This past Sunday, I finished up a five-week series called Why Believe?, where I tried to answer some of the major objections people have to the Christian faith and the God of the Bible.  I have found the series to be very strengthening for my faith, yet at the same time incredibly challenging as I spent a great deal of time reading and listening seriously to the objections that people have.  The general attitude of many of the new atheist books has been summed up as “God isn’t real, and frankly, I don’t like him very much either,” and believers in God are generally characterized as unsophisticated, pre-scientific, arrogant people who enjoy having someone tell them what to do and have serious wish-fulfillment issues.  While I have heard many fair criticisms that should motivate believers towards repentance and discipleship to the true gospel of Jesus, I obviously disagree with their main conclusion and much of the route by which they get there.

I wanted to end my interaction with the objections to the faith today by dealing with a challenge that Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, throws out in his book and in most talks I have seen him give.  His challenge is meant to communicate the fundamental unnecessariness of religion, and goes something like this:

“It is argued that some religious people have done great things that have been motivated by their faith… Here is my challenge:  name me an ethical statement that was made or a moral action performed by a religious person in the name of faith that could not have been uttered or done by a person not of faith.  So far, none have succeeded in finding one.  Now, think of a wicked thing said or evil thing done by a person of faith in the name of faith.  No one should have a second of hesitation thinking of one.”

Hitchens’ point is that we have no problem seeing the harm that religious people have done in the world – as he puts it, suicide bombers are all men of great faith.  However, there is no benefit that religion provides that we could not get from someone without faith.  The most common response he receives, he says, is Martin Luther King Jr., but Hitchens always finds a way to explain the answers away (usually by downplaying religion as their primary motivator or highlighting those who have done similar things without faith as a motivator).  His conclusion is that since religion provides no benefit that a person of faith could not provide, the world would be a better place if there were no religion.

I obviously disagree with Hitchens.  Let me answer him by saying three things:

1) I am not sure the lack of a convincing answer to Hitchens’ challenge accomplishes what he thinks it does.  The Christian teaching is that every human being is created in the image of God.  One of the implications of this is that every human is capable of doing incredible acts of love, goodness, and creativity.  This means that we are not surprised when people of other religions or of no religion at all act in ways that are moral; in fact, we should expect that there will be people who do not follow Christ who are more moral than we are.  Therefore, to prove that there is no ethical statement made or moral action performed by a religious person that could not have been performed by a person of no faith, in the end proves nothing.

2) Hitchens is right to point out all the horrible things people have done in the name of religion, and in fact is in good company when he does that.  After all, Jesus himself spent plenty of time railing against the religious leaders of his day for how they had perverted the beauty of faith in God.  For example: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are” (Matthew 23:15).  Ironically, Jesus sounds almost like Hitchens in his anger against how religion can cause great destruction!  However, it should be fairly obvious that people have used just about everything to cause harm, and religion is no exception.  The flip side of the nature of man, Biblically-speaking, is of course that while we are all created in God’s image, we are all fallen as well, capable of incredible acts of wickedness and self-centeredness at the expense of the rest of the world.  In my opinion, a more accurate title for the book would have been We are not Great:  How People Poison Everything.

For example, look at this list of the worst genocides of the last 100 years, according to National Geographic:

China (1960s, 1970s), 30 million dead
USSR (1920s, 1930s, 1940s), 20 million dead
Germany (1930s, 1940s), 11.4 million dead
Japan (1930s, 1940s), 10 million dead
Pakistan (1970s), 3.1 million dead
Sudan (1960s, present day), 2.8 million dead
Nigeria (1960s), 2 million dead
Afghanistan (1980s), 1.8 million dead
Cambodia (1970s), 1.7 million dead
Turkey (1910s, 1920s), 1.5 million dead
Indonesia (1970s, 1980s), 1.2 million dead
Rwanda (1990s), 1 million dead
India (1940s), 1 million dead
(Source: Barbara Harff, National Geographic, Jan 2006, p. 30)

 As much as atheists love to point out all the wars fought in the name of religion, this list shows that by far the greatest injustices have been done in countries that have tried to either suppress religion or exploit it for political gain.  Hitchens argues his way out of lists like this by linking the leaders of these genocides to religion however he can (like claiming that Stalin could not have wielded so much power without an Orthodox Church that taught the head of the state was the head of the church), and by claiming his answer is a society founded on the ideals of humanists like Voltaire, Spinoza, Jefferson, Paine, etc., not a society like the ones listed above.  I think a fairer conclusion from the evidence is that people have used anything and everything in their quest for power, and that suppression of religious freedom is usually the grounds for the worst kinds of evil.

 3) Finally, the only answer to his challenge, from a Christian perspective, has to be Jesus.  Certainly the Christian faith is not about the great things man has done, but the great thing God has done for us in the midst of the world we have broken.  The only true “moral action performed by a person of faith that could not have been done by a person without faith” would have to be Jesus living a sinless life, taking on the full weight of sin and evil on the cross, experiencing Hell, rising from the dead, and conquering death.  Really, people can bluster all they want about the horrible things that have been done in the name of religion, and all the things they don’t like about the Biblical God, but in the end (and this has been the point of my whole series) it comes down to this:  either Jesus lived a sinless life, died for the sins of the world, and rose again to conquer sin and death, or he did not.  If that is all a myth, then none of the other arguments or side issues really matter. 

But if Jesus really did rise from the dead… then despite all the horrible things that have been done in His name, despite all the things we may not understand about God and life from our perspective, and despite all the vehement protests of those who dislike religion… Jesus really is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6).  That is the central answer to all the objections – investigate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for yourself, and then evaluate everything else in the light of that reality.

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