The Blind Faith of Atheism

(Before you get annoyed - the title is merely a tongue-in-cheek inversion of criticism levied against Christians. My wider intention is to encourage intellectual honesty - for both non-Christians and Christians alike)

Blind Faith?

The key question that drew me towards Christianity was a curiosity of why an atheist would become religious. It seemed pretty clear why Christians lost their faith: I mean, do you see this Jesus fella around? That hardly needed any explanation. But the obviousness of such was precisely why conversion was so mysterious - who voluntarily believes in something they cannot see? Or even weirder, who lets that invisible being dictate their life? 

The inherent drama I felt necessary to reconcile was such. I had without scrutiny bought into the narrative of the ‘naive Christian’, the intellectually dull individual whose faith was contrary to scrutiny. Whose faith was merely a therapeutic story to protect oneself from the reality of death, such fear preventing a rational acceptance of the obvious ‘facts’, hence failing to be reasonable. And yet this seemed inconsistent with the reality that atheists become Christians - who held none of the prior biases which I had assumed faith to be on. What was it that convinced them?

Now as a Christian it is fairly entertaining, now I have been baptised after a lengthy period of questioning and criticising, I have front-row seats to the ‘faith manipulation’ of atheists. It is only through discussing faith now that I realise just how much of the ‘rational criticism’ of religion is in reality a priori assumptions masking themselves as a thought-out assessment of the evidence. Funnily enough this is what can unite both believers and secularists - ignoring what is inconvenient! Within that spirit, I thought it would be interesting to note and discuss some of these ‘atheist irrationalities’; not necessary so that you might place your faith in Christ, but to destabilise faith that he doesn’t exist.

‘There is no scientific evidence’

One of the major beliefs is that science either science cannot confirm the existence of God, or (a weaker position) that the proofs of science suggest the non-existence of God. Which is ironic, as in many of the cases that I have come across, this actually indicates misunderstanding of what science claims to be.

Take the resurrection of Christ - which is the central question of Christianity. The foundational principle of science is ‘falsifiability’; that a single counterexample is sufficient to disprove the theory. As such science can be understood to be an assessment of ‘generalities’, there are certain ‘laws’ which ‘govern’ the working of the universe (Please forgive the numerous simplifications I am making out of necessity here). Science describes (or ‘models’) these general truths. 

This is what makes science pretty great, but also an absolutely nonsensical way to assess the truth of the resurrection. The resurrection by its nature was a one-off event - the entire significance is that according to the ‘natural laws’, people don’t tend to come back to life. Christs’ authority is proven precisely because it breaks our understanding, and points towards the joyous fact that we will be resurrected and reunited with God. We acknowledge and accept that there are many valuable truths we simply cannot test with utmost scientific rigour, such as the chaotic complexity of the soft sciences - so it is not as if the resurrection is uniquely unscientific (and correspondingly fallacious).

One friend once made the point that ‘if I think as a statistician, if I weigh up what is more probable, someone coming back from the dead is so unlikely that practically any historical evidence will be outweighed by it’. The issue is that this isn’t in reality a statistical analysis - how can you begin to construct a probability from a (potential) source of a single event? Probability requires repetition under stable conditions for a lengthy amount of time to be justified as an approximation of ‘chance’. Such a use of ‘probability’ more accurately corresponds to an intuition of what one would expect to happen or not - which is distant from the scientific notion of ‘probable’.

‘Christians flexibility’

An adjacent criticism is that the church keeps ‘moving the goalpost’: that Christians have made many claims about how the world ‘is’ which have been scientifically disproven, and yet such has not prompted a re-evaluation of the Bible’s claim to divinity. The account of Genesis says that humans are the ‘original’ creation of God, and yet evolution shows that humans were not created from nothing, but slowly came to be through years of procreation. Yet Christians have completely revised their account and now say evolution is part of God’s creative process - which obviously is a fallacious ad hoc claim.

First of all I find this quite an amazing criticism, as it practically is a confession that Christians are open to being corrected. Is it not a proof of intellectual honesty that when confronted with concrete conflicting evidence, one adjusts their understanding of the world to incorporate such findings? Or even further, isn’t this precisely what the theoretical scientific process is? That one devises a new theory and understanding to incorporate and explain all of the empirical evidence?

The observant will have noticed a certain oversight: the Christian may have acknowledged the criticism, but not given it sufficient weight. There is a clear difference in that the scientist disavows and completely changes their theory, whereas the substance and essence of the Christian message is hardly altered in any meaningful way in response. 

And I think on some level this is correct - I think (intuitively) most Christians in their heart do want to explain away the difficulty rather than really confronting it. At the very minimum it produces epistemological problems for Biblical interpretation. And yet there is a very rational difference: in that a description of the physical world is the central concern of science, yet merely an adjacent (at best) concern of the Bible. Jesus did not come down to reveal that atoms are the building blocks of everything, but to address what the meaning of humanness is. It is very legitimate for Christians to sideline such questions in a way which would be inappropriate for the scientist, because they are not the primary issues of concern.

‘Faith cannot be scrutinised’

A major misconception (albeit a pretty understandable one) is that divine claims by nature cannot be verified - and hence can only be justified through faith alone, ie irrationality. And this would be true for about 95% of religious claims. Almost all claims to divinity relate to some internal (hence private and unverifiable) and rely on trust in some prophetic individual. Hence for modern people who read about religious prophets through texts rather than being contemporary to them, it essentially becomes a game of ‘which random individual do I put my trust in’. Of which there is a very genuine issue of trust, which one would struggle to resolve.

Christianity (as far as I am aware) is the one exception - in that proof of its claims depends entirely upon the truth of whether Christ rose from the dead or not. Such is a historical, not a revelatory, claim. The witnesses who testified to the truth of Christianity were not saying they believed Jesus was alive, but they saw that he was alive - and they were so certain that they went through excruciating deaths for such truths. Such witnessing is the foundation of New Testament scripture, which is either primary sources claiming Jesus was resurrected, or a historical account of Jesus’ life. This provides an intellectual avenue into belief: who are these witnesses, and can we trust their claims?

Note an important distinction: it is not a claim to belief, but a claim to what they saw. Frequently I get the response that ‘people believed (and even died) in service of X cult, that isn’t proof’, but there is a significant difference between a claim to belief, and a claim to witnessing. Charismatic manipulators can get people to buy into many different ideas, but there can be no manipulation of what you’ve seen first hand.

‘Schizophrenia’

The most blatant atheistic covering-up of evidence is in the complete derision and refusal to believe any mystical experience - primarily medicalising religious figures so as to give a ‘rational’ explanation for what occurred (Foucault would have many words about such). Yet this is often done in the most nonsensical manner, not taking seriously the actual conditions that are used. And as such it is obvious that such are not genuine explanations, and they are not honest attempts to address theological claims, but mere hand-waving

Atheists who don’t deny the Gospels as historical accounts wish to describe the vision of Christ’s resurrection as a hallucination/delusion, and Christ as a schizophrenic. This latter use of ‘schizophrenia’ is the more frustrating error, for anyone with a cursory knowledge knows the condition is defined by positive (hallucinations/delusions) and negative (flat affect, anhedonia, ect) symptoms. Frankly, it appears to me disrespectful to throw around diagnoses so haphazardly - regardless, the negative symptoms don’t fit the description of Christ in any capacity. ‘Schizophrenia’ is a tool by secularists to ignore the real manifestations of religion, a shit explanation to avoid engaging in complexity.

Hallucination theories are less egregious, but not fantastic - they may have some weight in the case of Paul’s visions on the Road to Damascus, but not the appearance of Christ to the Apostles. Firstly this would constitute mass psychosis, which itself is a fantastical explanation. But the witness accounts report seeing Christ eat, and Peter touching the hole in his side; such intense multimodal hallucinations are not common. Worse so, such hallucinations would occur without any prior history of mental health, and coincidentally in-line with Christ’s statements that he would rise in three days (hmm, which secular discipline gives great weight to predictive validity?). These aren’t explanations which wish to provide a serious explanation of actual events.

‘The Wise Teacher’

Another way in which the significance of Christ is denied by more sympathetic atheists is the ‘good teacher’ theory - that Jesus was a wise man with worthy teachings, but not God. C.S. Lewis (I believe) decimated the validity of this as a rational takeaway of Christ’s teachings in his famous trilemma from the fact Jesus claimed to be God:

1. If Jesus is God, then you must put your faith in him

2. If Jesus isn’t God and was insincere, then he is a liar, hence the Gospel accounts of his virtue are false

3. If Jesus isn’t God yet believed he was, then he is a madman who shouldn’t be listened to

‘Only the Bible supports Jesus’ claim’

I shall finish with a series of criticisms against the historical evidence pointing towards the Christian truth. The first of which being a simple misunderstanding rather than an inherent fallacy - that there is only a single source which supports the Christs’ divinity, the Bible. This is a misunderstanding of what the Bible is: it is not a single source, but an authoritative list of sources that Christian communities have accepted as verified and important to the faith. Just because you compile a variety of sources into one text doesn’t mean you should treat that text as a unified source. It also renders statements which attempt to define the character of the entire Bible as nonsensical; not every biblical text is a historical document.

This is a fairly innocent error, less understandable is the criticism that “the authors of the Biblical texts are biased, therefore how can their claims be trusted?”, which is fallacious on many levels. Most essentially the implication that an author is distorting the truth because of their beliefs, rather than the possibility that they are biased because of the truth that they have recorded. If someone knows something is the case, of course they’re going to be biased towards that truth - especially one as important as Christ’s divinity. They are only biased because they’re Christians, and they’re only Christians because they are following Christ; the very thing they are writing the history on. ‘Bias’ is nowhere close to being a sufficient argument.

But it makes an even more fundamental error, in suggesting that such things as ‘unbiased’ historical sources exist - they don’t (and especially not in ancient times). Anyone who writes on the issue either is biased by some explicit position on the topic, or less-explicitly through the fundamental assumptions which define the lens through which they assess the world. The most objective you can get is people detached from the topic: put by definition detached individuals cannot be eye-witnesses, and hence couldn’t verify the resurrection of Christ - the very historical claim which is being assessed.

But people also forget that the written accounts we possess now were not individual creations as such, but emerged within a context of early Christian oral history. Many validly criticise the authority of the claim that Christ revealed himself to over five-hundred people, as this was a claim by a single individual. One claim that five-hundred people witnessed Christ =/= five-hundred claims to witnessing Christ. The same claim should validly be applied to the Gospel accounts: the account of Christ's life by one person is not ‘simply’ a single testimony, when such writings are informed by hundreds of individuals testimony of Christ - a fact hidden in the sole authorship. And when discussing the time between Christ’s death and the written accounts (itself a tenuous issue), the errors and validity of transmission cannot be addressed without acknowledging that Christianity began as an oral culture.

The very extensiveness of the Biblical corpus is a rather incredible fact, considering it was written about a random impoverished carpenter, and survived through heavy state repression. It is weird that so much energy was devoted to writing about a random Palestinian who was executed. Anyone with a vague understanding of ancient historical sources knows the source difficulty that there was practically never any writing about the lower classes. Unless pure coincidence (which is hardly a rational explanation), the fact there was such substantial writing about Christ itself constitutes historical evidence that something weird was going on.

As a result, criticisms of Biblical historicity have to be put in relation to the wider historical discipline: specifically ancient (comparison to the sources of other similar events) and colonial (an area where oral history is prevalent) history. I find in many instances that criticisms tend not to be aware of the broad implications of what they mean: if you condemn that with few available sources, you kill ancient history; if you only accept sources physically written at the time, you kill a great deal of colonial history. One should be aware of the limitations inherent to the history of such times, but complete dismissal is not valid.