December 30, 2008: "They Take Away People's Minds"

Years ago my brother Dave told me he read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian concurrently with C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, and that he would have liked to have seen a debate between those two. "Lewis would have destroyed Russell," he said.

Recently I read Russell's essay myself and found that my brother under-spoke. Why I Am Not A Christian strikes me as the work of a child. Granted, a very witty and smart-mouthed child - but a child nonetheless. Before reading it I assumed that the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and standard-bearer of 20th century atheism would at least be a worthy opponent for Lewis, and that bringing these two minds into dialogue would be a stimulating exercise. But it is not so. A "debate" between Lewis and Russell would have had all the sizzle of a grown-up corralling a boy who is just playing verbal "Gotcha!" and changing the subject every two minutes. Russell's colleague Alfred North Whitehead knew whereof he spoke when he told students at Harvard, "Bertie [Russell]...is simple-minded."

Two examples of what I mean:

Russell understands the "First Cause" argument to mean that everything has a cause, and notes, "If everything has a cause, then God must have a cause" (I heard Richard Dawkins make the same mistake in his debate with Oxford mathematician John Lennox, asking rhetorically: "If God made everything, who made God?"). But this point involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from causation! No theistic philosopher would be so stupid as to claim that everything has a cause; what has frequently been claimed (and I believe justly) is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The distinction between existing and beginning to exist is what the causation debate is all about! Russell's sleight-of-hand at this point is breath-taking, since later in the same paragraph he simply assumes an atheistic answer to the beginning-to-exist question without ever having noted (or noting himself?) that he has moved the debate onto different ground.

That which is truly eternal, which has no beginning, need not - and, I would argue, cannot - have a cause. The interesting question then, the one on which the whole debate turns, is whether the universe is eternal. I believe there are good reasons for believing it is not. (For an excellent discussion on this matter, please read chapter 5 of Lee Strobel's The Case For Creator, an interview with philosopher William Lane Craig.) But even if the universe were eternal in the only sense it could be - extending backward in time through an infinite succession of moments - it would still not have the kind of eternality which theists have traditionally claimed for God. God has been understood to be eternal in the sense of having existence outside of time, with "time", like "space", merely being things he might choose to enter or exit as a man would his own house. (Christians in fact understand that this is precisely what he did in the incarnation and ascension of Christ.)

Russell is playing a child's game when he asks, "If God made everything, who made God?" That is a question I first heard as a young teenager, along with, "If God is all-powerful, could he make a stone so big he couldn't move it?" Such questions did not impress me as profound even then, when I knew very little and had not read anything. They're barely worth the intellectual effort required to dismiss them.

A second example concerns one of Russell's attacks on Christian morality. He writes, "Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life.' And no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children." Russell calls this a "fiendish cruelty", one example among many of the ways the Church inflicts suffering on people.

Wait a minute. First of all, I personally do not undertake to defend any Catholic dogma that conflicts with Scripture, and Russell's attempts to condemn Christian faith because aberrant Romanist practices have attached themselves to it like leeches is simply illegitimate. Russell's point might better be made in an essay titled Why I Am Not A Catholic rather than Why I Am Not A Christian.

Second, Jesus explicitly taught that divorce was permissible in the case of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). A woman may freely divorce her adulterous husband - even as Joseph nearly divorced Mary on the suspicion of unfaithfulness (Matthew 1:18-19). If Russell had thought about it for two seconds, he would have seen that he actually agrees with biblical policy, and that what he finds cruel is Catholic repudiation of it!

Third, all brands of Christian faith teach faithfulness and chastity. It is not through following the Church's moral teaching that a man becomes syphilitic, but through rejecting it. If, on the other hand, a man adopted Russell's moral code and personal example, he might indeed become as syphilitic as Nietzsche (who died deranged of the disease), and give that wasting illness to his wife and kids too. The problem here is not with Christians who obey the Church's teaching, but with people - Christian or not - who defy it.

The intellectual poverty of Russell's essay puts me in mind of something my son Ben said when he was just three years old. It remains perhaps the one truly mystical experience of my life. When we were living in Colombia my wife and I took Ben to the beach one night to see a dance performance. We thought he would enjoy the spectacle of a bonfire and drums and energy and movement. As the first dance played out, it dawned on me that what we were watching was a reenactment of a frenzied pagan ritual. (The dancers had dressed as Chimila Indians; one character in a mask portrayed the devil who was tied up by others and then released.) Neither my wife nor I said anything, but when the dance ended, Ben said quietly, "They take away people's minds." We stared at our little boy and asked, "What did you say Ben?" and he repeated, in a small voice, "They take away people's minds."

We left immediately. Ben said nothing else, and we questioned him no further. But I felt that I had grasped the import of what was actually a prophetic statement - a word from God, if you will - and have reflected on it many times since. To "take away people's minds" is the work of demons. The forces arrayed against God have, as one of their goals, the corruption of human intellect. Though they may leave intact the IQ, and memory, and faculties of expression, they hinder the mind's ability to think rationally, and leave vacuous space where otherwise a mind might work to perceive spiritual truth and awaken to God.

I do not think that demons can do this to us without our permission, which we grant by sinning. I have known several former Christians who became "Russellitic" in their thoughts, and, for every last one of them, the loss of faith was preceded by (or at least accompanied by) obvious personal sin. The correlation in my experience is 100% exact,
and I do not regard it as coincidental. I have seen the correlation work the other way too. In discussing his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, "[I]t is significant that this...happened at a time when I was making a serious effort to obey my conscience." (in C. S. Lewis: Christian Reflections: "The Seeing Eye"). Submission to conscience brightens the mind, even as rebellion against it summons intellectual darkness.

In John 7:17 Jesus laid down a gauntlet challenge to any who might question whether he was speaking for God or blowing smoke out his ears. It was simple: do good. "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own." The best preparation for contemplating ultimate truth,
including the weighing of the claims of Christ, is to behave well. Do good. Submit humbly to the voice of conscience and divine authority, and watch where your thoughts go.

Or sin, and, apart from God's grace, you will manage to find verbal mush persuasive. Russell himself is the best example. He was an utterly despicable human being, a would-be genocidal maniac (see my November 18 essay) and serial cheater so enslaved to the urges of his genitalia that T. S. Eliot labeled him "Priapus in the shrubbery." (And that was before Russell seduced Eliot's wife!). If you go in that direction, abandoning your morals to the self-serving call of fallen human nature and despising the voice of duty, conscience and law, you risk having your mind taken away, and philosophical rubbish of the sort that Russell spouted may start making sense to you.