Apologetics is more than simply answering difficult questions. It is also asking difficult questions.
Apologetics certainly includes the defence of the faith (1 Peter 3.15), but also implies that we challenge the world and its alternatives. Some questions posed are very hard to answer (‘Why does God allow suffering?’), but let’s not imagine the critics have better answers. With gentleness, respect and courtesy we can turn most arguments around (2 Corinthians 10.5).
Sense of morality
For example, where does our moral sense of right and wrong come from? Having abandoned faith in God, where will we find a basis for moral categories like good and evil? Friedrich Nietzsche, the atheist philosopher of the 19th century, recognised this problem.
He wrote: ‘When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality … Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands’ (The Joyful Wisdom). Those are perceptive words. The death of God is also the death of morality. Christianity is a system of thought, not a pick and mix of unrelated ideas.
Blessed mistakes?
Richard Dawkins cheerfully ignores 3,000 years of philosophical thought, offering his own take on the origins of moral feelings: ‘We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes’ (The God Delusion). So what is morality? Just a misfiring of our urge to reproduce.
The sneaky sleight of hand in Dawkins’s words is in his claim that these are ‘blessed, precious mistakes’. Who says they are ‘blessed’? By whose standards are they ‘precious’? Dawkins’s error is the classic mistake of quickly (and quietly) moving from a statement of what ‘is’ to a statement of what ‘ought’ to be. And how can Dawkins then distinguish between pity which moves someone to compassion and lust which moves someone to crime? If both are blessed mistakes, then how do we make moral distinctions?
The attempt by atheists to establish a basis for morality often sounds like a lot of bluster. But at least they are trying. They recognise the claims of morality upon their lives even if they cannot justify them. We could call it an atheist misfiring: a blessed, precious mistake.
Betraying his convictions
One day in 1889, Nietzsche saw a man mistreating a horse in the streets of Turin. Moved by pity he ran to the horse and threw his arms around it to offer protection. He was later found collapsed in the streets suffering a breakdown from which he never really recovered.
In contemporary culture this might have been seen as a great act of moral courage and sensitivity to animal welfare. Nietzsche considered it a failure to live up to his own principles. He had betrayed his philosophical convictions by acting in such a weak, compassionate manner. In many ways we should be grateful for the inconsistency of atheism. No one, not even the most evil, can live without moral values of some kind.
Vegetarian Adolf Hitler loved his dogs and Nazi Germany, ironically, imposed the strictest animal welfare laws in Europe, including a ban on vivisection (yes, inconsistency can be astounding!). But the existence of these moral values is a signpost. They point to the existence of a lawgiver. Our thoughts inevitably move from seeing the way things are, to feeling the way they should be, and then pondering; ‘Who says?’ God says. Or, if we don’t agree, then where do we find a basis for morality? The alternatives to the biblical worldview can be as disturbing as they are inconsistent.
Shameless plug!
Apologetics is well served in Christian literature, but I have just had my own title published with IVP: Confident Christianity: Conversations that lead to the Cross. It’s an introductory textbook on ideas, arguments and apologetics. See http://www.thinkivp.com where you can order a copy for £7.19.
Chris is the minister without shame at Alderholt Chapel and lectures on apologetics and biblical studies at Moorlands College!
