August 20, 2008: "What Is Christianity Mainly About?" (Part 1)

Last night on “Larry King Live” atheist Bill Maher voiced a complaint against Christianity. He said, "One thing I don't like about religion is that - ask any of the truly devout - it's not mainly about doing the right thing or being ethical. It's mainly about salvation. It's mainly about getting your butt saved when you die."

I suppose by Maher's standards I qualify as one of those "truly devout", but I do not answer, "This is mainly about getting our butts saved when we die" when asked what is central to the Christian faith. What, would I say, is our faith mainly about?

It is mainly about glorifying God. Ethical behavior, doing the right thing, is certainly one aspect of that. How can you glorify God if you displease him? Christians believe that God has commanded us to be pleasant and kind and gracious and honest and noble and generous, and not do things like cheat, lie, kill, steal, extort or insult. Moral goodness is bound up in Christian doctrine, and can't be bled or cut out of it. Ethics-less Christianity is no Christianity at all - it is a bloodless, boneless corpse.

Atheism, however, survives quite well without ethics. In fact, I have never been able to understand how atheism can build a theory of moral behavior that actually succeeds in urging anybody to do good. I am glad that Bill Maher wants to "do the right thing", and I hope he continues to want to do the right thing and does not think too hard about it. Because if he does think about it, he'll see (ask any atheist!) that morality reduces to social custom, which reduces to urges dictated by the competing claims of evolutionary biology, which reduces to chemical reactions in our brains and in our environment, which reduces to electrons jumping from the orbital of one atom to another under the precise laws of physics and the imprecise randomness of quantum mechanics, which reduces to, well, that's pretty much all there is! That is where the chain of moral reasoning stops. What then is to keep the atheist from torturing Guantanamo detainees or falsifying evidence to convict innocent men if, when he asks why he shouldn't, all he's got to answer to (or even formulate an answer with!) are atoms in his brain knocking about like ping pong balls in a lottery glass cage? For the Christian, though, at the end of every chain of moral reasoning (which in some contexts we might call "temptation"), there is a holy God wagging his finger and saying, "You must not do that bad thing."

Doing the right thing is packed hard into Christianity and distributed through every feature of it like crude oil in Canadian shale. Dig into atheism, however, and keep digging hard and deep, and you will bore a hole right through the center and come out the other side without ever having encountered a single thing to fuel good works with. I'm not saying atheists can't find reasons for doing good - I'm just saying they can't find them in atheism. Good atheists (I've known several) will then shrug their philosophical shoulders and say, "Well, I don't know why, but we should do good anyways." Bad atheists (though they are not logically inconsistent) will say, "Nietzsche was right," and, given power, will become our Stalins and Mussolinis and Pol Pots and Kim Jong Ils. Millions die as a result. How can you appeal to the conscience of someone who knows in his heart that conscience is an illusion - the mere froth of an evolutionary heritage that strong people can sweep away with a wave of their hand?

I think there is a reason why, when you go around the world and look for those who are rebuilding schools in New Orleans, rescuing AIDS orphans in Kenya, helping lepers in India, rebuilding the shattered lives of rape victims in the Congo - what you find are Christians, Christians, and more Christians, and virtually nobody representing the atheist and freethinker societies. It is not just because Christians outnumber atheists - though certainly that is a factor. It is because our religion commands us to do good no matter what.

More next week, Lord willing, on what our religion is mainly about.