Does Religion Make People Behave Better?

Christopher Hitchens asks the question: “Does Religion Make People Behave Better?”  I would agree with Hitchens with regard to a negative answer.  In fact I would say that religion does not make people do anything.  The subtitle of the book “How Religion Poisons Everything” would suggest that Hitchens believes in general religion makes people behave worse.  I would believe that too is false.

Can Hitchens find examples of religious people who have had moral failings or who were down right bad?  With the huge amount of religious people in the world, I would be surprised if he couldn’t find any.  I do not want to dismiss the horrors described in this chapter, especially the genocide in Rwanda.  The role some clergy played sickens me.  But these examples do not disprove the suggestion that religion can have a positive effect.  To do that, Hitchens would have had to look for positive reasons and fail.  The truth is that there are many examples of people who have turned to God and have become better people, better spouses, better parents and so on.  On the contrary, I have yet to meet a formerly religious person who was rotten but after turning to atheism became a shining moral beacon.  It is also interesting to look at the number of religious charities out there that make a difference around the world.  Should we discount these organizations because Hitchens can point to some religious people who are nasty?  No, religion does not make people behave better.  But from my experience, at least Christian faith can have a significant positive change on people’s lives.

Considering the Community of Christ

I recently heard from a Community of Christ pastor who was receiving some opposition from his local ministerial.  If you are not familiar with the Community of Christ, they were formally known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  When people hear this, they automatically think of the Utah Mormons and the doctrines of polygamy and becoming gods and denying of the Trinity.  Many assume the Community of Christ believe the same things as the more famous Mormons.  The fact is that they do not.  In fact the Community of Christ have a very orthodox theology.  You can find their statement of faith here.  Please notice that they believe in the Trinity, the deity and incarnation of Christ and salvation by grace.

The main concerns people have once they get over their initial prejudice is their doctrine of Scripture.  They accept the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants as Scripture along side the Bible.  But a closer look will show that they do not see them on the same level and that the Bible is their primary foundation for theology.  From the protestant perspective, is an incorrect canon enough to lose orthodoxy?  If so, what do we do with Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans (to a certain extent) who accept more books than the protestant canon?  A correct canon was not one of the early tests for orthodoxy, especially considering our exact protestant canon was not found in any list until the end of the fourth century.

I am not suggesting that people should accept the Book of Mormon as truth.  What I am suggesting is that the Community of Christ explicitly seeks to follow Jesus and holds to almost all the same doctrines as protestants.  What would be the result of avoiding fellowship with them over what we disagree on?  Fellowship would draw us closer together, enabling us to be a positive influence.  Rejecting them as heretics or a cult will drive them away from the orthodox position they have taken.  I urge Christians to not judge before they look at the facts and that they respond with grace and humility.

Sometimes That’s the Way It Is

The chapters in Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great are not getting ver substantive and so I will deal with a number at the same time.  These four chapters, “The Koran is Borrowed,” “Tawdriness of the Miraculous,” “Religion’s Corrupt Beginnings,” and “How Religions End” all have something in common: religious examples that should be embarrassing.

I was a little surprised at Hitchens’ chapter on Islam.  Considering the current anti-Muslim sentiment in much of the West, Hitchens was not near as mocking as he is of many religions, including Christianity.  Don’t get me wrong, he is critical, he just does not have the same biting tone he uses for other religions.  I am also shocked that he would suggest that there is much better historical evidence for Muhammad than there is for Jesus.  Hitchens, himself, points out how long after the death of Muhammad that the first biography appears.  Whereas we have information in Paul twenty to thirty years after and in the Gospels forty to fifty years after.  Hitchens just seems bent toward the non-historical Jesus bias.

The rest of the chapters are about examples of cargo cults, Mormons, charlatan healing evangelists, falsified Catholic miracles and Jewish sectarian groups.  I neither have the background nor the interest to go into detail to defend each group.  He is likely correct in his criticisms in some of these areas.  But so what?  He is trying to show that religion is bad.  Is immorality or error in some religious examples the same thing as religion being about immorality or error?  How hard would it be to find examples in politics, law, police or business of people who used their position for their own profit and were not sincere in how they portrayed themselves?  Could we then conclude that all these things must be inherently bad?  Not likely.  So why does Hitchens think he can get away with this for religion?

Hope’s Reason Journal Vol. 2 No. 1

The second issue of Hope’s Reason: A Journal of Apologetics is now online.  There are some great articles and reviews there that are worth reading.  You can find it here.  Keep watch for an announcement for the print version.

A Theological Dialogue With N.T. Wright

I am currently listening to “A Theological Dialogue With N.T. Wright” taken from a conference at Wheaton College.  It is good stuff and worth listening to.  You can find it on iTunes here.

Something Old, Something New

In the next two chapters, Christopher Hitchens takes aim at the Old and New Testaments.  I was a little surprised at his chapter “Revelation: The Nightmare of the ‘Old’ Testament” as he did not focus on the difficult passages that I thought he would.  In fact Hitchens spent more time on rather silly things such as Moses supposedly recording his own funeral or the wording of the Ten Commandments.  Hitchens obviously does not understand what slavery looked like in Israelite society, possibly mistaking it for the American and European versions of it.  Israelite slavery was for families who could not pay their debts and it was a way for them to feed their families and pay back what they owed.  It was not a permanent situation.  Of course Hitchens neglects to mention things how farmers were to leave part of their crops for the hungry or the strong injunctions against oppressing the poor or the strong stand the Old Testament takes for justice.  I guess that did not sound very much like a nightmare to Hitchens.  I doesn’t for me either.

Hitchens then attempts to show “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.”  As a person trained in New Testament studies, this was painful to read.  Hitchens claims that when one Gospel describes an event and another does not describe it, then they are contradicting each other.  When he does not get much out of that route, he takes aim at Mel Gibson.  Whatever the pros and cons of the Passion of the Christ movie, it has nothing to do with the value of the New Testament itself.  Hitchens makes some terrible errors such as describing the gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in this way: “These scrolls were of the same period and provenance as many of the subsequently canonical and ‘authorized’ Gospels.”  These gospels were actually written centuries after the canonical Gospels and are not even of the same genre.  Hitchens speaks of a violent struggle over which Gospels should make it into the canon.  Really?  Which history book did Hitchens read?  There were no lack of conflicts in the early church but the canon was not the one that led to violence.  Hitchens strangely seems to agree with C.S. Lewis’ statement that either Jesus was who he said he was or he was a fraud or a lunatic (or a legend Hitchens would add).  He even praises Lewis for his honesty.  But then he twists Lewis’ intent by saying “Either the Gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps an immoral one at that.”  Lewis was not a literalist and so would have had some problems with Hitchens’ interpretation.  By speaking of “literal truth”, Hitchens opens the door to an extremely wide definition, one that he can aim at making the New Testament fail.  The sign over Jesus’ cross is described differently in the various Gospels, so they cannot be literally true and therefore they are frauds.  That is Hitchens’ reasoning.  I believe that the Gospels are literally true in that literally Jesus was born of Mary and his adoptive father Joseph, preached in Galilee, performed miracles, travelled to Jerusalem, was arrested, crucified and rose again.  How all that was described was according to first century standards and in the context of that culture.  Hitchens never does any serious interaction with New Testament scholarship and fails to be convincing in his attacks.

A Poorly Designed Chapter

In his chapter “Arguments From Design” Christopher Hitchens attacks the concept of intelligent design.  This was a frustrating chapter in a number of ways.  One reason is that Hitchens got off topic quite often.  He would be talking about evolution or intelligent design and then would be reminded about something else that ticked him off about religion.  Apparently no opportunity for a potshot should be overlooked, even if it breaks the flow of an argument.

Hitchens’ basic argument is that Darwinian evolution has basically removed any need for God, if there ever was one.  He seems to think that Darwinism has explained pretty much everything.  He sees Darwinism as more than a theory and intelligent design (ID) as less than a theory.  It should be remembered that Darwinism has official sanction to be researched, studied and published, allowing it to develop (evolve) as a theory.  At the same time, ID is banished from the conversation resulting in much more limited opportunities to be studied.  Still, ID has provided some impressive results despite what Hitchens claims.

There are definitely some limitations to Darwinism.  For example, Hitchens cites (sights?) Michael Shermer on the evolution of the eye.  Shermer argues that the current form of the eye was a gradual development from a simple eyespot with light sensitive cells.  Let us use our imagination.  We would have to assume that at one point, no organisms had any eyespots.  Then there was one that happened to have mutated with such eyespots.  We are not talking about an adjustment to size or colour.  Even a simple eyespot would be fairly complex, being able to measure the light and then transmit the information to the brain.  And that just appeared?  And then kept appearing?  And Ockham’s razor really makes that more likely than a Designer?  Then there is the thorniest problem, which is the origin of life.  How did such life first begin?  Hitchens (or Darwinism) has no really answers here.

One of Hitchens arguments is that if there was a Designer, he did a very bad job.  After all, there is sickness and age and death and eventually an end to our solar system.  Hitchens problem is that he takes one aspect of the Christian worldview, intelligent design, and dismisses it as not answering all the questions.  The Christian world view has many other aspects including God’s plan for the human life with an afterlife and a transformation of this world.  All of these things must be taken together.

Metaphysical Claims of Religion

In Hitchens’ chapter “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” he does not really try to prove anything.  It is just another chapter of Hitchens taking cheap shots at anything religious.  It is all based on sweeping assumptions and not any actual evidence.

Hitchens looks at some of the people such as Aquinas or Augustine who are held up as intellectual giants.  Hitchens claims we will never see intellectuals like that again as it is impossible to be both a rational and religious person today.  He makes fun of these people of former generations as being scientifically stupid, not knowing even a portion of what children know today.  And this is religion’s fault?  Does he really think that non-religious people fifteen hundred years ago knew as much science as we know today?  What about the impossibility of being a rational and religious person?  I guess that depends on how you define rationality, which Hitchens never does.  If you define rationality as rejecting religion as superstition, then of course Hitchens is correct.  But if you define a rational person as an educated, logical, scientifically knowledgable and philosophically articulate person, then there are plenty of religious people like this.  And is it true that scientists today are pretty much without religion?  Hitchens does not offer any evidence for this aside from a few examples of atheist scientists.  Could I offer a list of Christians who are accomplished scientists and then conclude that most scientists are Christian?  Evidence please.

Hitchens’ cites Ockham’s razor as to why religion is irrational.  For theists to say God created the universe, they are left with the question of who created the Creator.  We are better off with the simpler explanation that there is no Creator.  But are we?  It is not enough to just say there is no Creator.  You are still left with questions of how the universe began and why it seems fine-tuned for life.  Is a universe without a beginning really a simpler universe?  Is a multiverse who a vast array of parallel universes really a simpler explanation?  Ockham’s razor cuts both ways.

Health, Sex and the End of the World

In Hitchens’ chapter “A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous,” he continues his tirade against religion.  This chapter is really just more of the same.  Hitchens’ goal is not to offer a direct link between religious teachings and evil/suffering but rather to just show some of the worst moments in humanity and how people affiliated religiously were connected.  What Hitchens continues to fail to do is show how religion leads to these things.  He avoids the fact that even in this increasingly secular world that most people still affiliate religiously and so by the odds these connections are going to be found.  Does he really believe if we turn to officially atheistic national experiments such as the Soviet Union or Communist China that we would find a pristine moral paradise?

Hitchens suggests that religion has lead to some very bad decisions that have harmed the overall health of people worldwide.  Perhaps some Muslim groups have discouraged use of some vaccines because of supposed western conspiracies.  However, I have heard secular people discourage use of vaccines because of pharmaceutical conspiracies.  This is not a religious phenomenon.  Also, somehow Hitchens forgot to mention all the Christian and other faith-based organizations that work hard to improve the health of children and adults worldwide.

What does religion say about sex?  I can only speak about Christianity.  Some organizations have made some very bad choices.  The decision by the Roman Catholic Church to hide sexual abuse was evil.  No excuse.  But does Christianity lead to an unhealthy view of sexuality?  Not at all.  People may abuse religion to impose their own sexual values, but that does not find its origin in religion.  Hitchens connects this issue with religion’s offensive view of women.  Speaking for Christianity, the church has made some mistakes, but looking to the New Testament both Jesus and Paul had some very positive views of women, radical for their own time.

As for the end of the world, perhaps there have been some people who have looked forward to the end.  But how do we measure this?  Is it by how much it is spoken of?  What about all the secular talk of nuclear war, climate change and other ecological disasters.  I hear more of this talk from secular sources than I do from religious sources.  By the way, Christianity does not look for the end of the world.  The Christian hope is for the re-creation and transformation of the world (See Romans 8).  The Christian hope is not pie in the sky when you die but resurrected people living on a transformed and perfected earth.  No end of the world to look forward to.

Ravi Zacharias in Conversation

Last night I went with Amanda and Andrew Scholl to see Ravi Zacharias speak at Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto.  I have read a couple of his books and have listened to his podcasts, but this is the first time I have heard Ravi speak in person.  He spoke about who Jesus is in the context of mass market spirituality.  It was a great message.  Ravi is a talented communicator who is passionate about helping thinkers believe and helping believers to think.  I have really come to appreciate the ministry of Ravi Zacharias and the legacy he has built into with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.