Still Not Getting It

I have now begun to enjoy the predictable inability of the atheists to grasp the following simple proposition: Absolute ideas of good and bad, wrong and right, cannot exist without a religious belief. Unless they are attributed to a power beyond human control, then such ideas have no sure foundation.

They can appear to exist, but they will swiftly become conditional as people alter them to suit their circumstances. Any honest human adult with any self-knowledge at all knows that he or she can and will talk himself or herself into believing that a desired or convenient act is in fact justifiable. The more powerful that human being is, the wider the range of actions to which this applies. An illustration in miniature of this is the transformation of human behaviour which often results from placing a person behind the wheel of a motor car. The power conferred will often turn apparently mild, patient, considerate and gentle persons into snarling, selfish monsters. Imagine, in that case, the transformation possible if someone is put in charge of a state machine. Power, as Lord Acton did say *tends* to corrupt. What does it corrupt? Moral goodness.

I might add to this that atheists generally cannot distinguish between 'Golden Rule' common decency - a self-interested practice of public goodness in the hope of securing a return from ones' fellow creatures, with the belief that one must love God above all things, and love one's neighbour as oneself, a wholly different and much tougher proposition.

The two examples of moral sophistry I always come up with here are:

Number one - (for liberal leftists) abortion, which secular sophists quickly conclude is not the meaningful killing of an innocent person but the justified removal of a 'foetus' or 'blob of jelly' which is not properly human and whose removal therefore involves no moral breach.

Number two - (for patriotic conservatives) the bombing and burning to death of women and children in their homes, provided the regime of the country involved is sufficiently wicked on the Hitler-Stalin scale. These hideous killings (of unquestionably sentient but wholly innocent beings) are justified and excused by the higher purpose of saving the country from a dreadful enemy. Anyone who raises doubts about this is drowned out by false accusations that such protestors are equating the bombing of Dresden with the Holocaust. Personally I regard the Holocaust as a distinct and unique crime, considerably more wicked than the bombing of Dresden. But this does not in any way overcome the problem that the bombing of Dresden was morally wrong too.

Paradoxically, many of the liberal defenders of abortion will condemn the bombing of Dresden, but quite large numbers of them could be found to defend the more recent bombing of Belgrade (which the British left were in general happy with), and a significant number of secular leftists also defend the bombing of Baghdad and the bombardment of Fallujah.

So when 'Tony' asks petulantly: 'Are you seriously suggesting that people who have no active belief in a higher Deity are somehow inherently lacking a sense of moral code? That unbelievers are somehow lacking in compassion for others?'...my answer is 'No'. That's not what I said, and 'Tony' has absolutely no basis, save his own rush to judgement, for concluding that this is what I said.

Nor is it what I think. Unbelievers are quite capable of having and following a moral code. Who could doubt it? I never have. But they will be borrowing that moral code from religion, and would have no basis for distinguishing between right and wrong if religion didn't provide it for them.

But it's what I knew 'Tony', and everyone like him, would immediately convince himself I had said. They almost all, almost always, do it.

Here's what I did say: 'All the categories of good and evil employed by the Godless are in fact religious categories. They cannot acknowledge this, for two reasons.

'One, because it would make them look silly to admit it, and expose one of the large holes in atheist certainty which are at least as embarrassing to the Godless as the more arcane claims of Christianity are to the believer.

'The other is that the accusation of free riding gives them private cause for alarm, alarm they cannot admit to without disclosing their true reasons for their own faith in a Godless, purposeless universe. After all, if they were to concede that they wish to be free from those rules, then in all honesty they would have to argue that others should be free from them too.'

As I said. they cannot acknowledge it. So they feign rage at a suggestion I haven't actually made, while steering smartly round the much more important suggestion which I have made. Note the large concession I made in my original article, of doubt and weakness in my own position, which they didn't seize on because to do so would be to acknowledge that both sides - including them - have problems. The atheist is consumed with such a burning certainty that he is sure that only the believer has problems of doubt.

Most believers, by contrast, are filled with doubt. And I've said before that both Christians and atheists fear there is a God. But Christians also hope there is one.

The connection between Christianity and liberty is likewise straightforward. It stresses the self-government of each human, based upon his willing acceptance of the known desires of God. This creates a society in which individual conscience, self-discipline and self-restraint are so nearly universal that there is no need for a strong state to enforce rules of goodness.

Thanks to Christ's clear statement of the distinction between earthly and celestial power ('My Kingdom is not of this world' and 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's), Christianity does not seek or endorse (as for instance Sharia does) a theocratic state. Though it does urge Christian love upon rulers, it rejects Utopian movements. (Christ rebuffs Judas's socialist plan - to sell the costly ointment which the weeping woman is wasting on Christ's feet and give the money to the poor - by remarking that the poor will always be with us. One gospel also hints that Judas, like so many utopian socialist states, is actually a thief who intends to steal the money he pretends to want to distribute to the needy.)

The rule of law (wholly absent in so many parts of the world, and not even understood in many more) is perhaps the most important contribution of Christianity to liberty. Because it asserts the existence of a celestial law higher than human law, and of rules so important that even the powerful may not break them with impunity, it creates the concept of an invisible but supreme authority higher than that of princes. This lies behind the development of most truly free societies. Without this concept, Magna Carta, and all that flowed from it (and Magna Carta is the ancestor of the American and English Bills of Rights) would not exist.

We might also consider that the division between Church and State is the origin of political pluralism, and some theorists have likewise attributed this idea, and the development of the separation of powers, to the existence in the Christian mind of the concept of the Trinity.

Once again, if people would read my books, they would find much of this explained. They're readily available, in bookshops and libraries, for anyone really interested.

I've also stated, more times than I care to remember, here and elsewhere, that in my view belief is a choice. We are all free to believe that there is a God, or to believe that there is no God. In either case it's a matter of faith. Childish abuse about 'flying spaghetti monsters' and 'fairytales' misses the point that the putative existence of God would explain a number of things which otherwise remain unexplained. (Not least 'Why is there something, rather than nothing?') Many people who jeer in this fashion are startlingly ignorant of the limitations of scientific knowledge or indeed of the existence of many distinguished scientists who are also religious believers. Science cannot answer the question 'Does God exist?' for us. We must choose for ourselves.

What's important is the making of the choice, and what fascinates me is the reason behind the choice. I believe most atheists are less than candid about why they so very anxiously want there not to be a God. They could so easily conclude that the question couldn't be decided, and leave it at that. But they absolutely must go further, and are then stuck in self-condemnatory traps about faith, such as my brother's two-edged assertion that 'what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof'. Well, so it can, and that goes for atheism as well as for belief.

And thus it leaves both sides where they were before, with nothing but faith. Well, that suits me fine. I choose to have faith in God. This seems to me to be quite easily explicable.   It is easy to see why the human heart yearns for a just and purposeful universe in which the least of us matters, and each action has significance. But why would an intelligent person yearn with such furious passion for a pointless chaos?

I think the only way for this argument to advance is to concentrate upon that issue, since faith and belief are consequences of the individual's desire. What do atheists want, and why?

Works every time.

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