The richer meaning within a Christian vision for the future

Premier Unbelievable aired a debate last year: Does secular humanism or Christianity offer a brighter future? Hosted by Aylesbury Vale Youth For Christ, the discussion was between secular humanist Neil McKain, religious studies teacher and vice-chairman of Humanists UK, and Christian apologist Sara Stevenson, writer, speaker and theologian from the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Here are some reflections on this fascinating discussion: 

Rumours of Christianity’s death have been greatly exaggerated 

McKain began his opening remarks by painting a bleak picture for the future of Christianity, attributing its decline to the inability of the church to keep in step with the march of what he perceives to be cultural progress. He pointed to the dramatic changes in the attitudes of young people towards cohabitation, same-sex relationships, and abortion, as evidence for the abandonment of traditional Christian beliefs. These controversial issues may contribute to the rise of the “Nones,” the demographic that does not identify with any religion. However, suggesting that this is evidence for waning belief in God is problematic because while they reject institutional religion, studies have found that the “Nones” continue to be as spiritual as ever. Decline in church attendance, therefore, doesn’t appear to be due to decreased belief in God, but rather to the way he is institutionally portrayed and worshipped. 

Rather than becoming more secular, the world is just shifting spiritually to a “none of the above” category. The church doors may be closing, but we can take heart that the portal to spirituality is now wide open and presents an interesting opportunity to reintroduce the world to God. We can bemoan the fact that Biblical knowledge is at an all-time low and spiritual seekers will have to begin their journey with a blank slate, but it will also make us more diligent in our attempts to evangelistically fill in the blanks so that they can clearly see the Christian writing on the wall. Our apologetic may need to go back to square one but as we retrace our steps, we may discover how we inadvertently made the Good News sound like bad news to our young people. We may, as the late Christian writer Frederick Buechner suggested, need to strip away all the institutional bells and whistles that have hidden our Saviour, if we want to increase the likelihood that our young people will experience a Jesus sighting.  

“Maybe the best thing that could happen to the church would be for some great tidal wave of history to wash all that away - the church buildings tumbling, the church money all lost, the church bulletins blowing through the air like dead leaves, the differences between preachers and congregations all lost too. Then all we would have left would be each other and Christ, which is all there was in the first place.” (Frederick Buechner) 

I believe the rumours of God’s death have been greatly exaggerated because if you listen closely, you can still hear him speaking to us from the church graveyard announcing a Surprising Rebirth of belief in God, as apologist and former Unbelievable host Justin Brierley puts it.

Follow the Science

Secular humanism is all about humans navigating life through reason, logic and science, without appealing to what atheists believe is an imaginary deity. However, we need to ask ourselves if this strategy has made us ethically better or technologically smarter? Are we making good choices or are we just better at managing the bad ones? Are we strapping on the better-angels-of-our-nature wings, as Stephen Pinker suggests, or have we just sharpened our pitchforks? Are we evolving saints or just more efficient sinners?  Chinese author, linguist and educator, Lin Yutang described the situation like this:

“I saw that the fruit of the humanistic age of enlightenment was an age of materialism. Man’s increasing belief in himself as God did not seem to be making him more godlike. He was becoming more clever. But he had less and less of the sober, uplifting humility of one who has stood in the presence of God. Much of contemporary history seemed to me to indicate how dangerously near the savage state that man, lacking that humility, may be even while he is most advanced materially and technologically.” Source: ‘Famous Conversions: The Christian Experience, edited by Hugh T. Kerr and John M. Mulder.’

Sadly, when we cut God out of the picture someone must take his place. Unable to find anyone with comparable divine credentials, we make an internal hire and promote ourselves to our level of incompetence. McKain assumes society is the best arbiter of truth, and that all institutions should be judged by their ability to conform to the dictates of the culture, but this is a big problem because our culture has been constructed by unbonded, unlicensed and unqualified humans. In a godless world the frog eagerly jumps into the slowly heating cultural cauldron initially enjoying a spa day until it’s too late and they croak. It seems to me we are better served if we have an institution on the outside monitoring the cultural temperature to warn us before we get cooked.

Secular humanism prides itself on being data driven, yet we must take note that the decline in religiosity, while associated with increased material well-being, also correlates with rising levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. The humanist must acknowledge the expanding corpus of medical literature suggesting that religious people are happier and healthier, and while they may attribute these findings to the intellectually anaesthetising effects of the so-called ‘opiate of the masses’, they must at least admit it is an effective placebo. 

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Social Justice Warriors

Stevenson acknowledged that in addition to other cultural changes there has been a heightened desire for social justice, but attributes this compassion to Christianity and not secularism. McKain, however, pushed back and said, “to argue that social justice and social progress only come about as a result of a Judaeo-Christian worldview is deeply disingenuous position to hold.” While I would agree with him that you don’t need to be a Christian to have a deep sense of social justice, you do if you want to explain where that passion comes from. 

The Humanist UK website states that compassion and justice are“based on reason, empathy, and a concern for human beings and other sentient animals” While this appears to be an inspiring statement, it is incoherent in an atheist universe because reason, empathy, and concern are merely epiphenomena of a Neo-Darwinian evolutionary process which is only interested in survival of the fittest. Humanists will argue that these desirable traits, while immaterial in nature, are nonetheless passed on from generation to generation as memes, but the problem is that selfish genes find altruistic memes a bit of a nuisance. 

Natural selection sorts through our unequally apportioned physical abilities to find the ones that confer the best survival advantage which means some win, and some lose and that is just how the evolutionary game is played. Human rights are therefore a problem in a materialist universe because you can’t get equal rights from unequally distributed physical skills. However, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition all people have an equal immaterial worth that not only transcends physical differences but is stamped with an image bearing divine seal of approval. 

Burning Bushes

Humans are body and soul, material and immaterial, therefore if you want to be a [Christian] social justice warrior you must take both realms into consideration. Stevenson used the story of Moses and the burning bush as an example of how the spiritual realm informs social action. She noted that while Moses was shocked by the unjust treatment of his Hebrew brothers and sisters it wasn’t until he had a spiritual encounter with God in the burning bush that he received the clarity, motivation and power to effect change. Moses was a virtue signaller grousing in the desert until a spiritual encounter with God prompted him to become a social justice warrior in Egypt. 

McKain, as a secular humanist, denies a spiritual realm and therefore only focused on the physical impossibility of a fiery talking bush and missed the far more important fact that it gave Moses his marching orders to free an oppressed people. His materialist presuppositions prevented him from recognising that the point of the story wasn’t the appearance of a miraculous fire-resistant bush, but the need to feel its spiritual heat.

Stevenson noted that true ethical progress is only possible when we contemplate the spiritual ramifications of our potentially stupid physical decisions

“Christian theism offers us not only a coherent worldview that makes sense of the universe but also makes sense of those questions we ask of ourselves, and there is so much to navigate ethically…artificial intelligence…climate change…immigration laws… Christian theism offers us a guiding way and a path and a design for making ethical decisions.”

True social justice can only occur when the physical bows to the spiritual because only then are we are humble enough to silence our egos and hear the voices of those crying for help. Ironically, it is only when we bend a knee to the Spirit that we can physically stand up for others.

As Stevenson noted, consulting the immaterial realm for physical guidance is nothing new. Scientists utilise the mathematical realm when they send a man to the moon or statistically verify the findings of a laboratory experiment. The laws of logic are used to determine the rules of engagement when debating ideas that have physical consequences. It would therefore make sense that we should consult a spirit God who considers widows, orphans and strangers extremely important when we engage in physical acts of compassion.

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Luck as meaning

The debate shifted from morality to meaning and purpose. Stevenson said, “we were made for more” and suggested the secular world just gives us less. We are currently experiencing a meaning crisis yet at the same time the world is becoming more secular – coincidence? – I think not. When we eliminate a higher power, we must lower our expectations, which in the end only cheapens our existence. McKain recognizes that a world without meaning, and purpose is miserable but believes that it can be constructed without the help of a spiritual contractor. 

“It’s the fragility of your existence that gives your existence meaning. If you are lucky you will live for eighty years, 90 years in good health…if you have a family, if you have a job, if you have a life full of meaning and value, your achievements and your genes will then be passed on…that finite nature, that you are going to live and you will die just like billions of people before you, that is my reason for getting up in the morning and valuing every single day that I exist…That’s what gives my life meaning and purpose.” (my highlights)

The things that make life meaningful for McKain come with a big “if” because he has confused meaning and purpose with luck. Sadly, many of us won’t have that kind of luck and will have to settle for just passing on our genes which seems an odd accomplishment, given that I have never heard a eulogy that included a reading of the deceased’s nucleotide sequence. Eulogies are more interested in cataloguing the fruits of the spirit than the fruits of the loins.

While I think one can make the case that a time-limited existence creates a sense of urgency and attention to the moment, it ultimately reduces life to a bucket list which most people don’t have the money to afford and the world isn’t particularly keen on funding. Very few humans will make a multi-generational contribution to world history, which sadly for the materialist, just leaves the rest of us using up the oxygen of the true movers and shakers. 

Intuitive Theists

If the lives of the deceased aren’t measured by material accomplishments, then maybe we need to pay more attention to the spiritual aspects of their lives. Stevenson’s statement that “we were made for more” appears to have a scientific basis. Secular scientist Dr. Deborah Kelemen, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, wrote a very interesting paper titled, “Are Children ‘Intuitive Theists?’” in which she notes that children attribute supernatural causation and purpose to the natural world, a propensity which often continues into adulthood and for her presents an unfortunate obstacle to accepting a Darwinian materialist account of life. It appears the belief in God begins in infancy and represents a normal developmental milestone, which we ignore at our own peril. 

Surprisingly, Kelemen thinks that for science to proceed, this intuition should be suppressed, which as a physician concerned with the importance of achieving developmental milestones, sounds like malpractice to me. Interestingly, Humanists UK launched their own program called “the ‘Please Don’t Label Me’ billboard campaign” to draw “attention to the strange practice of labelling children with a religion from birth” which, based on the data from Kelemen and others sounds a lot like science denial to me. What is perhaps even more interesting is that the materialist must face the fact that evolution created this troublesome developmental milestone in the first place. You know a theory is in crisis when Darwinists must manipulate evolution to get it to believe in itself. 

Hosting Humanism

McKain stated that “Religion is a human construction” but I would counter that “secular humanism is a religious construction” because the human rights to which they adhere were made possible by a Christian world. Secular humanism must imitate Christianity to work, and while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is never the same as the real O.G. The problem for the humanist is that when you imitate something which has a supernatural component and then toss that supernatural element aside, all you have done is manufacture a cheap knock-off. 

In answering the question of whether secularism or Christianity has a brighter future I would have to answer, yes. I believe secularism has a future but only if Christianity remains by its side to prop it up and correct it. Secular humanism on its own will perish because it is parasitic on Judaeo-Christian values. If it loses its host, it will starve to death. 

Erik Strandness is a physician and Christian apologist who has practised neonatal medicine for more than 20 years.