I told you in a previous
post about an atheist friend (Robert) I had a chat with. I want to focus on
another aspect of our conversation.
Robert told me he had attended a funeral
recently, and while he was there he felt disrespected by the Christians. When I
asked why, he told me he was made to feel that he was just a target for the
gospel, just a soul who needed to be saved.
We chatted for a while about
how his offence sprang from the fact he doesn’t believe what Christians
believe. I asked him, “Can you not see that if you believed what Christians
believe then you would view everyone as a soul who needs to be saved?” He said,
“But I don’t believe what Christians believe!”
“I know,” I replied, “but
they do! They believe your existence doesn’t end at the grave.” I told him
about the famous atheist magician, Penn Jillette, who said, “I’ve always said
that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. … How much do you have to
hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them
that?”
But after talking about this
for a while, I told him I wanted to deal with the issue of respect generally,
rather than the specifics of his experience.
“I am a Christian,” I said.
“So, I believe you are created in the image of God, and because of that you have
dignity, intrinsic value, infinite worth, and it is wrong for anyone to treat
you in a disrespectful way. You believe we are bags of mostly water, nothing
but a collection of chemicals, the end product of a mindless process. On your
view we are star dust, descendants of fish, cousins of bacteria, fruit flies
and bananas. How do you get from there to ‘Therefore I deserve respect?’ I’m
missing a few steps in the argument.”
He admitted he couldn’t fill
in the blanks, because as an atheist he didn’t believe in good and evil! He
said that good and evil requires the universe has a purpose.
He was absolutely right.
Most atheists don’t see this. They think atheism gets rid of God but allows
them to keep the categories of good and evil. In fact, if you get rid of God
you get rid of good too, which means there’s no evil either.
Robert agreed with this in
theory, but the problem is he disagreed with it in practice. Throughout our
conversation he continually made moral judgments, condemning Christians and God
for all sorts of things. When I reminded him that on his view there is no evil,
he would say, “I know there’s no evil, but in my opinion that’s evil.” I
told him that this qualification made no sense – it is his opinion that there
is no evil. It is like saying, “I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster, but
in my opinion he’s green,” or saying, “There’s no east or west in space, but in
my opinion east is this way.”
Truth corresponds to
reality. Robert cannot live consistently with his beliefs. The reason is, they
don’t match up with reality. That means they aren’t true. His outrage at being
disrespected proves he knows there’s more to him than meets the eye. He is made
in the image of God. His words deny it, but his actions affirm it all the
time.
