Just to clarify some starting places: what I’m hearing many espouse in this thread is essentially philosophical naturalism, the belief that the material world is the only world, and that the natural sciences are the primary way to know truth. In the world of thought, analytic philosophy most easily meshes with this way of looking at the universe. As for attitudes toward God, atheism or a fairly negative agnosticism goes along with this way of looking at the universe. When I usually get into discussions of religion with people who are eager to debate with me, they generally come from this viewpoint: philosophical naturalist, atheist/agnostic, and their philosophy is mostly in the analytic tradition.
Before we begin, we should nod to the unseen, third dog in this fight: the tradition of continental philosophy, which accounts for a huge range of secular thought, but rejects the natural sciences as the primary way of knowing truth.
But back to the debate at hand: to avoid rehashing age-old arguments on the subject, I’ll just give you an idea of how my discussions with naturalists have often gone down. Often, the naturalist will attack religion on many fronts: the evils committed in the name of religion, contradictions within the sacred text, or science’s disproving of religious truths. As for the latter two, the conversation generally degenerates into a rehashing of previous arguments over textual data. I’ve researched this extensively and I’ve yet to meet a convincing argument against scriptural accounts. Most of these are based on a willful misreading of scripture in the hopes of making it contradict itself. If anyone in the thread would like to raise specific examples, I’m quite happy to respond to them, but as I’ve said—I’ve read Ehrman and others, and haven’t yet found an argument that wasn’t answered centuries ago by theologians as early as Aquinas. The problem is that most people haven’t read these texts: my edition of Summa Theologica runs over 4,000 pages, and I can’t honestly say I’ve read every word on every page myself.
Generally, the naturalist will give up this line of questioning when it becomes clear that we could talk about this for ages as we slowly work our way through the interpretation of Scripture. I don’t blame them—if I didn’t believe in the Bible, I wouldn’t be interested in slowly culling through scripture in order to disprove it. I’d begin by assuming that it was false, so unless someone showed me a good reason for its veracity, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on it.
So the discussion turns to the evils of religion. This also usually degenerates. The naturalist will cite the Crusades, American slavery, and so on. The Christian will respond that of course they were monstrosities, they actually violate Christian morality, and he does not condone them. Then the Christian will add that secular movements and leaders have also committed great atrocities, probably beginning the list at Stalin. The atheist/agnostic will respond that someone’s disbelief in something doesn’t cause them to commit atrocities. They will say an atheist serial killer’s lack of belief in unicorns doesn’t cause him to murder anymore than his lack of belief in God does.
Here is where it gets interesting. When I press most atheist/agnostic naturalists about their own personal ethics, they generally respond by saying that we shouldn’t need a God to tell us how to be kind. Generally, what it boils down to is that they have their own ethical understanding of the world, and they act according to this. While naturalists may be extremely rigorous in their demands of Christianity—scrutinizing the sacred text, demanding an explanation for philosophical problems like the problem of evil, demanding a perfect alignment between scripture and the natural sciences—these same individuals generally do not subject their own moral/ethical code to anything rigorous like this. In fact, their ethics are generally quite hazy. When I question them about this, they don’t seem to make much effort to give an answer. They’ll vaguely affirm some utilitarian system of ethics, sometimes virtue ethics, and on rare occasion some sort of deontological ethics. While they’ve been arguing from a naturalist perspective the entire time, generally they’ll suddenly drift into the language of continental philosophers, hazy, relativistic ethics that really have nothing to do with the natural world whatsoever and don’t subject themselves to any sort of academic rigor. (It’s not that continental philosophy can’t be academically rigorous; there’s just an interpretive leap here that doesn’t seem coherent.) People who think like this essentially base their entire ethical system on their life experience—which is generally only four or five decades of life. As scientifically minded people know, one human’s experience is a pitiful amount of data in comparison with the range of human experience. But how can we have more than our own experience, since everyone’s morals seem to differ so radically? Even the most basic moral imperative that everyone might share—e.g., that is wrong to kill becomes ridiculously complicated and tangled in the real world. Just think of abortion, euthanasia, war, animal cruelty, veganism, the death penalty. Furthermore, although my opponents will often say that a lack of belief in something, or disbelief is not really a moral motivator, this simply isn’t true in many cases. When I disbelieved in God and reject the moral system laid out by scripture, it absolutely had a huge effect on my behavior and actions.
Now I’ll explain my position. I strongly value that ability to make clear ethical decisions. I have tried doing this by my own thinking, following my “inner compass,” and have found that it is a pitifully lacking way of coming at the problem. I am faced with very real ethical quandaries every day, and while I tried to choose based on my own experience and understanding of shared human ethics, this led to fairly disastrous results in my personal life. I won’t go into details, but I hurt a lot of people and a lot of people hurt me. I was a nice guy, and they were nice people, but life was brutal.
I felt that there was good and evil in the world. In thinking about the Bible, it didn’t make much sense to think that a group of texts written by many different authors, passed down through the ages should be consistent or error-free. (For the record, I have since examined the manuscript history, and it is remarkable how much manuscript consistency we have for extremely old books in scripture. It is especially unusual when compared with the manuscript history of Shakespeare, for example, whose first folio manuscript differs wildly from copies of the plays published only a few decades later.)
But regardless, let us take a different starting point which makes scriptural integrity make sense. I accept good and evil, which for me means that a naturalist explanation may be correct so far as it goes, but it isn’t everything. In the course of human history, essentially all societies have some concept of good or evil. Even naturalists, atheists, etc., almost always affirm some form of ethics. The nearly universal recognition of good and evil suggests to me that there is real significance beyond the material world. It does seem to me that the only legislator of such an overarching, universal force (good) would be a force that would be best described as a God. If this God wanted to express himself to humanity, it would make sense that he would preserve the coherence of his sacred text. I don’t think that God would attempt to speak to humanity through scripture, but leave it so full of confusion and errors that one had to be a biblical scholar, theologian, and archeologist all in one in order to understand it.
Now, there is a bit of a leap. Christianity seems to me the religion that in its scripture (not the actions of all believers) meshes most closely with proper morality. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll make a comparison that would make a scientifically-minded naturalist cringe: my experience with Christianity has been a bit like Andrew Wiles’s proving of Fermat’s last theorem. Wiles came to the theorem, and for some reason, believed it to be true and provable, despite the fact that many other mathematicians had tried and failed. It took years and years to do so. Even when he finally unveiled his work, it was pointed out that the proof contained glaring errors. Humiliated, he went back to the drawing board, and eventually proved it. It had been true the entire time, and he had seen things along the way that pointed to its truth, despite his own failings and the messiness of the entire process.
My experience with Christianity has been similar to Wiles’s dogged pursuit of a proof for Fermat’s theorem. Though my initial belief might to some seem to fly in the face of reason, every day I see further indications that I am adhering to the truth. Once I start from the point of the truth of scripture, I find direction for the many ethical quandaries I have faced in life. The direction has proved remarkably profitable for me. The encouragement in Proverbs to work hard and pursue knowledge has helped me finish my degree and get a position as an Assistant Professor straight out of school. The instruction on marriage in the New Testament has helped me develop a hugely rewarding relationship with my wife over the past years. Even in hardships, for example, finding out that my son was rendered deaf by antibiotics in the first week of his life, I have seen good win out in the midst of pain.
Unlike naturalism, Christianity has provided me with a detailed, thorough system of ethics and morality. This system is subject to intellectual inquiry, and it is quite rigorous by academic standards. For me, this is hugely superior and far more practical than a vague ethical relativism.
I’ll end on an unfinished note: I believe the problem of pain and evil is in the end completely resolved through Jesus’ atonement, that Christ’s death on the cross will end and retrospectively ameliorate all human suffering, which has been the result of evil. Scholars such as Paul Fiddes (Oxford University), N. T. Wright (Anglican Bishop of Durham), and Marilyn McCord Adams (Rutgers) have suggested this, so I’m by no means original in this regard, but it has been remarkable that this idea has been noticeably absent from the traditional discussion of this problem.
Anyway, I apologize to give such a long post that still doesn’t really begin to fully answer the question raised in the original post, but such is the nature of these discussions!
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