The Christian Atheist

29 What IS an Atheist? (Part 2)

The second definition for atheism that we discussed last episode, that atheism is the claim that we do not have sufficient reason or evidence to believe in God, is meant to sidestep the problems we highlighted in the first definition for atheism, the assertion that God does not exist, allowing the atheist to neither assert the non-existence of God (which requires as Hitchens said, an “impossible” burden of proof), nor to acknowledge that atheism is itself a belief, a faith stance.
In this episode we argue that the atheist is logically frustrated in BOTH these expectations, that atheism is necessarily a faith-stance, and that if it doesn't assert God's non-existence it isn't atheism at all, but agnosticism.
Also, the question of God's existence is unlike other questions, as it is, indeed, as the atheist asserts, not provable from any perspective other than God's; the finite cannot contain or grasp the infinite. This question also stands at the highest level of explanatory choice. We choose to believe or not to believe in God, and our choice will necessarily affect all our other explanatory choices. For instance, start with the claim that God does not exist, and by logical extension there can be no evidence for God, just as the atheist asserts.
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28 What IS an Atheist? (Part 1)

As I say in my Outro to the Christian Atheist podcast, "I am a Christian, with the searching and skeptical mind of an atheist. I don't want to believe anything that isn't true. I know both sides of the looking-glass [i.e., the Christian AND the Atheist], and I know them with open eyes. I choose Christ's side. I invite you to join me from wherever you stand before the looking-glass."
When my wife, Jenny, and I decided to launch this podcast, we determined that we would play a straight game. We are Christians, but neither naive nor mindless of the real difficulties involved in being Christians in the modern world. We believe that Christ is the answer to the world's ills, but this does not mean that atheists and agnostics are irrational. We try to honestly and rationally confront our problems, and to reason honestly with the opposing view. THIS is a basic commitment to our project, and as I know BOTH sides of the looking-glass, I am in a unique position with a unique responsibility to fairness and probity on both side of the debate. In addition, we believe that God DEMANDS honesty and truth from us, not tricks of logic and rhetoric.
For these reasons, I ask in this series of episodes of The Christian Atheist for a stabilization of terms. I would like to be able to confront atheism in its strongest and most robust formulation, which requires that we find a stable definition of the term, or at least a stable understanding of the range of atheistic thought and practice. It seems to me as though atheists constantly vacillate strategically between differing definitions in order to avoid the problems of atheism. I try to pin them down here.
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27 The Strongest of All Arguments for Atheism

In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis quotes Lucretius:
Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.
These lines, Lewis says, present the strongest of all arguments for atheism. I agree, and I suggest that broadly construed they encompass the spectrum of arguments against divine authorship. I challenge this argument on the basis of the value necessary in applying it. The Western conception of God has struggled mightily, honestly with the Problem of Evil, and I suggest that atheism has an analogous Problem of Good (or Value).
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26 Letter to my Atheist Self #3

I send this letter back to September 11th, 2001, a watershed for our world and my personal history. Evil is insidious. It can destroy with a suddenness and violence that shocks and disconcerts, but it HAS a logic, too; reason, evidence and motivational justification can lead to great evil, as well as great good. Reason is a tool, and like all tools it must be directed by a will, by choice, by decision. By their fruits you will know them, Jesus said. When I turned from God to atheism, I too tore down the towers of what I labeled un-reason and oppression. Truth, however, when it is ardently sought, can use even our false turnings, our faulty reasoning, and our impure motivations to direct our feet back on to the proper path, to rebuild what was destroyed. And thus the war continues. As Truth restores, evil is never quiescent, and there are ever new incarnations from which to extricate ourselves and our world. God, and God alone saves.
 
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25 Letter to my Atheist Self # 2

This letter goes back to my atheist self around the year 2000, after I had spent close to five years living as an atheist in the academic world. What advice can I offer that young atheist who is becoming increasingly disillusioned with his new faith community?
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24 Letter to my atheist self # 1

I send a letter back in time to the moment I turn from agnosticism to atheism. It is a crucial moment in my life, and I won't turn back to God for 25 years. What would I say to myself at that moment, now that my faith in Christ is restored?
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23 Travel Readings

Jenny and I read together whenever we can. This week a presentation of two passages from C. S. Lewis that we found particularly important and moving while we traveled the US to see family.
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22 On Ethics (Part 5): God and Ethics

Ethics as an argument for God's existence seldom convinces the unbelieving, as it is conceived at the wrong level. Atheists know themselves as ethically concerned while at the same time denying God. That is, there is a fundamental disconnect between their ontological experience as ethical beings and the metaphysical explanation of ethics as dependent upon God. For them ethics is REAL based on their experience, and thus does not require God.
Faith is always the foundation on which we construct our knowledge-structures. Atheists believe first that God does not exist, so clearly ethics is not dependent upon God. This conclusion is completely logical, when you start with that premise, as is the conclusion that ethics requires God when we start with the premise that God is possible.
I claim that it is only by explaining away the evidence of ontology, of lived human life, at the metaphysical level, that we can conclude that God does not exist. Mine is not a new argument for God's existence, but a plea to accept the evidence of ontology AS evidence of something important. If we destroy human reason at the most basic level, the level of lived life, what right have we to trust it at the higher level of metaphysics?
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21 On Ethics (Part 4): The ”Nature” of the Ought

In traditional ethical theory we have two broad systems of thought, deontology, which bases ethics in obligation to follow an ethical standard, and consequentialism, which tries to ground ethics in the value of the consequences of our actions.
Ethics, I argue, is sui generis, unique. It is its own discrete field of value, standing outside the already unique human understanding of value discussed in a previous edition of the Christian Atheist. The ought of obligation is the coextensive demand of human reason to do the right thing. We find this obligation in the very heart of our own self-consciousness; we do not create it. This is THE basic fact of human morality. We can of course explain it away, at the level of metaphysics, as a human creation, but we do not know it as such. We know ethics as a self-evident truth, as an axiom of our rational nature - we should do what is right. When we ask why this is the case, the only answer we get at the ontological level is, because it is right.
It seems, then, that human rationality points radically outside itself to a transcendent reality in two ways: 1) we are the only beings that can produce the UNnatural, the "artificial," and 2) we look constantly to a transcendent ideal in our hierarchical value systems. This is not meant as a new "proof" of God's existence, but it is a curious fact for which an account must rationally be offered, and one plausible, indeed eminently rational account, is to accept the possibility of such a transcendent reality.
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20 Ethics (Part 3): The Origin of the Ought

Ethics addresses the question, how should I act? We begin by clarifying what it means to act in opposition to the deterministic notion of react. We discover that action is built on rationality, and involved the uniquely human faculty of imagination, the ability to structure a negation, and thus have both a past and a future. In this way, being spread out over the three temporal dimensions we can be responsible agents, for IF we can choose how to act, THEN we are accountable for our actions - past, present, and future, and we ought to choose the right, as rational agents who rank-order value.
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19 Ethics (Part 2): On Value

Building on the picture of human rationality we presented in episode 18, we focus our attention on human rationality and Value, which is central to ethics. We argue that value is the very substance (not matter) of our experience of the world, that even perception is inextricably bound to value. As a consequence, we find that value exists in the same sort of paradoxical reality as the Incarnation itself - both natural and supernatural, human and divine. While we are responsible for recognizing and ordering our values into a hierarchy, we are also constrained by the reality of value itself. We are, that is, both free and determined.
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18 Ethics (Part 1): On Rationality

We begin a series of episodes on ethics to discover what it might teach us about human beings, God, and our possible relationship. We begin by looking at human rationality, which separates us from the animal kingdom. What does it mean to be rational?
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17 Problems with Old Testament History

Are there errors in the history of the OT account? We examine how to address the critic on these issues in this second edition of "answering the critic."
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16 Old Testament Superstition

Responding intelligently to the critic means paying attention to real problems, not sweeping them under the rug. In this edition, the first of two, we examine the critical comments of Max Doubt concerning the superstition that he claims infests the whole Bible.
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15 Old Testament Ugliness

The Old Testament is a complex narrative, to be treated carefully, but it is rich beyond our imaginations in insight, wisdom and information. It is also full of potential "stumbling blocks" to faith, especially for the modern seeker. In this edition of the Christian Atheist we explore what is, for me at least, one of the most troublesome aspect of Western theism, the Hebrew sacrificial system. Can I believe in a God who instituted such a brutal, archaic and arcane system of worship? The atheist in me says "no." How can the Christian respond?
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14 Uriah, Job and Frodo

Uriah, Job ... and Frodo. Part of being human is passing moral judgments. There are proper and improper ways of doing this. We look at the story of David and Uriah, and of Job. These stories tempt us to judge God, which requires us to take HIS position, His moral authority, His righteousness. We do this same thing in judgment of our fellow human beings. In doing so, we set ourselves up in our arrogance AS GOD, the very position of Satan himself, the pathology of Cain. This arrogation of God's position becomes a central theme for us moving forward with the Christian Atheist. We exemplify it Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS in the character of Frodo as he interacts with Gandalf.
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13 The Cruelty of God

This episode represents my first attempt on YouTube to express my joy in returning to the Savior while doing justice to my journey, God's story in my life. It was from this seed that The Christian Atheist was born. I hope it retains some value.
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12 FDR’s D-Day Prayer

June 6th, 1944. The allied Invasion of Normandy in WWII is a major watershed in history. We commemorate that day with a reading of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's D-Day prayer for the troops and the nation.
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10 Atheism and Arguments for God’s Existence

There is a long history of arguments for God's existence offered by the faithful - the cosmological, the teleological, the ontological. As means to the conversion of atheists I find these arguments nearly useless, because I knew them quite well as an atheist without ever being compelled to reverse my atheism.
This episode is a clarion call to Christians, as Paul put it, "to stand," having faith in God's truth and power. Faith results in action; it cannot help to do so. Trust that The Way is Truth for all men. Proclaim Him, think clearly, be honest, acknowledge what you don't know.
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9 Afterthoughts - The Escape Back to Reason

Rationality is a more expansive notion than mere intellect. I make the case that faith in God and Christ is a rational response in our world today, and that value (which is also part of human rationality) is a good basis on which to choose theism over atheism.
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8 The Denouement: The Machinery of the Looking-Glass, Part 7

As my life unraveled, the intellectual noose tightened. Eventually, as C. S. Lewis said about his own conversion, I had to acknowledge that "God is God." My wife Jenny became the REAL incarnate ideal that reflected my own intellectual dishonesty as well as the larger reality of the Incarnation of God in Christ. Reason is not opposed to faith, but finds its foundation therein. Jesus Christ is the fusion of Reason - Logos, literally both "word" and "reason" in Greek - and Faith, the divine and the human: The Incarnation.
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7 The Looking-glass: The Machinery of the Looking-glass, Part 6

My wife, Jenny, became my portal back to Christ, an incarnation of the reality of God in human form. One of the constant refrains of my renewed Christian faith is the mirror of the large structures of creation in the smaller. The Incarnation of God in man as the Redeemer is seen at smaller scale in God's image in man, in the relationship of Church to Christ, of man to woman, of man to creation, etc. I see God through Jenny, and His perfection is mirrored in her perfection for me, and it was that mirror that was decisive in my step back through the Looking-glass.
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6 Lessons from Jordan Peterson, The Machinery of the Looking-glass, Part 5

The Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson, came onto the scene at precisely the right moment in my odyssey from atheism to Christ. He reminded me of the profundity of the Biblical narrative, taking seriously from a psychological and academic perspective a text I had dismissed from my consideration years ago. It was his practical insights and his uncompromising stand for TRUTH above all, however, that captured and held my attention, that helped pave my path toward the Looking-glass.
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5 Lessons from Jean-Paul Sartre: The Machinery of the Looking-glass, part 4

Atheistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre seems an unlikely character to play a prominent role in my turn from atheism to Christ, but his influence on my thinking is profound. In many ways Sartre reflects Kant's conclusions that faith is a basic component of human experience, and that reason builds upon faith as foundation. It was Sartre who convinced me that my atheism was as much a faith-position as my theism had been. In Sartrean language, both theism and atheism are metaphysical and not ontological positions. That is, they are the result of our manner of explaining the facts of our ontological reality. As such, metaphysical explanation can be accepted or rejected, believed, or not. Ontological theory, though, Sartre thinks of as incorrigible, as imposed upon us by the nature of our conscious experience of the world. We live it; we are our experience. For instance, we exist our freedom ontologically, but we can metaphysically explain it away as determinism, or affirm it, through belief. This distinction between metaphysics and ontology looms large in the machinery of the looking-glass, as does the fact that Sartre makes it clear that a notion of God is inherent in human existence.
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4 Lessons from Immanuel Kant: The Machinery of the Looking-glass, Part 3

Immanuel Kant, in the face of the overwhelming forces of science and philosophy in his day, undertook the monumental task of limiting the claims of knowledge to transcendent insight, in order to allow for the possibility of morality, of human freedom. That is, Kant made it clear that while we can think of human beings as determined by natural and social forces, we can also think of them as free, autonomous agents without contradiction. We choose which of these explanations we believe to be true, but we live "as if" we are free agents in the world. Faith, then, is not contrary to reason, but is the very foundation upon which reason operates. Faith, I learn from Kant, is a human universal; it is essential and not accidental to reason, and while not all objects of faith are rationally justified, some are, and against them the ignorance of the critic cannot stand. 
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3 Lessons from the Classroom: The Machinery of the Looking-glass, Part 2

The odyssey of my return through the Looking-glass, to a recognition that faith in Christ is a fully rational response , if not the only one, to the evidence given us, was not simple, quick, or short. In this episode, I trace out the long-curve of a growing understanding, based on teaching Plato and Socrates in the university classroom over many years, that human reason must face its fundamental limitations with intellectual humility. The primary danger of the human intellect is arrogating to itself a knowledge which it cannot justly claim. This is the error of ideology that bathed the 20th century in blood and horror. Christ is the Way to peace and Truth.
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2 Truth Above All and At All Costs: The Machinery of the Looking Glass, Part 1

My conversion from Christianity to Atheism started with commitment to a fundamental principle, Truth above all, and at all costs. It will be seen that this SAME principle led me back to Christ, the Way to, and source of, all Truth. The Machinery of the Looking Glass tells the story of how God used my intellectual odyssey through philosophy as both student and teacher to ground a renewed faith in Christ, one in which the conflicts of reason and faith are resolved in the person of Jesus Christ. You can have respect for science, a 21st century worldview, be rational and be Christian.
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1 Through the Looking Glass: Who is The Christian Atheist?

Who is the Christian Atheist? John Wise is a philosophy professor who spent the bulk of his academic career as an atheist. In 2019 he underwent a dramatic (re)conversion to faith in Christ, and now, seeing the world through the dual lenses of Christianity and atheism, he seeks to understand how a 21st century worldview, a respect for science and a commitment to truth are reconciled in the Incarnation of Christ.
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