Why does God
Allow Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Which is
right?: Judaism or Christianity? /Apologeticshtml/Is
Christianity a Fraud vs Conder Round 1.htm
/Apologeticshtml/Is
Christianity a Fraud vs Conder Round 2.htm
Should God’s
existence be proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should
the Bible and God Be Proven Fideism vs WCG.htm
DOES HYPOCRISY REFUTE CHRISTIANITY’S TRUTH?
By Eric V. Snow
Do the sins of
Christians refute Christianity? Do the
Crusades and the Inquisition prove God’s nonexistence and the Bible’s
falseness? Would the voyeurism of
televangelist Jimmy Swaggert reveal that Jesus isn’t humanity’s Savior? Would we then accept it as a general
principle that the (im)moral actions of any adherents of any belief system are
a way to determine its ultimate truth?
So then, if crusades refute Catholicism, do jihads refute Islam? If Pope Urban VIII’s persecution of the
great Italian scientist Galileo refutes Catholicism and/or theism, do Joseph
Stalin’s political attacks on Soviet scientists upholding Mendelian genetics in
the name of Lysenkoism (i.e., evolution by acquired characteristics) refute Marxism and/or atheism? So can we reject a belief system based upon
the bad behavior of those upholding it? In reality, bad behavior by
atheists or theists can't logically prove or disprove the existence of God or
the truth or falsity of any philosophical position or religion. The
Crusades, the Inquisition, Western Imperialism, the transatlantic slave trade,
the Irish Troubles, the Thirty Years War, etc., can't ultimately prove the
falsehood of the Bible or of belief in God. The Bible could be perfectly
true, and Jehovah could exist, yet people who believe in it and
Him would have an evil human nature that causes them to fail to love
others of their faith or outside of it.
The ubiquity
of this bad, emotionally driven argument among people, whether academics or
average folk, merely proves the shoddiness of their reasoning processes when it
comes to searching for a way to disbelieve in the Bible's God because he makes
moral demands of them that they wish to evade. A good example would
be, "Because minister X committed adultery and/or theft, Christianity
must be false, God’s laws on sex and/or property don’t exist, so then I can
freely commit adultery and/or theft myself." Aldous Huxley, the
British atheist intellectual who wrote the novel "Brave New
World," among other things, admitted towards the end of his life the
motives behind why he rationalized to an skeptical position:
"I have motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed
that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying
reasons for this assumption . . . For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my
contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument
of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation
from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain
system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered
with our sexual freedom." Atheists have emotions and self-interested
reasons too, and thus will rationalize their own position as justified. For more on the rhetoric of atheism and role
of imagination on why people accepted dogmatic disbelief in God in the past,
see Alister McGrath, “The Twilight of Atheism:
The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World.”
So suppose
someone said, "Because atheists (meaning, the communists) slaughtered 100
million people in the 20th century, their bad behavior proves God's
existence." That reasoning is just as sound a priori (before
experience) as saying, "Because Catholics launched the Crusades and
the Inquisition, therefore, God doesn't exist." The equivalency
here is obvious: Bad ethics by adherents of a belief system doesn't
prove or disprove anything ontologically or metaphysically. Consider
in this context the Scottish philosopher David Hume's view that we can't go
from an "is" to an "ought." This view is problematic, but it’s still difficult to refute
fully convincingly without using revelation. May it also work the other way conversely, using human reasoning
alone?: We can't go from an
"ought" to an "is"! That is, using a moral belief as
a premise that condemns the behavior of someone, we can’t as a conclusion then
determine what entities exist in the universe and what their relationship is to
humanity (i.e., what moral demands God or the gods do or might make of us and
what the possible consequences are of disobeying Him or them).
But now, a deeper
point emerges here that justifies an anti-atheist using the atheists' bad
behavior in the 20th century to argue for God's existence: What
restraints are there on atheists' own behavior, according to their own belief
system? You can condemn a Christian who persecutes others based on his
own religious revelation, the Bible, which means his behavior violates
the Golden Rule, the command to turn the cheek, loving your neighbor as
yourself, etc. But, given the atheists' own philosophical premises, what
can they condemn their own bad behavior by if we happen to
be agnostics or atheists ourselves? What is the source of moral absolutes
to atheists? Indeed, precisely because they are atheists, they can act
morally abominably, yet feel good about themselves theoretically!
(Perhaps they might still feel guilty emotionally, but that's God's
natural law witness in themselves, such as the Nazi concentration
camp guards, Einsatzgruppen, etc. who felt they had to get
drunk after killing Jews or afterwards felt the need to transfer out of
doing such grisly duties for their Fuhrer). In the case of the
communists who plotted and then later gained political power, any and all
the lying and killing was a means to the end of abolishing capitalism
and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat and (theoretically later)
the withering away of the state to establish equality, happiness, etc. for
the mass of the people. Hence, the end justified the means (despite the
evil methods used to achieve a goal would affect the ultimate “destination”),
the goal of ridding the world of capitalism was to be done "by any
means necessary." This was despite
communism killed far more people by many orders of magnitude than the most
ruthless and callous "robber barons" ever did. (It's hard
to say ruthless business competitors like Rockefeller and Hill actually
killed anyone, while men like Gould and Fisk were
basically high-level con artists). The Russian novelist
Dostoevsky in "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880) criticized in
truly prophetic words the setting up a socialism that ignored God: "In
trying to bring about a just society without Christ, they will end up by
flooding the world with blood, for blood cries out for more blood and he who
lives by the sword shall perish by the sword." Hence, the
Russian revolution later had the Bolsheviks turn against
each other and kill one another, were a partial fulfillment
of this insightful prediction. (The same occurred during the French
revolution as well, of course, as the case of Robespierre illustrates
spectacularly. Dostoevsky may have had in mind the activities of the
Committee of Public Safety when writing this).
But could a
powerful reason for God's existence ultimately arise ironically from the sins
of atheists? As C.S. Lewis argued in "Mere Christianity," our
moral sense is derived indirectly from God even when we aren't believers in the
Bible, as part of our created human nature. (See his "Abolition of
Man" for more related material on this general subject). We can't
condemn others' actions without believing in moral absolutes. But
almost all atheists and agnostics deny moral absolutes. (Ayn Rand
and her band of Objectivists are an interesting exception to this
generalization, but since they deny the need for self-sacrifice for other
people, we Christians would see their moral system as distinctly minimalistic
at best). So how can an atheist condemn a past or present sinning
Christian if he believes in moral relativism? Someone could always claim,
while using atheists’/agnostics’ moral/cultural relativism back at them,
playing the Devil's advocate to expose the folly of their ethical
position: "Well, slavery, the
Crusades, the Inquisition, jihads, Apartheid, Jim Crow, female genital
mutilation, Chinese foot binding, suttee, female infanticide, gulags,
concentration camps, genocide, nuclear wars, imperialism, racial discrimination,
poison gas, landmines, sexism, etc., etc., etc., may be wrong for you, but
they are fine for us! So now you can't condemn us!"
If the atheist/agnostic says the Christian is being hypocritical, by violating
his own revelation's moral standards, that doesn't prove the
unbeliever’s own moral position intrinsically since he rejects God and the
Bible's inspired truth. Therefore, because atheists’ bad behavior is a
logical consequence of their belief system’s lack of a good source of moral
absolutes, it's actually a better argument to say, "The sins of
atheists refute atheism," than to say, "The sins of theists refute
theism"!
Dostoevsky was
deeply right when having another character comment on the skeptical Ivan
Karamazov's intellectual position: "Crime must be considered not
only as admissible but even as the logical and inevitable consequence of an
atheist's position." (Although by using natural law theory they’re
ways to try to partially evade this kind of reasoning, such as by the respective
approaches of C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, and James Q. Wilson, how ultimately
convincing they are is another
issue). Elsewhere, Dostoevsky has
another character say: "Then, if there is no God, man becomes master
of the earth and of the universe. That's great. But then, how can a
man be virtuous without God? That's the snag, and I always come back to
it. For whom will man love then? Whom will he be grateful to? . . .
We, for instance, may think that virtue is one thing while the Chinese may believe
it's something quite different. Isn't virtue something relative
then?" The bloody history of the
religiously skeptical yet politically fanatical 20th century shows
this snag indeed caught atheists and agnostics: Wasn’t the Europe of the Nazis and Communists even morally darker
than that of Medieval Catholicism at its collective worst?
This discussion
naturally leads in to the related “problem of evil” that’s long been used to
deny the existence of a loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God: Could God exist and care while allowing all
these moral atrocities to occur?
Atheists and agnostics, however, can't condemn God for allowing
evil to exist without believing in moral absolutes also. But since
atheists and agnostics (mostly) uphold moral relativism, they can't use
the problem of evil to deny God's existence logically! If you don't
believe in evil, you then can't condemn God for allowing it!
But now, would
the good behavior of true Christians witness to the world that
they have the truth? What did Jesus
tell His disciples the night before His crucifixion? “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even
as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have
love for one another” (John 13:34-35).
So now, shouldn’t the good behavior of some Christians in their family
and business lives convince the faithless to have faith? Admittedly, the text doesn’t actually say
that, but merely that people in the world would know Christ’s true disciples
from other people based on their love for one another. God has to call people for them to be truly
converted: “No one can come to me
unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). Hence, even (say) the amazing level of self-sacrifice of a Mother
Teresa for India’s poor won’t convert automatically the Hindu masses of
Calcutta to Catholicism. Rather, the
good works of Christians simply remove an excuse for unbelief (cf. what King
David’s bad example in the case of Uriah the Hittite helped cause the enemies
of Jehovah to blaspheme Him, II Samuel 12:14).
Hence, the sins of Christians largely serve as an excuse for unbelievers
to deny the truth of the Bible so they need not undertake the difficult work of
changing their lives and beliefs. But
for actual proof that Jesus was who He said He was, He pointed to His
relationship with His Father and how His life reflected that, including the
miracles He did: “Do you not believe
that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me?
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but
the Father who dwells in Me does the works.
Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe
Me for the sake of the works themselves” (John 14:10-11; cf. John 15:22, 24;
12:42-45). So although true Christians’
love one for another would witness to the world that they are Jesus’ disciples,
that differs from the evidence miracles would serve as experientially or,
alternatively, be like a formal proof of God’s existence.
So then, does the bad behavior of other Christian authorize
use to leave the church? Let’s now
examine a key assumption of people who leave the church because it has
hypocrites in it: Does Scripture teach
us that those professing Christ’s name will always behave 100% correctly all
the time? Does it teach us or authorize
us to give up on attending church, i.e., organized religion, when other
Christians, professing or not, sin? For
example, notice what Christ taught through the parable of the sower. Of the four classes of responses to the
Gospel message given, notice that two of them concern Christians who ultimately
fall away and don’t endure to be saved despite assembling with other
Christians. In Matthew’s telling
(13:20-21), the second class consists of those who believe for a while with
joy, but fall away when they are persecuted or suffer serious trials in
life. The third class (verse 22) is
made of up those who clearly believe, but the cares of this life, such as those
stemming from materialism, financial worries, and seeking after wealth, causes
them to be unfruitful. So these people
may attend church for years, yet they can’t be expected to behave well and they
ultimately aren’t saved. Then the
parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43) adds to this picture,
by portraying the church as having people who are placed there by Satan. Others simply can’t expect these “weeds” to
behave well in their relations to others in the church, but they will be
attending along with true faith Christians until the time of the end, when
Christ returns and the tares can be easily separated from the wheat. Christ plainly didn’t expect Christians to
always treat each other correctly and to behave well always, as shown by the church
discipline process explained in Matthew 18:15-18. In particular, the explanation begins by assuming other
Christians will sin: “And if your
brother sins, go and reprove him in private, if he listens to you, you have won
your brother.” How many people who
leave the church ever trying to gently and carefully correct others first? And how about the next two stages of the
process? After hearing this
explanation, Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against
me and I forgive him? Up to seven
times?” Christ responded, “I do not say
to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” (verses 22-23). So the Savior was plainly expecting that
Christians would sin and that it would be necessary for other Christians to
forgive them. They weren’t expected to
live perfect lives all the time. The
story of the man whom Paul had to disfellowship because he was committing
incest with his mother or step-mother shows that even serious sins can occur
among true Christians (I Corinthians 5).
Notice also that this man ultimately repented and was restored to the
faith. Indeed, all the troubles that
the Corinthians had illustrates a key truth:
This was a true church of God, but they had all sorts of serious
troubles, including dissensions, factions, members suing each other, flagrant
sexual sin, misuses of spiritual gifts, disorderly church services, sicknesses
and deaths caused by taking the Passover (Lord’s Supper) incorrectly, and
doctrinal heresy (i.e., disbelief in the resurrection). So should we really expect Christians will always
behave correctly? Well, the bible
itself denies it. The Letter of Jude makes it clear that we shouldn’t. So should we unrealistically expect all
other Christians to behave perfectly in our practical experience? So if we see others sin in the church, we
can work to correctly them and to work at correcting our own behavior. After all, why are we so certain that we are
perfect in our own behavior, and we judge everyone else to be acting so badly
that we shouldn’t associate with them?
(In this light, read Matthew 7:3-5).
After describing people who attended church as sinning in various ways,
Jude 20-21 tells us the right way to respond:
“But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith;
praying in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting
anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life.” So the sins of others professing the name of
Christ, whether they are true Christians having bad days or false Christians
who were planted there by Satan, don’t give us license to sin by leaving the
church as well (Hebrews 10:23-27; Leviticus 23:2-4).
Ironically, the sins of past traditional Christians don’t prove the falsity of Christianity metaphysically, but the atrocities committed by atheists help to prove atheism’s falsity ethically. The crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot could all be seen as the logical consequences of their atheism, while the atrocities of (say) Catholics ignore and deny the correct interpretation of the inspired revelation that's (partially) their source of spiritual authority. Furthermore, we shouldn’t falsely expect other people professing Christ’s name to always behave 100% correctly based upon what the bible itself reveals. The sins of traditional Christians contradict their overall belief system, but the crimes of atheists corroborate it!
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Why does God
Allow Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Is Christian
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influence issue article Journal 013003.htm
Which is
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Christianity a Fraud vs Conder Round 1.htm
/Apologeticshtml/Is
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