Richard Dawkins: Oh no he didn't!

When I was in middle school, the youth pastor at my church was a 22 year-old man named Mark Chapman. During his first year teaching us, Mark did a series on predestination. Here’s a little blip about predestination in this article from The Calvinist Corner:

Many believe that man, by his free will, by something that resides in him, is completely able to independently accept or reject God. But this belief is not supported in scripture… man's will by nature is sinful. What then will a sinful free will choose? It will choose sin. His free will, then, would never allow Him to reach out to God.

The basic idea is that when someone believes in God and goes to heaven, it is because God chose that person to go to heaven. Everyone who goes to hell was not chosen by God to go to heaven.

I had a hard time wrapping my 12 year-old head around this. In Sunday school classes and youth group on Wednesday nights, I kept saying, “But that means God chose to send all those people to hell. He didn’t even give them a chance.”

Jenna, Mark’s wife, told me a story to help me cope with this concept. When she was in school, she had an art teacher who would grade student art by throwing the pages down the stairs. Projects that landed on the first stair received an A, on the next, a B, and so forth. The teacher did this because she felt that art is subjective and impossible to grade.

Similarly, Jenna said, I should think of predestination as God throwing all of our papers down the stairs. Those that land on the first stair go to heaven, the others…

My last post was about the gays. This post deals with an equally reviled and feared group: Atheists. The atheist of the day is Richard Dawkins, and this lecture he gave for TED.com. You can watch it now, later, or not at all. It is not required viewing for this blog, but I highly recommend it watching it at some point.

Dawkins opens with a disclaimer: “My approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole. Now, at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against talking ill of religion.” Then he quotes Douglas Adams, “[Religion] is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about. You’re just not. Why not? Because you’re not.”

Dawkins makes a point that I heartily agree with: there is no reason why religious ideas (in this blog, Christian ideas) shouldn't be as open to debate and criticism as others.

The taboo of debating Christianity is much worse if one happens to be a Christian. I believe this comes from the fact that debate implies doubt and doubt implies that you may not be saved after all – for it is by faith that you are saved and doubt suggests that your faith may be failing.

Doubting accepted truths such as: Jesus is the only way to heaven; God created the earth in six days ex nihilo; Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to her firstborn; Jesus rose from the dead on the third day; all Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and pagans are going straight to hell even if they have never heard of Jesus Christ; is to rebel against God and put your eternal safety on the line. Why would you do that? Why would you paint a big apostate bull’s-eye on your forehead for everyone to see? Just have faith.

If you really can’t get over it, if you cave on one of the essential pieces to salvation, then you were never saved. You were never chosen. God did not elect you to be with him in eternity forever. Or as my junior high youth-pastor's wife told me, your paper landed on the wrong stair.

Try to follow this. It’s going to move fast:

If my paper landed on the wrong stair,
If my doubts are going to cost me my salvation,
There's nothing I can do about it,
Because people are not saved by choosing God of their own will.
And if I am happy and content in a life that will lead me to hell,
It is evidence of my total ignorance in rebellion since Adam and Eve sinned,
And ignorance is truly bliss.

At least God has given me a happy life to precede an eternity of torment.

I revolt against the idea of a God that will send me to hell because my God-given reason, and my God-designed experiences bid me reject an exclusive belief in Christianity. Millions of people around the world were born into families just as kooky and loving as mine, but, unlike me, they believe what their parents taught them. They are not atheists to the God that they were taught to love and worship. They are atheists to all other gods.

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further,” Dawkins says.

He brings up an argument that I used to counter atheists that I knew in high school. I would say that to be an atheist is to apply an absolute negative to the existence of God, an omniscient being. However, to apply an absolute negative is to imply that you know all possibilities and that under no circumstances could God exist. Therefore the atheist is claiming to be all-knowing when he denies the existence of an all-knowing being. It’s a self-defeating term.

However, Dawkins points out, by this definition, it is also impossible to deny talking camels, dragons or unicorns. This suits me just fine. I would love to ride my unicorn up a great mountain to defeat a vicious dragon with my sidekick, Cami the talking camel. But if I want to tell people the story of our adventures, and have them be taken for incontrovertible fact, I’d better take some pictures.

Thanks for reading. I’m aware that this one was too much of a thinker. Next week I’ll dumb it down, swear more and add pictures.

-KL