The New Atheists and the Old Testament

I came across a lecture
by Peter J. Williams that I found to be an excellent complement to this month’s
Solid Ground (if you haven’t yet read Greg’s “The Canaanites: Genocide or
Judgment?” you should download it here).
The lecture is worth taking the time to watch (see below) or download as an MP3.

Williams points out that the New Atheists often
make a very elementary mistake in the way they critique the morality of stories
like the judgment of the Canaanites in the Old Testament: They don’t evaluate
the whole story as it is, they
critique a naturalistic story of their own making—a story where God doesn’t
really exist and men are evilly using the idea of God to achieve their own
nefarious ends (for example, as an excuse to commit genocide). When they
examine the Bible this way, surprise! They find evil.

I’ve encountered this many times before (read these comments
to see one of these conversations in action), so it’s something you need to be
aware of and know how to counteract. Here’s how Williams responds to this move
by the New Atheists:

If we’re going to look at the
fairness of something, it doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. We look at
the fairness of the story. We could
look at that in Tom and Jerry’s world, we could look at it in any story,
whether something is fair or not. But if I’m going to judge the fairness of the
story, I think it’s only fair to look at the story world that I’m looking at. I can’t judge the morality of
Jerry’s actions against Tom, thinking of our physical laws. That’s not actually
entering properly into understanding the story.

So I believe that in order for an
atheist to critique the morality of the story in the Old Testament, they have
to enter into that story…. If we’re going to consider the story, we have to
consider all of the details in the
story, including all of the characters in the story—and one of them, by the
way, is called “God.” He’s a character in the story, and I can’t just say,
“Well I don’t believe in God, so as I’m judging the story, I’ll sort of omit
Him from the story.” That’s not fair….

When Dawkins tells the story [of
the Old Testament], it goes like this: God doesn’t speak to anyone, no miracles
are performed, there's no massive exodus. But then, I can judge all of the
characters as if God hadn’t actually told them to do anything.

So in other words, he’s got his own
naturalistic, watered-down version of Exodus, and that’s the thing that he attacks.

What’s the reality? When we look at
the story in the Old Testament, firstly we have to go back to the beginning.
And to understand God, we have to understand what He set up in the beginning.
In the beginning God gave everyone life. That’s part of the story. I can’t
just miss that out—it’s actually there. I could also say that God clearly
doesn’t think violence is good, because in the beginning there was none. When
I look at the end of His story in the Old Testament, as outlined in the
prophets, I can see again His vision of peace—that the wolf shall dwell with
the lamb, and so on.

So that gives me some guidance as
to how to understand the story. Trying to understand a bit of a story without
reading the beginning and the end usually isn’t the best way before you write
your literary criticism.

When you’re having a conversation about the morality of the
Bible, be sure that you’re actually discussing the story in the Bible, not a blend of the Bible’s story about God
and the atheist’s naturalistic story without God. You need to hold the atheist
to the idea that in order to judge the morality of a story (not its truthfulness, but its morality) and the
characters in that story, one must take the story as it is and look at what it portrays from within that story.

Williams goes on in the lecture to evaluate the story of the judgment of the Canaanites in its
own context and then concludes by noting how their destruction clarifies
the gospel:

Arguably, we could say that if the
destruction of the Canaanites is the punishment for their sins, then that’s
what sin deserved. And if Christ on the cross took our sins on Himself, then
what happened to the Canaanites becomes [in] some way a picture for us of how
awful sin is and how much Jesus Christ did on the cross for us, taking on
Himself—that one person—the
punishment for so many.

That’s truly a staggering thought, when you consider it.

 

(HT: Apologetics
315)

See also:

The
Judgment that Led to Salvation
Not
Genocide, but Capital Punishment
Israel’s
Failure Led to Evil and Suffering