Tuesday, March 27, 2012

The Rally for Nothing in Particular

Larry Taunton wonders what an atheist world would really be like.

Christianity, whatever the faults of its adherents, has a rich intellectual tradition that has a comprehensive view of life. It has given rise to the West as we know it. Our laws, arts, governments, and the very framework of our thought find their meaning in Christianity. Take for example the central premise of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.”

As Indian philosopher and social reformer Vishal Mangalwadi points out, there is nothing self-evidential about the equality of men.

But in comparison what is atheism and what is it's history?

Atheism, by contrast, has no creed, no principles, no philosophy, and can give no guidance. It is but to have a settled disposition on a single question: is there a God?

As my friend the late atheist and journalist Christopher Hitchens conceded, “atheism is nothing in itself.”

That not withstanding, atheism does have a history—a bad history. By conservative estimates, the twentieth century, an experiment in secular governance, witnessed the deaths of more than 100 million people. That is more than all the religious wars in all previous centuries combined.

It gets worse...

Proponents of a society free from religious influence can point to no nation or civilization that was founded upon atheism that we might call even remotely good. The story of those regimes is well documented and may be summarized in a word—murderous.

What they can point to are secular societies that are still running off of their accumulated Christian capital. But beware. When the fumes in that tank are spent, tyranny cannot be far away.

In his farewell address, George Washington offered a sober warning: “Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” This he deduced without the benefit of seeing the twentieth century. The eighteenth, it seems, was enough.

So as the rally for nothingness meets to celebrate, well, nothing in particular, reflect for a moment on the world they would give us. One need not imagine it. It has been done.
Larry Taunton, well said.

In a tweet he posted a day before the reason rally, Taunton issued a challenge.

The Reason Rally's stated purpose is to "promote secular values." Other than no God, I challenge atheists to name one of these "values."

As I've discussed before, it is reasonable to wonder whether there is even such thing as "secular values" or whether secularists are just hijacking values that were imported into modern day culture by Christianity and then claiming those values as their own.

It's also clear that many atheists have a rosy view of atheism and secularism, such that they fail to confront potential logical inferences arising from their own views, instead choosing to promote a version of secularism that is more in line with Christian thought. Julian Baggini is one such example. John Dickson's comment in his brilliant essay on religious violence, that I have quoted before, is worth repeating. In fact Dickson himself recently re-tweeted it.

Only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity; any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Lewis's Trilemma

C.S Lewis's Trilemma is probably the most famous argument in Christian apologetics.

The argument is thus:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."[5]

The logic appears sound. It is hard to imagine someone going around claiming to be the Son of God, whilst just being a regular human male, unless they were either 1. totally deluded and suffering from seriously bad mental illness or 2. A complete liar.

But as with most arguments, the value of the argument depends on who it is addressed to and the underlying assumptions that are brought to the table.

The "trilemma" on it's own can only be addressed to people who already accept all of Jesus's teachings as being historical words that the historical Jesus actually spoke. In other words, the argument doesn't address the possibility that Jesus did exist but that he didnt say everything that was attributed to him OR that he didn't exist at all. Before you can use it, you need to either 1. assume or prove that Jesus made his various claims of divinity , or 2. you need to know that your audience already accepts this. Having said that, there are good historical reasons to suggest that Jesus did make claims to divinity- therefore once you've done that groundwork, then the argument may be put to use and could be effective to some degree, to a wider range of people than those who Lewis was originally addressing.
 
Lewis claims that people "often" say that Jesus was just a teacher, but his argument still isn't wholly effective even to that target audience. Many people in that category would have the objection that they simply can't accept any supernatural stuff- and that is why they stick to the moral teachings. I think that kind of objection requires philosophical arguments against naturalism per se, in addition to a historical argument such as the Trilemma. For someone who has a strong naturalist outlook that they bring to bear on the Jesus question, and who believes they have good independent reasons for believing naturalism, it is difficult to imagine them being convinced of Jesus's divinity merely by the Trilemma, even if they already accept the historicity of Jesus's claims to divinity. However in this instance, the Trilemma could form a part of an overall argument or set of arguments.
 
With the above qualifications in place, we can see that the Trilemma can have some value in showing that Christianity is reasonable.


So you want to be a Jesus mythicist?

Here's the guide on how.