Deconstructing New Atheism & Defending Christian Hope
Introduction 2. Everything I have written here is probably near nonsense in comparison to the truth. I do not have faith in it, but if it helps translate something of God’s truth then I consider it worthwhile. I pray that God will forgive me for the inaccuracies. He has asked us to use our minds in his service, and this is my attempt to do so. However, I do not think this outline represents the ultimate truth about reality. Humans are too limited to fully integrate the immense number of variables at work in this world. I am not an expert in all the fields I have tried to cover in this outline, nobody is, and yet every human needs to find answers related to these big issues. Everyone now has access to a free education in any field via the internet, and I studied many such resources before writing.
Introduction 3. Everything can be reinterpreted if you start with different axioms (first principles). Everything looks different if you start out with God. Everything looks different if you choose another god. Everything looks different if you start with a programmer who designed our reality as a simulation. Everything looks different if you start out with materialism (the idea that only matter exists). Everything looks different if you think the world is a product of your own imagination. The starting point changes everything. Can humans accurately choose between different starting points? We might be able to make an informed choice, but few starting points can be totally disproven. We should probably not trust ourselves too much after considering how our minds deceive us every night in our dreams. If we cannot distinguish between dreams and reality then how much less should we trust our judgements about God, a simulation programmer, or materialism?
Atheism 1. Atheists often claim the burden of proof is on religious people to prove God exists. However, you cannot always prove something in a way that satisfies your opponent. If you debated a solipsist, a person who believes the external world is a product of his own imagination, you would be incapable of proving your own existence. The solipsist would continue demanding absolute proof that you existed. The problem is that solipsism is unfalsifiable, and therefore the solipsist could continue responding that your proof was invalid because it was just another product of his own imagination. The burden of proof is on the skeptic to prove his negative (that you do not exist). There are less extreme examples, a person might refuse to believe that your grandmother is from New York because you cannot present legal documents to prove her origin (perhaps they were lost). Even if your grandmother really is from New York, there is no way to convince a skeptic who demands a type of proof that cannot be provided. Skeptics are not correct because they are skeptical, and they are often completely wrong. Almost nobody demands genetic proof that their mother is really their mother, and a mother would be right to push the burden of proof back on her skeptical child: “What proof do you have that I am not your mother? You have always assumed I am your mother.” The solipsist, skeptic, and child all make demands for proof comparable to the demands made by atheists on those who believe in God, but these demands have no effect on God’s actual existence whether or not the atheists receive the kind of proof they seek. An atheist can win an argument and yet be totally wrong about whether God exists. God does not care if the proof for his existence rises to the level demanded by atheists, and most humans throughout history have not needed the level of proof that atheists demand to conclude that God, or gods, exist. Furthermore, such skepticism is antisocial and would destroy the foundations of human cooperation. Societies are correct to push the burden of proof on revolutionaries who make bold claims. Almost all human societies have believed in deity since the beginning of history. When skeptics demand that people prove that gods exist, their societies, like the hypothetical mother mentioned earlier, are right to push the burden of proof back on them: “What proof do you have that gods do not exist? We have always believed in gods.” In the absence of convincing proof, why should society abandon something it has always believed in? There is no convincing proof that gods do not exist, and that is why atheists need to reverse the burden of proof. If a solipsist murders someone, the burden of proof is on him to prove that the person he murdered does not really exist. No society would accept a solipsist’s extreme skepticism as a logical basis for justice. Similarly, why should society operate on the extreme skepticism of atheists and assume there is no God? Where is the convincing proof that for thousands of years all our ancestors were wrong to believe in gods? I do not mean to say that religious people should never provide proofs, but it should be stated that we are not logically obligated to provide them. A mother is not obligated to genetically prove herself to be the mother of her own child, but most mothers would take such measures if their children developed serious doubts. Atheists usually respond to this kind of rebuttal by demanding to know which of the many gods you believe in (the implication being that you disbelieve in every god but your own), but this is mostly irrelevant to the core atheist claim that no gods exist. Questions about which god is the true God are questions of comparative religion that are largely unrelated to atheism.
Atheism 2. Logical positivism is the philosophical foundation of the contemporary atheist movement. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, this philosophy is “characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless.” Atheists often make claims like: “there is no scientific proof for God, therefore it is meaningless to claim he exists.” The problem is that logical positivism’s claims cannot themselves be scientifically verified, and thus the philosophy implodes on itself. Another problem with this way of thinking is that it renders meaningless a huge range of human communication. Statements like “I love you” cannot be scientifically verified and are thus considered meaningless by atheistic philosophy. Wikipedia closes its introduction to logical positivism by stating that it “died” in the 1960s. It is difficult to find any modern academic who embraces logical positivism (such is the extent of its collapse). Contemporary atheists have failed to keep up with philosophical developments, but this should be expected because the public effects of new philosophy often lag by several decades.
Atheism 3. Many atheists claim humans should ignore the possibility of God’s existence for the sake of scientific progress. They believe that if humans are allowed to explain things using God, they will become intellectually lazy and cease exploring. There are at least two reasons this argument is weak. Firstly, as Lawrence Principe pointed out in his ‘Very Short Introduction’, probably every major figure involved in jumpstarting the scientific revolution was a passionate theist, and almost all of them were orthodox Christians. Atheists usually respond to this historical fact by claiming these early scientists were “secret atheists” cowered into religion by social pressure. However, this is not the impression one gets when reading these men’s writings, and it is not the opinion of these men’s major biographers. Secondly, atheists cannot explain how belief in God negatively correlates with scientific exploration. Numerous Christian thinkers have explained science as exploring God’s mind by exploring his design. Belief in God allows humans to imagine the universe as a created understandable masterpiece, and it could be argued that atheism leads to a chaotic understanding of an allegedly meaningless universe. By seeing the universe as a product of mind, humans can conceive of it as a thing we can understand and identify with.
Atheism 4. Atheism reduces humans to the level of animals, and animals can be killed and eaten for dinner. How can human rights be justified if humans are equivalent to the meat served at McDonalds? Can some humans breed and butcher other humans? If not, why not? Is eating meat evil? The atheist has two possible answers, and both undermine the foundations of morality in different ways. If cannibalism is evil, then eating a cow is evil. However, the more important issue is that atheism cannot discuss good and evil as religion can.
Religion 1. What is religion? Scholars do not agree, but I think the word is commonly used in reference to what a society regards as sacred axioms (first principles that must be assumed). Sacred means “set apart”, and the sacred is usually set apart from criticism. This is too simple because Christians are permitted to criticize God, and Biblical characters criticized him without sinning, but I think this definition decently covers the range of both ancient religions like Christianity and modern ideologies like Marxism. For example, in communist China dialectical materialism is taken as a sacred axiom that cannot be criticized. Chinese students have told me they were taught not to question this philosophy because it had to be taken as a first principle. Dialectical materialism is an atheistic axiom of Marxism, and communist China is an officially atheist Marxist state. I believe Marxism is essentially a religion complete with a moral value system and eschatology. The New Atheist movement, which includes nearly all atheists since around 2005, assume logical positivism as a kind of sacred axiom that must be assumed prior to any argument with a theist. I would not yet call New Atheism a religion, but it looks like one if we define religion as a community’s sacred axioms. New Atheism could be a religion in the process of forming.
Religion 2. What is spirit? Is spirit non-physical? Why do ancient books like the Bible compare spirit to breath and fire? Can spirit be reinterpreted in the age of cloud computing? How similar is spirit to things like energy or data? Are religion and technology simply different vocabularies that could be unified? In his 1958 book ‘Physics and Philosophy’, Warner Heisenberg, a key quantum mechanics pioneer, argued that the nineteenth century’s tendency to interpret classical physics in philosophically materialistic ways, which led to ideas like Marxist dialectical materialism, have been discredited by developments in quantum physics. The world does not seem to be fated by the sub-atomic interactions of matter. However, I am not yet acquainted with any serious theological effort to integrate the vocabularies of religion and spirituality with modern science and technology.
Evolution 1. My personal research has led me to the conclusion that “evolution” is a poorly defined term that includes natural selection, genetic drift within a species (microevolution), speciation (becoming a new species), and other components. Most Christians, even fundamentalists, believe in about half of what is often labeled “evolution”, but what they disagree with are the claims made about the alleged decent of species that occurred long ago in deep history. Christians can say “I believe in evolution” while disbelieving that humans emerged from apes (macroevolution).
Evolution 2. Macroevolution has an un-testability and reproducibility problem. To remedy this, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski set up a long-term experiment in which he established 12 populations of E. coli bacteria and watched them develop over the years. The 12 populations have now been observed for around 75,000 generations. None of the E. coli have speciated, and the biggest observed mutation occurred in just one of the 12 populations, compounding the reproducibility problem, and this mutation only involved the bacteria gaining the ability to do something that had already been observed in other E. coli populations (the ability was not new to the species). We allegedly have something like 16,000 years of observable change in domestic dogs resulting from both natural and artificial selection. However, we have not observed speciation. It is important to recognize a difference between social and genetic speciation. Some breeds will not mate with other breeds of the same species for various reasons that might be compared to racism, but this does not represent genetic speciation. I personally question the viability of macroevolution because it seems unreasonable to assume that it created earth’s broad biodiversity if nothing approaching speciation occurred in 12 populations and 75,000 generations of observed change. A Darwinian will respond by claiming 75,000 generations is only a tiny fraction of life’s alleged three to four billion years on earth. But this response is problematic because it implies that we must simply trust that macroevolution happened at some point in the unobservable past. It feels as though Darwinians simply push back the need for evidence into a magical space called “100s of millions of years”. If we see almost nothing happen in 75,000 generations then why would we assume something would happen in 150,000? One observer who commented on Lenski’s experiment said that the “holy grail of evolution, speciation”, has not been observed (social speciation has been observed, but genetic speciation has not).
Evolution 3. Richard Lenski’s experiment observed 75,000 generations of E. coli. If we make an imperfect comparison with 75,000 generations of apes, we could say Lenski observed the equivalent of 1,117,000 years of human evolution (chimpanzee females have their first child at age 14.9). This is roughly equivalent to 20% of the alleged six million years since chimp and human ancestors genetically split (after millions of years of hybridizing). How did the human species evolve from chimp like ancestors in the last 80% of our evolutionary history if no progress was made in the first 20%? What can we expect to see in the last 80% that we could not see in the first 20%? Is there a watershed number, like 53%, at which we suddenly see progress towards speciation? How does the difference between the complexity of apes and E. coli effect this? It is unfortunate that we must try to extrapolate data from E. coli to speculate about ape evolution, but that is because the data is so sparse, and macroevolution is so untestable. Personally, I want to see more observational and experimental proof of macroevolution before I accept it. Good speculation is not enough, there have been numerous scientific consensuses throughout history that have completely collapsed. Among the most famous of these was the geocentric solar system which remained scientific consensus for over two thousand years. Macroevolution might be a good theory, but it is far from definite truth. As one biochemist suggested, evolution should only be accepted as a good story.
Evolution 4. There are numerous ways in which macroevolutionary theory does not seem to comport with our observed data. In ‘The Blind Watchmaker,’ Richard Dawkins spends numerous pages discussing the phenomenon of convergent evolution. He describes several unrelated species who have allegedly evolved similar highly specialized complex systems. Humans and octopus possess similar eyes despite their great distance from each other on the evolutionary tree of life. Some cave birds use bat-like echolocation despite being unrelated to bats. Some eels and fish have both evolved their bodies into electric batteries despite having no relation to each other. Unrelated cicada species are said to have independently evolved a life cycle around the seemingly arbitrary years of 13 and 17. How did a few random species of birds evolve a complex bat like echolocation system while none of their associated relations did? Perhaps there is some satisfying Darwinian explanation for convergent evolution, but the point is that macroevolutionary theory and taxonomy is not a perfect fit with the world we observe. It too, like the geocentric solar system, remains susceptible to being overthrown by a better theory.
Evolution 5. A scientific consensus appears to be forming, perhaps it has already formed, that abiogenesis, the idea that the original ancestral life form spontaneously generated, is not statistically possible. Scientists have been trying to synthetically create life in laboratories for decades using the most advanced technology available, but they have not succeeded. They have not figured out, even theoretically, how life could have emerged. The most basic life form requires extreme complexity. The first life forms almost certainly needed DNA and fully operational molecular machines. How could this complexity arise from lightening striking a pool of organic slime? Scientists who hold out hope that abiogenesis could have happened tend to hypothesize about how the early earth might have been more favorable to abiogenesis, and scientists have tried to recreate this alleged early earth by shooting electricity through various organic slimes in hopes that something like life might appear. However, nothing beyond the most primitive materials have been observed to form. Large numbers of papers have been published on this topic, and the original mid-nineteenth century optimism has evaporated. Abiogenesis has become so unlikely that atheists like Richard Dawkins have attempted to avoid the possibility of a God by suggesting that life may have been seeded on earth by aliens (despite aliens falling under intelligent design theory). Some scientists have embraced non-alien panspermia which claims life may have migrated to earth from other worlds by hitching rides on asteroids. However, there are major problems with this panspermia hypothesis. How would life be ejected from one planet into outer space? How would it survive interstellar travel? How would it survive the exit and entrance of different atmospheres?
Evolution 6. Do we have any well observed examples of significant complexity emerging through unintelligent natural processes? Crystals are the most commonly cited examples, but they are exponentially less complex than the simplest life forms we can imagine (the simplest cell ever found has 516 genes). Some would cite star formation. This is controversial because we cannot directly observe stars forming (only alleged snapshots of different stages of the process), but even stars are significantly less complex than the simplest life forms. If we have never observed the spontaneous formation of anything as complex as life, then why would we assume that life spontaneously formed and then somehow, over three billion years, became a human brain? How many statistical miracles would this process require? There is something weird about claiming God cannot exist while simultaneously claiming humans were created by a statistically miraculous process.
Evolution 7. Most atheists believe in a semi-magical world that created life, and they call this world “earth 4 billion years ago”. It has nothing in common with the earth we now inhabit, and it can never be observed nor fully understood. Perhaps this world did exist, but we will never know for sure. We are simply asked to put our faith in this world.
Evolution 8. Perhaps the biggest unexplained and ignored evolutionary jump is how non-life gained a will to live and reproduce. Crystals form, but they do not desire survival nor reproduction. They do not recognize their own existence. They do not care what happens to them. “They” do not even exist as beings. Where did the will to live and the will to reproduce come from? It is easier for me to believe that a mouse evolved into a human than that a rock developed the will to live and reproduce. Even the simplest life forms have a will, and yet non-life exhibits nothing resembling one.
Evolution 9. Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ is a defense of the neo-Darwinian synthesis that emerged in the middle of the 1900s. Most of the book is a good example of how anyone with enough debating skills can spin an excuse for their chosen metanarrative (totalizing worldview). Is Darwinism just another metanarrative waiting to be deconstructed by postmodernity? I can brainstorm ten reasons why the Flying Spaghetti Monster really exists, and then I can think of ten reasons he does not exist, and then I can deconstruct those ten reasons and return to his existence. The internet is full of this kind of thing, and you can find enough material and cited sources to be certain both that the world is flat and that it is not flat in a week before realizing you do not have enough time to do all the research necessary to reach certainty on the question. You can repeat this process when trying to find out “who really rules the world”: lizard people, Jews, the Illuminati, the white man, or the Pizza Gate crowd. Information overload causes fatigue, and then everyone retreats into cat videos and individualistic self-help. Nobody knows what actually happened 100 million years ago, but a lot people can spin stories with cited sources to “prove” their chosen metanarrative. Dawkins wrote that he could not have become an atheist without Darwin’s explanation of life’s origin and complexity, and this suggests to me that Darwinism is a component of Dawkins’ metanarrative faith. He is forced to defend Darwinism to maintain his faith, its survival is crucial to his whole worldview. But modernity is over, it was deconstructed by the internet, and the era of Darwinian materialism is likely coming to an end.
Evolution 10. The anthropic principle is circular reasoning: “Life and the universe exist and thus my improbable materialistic explanation for them must be true. I know this because life and the universe came into existence.” This is not a logical argument, it is just a way to dismiss the problem that the universe looks designed. Atheists often counter that religion also uses circular reasoning. Perhaps, but at least we know atheism is no better than religion at escaping that problem.
Evolution 11. When we consider that scientists do not know why the Big Bang happened, that most of them recognize the statistical impossibility of life spontaneously generating on earth, and that macroevolution is unobservable and nearly untestable we end up with an intellectual situation comparable to the one we had 500 years ago. Certain theories like the geocentric solar system have been disproven, but the big questions about how the universe came into existence, how life began, and how exactly humans arrived on the scene have not been satisfactorily answered by secular science any better than by religion. Even if some form of macroevolution proves true, which seems possible considering the DNA evidence for common decent, how could we ever know for sure whether it was guided intelligently or by Dawkins’ blind watchmaker? The “God of the gaps” has just as many gaps to hide in nowadays as he had during the Renaissance. Numerous theological systems argue for a deterministic universe set in motion by an all-knowing God who predestined history and no longer interferes in it. If this is true, God only needs one gap to hide in, and that gap is the untestable unknowable moment before the Big Bang (or whatever happened at the beginning). It is also important to remember that atheistic abiogenesis and macroevolution have their own gaps problem. Defenses of these ideas usually devolve into something like: “Anything can happen in billions of years, and our small minds cannot comprehend the evolutionary possibilities contained in such huge time periods.” Atheists are searching for an “abiogenesis and macroevolution of the gaps.” They have created an unobservable four-billion-year gap in which these twin pillars of their ideology are hiding. Some of Charles Darwin’s earliest critics suggested that evolution just pushed its observability problem back into an abyss of time and therefore rendered itself incapable of being rigorously tested. It seems the situation has not improved much since the 1850s.
Design 1. The universe exists, the universe is complex, the universe contradicts the long-term implications of entropy. This is a problem in need of a solution, and it is evidence in favor of a force that acts against entropy at various intervals in history. Gods have been theorized throughout history to account for order and complexity against the expected results of an eternal entropy. Some people do not like gods as an explanation, but their own theories to replace gods are equally theoretical and lacking in evidence. So, the God hypothesis is at least as scientific as any other, and it has the benefit of being mankind’s default explanation.
Design 2. Computer programming is widespread in the twenty first century, and we see what looks like programming languages in DNA and the math behind physical laws. Why would we not assume the existence of a universal programmer? Several prominent thinkers have concluded that we likely live in a programmed simulation. MIT professor Rizwan Virk said the likelihood of our universe being a simulation is somewhere between 50 and 100 percent. Elon Musk is even more certain, he said there is only one chance in a billion that we are not living in a simulation. Musk used the rapid advance of online gaming and the future of augmented reality to support his theory. If this world is a video game, and we are the characters, then why would we assume there is no programmer and no meaning to our lives? Why would someone program a meaningless video game? Video games are almost always designed with directions and goals for characters and players. Personally, I think this is among the most significant evidence for a god.
Design 3. Richard Dawkins’ argument against intelligent design, which he crams into just two paragraphs at the end of ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ after repeatedly mocking creationism, is that God cannot be used to explain the origin and complexity of life because he is more complex than the system he is being used to explain. This argument is not very satisfying in an age of video games and virtual reality. We can easily imagine a sentient video game character claiming it was impossible to believe in a programmer because a programmer would have to be more complex than the video game he was being used to explain. The character might claim it is illogical to theorize the existence of a programmer, but his logic would be wrong. Logical theorizing can only extend so far before it runs into the wall of reality.
Design 4. As far as we know, earth is at the center of the universe. The earth is the only known planet with life, and human brains are the most complex living objects. The earth is the center of complexity and consciousness. It appears that humans are the thing most capable of understanding the universe, and it seems reasonable to imagine that the thing most able to understand the universe is also the thing that most resembles the unifying principle of the universe (the thing causing universal scientific laws). Man is the most complex thing, the thing most encompassing of the universes’ attributes (matter, energy, life, consciousness, logic). If the universe can create man then maybe the universe, or its programmer, can do what man can do (consciously think). If there is a God, it seems he would resemble man more than anything else. Our scientific research and exploration suggests that the earth is at the center of the universe in more important ways than geocentrism previously suggested.
Design 5. There is evidence that a designer answers prayer: religious people live longer, religious people report greater happiness in most countries, and religious people are more involved in building communities. Most people pray for health, happiness, and good relationships, and it appears that religion helps with all of these. It seems the designer wants us to be religious, but who is this designer?
Gods 1. Possibly the most common atheist attack on Christians is the question: “Which of the thousands of gods is the real one?” or “Why do you believe in your God and not all the others?” They often equate the extinct cults of Thor or Zeus with Christianity. I believe this attack is invalid, however, because it ignores the verdict of history and philosophy. Most Christian nations converted voluntarily because they recognized Christianity as superior; and, in philosophy, monotheism has always been the dominant preference. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, and the second largest, Islam, shares Christianity’s basic worldview. Christianity and Islam are both growing rapidly. The third largest religion is Hinduism, but it is mostly isolated within a single country. However, Hinduism shares the monotheistic assumption of a single high deity (there are monotheistic forms of Hinduism). Chinese folk religions also assume a high deity. Most religious thinkers throughout history have converged on a single high deity that somewhat resembles the Christian God. The term “gods” is problematic because it obscures the fact that most societies only believe in one actual God who is surrounded by a pantheon of lesser beings. These beings are translated “gods”, but they could probably also be described as angels, demons, or immortals. The Orthodox Church teaches that the process of salvation leads to deification, but it does not teach that humans can become God. Even within Christianity, the term “god” can be misleading. We could probably almost eliminate the category of polytheism if we used a different vocabulary. Ancient Greek philosophy’s “unmoved mover” has little in common with Zeus or Venus. The God of the Old Testament seems to resemble those gods a little, but he still looks more like an unmoved mover. Atheists ignore history and twist language when they pretend every god and cult are in the same category. There has never been much dispute about the existence of a single high deity.
Gods 2. Disagreements about God’s nature and identity are like disagreements about how gravity operates, multiple theories do not discredit the existence of a single correct truth. Atheists would not treat a scientific question the way they treat questions about God. They would not look at different theories of gravity and then assume that gravity does not exist because there are disagreements about its characteristics. The existence of fake Mono Lisa paintings proves the existence of a real Mono Lisa. No art critic would look at the millions of fake Mono Lisas around the world and assume that an original Mono Lisa never existed. People who lie about love do not render true love less real.
Gods 3. Among the proofs for the supreme deity being the God of the Old Testament are the prophesies that he would one day be worshiped around the world. The Prophet Jeremiah predicted the eventual global conquest of his God at a time when Yahweh seemed like little more than a neglected local deity of a failed nation state. However, several thousand years later, Jeremiah’s God has become the only deity recognized by most of humanity. An astounding turn of events. Can anyone deny that Jeremiah’s prophesy came true? Perhaps it was nothing more than a weird historical coincidence, but it does provide reason for hope.
Gods 4. Atheists often mock the book of Genesis as absurd (talking snakes, giants, global floods), and they often ask me how I manage to accept it as God’s word. I read Genesis as a condensed summary of early history written to communicate major truths to a mostly uneducated people. We should not expect Genesis to be using what we think of as scientific accuracy, but neither should we expect it to be factually incorrect. It is totally true within its own objectives. We might think it seems wrong in some details as it attempts to compress huge truths into condensed forms, in the same way that we expect children’s books to seem wrong from an academic perspective. Early Genesis seems to be written as a condensed myth. Even ancient people knew that a day could not pass before the sun was created. Bronze age society preferred to communicate in mythopoetic forms, and they did not regard these forms as inaccurate just because they were not scientific. It should be remembered that the literal fundamentalist interpretation of early Genesis was not the historical Church’s consensus, and it has probably been a minority opinion since at least Augustine. The Apostles and Early Church Fathers do not seem to have read the Old Testament as literally as modern fundamentalist do, and that is why we encounter seemingly weird allegorical interpretations in the New Testament that often make little sense to us. I do not have a definite position on Genesis, and I am open to both literal and allegorical possibilities. I agree with CS Lewis that Christianity is a “true myth”, and I extend that principle to the book of Genesis.
Gods 5. Christianity’s main rival, Islam, probably does not represent the truth about Jeremiah’s God. There are two main reasons for this. First, Mohamed never performed miracles to prove God sent him (there is some minor dispute about this, but it is generally agreed upon). Second, the Koran claims the Bible is inspired but then contradicts it numerous times in ways that suggest Mohamed was unaware of its contents. Islam internally contradicts itself in significant and easily recognizable ways.
Gods 6. There are reasons to believe Christianity’s primary claims are true. First, every contemporary source agrees that Jesus performed miracles. Even his enemies affirmed this. Second, God raised Jesus from the dead and thus communicated his approval of Jesus’ message. This resurrection was witnessed by hundreds of people who recorded their eyewitness accounts and were publicly executed in defense of their claims. Third, Jeremiah’s prophesy of Israel’s God being worshiped throughout the world was fulfilled through Christ and his Church (Islam only emerged in reaction to Christianity). Fourth, the arch of history makes more sense when viewed as the slow triumph of the Christian God and his Church.
Gods 7. Let us, for a moment, assume a position of radical skepticism that denies our ability to know whether we are living in base reality or whether this world is a programmed alien simulation or the product of our imagination. Even from this perspective, we can see that whatever is behind the world has made Christianity the central idea about human meaning that must be contended with. The world now agrees upon a dating system that counts the years in relation to Jesus’ birth. The year 2021 is two thousand twenty-one years after Jesus was born. History revolves around the coming of Christ. Christianity is the world’s largest religion in terms of both population and geographic spread. It appears that whatever designed the world thinks Christianity should be at the center of humanity’s search for meaning (the so-called “verdict of history”). This does not prove Christianity is true, but it does suggest we should take it seriously.
Gods 8. There is something special about the Church. It represents humanity’s highest political aspirations. Atheism builds nothing, but the Church is building the spiritual unity of mankind and moral communities of love and guidance. The Church is a society seeking to connect social status with virtue rather than with money and violence (as world governments do). The Church often fails to live up to its mission, but criticisms of it are legitimate only because of the high standards it holds itself to. The Church is still humanity’s best hope for world peace and global unity. Christianity is about the creation of moral community through the teachings and promises of Jesus, and that is a project I feel honored to put my hope in and contribute to. Even if Christianity is false, why would anyone oppose its main objectives? I believe Christianity offers the best answers to our questions about the meaning of existence.
Conclusion. Atheism provides no hope, builds nothing, and has no greater claim on truth than religion. New Atheism, and its myths, can be deconstructed like those of any other metanarrative. Christianity gives hope, builds moral community, and conforms to the truth. Our universe is increasingly being referred to as a programmed simulation, and that impression is strengthening with the advance of video games and virtual reality. The Programmer has likely created meaning for his characters, and Christianity is the dominant paradigm of meaning in this world. We have good reasons to wager our hope on Jesus.