Expecting People to Act Like Christians if They Reject Christ is a Fool’s Errand
All atheists are fools. Psalm. 14:1. But some are more honest than others. Alex O’Connor is one such. He is not a Pollyanna “cake and eat it too,” atheist like Jordon Peterson, who thinks one can have the benefits of Judeo-Christian morality without grounding that morality in an actual belief in God. He understands there are consequences when that belief is undermined. In this video, starting at 3:25, he talks about people like Peterson who seek the social utility of other people acting as if God exists even though the “smart” people “know” he does not. O’Connor concedes “that religion is good maybe even necessary for society.” Then, he asks an obvious question that Peterson never seems to consider: “What do you want me to do if I just don't think it's true?” He answers his own question in a profound and honest way:
Am I to just lie to my children, raise them believing something that I don't believe is the case, because I think it will somehow be beneficial to society? I don't think it works like that. I don't think people can actually fool themselves. Sure, you can act as if God exists, and that's what someone like Peterson says that people do already. But ultimately, if you just say, “Well I think that, you know, I should just act like a Christian because it's good for me,” then when push comes to shove and you really have to make a moral sacrifice, if you're not actually a Christian, you're probably not going to do the actually Christian thing.
This is exactly right. O’Connor refers to a poll in which people were asked if they would press a button if they could have a million dollars but some random person on earth would die. A majority responded they would push the button. And why wouldn’t an atheist push the button? If a person does not believe God exists and has said, “Thou shalt not kill,” why shouldn’t they gain a million dollars by acting on their actual beliefs? There is no good answer to that question.
O’Connor seems to be haunted by Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out.
The frequent rejoinder I hear from atheists is that atheists can be moral people. Of course they can. I have never denied this. What an atheist cannot do is ground his ethical choices in anything but arbitrary subjective preference. That is why no sane person actually makes moral choices as if materialism is true. And that is the difference. A Christian acts morally because he believes his most profound metaphysical commitments are actually true. The atheist acts morally only by suppressing his most profound metaphysical commitments. And when the rubber hits the road, why should he continue to suppress his metaphysical commitments? The “push the button” poll empirically validates the intuition that he won’t.
All of this does not prove (or even address) whether God actually exists. I have evaluated the evidence and concluded that it is overwhelmingly likely that He does. But I could be wrong. But if I am wrong, Peterson’s “let’s act like he exists even if he does not” project is a fool’s errand. If God does not exist, Camus is right. The universe is profoundly absurd and unbearably bleak. There is no middle way.
Sadly, sound, and echoing Paul of Tarsus in Ep. Rom, Ch 1:19 - 32. Lessons we have forgotten.
I suggest, though, that there are two levels of being "Christian," first of course having a repentant commitment of discipleship. Second, being part of a cultural movement, moment or flow that is influenced strongly by the gospel of Jesus, its integral ethics (esp. Sermon on the Mount, Mt 5 - 7), and the underlying Hebraic-Christian Ethical Theism. For, Disciples are preservative -- sometimes, stinging -- salt in an insipid, often decaying world, and points, lighthouses or even cities of light in the face of present darkness and lost-ness: wheat and tares are so entangled that they must be left together in the field till harvest, lest the wheat be also uprooted.
Hence, too, Augustine's famous City of God Against the Pagans.
That is, even a Peterson or a Dawkins can now sense the fading of the light of our civilisation, and can sense the Rom 1 chaos of encroaching, all too rapidly advancing darkness. Or, in another metaphor, we have slid so far down the slippery slope that we are at the crumbling edge of the cliff and many are desperate to get back to safe ground.
That is actually a point of hope.
I do not know if we can avert collapse of the edge, and another painful collision with the rocks below, as in 1914 and 1939. But, at least, we can identify a way forward.
Let us at least acknowledge that we are rational, responsible, significantly free, morally governed creatures. Creatures, with branch on which we all sit, first duties: to truth, to right reason, to warrant and wider prudence, to sound conscience, to neighbour, so too to fairness and to justice. (If you doubt this, try to deny without implicitly appealing to these same Ciceronian first duties, teased out of De Legibus. Yes, these first duties and first built in laws of our nature are self evident. Another forgotten first principle.)
So, we unify is and ought in the core of our being, and must turn to the only place such can be founded, the root of reality. Where, there is but one serious candidate -- just try to propose another, while being factually adequate, coherent and neither ad hoc nor simplistic.
Namely, the inherently good, utterly wise Creator God, a necessary and maximally great, Supreme Being. One, worthy of our respect, fealty and doing the good that accords with our evident nature.
So, reformation can begin.
Peterson and Dawkins position feels a lot to me like if I were to place a large bet on the Colorado Avalanche to win the Stanley Cup simply because I like the way they handle the forecheck. I don't like the Avs. I don't want them to win the Cup. Yet, I place a wager on them simply because I like some aspects of how they play the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=621LzO0qWnU
It really goes to show that neither man really grocks Christianity. That despite their academic pedigrees, and their obvious intellectual capacities, in the end, they just completely miss the point. The point they miss is the difference between legality and morality. You can't have the morality without bending the knee.
They want to have morality but atheism is wholly unable to provide it. Notions of good and evil are really just a difference between what I like and what I don't like under atheist philosophy. In this context, I define morality as good behavior enforced from within. I don't steal not because I fear the consequence of stealing, but because I know it to be wrong from within. Would matter if the state were to declare theft of any kind to be punishable by death or decriminalize it entirely. God has written on my heart that it is wrong. Atheism can lay no such claim to a kind of morality that can transcend the individual moral actor. Two atheists may agree that stealing is wrong, but differ on the amount the item is worth before it becomes wrong (e.g. a candy bar vs. people's life savings). Such a discussion can never come to a resolution in any meaningful sense (i.e. not "let's just agree to disagree").
Legality is all atheism really has then. In this context, legality being good behavior enforced from without. While at times legality is necessary, it can't hold a candle to morality in terms of effectively curbing human behavior. Here Darwin reigns supreme. The strongest make the laws and force them upon those who aren't quite as strong.
Under what Dawkins and Peterson have brought about is cutting the rode that allows us to be anchored to something solid, namely God. Add to that decades of both moral relativism and standpoint epistemology and you get a culture that is both simultaneously bereft of any sense of common coherent morality and also entirely unable to consider how we might actually create one other than to battle it out every four years in the latest "most important election of our lives". The levers of morality are largely gone and few are interested in finding them. The levers of power though...those are easy to see and sadly all too easy for the worst actors among us to lay their hands on.