John S. Mbiti, an African
Christian scholar coined the phrase that “Africans are religious.” However, the
recent news coverage of Atheists, in Kenya nonetheless, left a bad taste in the
mouths of many a “religious African.” The fact that there was a group of
Africans convening a meeting to educate parents on godless parenting reported
by the Standard Newspaper in September 2016, discloses to us the trend that
is too obvious, and that simultaneously offers a rebuttal to Mbiti’s claim. The
trend that is bemoaned within the global church is that of millennials leaving
the church. Typing the phrase on google shows how much interest this trend has
attracted. My personal interest in this topic lies in the fact that I was once
a personal statistic. My undergraduate years unlocked certain intellectual
questions that I had about the Christian faith which I had no one to turn to,
without being looked down upon as being “irreligious.” This led me to abandon
the Church that had nurtured much of my conception of the world and humanity,
even about the afterlife. Having come to the faith
after reading the Bible, I knew that I had to settle my intellectual angst with
topics that were problematic for me before. In fact, I researched, in a bit
more depth, the core Christian teachings in light of other competing religious and
philosophical teachings – This meant that I would sometimes struggle through
understanding certain texts and so cut my teeth with painstaking effort. Having
focused my research on those who had left the church (those who have been “de-churched”)
several points stood out. 1) Some felt that church leaders were hypocritical in
that they did not practice what they preached; 2) Some felt like church was
more like a consumerist show full of charlatans; 3) Some found solace in
other better philosophies and 4) Some went through the experience of pain and
suffering which removed any consolation that a God existed in their lives. Part
of my book A Curious Faith: Love, Loss
and Living,
deals with this issue of pain and suffering and why God allows it in addition
to my journey to faith. Much of these reasons however have been discovered by
others who have also researched on the issue of the de-churched in different
contexts. One instructive book for me on this has been David Kinnaman’s, You
Lost Me: Why Young People are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith.
Kinnaman is insightful
in as far as my own personal experience and that of the others I have
interacted with goes. Of course, the stories from those who have done so are
unique and no one analysis can apply across the board. In sum, he observes that
“a generation of young Christians believe that the Churches in which they were
raised are not safe and hospitable places to express doubts.” At a deeper
analysis, there may be two reasons for this: first, a misconception of
certainty in knowledge or what it means to know; and second a
generational gap that has not provided such a space to question. J. Paul
Nyquist and Carson Nyquist, a father and son duo, respond to the latter reason
in their book The Post-Church Christian: Dealing with the Generational
Baggage of Our Faith. The younger Nyquist, writing from a millennial
perspective, acknowledges that because the older generation within the church
have walked with God for long, they have forgotten to instruct the younger
generation on the process and have instead focused on perfection. It is such
inauthenticity that young people can easily identify and be repelled from, he
notes.
At least, this agrees
with the first and second reasons I identified from those like myself who had
been de-churched. The solution for this I think is to be more authentic and
deeply biblical. What is central in scripture is God redeeming a people who are
failures and hypocrites, for even our deeds are “like filthy rags.” The
biblical story is that of God redeeming that which has been destroyed by the
fall of man, and this distortion is more than evident in our own lives. Yet
belief in Jesus is confidence in who he says he is and what he is doing in us,
as biblical data informs us. Far many times the Christian messages in our
churches have only been a list of moral lessons meant to pacify “good people”
and to scare “bad ones.” This teaching, famously coined as “Moral Therapeutic
Deism” by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, has been
heavily correlated with the repugnance of youth with the church. In such
churches, god is seen merely as a godfather who is aloof, a bit far off, people
being able to pacify him by doing a few good things. Yet a concise scriptural
understanding shows that God is distinct from creation, sustaining it through
his power, yet close enough that he has come into human reality in the form of
Jesus Christ to transform the entire cosmos. The biblical vision of God as Holy
is foundational in teaching us how we unholy people can identify with him
through Christ, the perfect God-man. Perhaps if we were to regain the Christian
intellectual tradition through theological reflection and practice, we might
have the “dropouts,” such I was, coming back since the truth of Jesus Christ is
beautiful and attractive.
I think this is what
would help us to respond to distorted worldviews about the world. The Atheists
in Kenya (AIK) give a gimmick that a world that exists without God would be
necessarily better than one that does. Their mission is simply to separate
religion from the state. Yet even states that have been run with a secular or
atheistic ethos have contributed just as much pain to the world. Globally,
Russia’s Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong and Germany’s Hitler are examples – The statistics
of mass murders in these states have caused some to claim that the 20th
century has seen more mass murders than the last 19 centuries combined. The
point is that religion or lack of it is not necessarily the issue and hence an
argument that is based on this commits the fallacy of false cause. I find it
interesting that the AIK consider themselves as unbiased towards both those who
hold to religious belief and those who do not, yet they are expending their
efforts on the submersion of religious belief in the public square. In their
self-refuting argumentation, they illustrate that indeed, reason alone cannot
be an arbiter of harmonious coexistence let alone providing a robust ethical
fiber. In this regard then, they already oppose their first objective which
they list as “to promote and practice the open, rational, and scientific
examination of the universe and our place in it.” If they were open, why can’t
they make room for those who hold to religious belief? It has always been an
interesting observation to me that those who tout logical reasoning think that
they can do so objectively, without any underlying presuppositions. Would the
fact that there are logical people who disagree based on rational discourse
prove that we may not necessarily come to the same conclusions? Further, would
our logical reasoning allow us to live with each other with civility? Logical
reasoning is not only an entitlement that atheists can lay claim to, because
thinking is synonymous with being human across different spectrums. Needless to
say, there are both atheists and religious people alike who do not think about
what they believe and may only appeal to emotional outbursts but that does not
refute the human ability to think. All humans can run but it is not necessarily
a norm that all humans are athletes. To say therefore that humans who do not
compete athletically cannot run is an over simplification.
Take for instance the
story of the preeminent Atheist C. S. Lewis who became a self-professed believer,
and went on to publish widely as a formidable Christian author and apologist. Allister McGrath a formidable Christian intellectual who teaches
at Oxford also swapped teams from the atheist camp. While the counterclaim can be made, that is, that
there are also some who moved their religious affiliation in the other
direction, the point is made: Logical reasoning presumes certain underlying
assumptions and is thus not unbiased. To make my point further, would the AIK
be willing to apply critical thinking to their atheism? The proverbial person
who throws stones in a glass house risks finding himself homeless. If the AIK
were open minded enough to look to the past, they would realize that their
atheism is nothing new. They are only riding the tide of the New Atheists, themselves
only retrieving an old atheism in the likes of people such as Sigmund Freud.
The New Atheists have been popularized by the Four Horsemen (Richard
Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens) and many popular
figures in media, movies and music agree with them.
This movement has
received criticism that their arguments are not philosophically rigorous. While
all of them have different nuances, these atheists sometimes make assertions
without giving evidential claims for them. So for instance,
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins states that
faith is blind trust without evidence and even against the evidence. He follows
up in The God Delusion with the claim that faith is an evil because it
does not require justification and does not tolerate argument . . . Harris’
articulation of the nature of faith is closer to Dawkin’s earlier view. He says
that religious faith is unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern.
According to Harris, faith is the permission religious people give one another
to believe things strongly without evidence. Hitchens says that religious faith
is ultimately grounded in wishful thinking.[1]
Their assertions,
subsumed in a scientific
naturalistic perspective, are made on the basis that metaphysically,
reality does not include the existence of a God and epistemologically, only
science is the only valid way of knowing truth or reality. Already, the
arrogance is clear in these assumptions given the historical and long-standing
classical view that theology and even philosophy can be valid in ascertaining
truth claims. On this view of scientism, my assessment is that the new
atheists assume science and faith are at loggerheads.[2] Yet the presence of
scientists who are theists and even more specific, followers of Jesus Christ
offer a rebuttal (See this critique of scientism). A quick
brush of history reveals that the initial natural scientists such as Nicholas
Copernicus,
Johannes Kepler and Blaise Pascal for instance were deeply religious. This
supports the critic of the New Atheist movement that faith and science cannot
co-exist, and hence the claim that science is on the side of atheism is not
necessarily true. Informative articles
on this last point are by Dr. Denis Alexander (chairman of the Molecular
Immunology Programme at The Babraham Institute, Fellow of St. Edmund’s College,
Cambridge, and Editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief) and William
Lane Craig, a Christian Philosopher and Apologist who surveys the relationship
between faith and science in this article. For instance, Craig posits that science
encounters several metaphysical problems that faith can help to answer in
addition to faith providing a framework through which science can flourish. Moreover,
several arguments for God’s existence have been posited in the past centuries,
and there are some twenty or so arguments that Peter Kreeft proposes
in line with the classical tradition in these matters. Were the New Atheists willing
to be objective and look at the Christian intellectual tradition, they would
perhaps see the intellectual depth and reasoning of such people as Tertullian,
Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, Jonathan Edwards and in
contemporary 20th century, the work of Christian philosophers J. P.
Moreland, Nicholas Wolterstoff and Alvin Plantinga; theologians such as Timothy Keller, John M. Frame and R.
C. Sproul and the luminary apologists John
Lennox and Ravi Zacharias. A great host of Christian intellectuals are present
amongst different Christian traditions, east, west and south. Perhaps closer
home, the womanist, Methodist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the great Ghanian
Christian missiologist and scholar Kwame Bediako and the Yale Historian Lamin
Sanneh are examples of “Africans who have sought understanding.” The claim that
faith is unreasonable is countered by the valid arguments that have been
proposed as a response to atheism. The atheist’s reduction of “all religious believers to scriptural literalists, dogmatic
extremists, sentimental escapists, or fanatics who perpetuate human suffering,”
prove the overly simplistic and gross generalizations of atheists that
necessitate a burden of proof on their end.[3] Merging the beneficial
analytic tradition of the west with African cosmology, I have critically written
elsewhere
that Atheists in Africa have no basis for lack of belief. Additionally, I have
written a defense of the claims made by an atheist on the Bible and Jesus here,
building on the work of others.
It is true that the
AIK may not necessarily be devil-worshippers, as they claim in one of their
objectives. Certainly my going to their meeting space on one occasion two years
ago for research purposes wasn’t as hair-raising of an experience as I thought
it would be. One thing was very certain for me as a follower of Jesus. I got
the impression that it is necessary to respond
simply and intelligently to some of the questions that they ask, at least,
the ones that come from a genuine place. The very least we can do is to offer
truth with grace. The beauty of the heritage that we are a part of over the
ages is awe-inspiring. The worst thing for us to do is to remain ahistorical
and fail to learn from what the past thinking of the Christian tradition can
bequeath to us and also to warn us. At the very least, this is what the AIK are
giving us an opportunity to do. They are challenging us to examine our faith
and to understand it. In doing so, we become a people whose hearts and minds
are redeemed. This is to follow scripture’s injunction to “Love the Lord with
all your heart, soul and mind.” In perplexing cultural times that we are in,
with the increase in a pluralism of voices and alternatives, we need to be
redeemed even in our thinking. The gospel will not allow us to be
intellectually docile in an intellectually charged century. As those who stand
guard over the deposit of truth, we are being called to fasten our seat belts
and so to be able to stand even when Kenya finds herself in a secular state.
Right now, we can make our discipleship all about acquiring big cars and flashy
clothes, or even, in our disdain for the gift of human mind that God has gifted
us, to throw the baby together with the bathwater. Yet to follow Jesus will
mean a great cost to us. It will mean striving to understand the revelation of
Jesus Christ and to understand the context that we sojourn in. Fitting the theme
of this discourse, it will call to mind retrieving our Christian intellectual
tradition so as to deposit truth in its beauty and goodness to humanity. This
is what the AIK are calling us to do, in the words of a popular phrase, they
are “God’s quality control.”
The likes of the AIK want to tell us that “God is dead” but the statistics from the Pew Research Forum on religious affiliation show us that in 2050, the 35% increase from 6.9 billion to 9.3 billion people who are religiously affiliated, reveals that religion will still play a pivotal role in the society. It is evident that human beings need God. The question then, which God?
Despite the fact that
the wide variety of Christian intellectual tradition may offer the most
coherent worldview, the fact that there are many who still hold on to their
atheism shows that reason is not the only answer. Even while many have tried to
show that logical reasoning can remove roadblocks against belief, it is only
God who can truly redeem our inner sight. The fault lines in logical reasoning
can be attributed to the Christian understanding of the fall that has affected
the whole of man. Even while many down the ages have given credible arguments
for the existence of God, and even while the orderliness, complexity and beauty
of nature speak clearly that God exists (Psalm 19:1-4; Romans 1:19-21), it is
evident that intellectualism is not the issue. The mind itself is laid captive
by sin. The mind unaided cannot come to the light of the knowledge of God
because while atheists blame Christianity all along excusing their perverted
ways as scripture informs us, they cannot see God. Atheism shows us that at the
depths of our hearts we are ALL rebellious and would prefer to be autonomous.
Our consciences, together with the atheists who are neither devil worshipers
nor mere “primal hunter-gatherers,” prick us to our failures and our inability
to align ourselves with a perfect and dependable ethical standard. If this
standard is based only on subjective and relative alliances, then we can never
hope to make any headway in recovering a wholesome and transformative ethic. Yet
scripture also powerfully paints a picture of man as created in God’s image.
Man is not likened to the “primal hunter-gatherers” that roam the earth, but
man is dignified. Prior to and after the fall, we see Jesus, the second Adam - the
perfect human, the restorer of the true image of God within man. In light of
this, scripture teaches us that our only hope is in this Christ, the one who is
fully man and fully God. His responses to different people sum up the fact that
he is wisdom personified, the truest intellectual, the source of all knowledge;
His divinity apprehends our efforts of self-justification and show us that our
only response is to bow and worship, for he is both the creator and sustainer
of the cosmos, mind and all. The mind bows down to Jesus. Demons acknowledge
to. Stones would sing too. So should we. Only Faith can seek understanding,
because understanding would never seek faith. At best it would run away. Jesus
Christ however has the power to renew minds and in effect, to enable us see God
with our entire being, mind and all, and be participants and partakers of the
Kingdom. This is the free gift of grace available to all who believe in him.
[1]
“The New Atheists,” in Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy Accessed
here http://www.iep.utm.edu/n-atheis/
on the October 13, 2016.
[2]
Scientism is the view that “science is the only paradigm of truth.” It is further
classified as strong scientism and weak scientism. For more on this see J. P.
Moreland ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers
Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 14. Moreland proposes an integration of
science, theology and philosophy as better able to validate truth claims than
purely scientism.
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