Believers at the Net

The secularist criticism of Christianity and of religious belief in general is one of continuing interest to our readers, judging from the discussions just of two recent “On the Square” articles, David B. Hart’s The Perniciously Persistent Myths of Hypatia and the Great Library and Edward T. Oakes’ Atheism’s Just So Scenarios .

Someone I know said that this kind of thing proves how insecure and defensive are religious believers, who are always worried that the skeptics are really right and pounce on every skeptical argument to convince themselves the skeptics are wrong.

That may be true in some cases, but I suspect it’s true in as many or more cases that they find the secularist arguments just temptingly bad. When they read something by a “new atheist,” they react to it the way a tennis player standing at the net does to a weak return floating in the air above him: he’s just got to smash it.

I had an experience something like that, as a secular-minded young man. I was blessed, looking at it now, to have been put off by the secularists’ dogmatism. A secular teacher or friend or a secularist writer of note would declare that God did not exist or that a particular belief was incredible,  and I would wonder how he could be so sure. Friends and teachers would sweep away the supernatural with all the confidence of the Fundamentalists they laughed at, and with fewer arguments than the Fundamentalists offered.

They would declare, for example, that the rational man simply couldn’t believe the claim that a man rose from the dead. When you’re dead, you’re dead. But since most people can’t live with this reality, they invent the idea of life after death, and in the first century this wish was attached to a particularly popular preacher and was developed into what we know as Christianity. You don’t want to die, claim that someone rose again a long, long time ago, and that he’ll save you too.

This seemed to me likely, but still, I always wondered, how could they know? How could they be so sure that they knew the universe so intimately that they could rule out life after death? How could they know that the idea of an Incarnation and a Resurrection was intrinsically impossible? How could they be so confident that the religious didn’t sense something they didn’t sense, like the possibility that we hope for a next world because we were made for that world?

I saw, as did many of my friends, that if God existed, he might not make himself known in the ways they required. How could we predict what God would offer us and why? If he existed, he didn’t come to you on your terms. He came on his, and he might prove somewhat indifferent to your demands.

And even then I saw that he might make himself known in ways the secularist would refuse to see, and that the atheist may have made himself unable to see the evidence, no matter how clear it is. I had no confidence that my atheist friends and teachers wanted to meet God, because God was likely to prove excessively disruptive. I wasn’t excited by the possibility of meeting Him.

At any rate, if religious people do jump on the “new atheists” because they’re afraid the “new atheists” are right, it might equally plausibly be argued that the new atheists jump on religious believers because they’re worried that the religious believers are right. That would explain the peculiar and sustained energy they put into attacking an idea they think too absurd to be believed.