"Christianity's Moral Failings" - A Response

Last Thursday, Oxford Atheists, Secularists and Humanists heard Paula Kirby on ‘Christianity’s Moral Failings’. A lively debate ensued. This is one attendee’s response to the talk. An expanded version is available at the author’s blog: Dove Theology.

It is customary in my field to declare any conflict of interest when publishing an article; alas, as an evangelical Christian I must admit a slight bias not to present Christian Theology as morally intolerable. Nevertheless, I would like to show that Paula Kirby’s moral objections to Christianity are not insuperable, and maintain rational integrity while doing so. I offer my apologies in advance for lack of structure: this will essentially be an immediate elaboration on each of the points I noted down during the talk.

There was a lot I enjoyed about the talk. Before the event, I was hoping that it would not just be a list of ecclesiastical atrocities. Kirby obliged and went further in noting that, in particular, debates about the religious/irreligious beliefs and motivations of Hitler and Stalin trivialise the suffering of their victims. I found this quite profound, and was grateful for a discussion of the morality of Christian (or, in some cases, pseudo-Christian) Theology rather than a repetition of moral failures by those proclaiming Christ, of which we are all well aware.

I also empathised with Kirby on many points. For example, it is my conviction that a theology which makes life simply a test for the rest of eternity, or which undermines the importance of this life in its view of the afterlife, is one of the most abominable things to have ever come from the Church. Kirby also did well to, on the whole, distinguish between those features which she thought were central to Christianity and those which were peripheral issues.

Kirby did, however, propose a ‘Terrible Trinity’ of Christianity’s moral failings - the doctrines of original sin, hell, and substitutionary atonement - at least two of which she claimed were core Christian doctrines. It is these which I will address in this shortened response (full version).

I am glad that Kirby offered a slightly more sophisticated version of original sin than most critics (and proponents, for that matter), exploring it as a disease and proclivity towards evil rather than simply confusing original sin with original or inherited guilt. Original guilt, by the way, being a quite distinctly Augustinian and Roman Catholic initiative – it’s certainly rejected by many Protestants and was barely present, if at all, in the writings of other (earlier) Church Fathers - Irenaeus is a good example of a theologian who wrote quite extensively on the idea of original sin [if not by name] without really implying our guilt from birth at all.

Kirby still, however, presents a picture of original sin which not all Christians accept, in arguing that original sin is the belief that everyone is prone to do evil from the moment of birth. I need not even refer to particularly liberal Christians; I know several conservative, fundamentalist (self-identified) Christians who believe that the category of original sin only applies to the cognizant, and that talking of babies having original sin is thus a category error. Nor do all accept that original sin necessarily involves being prone to doing evil in the sense of committing moral atrocities – many would see it simply as not being fully oriented towards God from the beginning, which seems much less objectionable. (On this point, I believe that Kirby also included the description ‘meriting an eternity in hell’. I do not know if she saw this as essential to the doctrine, but if she did, then the same applies to this clause).

While original sin is a core part of Christianity, Kirby’s ‘grossly immoral’ conception of it is not. Kirby argues for the intrinsic immorality of Christian theology on the basis that, without original sin, there is no reason for us to need salvation. But when we consider that behind this premise is a very precise and non-universal conception of original sin, we realise that there may yet be abundant reason for us to need salvation other than simply a proclivity towards evil, and that the Christian can therefore still hold to original sin as a core component of his or faith while at the same time rejecting those non-essential aspects of the doctrine which Kirby emphasises. Given that sin is not necessarily seen as the sum total of evil acts or thoughts (in fact, I would go further; it is rarely seen as the sum total of evil acts or thoughts) but rather, minimally, a particular attitude towards God, there is a lot to be desired in terms of the reasoning for thinking that original sin is a grossly immoral doctrine. Of course, it may be that this conception, Kirby’s conception, or any other conceptions of original sin are immoral. But it was not made at all clear why we should think that any of them are, other than a crude appeal to prima facie disgust. Incidentally, while we’re discussing the morality of beliefs, it would be interesting to see what is meant by calling a belief immoral. Is there not the possibility that it is a true belief? If so, would it still be morally abominable?

The second of her ‘Terrible Trinity’ was the centrality of hell in Christian orthodoxy. Her treatment of hell, however, suffered the same difficulties as her treatment of original sin; namely, that while hell (that is, a temporally unspecified state of disunity with God) as a reality is indeed central to Christianity, her idea of it is not. Kirby discussed hell as eternal torture and punishment before noting that she was well aware that many Christians do not believe in hell. She dismissed this as a possible Christian position on the basis that, unless hell ‘exists’, there is nothing for us to be saved from. Yet, interestingly, she provided no discussion of hell as something other than eternal torture and punishment (as I suggested above), thereby setting up a false dichotomy between believing in her conception of hell or rejecting a core Christian belief. With only a straw man of the ‘core’ Christian position attacked as immoral, then, we have been given no reason to believe that Christianity is fundamentally immoral on this basis.

Kirby’s point about hell’s being used a scare tactic as a moral deplorability is true, of course. Whether the citation of an anonymous American theologian who claimed that most of the teaching about hell comes from the lips of Jesus himself can be trusted, is debatable. Of course, I do not doubt that an American theologian said such a thing. But we ought to ask for more substantiation than the word ‘hell’ appearing in our English Gospels and being attributed to Jesus to also attribute to him the conception of hell that Kirby describes, and which we both deplore. The word Jesus used which is translated as ‘hell’ in our Bibles is γέεννα (known as Gehenna in English), which was the name of a place just outside Jerusalem where, for example, children were sacrificed. It came to be used as a metaphor for the destination of the wicked but was, on the whole in Rabbinical literature, not eternal, and not a place of torture. The Old Testament does not give it an eschatological dimension at all, and it didn’t always have an eschatological dimension in Jesus’ time either (hence him calling the Pharisees ‘children of Gehenna’ without making any claim on their eternal destiny). Now, it may be that Jesus believed in eternal torture, but it certainly needs more substantiation than, “Jesus talked about hell a lot”. So it does not seem clear to me that Kirby has effectively argued that her conception of hell is a core Christian belief.

In the third part of the ‘Terrible Trinity’, Kirby claims to be attacking substitutionary atonement, but in fact ends up attacking an even more particular theory, that of penal substitution. While substitutionary atonement, that is, Jesus mediating reconciliation by doing something we could or did not do, is a key theme in Christianity, simplistic expressions of penal substitution are not. Penal substitution goes further than normal substitutionary atonement by saying that Jesus took our punishment for us, rather than just doing something in place of us. Now, it does not seem as if there is anything particularly immoral about Jesus doing something on behalf of us, so it seems that we can remain content with core Christian belief on this issue. Instead, we must turn to the difficulty with portraying penal substitution as a key Christian teaching on atonement, since this seems to be what Kirby finds morally disturbing. The difficulty, essentially, is this: penal substitution, especially as the primary expression of atonement theology, is a relatively modern innovation. It has roots in the medieval period, building on Anselm’s satisfaction model of the atonement, which itself was a modern, parochial interpretation formed to explain atonement in a very particular context, namely, feudal 11th century England. It was not until centuries after that that penal substitution, in a culture with a penance and retribution-based criminal justice system, that penal substitution really began to flourish and become dominant among evangelical theologians. There have always been, and continue to be, other theories of atonement which, other than in the last couple of centuries’ evangelical traditions, have been more popular (cf. Irenaeus and Gregory of Nyssa on Christus Victor as recapitulation and ransom respectively, or Abelard on the moral influence model, for some examples). Many theologians today reject penal substitution, at the same time holding to the truth of a substitutionary model of the atonement and keeping their orthodoxy intact.

In summary, Kirby’s failure to provide a rigorous formative basis for Christian orthodoxy and ethics led to a number of problems, particularly when she aimed to criticise what she claimed were ‘core’ Christian beliefs. This is most clearly manifest in her treatment of original sin and hell. Essentially, it led her to claim that either babies are prone to evil and deserve eternal emotional, physical and mental torture, or that there is no need of any form of salvation and so “the whole thing falls apart”. She failed to justify her rendition of original sin, hell or penal substitution as core parts of Christianity, confusing substitutionary and penal substitutionary theories of atonement and failing to appreciate the modern roots of the latter while giving no mention to the theories which have been much more prominent historically.

I therefore conclude not that Christianity is morally good, or morally superior, but that Kirby gave us no adequate reason to believe that Christianity is inherently immoral.

Calum Miller

Attacking the Roadblock to Reason

When religious people use faith as a cop-out, it’s annoying – but if we give up there, we don’t have the right to complain.

So now, having spent some time giving all the usual arguments, you’ve reached the stage of debate where your religious friend tells you you have to have faith. You’d understand, they insist, if you believed – and that, as far as they’re concerned, is that.

We’ve all encountered this. Used by theists as a roadblock to reason, all the assertion of blind faith does is demonstrate their ideas are unfounded: having failed to make ground with their best arguments, second best arguments and last resorts, they like at times to lean on special pleading, asserting that their positions are sacred simply because they’re unfounded. This isn’t a straw man argument, let’s be clear – there are plenty of bright religious people whose ideas, while still not convincing, are reasonable and considered. Yet the appeal to faithfulness is an infuriatingly common trick, bringing arguments swiftly to an end and alienating people on both sides. The trouble is, writing these people off as faithheads we just can’t reason with only serves to validate their cop-out.

Anyone fond of debate will agree that the ‘it’s my faith’ position holds no weight; all that it really displays is blind certainty and a phobic aversion to changes of mind. But someone willing to use such tactics probably won’t agree; rather, they’ll simply withdraw from discussion, bemoaning in hindsight how atheists, having turned their backs on faith, are simply unable to comprehend it. Yet aren’t we equally at fault if our only response is apathy? ‘Some people’, the adage goes, ‘you’ll never convince’; but if we let the argument end once faith’s been declared, we’re playing on our opponents’ home ground.

Those of us without religion, after all, have almost universally held faiths of our own at some stage in the past. If not through reading the books or articles of atheist philosophers, we’ve grown away from whatever religious backgrounds we held simply by living in secular environments, where faith isn’t encouraged and ideas have to be supported. The more we’ve leaned towards evidence, logic and common sense, the more our faithfulness has left us. We ought to understand, then, that it is possible to be argued out of it.

The fact is, faith isn’t self-substantiating. We know this, because when asked to have faith by people we argue with, we find the idea ridiculous. There are some, indeed, whose brains they say will simply not permit them to think anything without due evidence or logic. In such (admittedly enviable) cases, the adoption of any faith position is unthinkable simply as a concept. So while we faith itself might not be easily unravelled with the application of reason, it certainly can disintegrate with a change of attitude: before we could give up our own unevidenced beliefs, we had first to recognise that they weren’t worth having – and there are so many reasons to do so.

If nothing else, it’s undeniable that what we believe informs the way we act. As soon as we grant ourselves the luxury of not needing to verify our ideas, we take the risk of acting on basic fallacies – and as long as the way we act affects other people, this alone ought surely to be avoided. Apart from that though, why not remind whoever hides behind faith that its achievements historically have amounted to so little? We needn’t even be as controversial as to say religion causes harm – on the contrary, we need only ask for an undisputed human achievement based on unevidenced assumption to be named. The faithful will have to rule out, in answering that challenge, at least the entire fields of medicine, academia, politics, economics, exploration, engineering, astronomy, agriculture and philosophy. If that’s not enough, then we still have the trump card of asking why only religious beliefs be justified only with faith, and not the way people vote, spend their money or raise their children.

We might not be able to get past the faith of believers with logic and reason, but we can persuade them to give it up. Once you no longer consider it valuable or useful, having faith becomes instantly impossible: the people who think unfounded beliefs are okay are the only people able to hold them at all. And as soon as faith is taken out of the picture, then either the religious friends we argue with are convinced, or they step up the level of their arguments. Whichever it is, the benefits are universal.

Alex Gabriel

President, Oxford Atheist Society

"...actually, you're an atheist."

'You just can't know, though’; ‘Prove there’s no God’, and 'You have faith as well.' To anyone who calls themselves an atheist, these are pretty familiar statements. We've heard it all in YouTube comments, or forum threads, or conversations with friends; pretty much all of us know someone who finds atheism just as unfounded as theism, identifying strictly as an agnostic. Too often, I can't help but think, we let this characterisation go - what we should say is, 'Actually, you're an atheist too.'

Admittedly, it's a widespread notion that atheism is a standpoint of denial, requiring faith in the certainty of there not being a god. The Charles Moores and Stephen Greens of the world haven't helped by calling it hypocritical to say, as an atheist, that 'There's probably no god.' 'They speak with anger and with certainty', Moore said last year, accusing the so-called New Atheists of fundamentalism , and from the vast majority of the ‘not particularly religious’ people I speak to, it seems as if his position’s a popular one. My very first RE lesson at secondary school, I remember, taught me that a theist believed in God, an atheist believed there was no god and an agnostic didn’t know. My RE teacher doesn’t seem in retrospect to have been particularly unusual, because I find myself on at least a weekly basis faced with the argument that since I call myself an atheist, I must myself have an unevidenced belief in the absence of deities which is just as strong a faith as any theist’s.

This of course is the silly and insubstantial accusation that inspired the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorns of Camp Quest and the dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage. To disprove the existence of any of these, we tell the not-particularly-religious person we’re having an argument with, is impossible; but you don’t have to wait until they’re disproven not to believe they exist. All these are sound counter-examples, definitely – but maybe because they spoof the silliness of ‘Atheists have faith’ position so well, I’ve always found them somewhat ineffective rhetorically. Much of their humour is satirical, admittedly – they’re funny because they get the point across so well – but in my experience, all they tend to provoke is a mild chuckle, and perhaps a simmering disapproval at the disrespect of the big-angry-atheist in the room comparing Jehovah to a dragon.

If we want to be a bit more persuasive and a bit less mocking, we might refer to Bertrand Russell’s great celestial teapot. How can we prove, he asked of his critics, that there isn’t a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars? It doesn’t take any faith not to believe it exists, because not believing something until it’s proved is the default setting. Quote this, and the person accusing you of holding hypocritical atheistic faith is usually a bit more impressed than they would be by the flying spaghetti monster – there’s no particular logical reason for this of course, but it comes across as a little less antagonistic. Even then though, I find the accusation of denying (rather than just doubting) a god’s existence still remains in the majority of cases. It doesn’t seem just to be a problem with my communicative skills, because I know people who’ve encountered the same reaction. There just seems to be something very counterintuitive about simply not believing an undemonstrated claim being different from asserting the opposite.

I have encountered one analogy with a somewhat better success rate, at least when I’ve used it in conjunction with the teapot or the spaghetti monster. Matt Dillahunty, presenter of The Atheist Experience and counter-apologetics enthusiast, uses the simply an inoffensive example of a coin toss. ‘Supposing I toss a coin’, we tell whoever accuses us of faithfulness, ‘and I tell you it lands on heads. Do you believe I’m telling the truth?’ Without knowing anything about the motives of whoever tosses the coin, we can’t know whether it’s really a heads or a tails result – so asked whether we’re convinced it’s heads, the answer ought to be ‘No.’ But that isn’t the same, as Dillahunty goes on to say, as asserting without any evidence that it must have landed on a tails. Just as with the spaghetti monster and the dragon and the teapot, we have to be agnostic about the coin toss and admit we can’t really know – but until we can know, the claim of a heads result can’t be bought into.

The RE teachers of the world have a lot to answer for, it would seem. To be an atheist is entirely complementary with being an agnostic, as long as you accept that doubt is the default. Agnostic theists, who think we can’t entirely know there’s a god but who nonetheless believe in one, do of course exist; for them, the existence of a deity is simply to be assumed until it’s proven there isn’t one. But this isn’t consistent with the way most of us live in all other cases. We can’t simply assume the Nigerian businessman e-mailing us is telling the truth, purely because we’ve no way of knowing he’s lying; we can’t expect gold at the end of a rainbow, just because we can’t prove there’s none. As far as skepticism’s concerned, deities always seem to be the exception more than the rule.

Nine times out of ten then, the non-committal and not-particularly-religious people who tell us we’re ‘arrogantly certain’ there isn’t a god are missing the point; as long as nobody proves there is one, we’re perfectly justified not to think so, without denying the possibility for a moment. These people are atheists themselves, the vast majority of the time – and if we want to solve the PR problem we have in much of the world, it’s time we started telling them so.

Alex Gabriel
President, Oxford Atheist Society