Hello, faithful readers. “Faithful” being meant ironically. I haven’t been working on this blog for some time now because of other projects and the fact that it is frequently too easy. Billy has a ready supply of “go to” answers” that he doesn’t mind regurgitating in response to question after question, and that prompts my own supply of “go to” responses. I’ll be starting a new blog with a wider mission soon, and incorporating “Graham Cracks” into that. You’ll be notified when that happens. Meanwhile, this one came up recently in Billy’s My Answer and, by golly, I felt I had to answer it. For old time’s sake. And because it punches so many of my personal buttons.
The Question:
My high school science teacher says we humans are just animals, and God didn’t have anything to do with putting us here. This is really confusing me, because I’ve always tried to believe what the Bible says. — K.B.
Billy’s Answer:
I hope you will keep on believing what the Bible says, because it will make all the difference to you in the years ahead. Let me explain. If God didn’t put us here, then we are here by accident, and therefore our lives don’t have any real purpose or meaning. Nor are we accountable to God for the way we live; if He didn’t put us here, we can live any way we want to, no matter how selfish or hurtful we are. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes before he met God, we’ll end up saying, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). But the Bible says God created us and put us here — and that makes all the difference. It means we have a reason for being here: to know God and do His will. It also means we can know how we should live, because God has told us what is right and what is wrong. Most of all, it means we can know Him in a personal way, because He came down to earth in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, to bring us back to Himself. Respect those like your teacher who look at life differently — but don’t be misled by them or assume their views are right. Instead, commit your life to Jesus Christ and build your life on Him. He alone could say, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6).
My Answer:
I have never had a discussion with a Christian without hearing, usually sooner rather than later, this nonsense about how empty our lives would be if God hadn’t put us here. Millions of people, both in antiquity before Christianity was made up and in the many parts of the world where it is not practiced today, have managed to lead fulfilling lives without it. I don’t think they’re faking it. Suicide rates are not higher where Christianity is absent, and never have been. People don’t go moping about in greater numbers. They experience the same range of joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, that Christians do. Interestingly, the absence of religion, which is a trend growing in the world everywhere but particularly in Europe where Christianity is increasingly seen as an anachronism, is very closely related to nations with the highest levels of happiness and the lowest crime rates. Correlation is not causation, obviously, but the fact the trend is there at all makes Billy’s contention that Christianity and some universal purpose is somehow necessary to our health rather suspect. I’ve heard many preachers as well as followers state this proposition as though it were a proof: I can’t imagine a world in which God didn’t exist: therefore, God must exist. The fallacy of this should be obvious but apparently is not. Consider this proposition: I can’t imagine a world in which Nazis existed; therefore, there must never have been Nazis. Obviously, the world that exists, with Nazis or not, or with God or not, is independent of my or your imagination, or wishes. I can imagine, or wish for, anything: reality may or may not be in accordance with my wishes, but certainly my wishes do not make what I wish for true. The wish itself does not constitute proof. The existence of God, or the necessity of God’s existence, requires evidence apart from how desirable you find said existence to be, or how unthinkable you find the alternative. The unarguable fact is that humans ARE here whether God is or not, and our history predates by centuries the arrival of the Christian God. The next argument is usually how lost and barbaric we were before “The Word” was revealed to us. This argument can only be made by people who rely on The Bible and the slanted view of history taught by those who believe it is the world of God. Although it has evolved and changed, every society we know about had or has moral codes and standards of ethical behavior. Many of them seem more admirable than those espoused in the Bible, and they certainly existed before The Bible did. And the track record of “Christian” societies throughout history has as many blemishes as any other society you can name, including moral outrages described in the Bible, and endorsed by God, that we have evolved beyond. When did you practice your last human sacrifice? Slept with your own daughter? Eaten the flesh of your enemy? Bought or sold a slave? Stoned a sinner? All of these practices are okey-dokey with God according to The Bible, though they are appalling to most of us. So if we practiced a morality more advanced or even just different than the morality espoused in The Bible, and if moral laws have existed in all societies whether or not they have even heard of Christianity, in what sense can we say morality is dependent on our being created by this particular supernatural being, or any supernatural being, for that matter? Billy says “if God didn’t put us here, we can live any way we want to, no matter how selfish or hurtful we are”, Newsflash: we can live any way we want to even if God did put us here. The proof is that people do. They are selfish and hurtful, even when they “believe” in God and the concept of eternal punishment. Look around. The overwhelming percentage of people in U. S. prisons self-identify as Christians, in an even higher percentage than the general population. The most chilling conversation I ever had (albeit online and not in person) was with a guy who insisted that the only thing keeping him from murdering and raping at will was the fear of eternal punishment. I doubt if his statement was true: I would think the prospect of Earthly punishment would deter him as well, as it does most of us. But I could be wrong. And it is an important insight into the Christian mind, or at least the mind of some Christians. Really? Rape and murder sound like swell ideas if only you didn’t have to go to hell after? If the only thing that makes us moral is fear of punishment, we are not moral at all. Morality requires us to do the right thing regardless of consequences, and even in the absence of consequences.More powerful than any passage in The Bible to me is the segment in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which young Huck decides not to turn in the escaped slave Jim, even though, as he understands it, this will result in his going to Hell. That is an admirable human being, acting out of a moral sense above anything dreamed of in Christianity. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I don’t think I would be raping and murdering even if there was no punishment either on Earth or in Heaven, because it goes against the moral code that I have absorbed from the culture and family in which I was raised. If raping and murdering were the norm, and by that I mean acceptable or even encouraged by the society in which I grew up, I would probably do it thoughtlessly, as we do so many other things. But the question you must ask then is how long would a society like that last? Certain behaviors are so destructive or at odds with a society’s survival that no society that practices them with great frequency could possibly endure. A prime example is the Shakers, whose prohibition against procreation pretty well ensured a survival of less than five generations. No baby Shakers eventually leads to no grown up Shakers. On the other hand, the standard Christian admonition to be fruitful and multiply helped spread the religion, not because a God demanded it, but because it’s practice helped insure there would be plenty of little Christians to keep the pond stocked, which was the point, and has nothing to do with morality. Although, in a world with a population that is straining our resources, this “moral” stand may eventually lead us to the same end as the Shakers. Especially if we divorce morality, not from God, but from rationality. Billy claims that because God created us and put us here, He did it for a reason, which “makes all the difference”. We now know how to act because He told us what is right and wrong, which apparently He either knew all along, his source of knowledge not being specified, or just made it all up Himself. But this isn’t the most important bit: “Most of all, it means we can know Him in a personal way, because He came down to earth in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, to bring us back to Himself”. It seems a pretty roundabout way for an all-powerful Supreme Being to behave. What is really being offered here is, of course, eternal life, which is the real candy Christianity dangles before the hopeful. We have already established that societies have always held ideas of right and wrong, and that our own moral standards are at odds with Bible teachings and have been for centuries. You won’t find a moral precept in the entire book that wasn’t espoused centuries earlier. Even the promise of eternal life was nothing new; cavemen were buried with all the tools they would need in the “afterlife”, and pharaohs had themselves carefully embalmed and even took servants along for use in their version of heaven. In what way is the Christian view more sophisticated or plausible than the Neanderthal’s? The answer is, in no way. It is quite possible, even likely, that early religions were established and flourished because they solve the problem of how to give moral precepts weight; a hypothetical human raised in a culture or time in which any action was deemed acceptable might well wonder why he shouldn’t split his companion’s head open with a rock and steal his wife if he wants to. A God prohibiting it, and making bad things happen to you if you disobey, has a persuasive force if you’re a caveman, or persist in thinking like one. What starts out as a means to enforce ideals of desirable behavior by imbuing them with supernatural authority, calcifies in time into a code of behavior that may or may not have value to a society which evolve as conditions and understanding changes. For example, prohibitions against homosexuality and reminders to be fruitful and multiply make some sense if sustaining your population in the face of wars, disease, and other conditions which lead to short lifespans is a problem; less so when the problem you face is overpopulation and dwindling resources. The principle disadvantage to giving our moral precepts supernatural sanction is that it separates them from whatever actual reason may have been behind their formulation in the first place. If people are asked to follow ethical laws for no other reason than God says so, and they believe this is the case, it’s difficult to get them to change even when there are sound reasons for changing. Not that they don’t eventually change anyway; we have already cited a few examples of moral precepts in The Bible that are roundly ignored because we don’t believe they are moral anymore. That is the crux of the issue. Religions are enforcement tools for morality, but morality is and always should be independent of them. The final point Billy makes, that we should respect those who look at life differently while not being misled by them, is a rare nod to tolerance, which is not a feature of modern Christianity, nor historical Christianity as far as that goes. He does stop short of urging K. B. to keep an open mind, which would have been a better answer, but of course Christianity has difficulty sustaining its grip on open minds and it’s not surprising that Billy stops short of advocating that. I think he does miss one final, important point, and that is that K. B.’s science teacher should not be teaching that the theory of evolution establishes that God didn’t have anything to do with our being here. The theory states no such thing, and teaching that it does is just bad science, demonstrating that the teacher either does not fully understand the subject matter, or has an agenda which doesn’t belong in a science class any more than creationism does. Darwin’s theory has nothing whatsoever to say about a Creator. One may, as many people do, draw the conclusion that a theory which provides a mechanism by which we could have come into existence without divine intervention is an argument against a divine origin, but many other people are both religious and proponents of Darwin’s theory because they have concluded that a better understanding of the mechanism by which the miracle of life was achieved does not preclude the possibility or even probability of a directing intelligence behind the curtain. The point being, students and adults, are free to believe or disbelieve in the existence of God, but the definite answer is not and cannot be provided by Darwin’s theory. The theory deals, as all scientific theories do, with observable data and testable, repeatable results, and divine beings in magical unobservable heavens are outside it’s scope. Billy should have called him on that. But then, Billy would have to have some familiarity with Darwin’s theory and how science works himself to do that. Not a great deal of understanding, mind you; just one high school science class, taught honestly.
Graham Cracks 