In this thought-provoking episode, the discussion centers around the resurgence of atheism and its critiques of religion. Using the 9/11 attacks as a reference point, the hosts explore the arguments presented by prominent atheist scholars who question the role of faith in our world. They delve into the philosophical and theological implications raised by figures like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, examining whether the criticisms hold any merit or merely set up straw men in opposition to religious beliefs.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
Periodically, it seems society gets a new rash of atheists. I think rash may be a very good metaphor for it. But like many irritants, it may serve a useful purpose in that it gets us off our posterior and on our feet to deal with it. The September 11, 2006 issue of Newsweek featured an article in their religion section titled, The New Naysayers, was written by Jerry Adler. It was fascinating because when I ran an internet search on those precise words, the new naysayers, I got a quarter of a million hits on that. Now, this one is actually a pretty fair and balanced article. And, obviously, naysayers is a common term. The subtitle of the article is, In the Midst of Religious Revival, Three Scholars Argue that Atheism is Smarter. Now, naturally, they think that because they are atheists and they think they are smarter. But there are only three of them. They really can’t be called a movement. Nevertheless, since these three scholars are intelligent men, what they have to say may bear examination. Here’s what Jerry Adler had to say about it. Americans answered the atrocities of September 11th overwhelmingly with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort. In the week after the attacks, nearly 70% said they were praying more than usual. Sam Harris, though, was then a 34-year-old graduate student in neuroscience. He had a different reaction. On September 12th, he began a book. If he reasoned, young men were slaughtering people in the name of religion, something that had been going on since long before 2001, of course. then perhaps the problem was religion itself. His book would be titled The End of Faith, which to most Americans sounds like a lament. To Harris, well, it was something to be encouraged. Now, this is really old hat. Thinkers for generations have been playing around not only with an end of faith, but with ideas like the death of God. Harris won an award for his book, so he’s writing another one. There’s another book that came out this year titled Breaking the Spell by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who asks how and why religions became ubiquitous in human society. The obvious answer, because they’re true, he says, is foreclosed by the fact that they are, by and large, mutually incompatible. It’s an old argument. They can’t all be right, so I guess they must all be wrong. His statement is accurate, but irrelevant. All religions, indeed, cannot be true, but that hardly forecloses the question that Why and how have religions become universal in human society? Now, that’s an important question and one that cannot be so easily dismissed. Then there’s another book coming out. Next month, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins weighs in with The God Delusion, a book that extends an argument he advanced in the days after 9-11. After hearing once too often that, quote, to blame the attacks on Islam is like blaming Christianity for fighting in Northern Ireland, end quote, Dawkins responds, precisely, it’s time to get angry and not just with Islam. Now, one wonders if any of these guys realize we’re not talking about God. We’re talking about religion and sectarian abuse of religion at that in both Northern Ireland and in Iraq. These guys ask, where do people get their idea of God? Well, from the Bible or the Koran. Tell a devout Christian, said Harris, that a frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he’s likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. Let me read that to you again, because if you are a Christian, you have just been insulted. Here’s what he said. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. Now, what bothers me about this line of argument is not merely that it’s wrong about what the Bible says, but that it’s being made by scholars who have to know that what they are presented is a one-sided, false view of the Bible. They should be aware that the Bible doesn’t say that. Christian preachers, Muslim imams may, here and there, but not God and not the Bible. What they have done is set up a straw man and set it on fire. And if they are scholars, they know this. That being the case, I begin to suspect a measure of intellectual dishonesty. Man may have many reasons for not wanting to believe in God. One of the Huxleys admitted forthrightly that his reasons were sexual. So I don’t know what the motives are of scholars who are dishonest in their dismissing of God, but I have a feeling they’ve got them. Continuing with Harris. He asks, how can anyone believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God who permits a tsunami to swallow 180,000 innocent people in a few hours? How does it advance our understanding of the universe to suppose it was created by a supernatural being who communicates only through the one-way process of revelation? Now this kind of argumentation is grating, because I know that the author knows better. Let’s start with the statement that the book we keep by our bed was written by God. Now there may be a fringe element somewhere who believes that, but Harris knows well enough that no serious Christian scholar makes that claim. Let’s start with the four Gospels and ask ourselves, what is it that we have here? Is there anyone out there who seriously believes that God took pen in hand, rolled out a scroll, and wrote these four books? Let me clarify for you. These books were actually penned on scrolls by four men whose names we know. The men tell us plainly enough that what they are giving us is their testimony of what they have seen and what they have heard. Biblical law, you know, requires at least two witnesses. We are provided with four, maybe five if you count Paul. Now let me explain something very important about witnesses. Their testimony is worthless if you don’t allow them complete freedom in telling their story. You would corrupt them. This being the case, you have in the Gospels the normal variations you will get with any set of witnesses of an event. There are reasons for this. One may see more importance in one fact than another. One may not have been present when something happened and couldn’t record like those who saw it would have recorded it. One man may have been standing to the north of the event. The other man may have been standing to the south of it, and they didn’t see the same thing. Now, there’s one set of events that are recorded in Luke that occur in 1, 2, 3 order. The same events from another gospel occur in 1, 3, 2 order. Same events, slightly different order. Now I ask you, does that mean that the events did not occur? Well, hardly. Is it also possible that Luke recorded them not in the chronological order in which they occurred, but in order to emphasize a point, perhaps in the order of what he saw as important? Now, one thing you be aware of is you read books written by people who think in Hebrew. Hebrew books tend to have the climax in the middle, not at the end. They place the most important thing, the most dramatic thing they have to say, squarely at the center of the book, which is kind of interesting in a way. Modern writers will place their climax closer to the end. They will follow right on through with it. Now, that being the case, I would look at Luke’s order and the order of the other gospel, and I would conclude, why did he put this event in the middle of the story rather than following strict chronological order? Now, you should know that biblical writers were not doing term papers, nor were they using the Chicago Book of Style. Many of the standards we have developed to aid editors and writers have arisen in the days of movable type of printing and now desktop publishing. As a consequence, many standards of accuracy that we hold today as being important were simply not important to them, and in many cases they weren’t even available. What was important to the writers of the gospel was the truth. They told the truth. If their story varied in unimportant ways from another witness, that only served to establish the independence of the witnesses. Now, there’s a term among lawyers for what happens when you coach a witness as to what he’s going to say on the stand. It’s called woodshedding. In other words, you take your witness to the woodshed and you get his story straight. The problem with this is that the witness can be impeached if this comes out in trial that his testimony is too perfect. Isn’t that a kicker? See, the truth is you have to let the witnesses tell the story. God has done that in the Gospels, and in fact, he has done it in the entirety of the Bible. And so to speak in terms of God being the author of the Bible, of God writing the Bible with his own hand, is silly on the face of it. And what really bugs me about this is, these guys have PhDs after their name. If they’re going to talk about Christianity, they have an obligation to be sure they know what they’re talking about. Actually, I think they do. I just don’t think they’re being honest or fair. Stay with me through this important message, and when I come back, we’ll talk further on this issue.
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Is it possible that an infinite God could find himself wanting anything? The Bible says it is not good for man to be alone. If it’s not good for man to be alone, then perhaps it wasn’t good for God to be alone either. Ronald Dart’s book, The Lonely God, is available from Amazon.com or directly from BornToWin.net. For information, write to BornToWin, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
Every single book of the Bible was written by some man in his style, using his vocabulary, and through his eyes and ears tells you what he’s seen. This in no way denies the inspiration of the Bible. But here’s your problem. You can’t presume inspiration when you’re talking to an unbeliever. You can only establish inspiration by establishing the truth of what the witnesses are saying. Then you can see plainly God’s hand in it. You can see plainly that he inspired the biblical writers to record the truth about their encounters with God and with history. You can’t address the doubts that these atheist scholars raise in their students unless you know how they work. According to Jerry Adler, he says this, quote, Like the fundamentalists, the atheists prefer to read the Bible literally, especially the parts about stoning people to death. It’s incredible when you think about it. You would think that they would heap scorn on us for reading the Bible literally, but that’s how they do it. They read it literally. He quotes at length the passages, that is, Harris does, in the Old and New Testaments dealing with how to treat slaves. Why, he asked, would anyone take moral instruction from a book that calls for stoning your children to death for disrespect or for heresy or for violating the Sabbath? Obviously, our culture no longer believes in that, he adds. So why not agree that science has made it equally unnecessary to invoke God to explain the sun or the weather or your own existence? Now, I am sometimes amazed at how men who are reputed to be scholars can misrepresent the argument they are trying to refute. It’s called setting up a straw man and knocking it down. One of the first things to know about this is that reputed scholars are just as prone to dishonesty and misrepresentation as any other segment of society. You can take a hundred men who have a PhD after their name and another hundred men who don’t, and you will find just about the same degree of dishonesty, of a lack of integrity in both groups. It’s just the way human beings are. The conferring of a Ph.D. after a man’s name means something, but it’s no guarantee of integrity. Harris, for example, knows very well that most Christians do not read the Bible literally. So why does he choose only one reading of the Bible to oppose and deconstruct? Answer? Because it works better. Because it fits his preconceptions. It just takes him further down the road he wants to go down and forget about whether or not it’s the truth. But let me take these issues he raises to illustrate what I mean. First, slavery. Something you need to know about Israel. Israel was a society without prisons. There were none whatsoever in Israel. Now today, we can grab a man off the street, slap handcuffs on him, prove his guilt through due process, and deprive him of his freedom, maybe even of his life. But what exactly is the difference between Israelite slavery and modern prisons? And how can a putative scholar say that our culture no longer believes in slavery when we obviously practice it by another name? I mean, we take the guy, we lock him up, we may give him a job where he has to work at it, and we do all kinds of things with these guys. We tell them what they can wear, we tell them where they’re going to sleep, they tell them how long they’re going to sleep, and we feed them what we want to feed them. But they’re not slaves. They’re prisoners. Actually, the Israelite system was arguably better than ours. Frankly, I think I would have rather been a slave in ancient Israel than be in any one of the Texas prisons. The next point he raises, stoning children for disrespect. The law in question is found in Deuteronomy, chapter 21, verse 18. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that when they have chastened him will not hearken to them, he’s completely out of control, then his father and his mother shall lay hold on him and bring him to the elders of the city to the gate of his place. And they shall say to the elders of the city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard. And all the men of the city shall stone him with stones that he die. So shall you put away evil from among you. All Israel shall hear and fear. Now, I have several things to say about that. One is, I frankly doubt that this penalty ever had to be exacted. The mere existence of the law, I think, would have had a profound effect on the behavior of some of these young louts. When it was exacted, it was in extremis, and it was always and only to be done after due process. The mom and dad couldn’t kill him themselves. They had to bring him to the elders of the city. There had to be a hearing. People had to deal with this. And, of course, you should also know that in Israel at that time, corporal punishment was permitted. It was restricted. It was limited. Due process had to be carried out. But they could actually cane a young miscreant like this before somebody had to get around to stoning him to death. Now, we still practice due process. And because we do, the death penalty is never applied in this way. But that’s not to say that Moses was wrong to strictly defend the order of the family in that time, in that place, and in that way. What the law does is establish the near absolute authority of parents in the family, something that modern law has taken away. But it’s important to know that that this is an administrative law, and there had to be a government with the power to enforce and a system of due process. If you take that out of the picture, you’re not going to understand what it’s all about. Harris spoke of stoning for heresy and for Sabbath-breaking. Now, I have no idea what he means by heresy. I think he may be confusing it with blasphemy. I recall no law dealing with stoning for heresy per se. And I know quite well that there is no law dealing with stoning for mere Sabbath-breaking. There was a specific instance of this while Israel was in the wilderness where discipline had to prevail. The incident in question occurs not in a historical narrative, but in a legal context. You’ll find the law on this in Numbers 15, verse 27. It starts off by drawing a contrast. It says, if a person sins unintentionally, then he shall bring a female goat in his first year as a sin offering. In a sense, it’s kind of like paying a fine. It’s going to cost him a little bit. But the person who does anything presumptuously, whether he’s native-born, whether he’s a stranger, that one brings a reproach on the Lord, and he shall be cut off from among his people. You see, what we’re talking about here is two things. One is a person makes a mistake, he screws up and does something wrong and didn’t really intend for it to happen that way. On the other hand, we’ve got someone who is in your face, who thumbs his nose at God, who brings a reproach upon God, and it says he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment. That person shall be completely cut off. His guilt shall be upon him. That is the legal context. What then follows is an example of administrative law. Underline that word, administrative. When the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation. They put him under guard because it had not been explained what should be done. Then the Lord said to Moses, This man must be surely put to death, and all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp. A couple of things. One, he was not executed without due process. Two, he was not executed for a sin of ignorance, accident, or even weakness. This is an example of presumptuous, defiant sin at a time when they needed the discipline and when everybody had been told what they had to do. The man was executed. Not because he broke the Sabbath, but because he was in defiance of God. It was a high-handed, in-your-face kind of sin. Now, I can imagine in any number of situations where a man might be caught up short and feel he had to gather wood on the Sabbath. If adjudicated not to have been presumptuous, and we still allow intent to play in law, he would not have been executed. Now, these men are reputed to be scholars, and scholarship is a disciplined approach. Discipline makes certain demands on scholars, which they have to live up to if they’re going to be held in reputation. They choose deliberately not only to read literally, but to take the fundamentalist approach to interpretation, even when they know there is another Christian approach entirely. I consider this intellectually dishonest. And don’t tell me they don’t know any better. They are scholars, which means they aren’t supposed to pontificate on matters where they are ignorant. Grab a pencil and a piece of paper.
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I’ve got a free offer for you, and then I’ll be right back. If you would like to share this program with friends and others, write or call this week only and request your free copy of The New Atheism. Write to Born to Win, P.O. Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And please tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
Returning to Jerry Adler’s article, he said, These are not brand new arguments, of course, and believers have well-practiced replies to them, although in some cases, such as the persistence of evil and suffering, the theodicy problem, responses are still mostly works in progress. Theodicy is the term for the question of how a God who is good could create a world with so much evil. Well, it may be a work in progress, but I think I have offered an answer in my book, The Lonely God. The answer is simplicity itself. God is good. He made man free. Thus it is man, not God, who is the author of so much stupidity and so much evil in the world. One of the scholars raised the issue of the tsunami in Asia that claimed so many lives. How is that possible that God would let that happen? Hey, the answer is simple. People know about tsunamis, and they still choose to live on the coast. What can I say? The earth is a huge rock in space, and because of its mass, it has a molten core. And because it has a molten core, it has to move. And every once in a while, there’s an earthquake. Every once in a while, there’s a volcano. And you can’t walk right up to these things. You can’t live on the edge of them and not take your chances. It’s not God’s fault. There were a few who died when Mount St. Helens erupted. They had chosen to be there. Why blame their death on God? You know, if you’re going to live on a volcano, if you’re going to go down the mouth of a volcano, and I always, when I see these documentaries of guys who are looking around these volcanoes and climbing down into them, I sit there and shudder and I think, why are they doing that? Well, they’re doing it in the name of knowledge. But it is they who are putting their life on the line, not God. Frankly, all this stuff begins to sound like so much philosophical whining, and it gets a little bit wearisome. Jerry Adler goes on to talk about another one of these fellows who, brilliant as he is, overlooks something any storefront Baptist preacher might have told him. If there is no God, why be good? He asks rhetorically and responds, Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality. That’s sucking up. Well, that’s clever. But millions of Christians and Muslims believe that it’s precisely God who turned them away from a life of immorality. Dawkins, of course, thinks they’re deluding themselves. He’s correct that the social utility of religion doesn’t prove anything about the existence of God, but for all his erudition, he seems not to have spent much time among ordinary Christians who could have told him what God meant to them. But in this little exchange, there’s something very important that emerges. If God doesn’t exist, then there is no standard of morality and no reason why I shouldn’t steal if I can get away with it. All this brings to mind something the Apostle Paul said. When he said, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Basically, Paul says, they’re a little bit crazy.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m Ronald Dart. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at
