A Christian Defence Of Atheism

Introduction
You’re probably wondering why a Christian would write an article in defence of atheism. This may seem unusual, but it is not without good reason. From a long history of engaging in debates I’ve found one of the big stumbling blocks people have is a failure to see things from their opponent’s perspective. This is strange because part of the strength one has in one’s own position is based on the fact that the opposing contentions have been honestly and rigorously considered and rejected. Failure to understand your opponent’s position is to equally have a failure to understand all the strengths and weaknesses of your own position.

Therefore a very good exercise I’ve found useful in the past, and one I have often encouraged others to do, is to formulate a defence in favour of the views contrary to your own – not because you are necessarily likely to change your mind (although sometimes you might), but because you’ll probably compound the strength of your original position as well as obtaining an even better understanding about where your opponent is going wrong. And if you do end up changing your mind – great – it’s always good to learn new things and improve your understanding.

So, for example, libertarians and socialists would be advised to each write an article trying to argue in defence of the other’s position; the same goes for any rival group you can think of: young earth creationists vs. evolutionists, Hayekians vs. Keynesians, pacifists vs. non-pacifists, free will proponents vs. determinists, big bang proponents vs. steady state theorists, and in the case here in this article, Christians vs. atheists.

As long as you’re a genuine fact finder and truth seeker (and they aren’t as common as you might imagine) your worldview will be enriched if you sit down at a keyboard and type out an honest and rigorous attempt at defending a position to which you are opposed or with which you disagree.

Out of the above rival groups, my position would be most closely defined as libertarian, evolutionist, Hayekian, non-pacifist, semi-free will proponent & semi-determinist (they are not actually at odds, as I describe here and here), big bang proponent and Christian. In the past I have written defences of all the positions I disagree with, and tried my best to argue in their favour to test the strength of my own position. Each time I have come away stronger and more confident in my views than I was before I started.

So with that in mind, let me present a defence of atheism by saying that if there is an atheistic worldview that makes some sense to me, and one that would most likely cause me to wonder if the Christian faith is actually false, it is along these lines. I might just add at this point that despite considering it the strongest objection to the Christian faith, and the one that can most undermine the claims of Christians, it is one I've not really seen a single atheist ever posit - at least not in the way that I'm going to lay it out.

A Christian defence of atheism

Humans have been evolving for a long time. The first members of the human family (hominins) lived approximately 6-7 million years ago. They lived in Africa, were probably bi-pedal forest-dwelling creatures that very slightly resembled humans in form. While the bigger-brained Homo group (including our own species, Homo sapiens) began arising over 2 million years ago, the species most closely resembling the humans of today evolved about 200,000 years ago. Needless to say, much of Homo history has been replete with hardship, suffering and early death.  It would be hard to get to grips with just how many proto-humans (pre 200,000 years ago) suffered and died as they made often futile attempts to live to an old age, with their early years from infancy through to teenage years perilously precarious due to risks posed by disease and injury. I've often wondered where God and His relationship with creation was involved all those millions of years. But let's make it easier for ourselves and leave them aside in this analysis and just focus on relatively recent human history for the past 200,000 years.

For about 199,800 of those 200,000 years the human struggle was rife. We had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitive hardship, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. Most of those 200,000 years involved no hope for any recordable progression. Even for the majority of the past 10,000 years progression has been slow. After the inceptive stages of trading, for the most part people's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes). For a long time in our history we've been worshipfully inclined; inventing thousands of gods and religions - even some pretty sophisticated and intellectual ones like Judaism and Christianity.

Even when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, progression was still relatively slow. Fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God, but yet as as people gazed at those great buildings the vast majority of them were still barely subsisting. Nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed human prosperity or enabled our standards of living to progress with any real significance. In summary, then, for 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace.

Then a couple of hundred years ago something big changed. From the 19th century to the present day, people started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly. What caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression was primarily two things - science and capitalism. The human history of progression resembles something close to a hockey stick - a long period of a straight-ish edge, then right at the end (the present period) a huge upward slope of progression after the exponentiation of free trade, science, engineering, and population increase, as well as other types of concomitant progress like improvements in rule of law, human rights and political stability.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 199,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it, including any of the ages that engendered religious belief, philosophy or empire.

Consequently, then, when asked to look at reality from an atheist's perspective - I can quite easily appreciate the narrative that says religious belief may have been extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, or on technological and industrial progress, or on their knowledge of how the world works, particularly not when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had in the past two centuries. Purely on the record of all those things, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was the most prominent phenomenon.

With such information in one’s arsenal it is not wholly unreasonable to see the above picture as a picture that may be absent of an all-powerful, loving God. It’s not just that the primary tools for engendering human progression are tools that evidently have occurred without the need for religious belief. It’s also that the proposition of a God presiding over that lengthy hominin-human history seems to involve millions of years of suffering and hardship with not much of a hint of God’s involvement in their lives. Moreover, despite the progression-explosion of the past two centuries, it is difficult to deny that if one takes the whole of human history, even including a vast proportion of modern human history, the sheer level of and intensity of hardship and suffering that has occurred and still is occurring in this created world can easily make one wonder whether an all-powerful, loving God would have created a world with quite that amount of pain.

The upshot is, there is a picture of reality that fits quite neatly with the notion that human beings can learn, grow, develop, improve, innovate, and progress fairly nicely without the need for God, and that the key to getting where we have has not been Christianity, but the ability to trade, innovate and be scientifically-minded creatures of empiricism.

 

* Addendum: This would be the point in such an article at which I'd then explain all the ways I think the above defence of atheism is flawed or inadequate, but given that's not been the intention here, it's a temptation I'm going to resist, and one we'll save for another day in the future.