Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists

by Sean McDowell

Here is a helpful definition of biblical inerrancy: “The Bible (in its original writings) properly interpreted in light of which culture and communication means had developed by the time of its composition will be completely true (and therefore not false) in all that it affirms, to the degree of precision intended by the author, in all matters relating to God and His creation.”

this means making the standard of accuracy what the original readers or hearers would have understood, not our modern conceptions of how the biblical writers should or shouldn’t have communicated.

A careful reading of the Old Testament will reveal that Israel was chosen by God to be a blessing to all nations.

The Jebusites moved from “being among the nations destined for destruction” and “came to be included within the covenant people as a clan in Judah.”

It will not do, as some have done when approaching this topic, to make the God of the Old Testament a God of judgment and the Jesus of the New Testament a God of love.

The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on Tough Questions of Faith.

The God I Don’t Understand

“We Don’t Hate Sin So We Don’t Understand What Happened to the Canaanites,”

their god, Baal, had sex with his sister while she was in the form of a calf, “seventy-seven, even eighty-eight times,”

In other words, Christianity is not fundamentally about what we have to say no to; it is defined by what we get to say yes to.

A number of years ago an article titled “Aha! Call It the Revenge of the Church Ladies” appeared in USA Today and took the perspective of the New Atheists to task.

Reason #1: Saving Sex for Marriage Pays Considerable Dividends

Reason #4: People Benefit from Believing God Created Sex

The Christian faith does not lead to sexual repression, but rather a full experience of what God intended for human sexuality.

Religious commitment also seems to be an important ingredient in a good marriage and a good sex life. A study of more than a hundred thousand women by Redbook magazine found that strongly religious women are less likely to engage in sexual behavior before marriage and are more likely to describe their current sex lives as “good” or “very good” than moderately religious or nonreligious women.

The crucial question in this chapter is not “Can we be good without belief in God?” but “Can we be good without God?” The latter is the more fundamental question.

Even Gentiles, who do not have God’s written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. They demonstrate that God’s law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right.1

what we are after is an ontological grounding of objective morality, not an epistemological explanation of how we know what is right and wrong.

Ontology deals with ultimate reality, with the question of what is real.

So what grounds morality in a world...

Objective morality would have to be grounded in naturalism because Darwinian evolution becomes the only explanation.

wrong.*

“The fact that our ethical intuitions must in some way supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths reducible to biological ones.” The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 226. While this is a more technical point, the reader will notice he doesn’t explain how this “supervenience” works. Craig is instructive here, “If there is no God, then it is hard to see any ground for thinking that the property of moral goodness supervenes on certain natural states of such creatures. If our approach to metaethical theory is to be serious metaphysics rather than just a ‘shopping list’ approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to supervenient moral properties or principles to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states or why such principles are true. It is insufficient for the naturalist to point out that we do, in fact, apprehend the goodness of some feature of human existence, for that only goes to establish the objectivity of moral values and duties, which the theist is ready to affirm.”

“There are circumstances … in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically.”

While Harris and Dawkins do a fine job of undermining their own attempts at grounding objective morality, there are additional reasons that evolutionary accounts of morality fail to explain objective morality.

better or worse—than other people. The fundamental point that Darwinist explanations miss is that “morality is not about how we do act but about how we should act.”

Finally, why should we trust our moral intuitions and reasoning if everything about us was selected for adaptive advantage or survival and not for the discovery of the truth?

chapter 2, we noted Dawkins’s observation that our senses cannot be fully trusted since they are the product of natural selection.

physics, chemistry, and natural selection are all they have to work with.

We believe that the existence of objective right and wrong, good and evil, are powerful reasons to think that God exists. Even Dawkins grants the strength of this intuition: “It is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.”

sound.*

gravity.†

Precious little in our world—beyond theoretical mathematics—can be 100 percent proven. Rather, we are making the more modest claim that it’s more plausible to affirm these two premises than deny them, and that given the reality of objective moral values and duties, it follows that God is the best explanation for them.

Dawkins does not seem comfortable going this far; he thinks “morals do not have to be absolute.”19 However, Harris, in a debate with pastor Rick Warren, clearly states, “I think there is an absolute right and wrong.”

Dawkins candidly admits that the concept of objective morality arising from Darwinian evolution is counterintuitive: “On the face of it, the Darwinian idea that evolution is driven by natural selection seems ill-suited to explain such goodness as we possess, or our feelings of morality, decency, empathy, and pity.

music.*

Christianity offers substantive hope that is reasonable in the midst of pain, suffering, and evil, even if we are without an ultimately satisfying answer to all of our questions.

Evil is a departure from the way things ought to be. It is a corruption of good, a parasite. Just as rust cannot exist without iron, and adultery is impossible without the good of marriage, so evil is what it is in virtue of what it steals and corrupts from good.

Thanks to Alvin Plantinga’s famous free will defense in God, Freedom, and Evil, professional philosophers widely regard the idea of God and evil as logically compatible.

As philosopher of religion William Lane Craig makes clear, the Christian will insist that we consider, not just the evil in the world, but all the evidence relevant to God’s existence, including the ontological argument for a maximally great being, the cosmological argument for a Creator of the universe, the teleological argument for an intelligent Designer of the cosmos, the noological argument for an ultimate Mind, the axiological argument for an ultimate, personally embodied Good, as well as evidence concerning the person of Christ, the historicity of the resurrection, the existence of miracles, plus existential and religious experience. When we take into account the full scope of evidence, the existence of God becomes quite probable…. Indeed, if he includes the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit as part of his total warrant, then he can rightly assert that he knows that God exists, even if he has no solution to the problem of evil.4

As theologian N. T. Wright put it in a “blogalogue” with Bart Erhman, author of God’s Problem, “The other side of the coin of ‘the problem of evil’ is, after all, ‘the problem of good’: if there is no God, no good and wise creator, why is there an impulse to justice and mercy so deep within us? Why is there beauty, love, laughter, friendship, joy?”5

Atheists often say the existence of evil is evidence that there is no God. But if there is no God, what is evil?

Experience cannot be allowed to have the final word—it must be judged and shown up as deceptive and misleading.

the entire story of the Bible is God telling us what he is doing about evil at personal, social, political, and cosmic levels, and the culmination of that story is the person of Jesus Christ.

But if Job could not make sense of natural events, then how would God’s answer of why evil exists make any sense at all?

Although “why” may be unknowable, God is knowable and he is good.

In debates with both Dinesh D’Souza and William Lane Craig, Christopher Hitchens has raised the question of why it took God so long to save humanity. The argument is rhetorically powerful.

Was he asleep at the wheel? D’Souza cites Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research in his reply to Hitchens: “The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth…. So in a sense, God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have

This observation fits nicely with what the apostle Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His

we are not called to run to the hills and isolate ourselves until Jesus returns; rather, we are called to embody in our relationships and in the world the healing and restoration of Jesus’ atonement on the cross.