of Crick (and others) and the clues to a creator that they are.

Next Time: Wrap-up of the Clues to a Creator.  In Christ...