"Why I am not a Christian" is a short book by Richard Carrier, a leftish liberal atheist activist and roving independent scholar. He is most known for being a Mythicist, that is, a promoter of the view that Jesus wasn't a real historical person but a mere myth.
In this little book, Carrier tries to summarize the atheist-materialist case against Christianity. It's not terribly original, but probably isn't meant to be. The chapter headings almost speak for themselves: "God is Silent", "God is Inert", "Wrong Evidence" and "Wrong Universe". Carrier's polemical target is fairly main-line Christianity of the kind C S Lewis expounded in his classical book "Mere Christianity". I'm not sure if hard-line fundamentalists will feel hit by the arguments in the book. For instance, their definition of "God is all-good" might be very different from the common sense idea of "good" used by more moderate Christians (and atheists). Charismatics might constitute another problem - they, after all, very strongly believe that miracles and special revelations *do* happen, so who is "silent"? But then, it's difficult to argue against 10,000 different forms of Christianity in one pamphlet!
Carrier places special emphasis on theodicy and the problem of evil or suffering. The universe doesn't look like it should if created by an all-powerful loving god. Rather, it looks like it would if atheism was true: vast, empty, mostly lethal to life, with humans the end-product of blind evolution and certain random chance events. At one point, Carrier describes the universe as an autistic idiot savant. Suffering and pain is everywhere, and only humans can overcome it. No God ever comes to our rescue, and if the universe is "fine tuned" or "designed" for anything, it's to produce more and more black holes! Had Christianity been true, we would expect the cosmos to look like early Christians assumed it looked like: small, new, teeming with life (including supernatural life) with Earth at the center, and a literal Heaven above. Paul even visited it. Unfortunately, that's not how it looks like.
Other arguments for atheism include the inconclusive and contradictory nature of the Biblical "evidence", the non-existence of souls and other supernatural entities, or the fact that nobody can prove which religion (or which form of Christianity) is the true one, the "evidence" being equally weak for every single one.
Carrier also believes that many arguments for Christianity are ad hoc and merely serve the purpose of explaining away the lack of evidence. He never discusses the Fall, but would presumably see it as just such an ad hoc hypothesis resorted to in order to explain away the fact that God doesn't intervene to stop suffering.
Carrier, perhaps taking a cue from John Loftus, also believes that Christians often apply common sense reasoning to the extraordinary claims of *other* religions, soundly refuting them on that basis, but never apply the same tests to their own religion. Would anyone believe four contradictory "gospels" with unclear authorship written long after the fact, about a soldier killed during the Vietnam War who supposedly was resurrected after three days and therefore must be the Son of God? Of course not, and yet Christians believe such scriptures when they are 2,000 years old!
Ironically, Carrier is sometimes too nice. As already indicated, many Christians probably don't believe that God is all-loving in the Carrierite sense. And many people probably would join a cult of a resurrected Vietnam War vet!
Personally, I'm not a materialist, in large part because I'm more positive towards mystical experiences and paranormal phenomena than our roving author. But above all, it's a kind of existential thing. It simply makes no sense, on a deep level, to claim that random or blind processes can create humans capable of experiencing Meaning and Love, and to feel that there is indeed something fundamentally wrong with the world...
No comments:
Post a Comment