Why I Believe (1): Letter 9 to Common Sense Atheist
Greetings, Luke,
I have just come home from the National Conference on Christian Apologetics, a truly great experience, where the final event was something you would have enjoyed too: a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. I did not meet either of them personally, but sitting on the front row I was struck with something that I hope nobody involved in these dialogues will ever forget: They are human beings.
I could not tell you the question of the debate in exact words, but it had to do with how we ought to respond to radical Islam. Hitchens had the first statement, and there wasn’t a word in what he said that I could disagree with.1 He is very concerned for the future of the Western world, in view of many persons’ unwillingness to see terrorism for what it is (especially following the Fort Hood massacre). He was brilliant on that topic.
Speaking to all readers now, I don’t know whether your inclination is more to believe Hitchens or D’Souza on Christianity. Either way it might do you good (as it did for me) to see them giving each other a hug, and to be reminded that even though we all differ in many ways, we share so much that we ought not to regard one another as less than brothers or sisters in humanity.
To do this is not always easy. I came home from the conference to find out that a friend, fellow church member, our car mechanic, had been killed by an angry intruder in his home. The suspect has apparently turned himself in; he is being held on first-degree murder charges. I don’t know the suspect personally, and I really don’t know anything more about what happened, except that I cannot imagine my friend doing anything to incite anything remotely approaching the anger he experienced. He is (I have to say “was” now; that’s painful) just a really good guy. It is upsetting beyond imagination.
It’s hard to make sense out of being human. This is the post I’ve been planning to write for several days, but it’s a lot more emotionally charged than I had expected it to be. The feelings fit the topic, however.
The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was. Though there never was a time when everybody thought the Christian view reality made sense, still there was a time not long ago in the Western world when a lot more people viewed it that way than do now. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting it as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.
The story I want to tell begins with what we all know best: ourselves. Christianity makes good sense of the human condition. How did we get to be so marvelous and yet so miserable at the same time? Why are we so good and so bad? Someone at the conference I attended this weekend put it this way: the lion eats the antelope. It does not strategize or conspire to wipe out entire herds. It doesn’t even think of eliminating the whole neighboring pride of lions. We can be very, very bad indeed.
But no animal can be as good and loving as a human can. No animal rings bells at Christmastime for the poor among them. Apart from the communication/awareness problem, it’s hard to imagine any animal caring for cyclone or tsunami victims on the far side of the world.
It’s especially hard to think of animals seeing their moral faults and weaknesses, trying to improve themselves, believing they ought to be better.
We are a very confused lot. No one has expressed this better than Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées.
The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. (100)2
“Full of faults and wants,” and full of contradictions. Nothing else we know of has an experience at all like this:
The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable. All these same miseries prove man’s greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, of a deposed king. (397, 398)
A tree does not know its misery. An animal may certainly know its pain, but what does it know of greatness? There is no such paradox in its experience.
The universe, for all its vastness, has nothing on us small humans:
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. (347)
Where does this sense of great wretchedness, or wretched greatness, come from? The naturalistic story is that we have arisen out of the animal kingdom; but no, not out of it at all, for we are part of it. Pascal sees the answer in our having descended: not as in Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” in which we are the children of the animals, but as in having descended from a higher, better condition in which we were originally intended to live.
The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.
For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? Was Paulus Æmilius unhappy at being no longer consul? On the contrary, everybody thought him happy in having been consul, because the office could only be held for a time. But men thought Perseus so unhappy in being no longer king, because the condition of kingship implied his being always king, that they thought it strange that he endured life. Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none. (409)
From an evolutionary perspective this is a puzzle. At the moment in our history when we supposedly developed this unhappiness, what was its adaptive value? How did the first discontented men or women bear more offspring? How did the first population that said, “We are not as good as we should be,” outstrip other competing populations in making babies that lived to make others? How does it even make sense today to regard our failures as failures? For no other organism seems to depend on this sense for its survival.
I know there are evolutionary psychological answers to these questions. Set aside for now that I think evo-psych is about the ultimate in evidence-free “science.” Let me suggest that even if there is some plausibility in its stories of human altruism, they are pale, thin, and watery compared to what we know about our own real selves.
Judeo-Christianity’s perspective on this paradox is utterly unique. Pascal says,
All these contradictions, which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of religion, have led me most quickly to the true one. (424)
The Judeo-Christian view is that we have indeed descended from a height. We were made in the image of God, intended to live in harmony with him, living a truly good existence, enjoying life in our physical, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions. But we rebelled. We chose against that goodness, and tried to develop an alternate one of our own. (The original source of this is in Genesis 3.) The image of God is still present upon us, and the awareness of something better is not lost. But it is certainly marred.
No other religion has recognised that man is the most excellent creature. Some, which have quite recognised the reality of his excellence, have considered as mean and ungrateful the low opinions which men naturally have of themselves; and others, which have thoroughly recognised how real is this vileness, have treated with proud ridicule those feelings of greatness, which are equally natural to man.
“Lift your eyes to God,” say the first; “see Him whom you resemble, and who has created you to worship Him. You can make yourselves like unto Him; wisdom will make you equal to Him, if you will follow it.” “Raise your heads, free men,” says Epictetus. And others say, “Bend your eyes to the earth, wretched worm that you are, and consider the brutes whose companion you are.”
What, then, will man become? Will he be equal to God or the brutes? What a frightful difference! What, then, shall we be? Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he anxiously seeks it, that he cannot find it again? And who shall then direct him to it? The greatest men have failed. (431)
…
After having understood the whole nature of man.—That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the Christian has known this? (433)
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!
… Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God. For in fact, if man had never been corrupt, he would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had always been corrupt, he would have no idea of truth or bliss. But, wretched as we are, and more so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of happiness, and cannot reach it. We perceive an image of truth, and possess only a lie. Incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge, we have thus been manifestly in a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen.
I could quote Pascal for pages, but I’ll restrain myself finally here.
To summarize, we all know that there is a good, that the good can be known, that the good is real, and that we are meant to aspire to it. Other systems, like evo-psych, can shoehorn something similar into their overall perspectives, but in most (or perhaps all) of them this paradox is solved in an ad hoc, uncomfortably fitting kind of way. In Christianity it is core, it fits, it belongs. It explains how we know murder is wrong, but how we can do it to each other anyway. It explains what Solzhenitsyn called the line dividing good and evil, which “cuts through the heart of every human being”—yours and mine. Christianity makes sense in terms of what we know to be true about ourselves.
It has an ultimate solution to the paradox, too. I’ll just allude to it briefly, by way of Pascal once again:
The knowledge of God without that of man’s misery causes pride. The knowledge of man’s misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery. (526)
…
Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair. (527)
This is not the whole reason I believe, and certainly not offered here as proof of the Christian faith. But it is one reason the Christian faith makes sense. I’m content with that for a start.