Mocking a God Nobody Worships

*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 3-75

The skeptic’s greatest victory has been over a cartoon.

Let me describe a god for you.

He is insecure in the way that only the genuinely powerless are insecure, requiring constant worship not because worship is the appropriate response to ultimate reality but because his ego demands it, because without the regular affirmation of his creatures he apparently cannot maintain his own sense of self-worth. He is easily offended, the way a thin-skinned bureaucrat is easily offended, quick to violent outbursts over violations of petty procedural rules that seem designed more to demonstrate his authority than to serve any coherent moral purpose. He is tribal in the most embarrassing sense, fiercely devoted to one small group of people in one small corner of the ancient Near East and contemptuous, or at minimum indifferent, to everyone outside that circle. He is hostile to science in the way that an threatened institution is hostile to anything that might undermine its authority, allergic to honest questions, suspicious of intelligence, and deeply uncomfortable whenever the people who are supposed to simply believe start actually thinking. He is morally inconsistent, changing positions based on who prays loudest or which political faction invokes him most enthusiastically this week. He sanctions violence in one passage and commands love in the next without apparent awareness of the contradiction. He is, to put it plainly, less morally sophisticated than most moderately thoughtful human beings you could pull off the street at random.

You have seen this god. He is everywhere in the contemporary cultural conversation about religion. He appears in the bestselling books of the New Atheist movement, described with gleeful precision by writers who clearly relish the target they have constructed. He stars in comedy sketches and late-night monologues, the reliable punchline that gets the knowing laugh from the educated audience that has long since moved past all of this. He is dismissed in philosophy departments and mocked in university lecture halls, the embarrassing holdover from humanity’s credulous childhood that the Enlightenment was supposed to have finally put to rest. He populates the social media memes that circulate among people who think of themselves as critical thinkers, the ones that reduce the entire question of God to a two-sentence gotcha followed by a smirking emoji.

Here is what I want to say about this god, clearly and without qualification: he deserves to be rejected. He is not worth believing in. The portrait is morally offensive, intellectually contemptible, and unworthy of anyone’s devotion. If the choice were between believing in this god and the confident atheism of someone who looked at this god and said no, I would have significant sympathy for the atheist. Significant sympathy, not complete agreement, but the rejection itself is understandable and in its own way honorable. Nobody should worship something this small.

The problem, the only problem, but it is a large one, is that this god is not the God of Christian theology. He is not the God of the New Testament. He is not the God of Augustine’s Confessions or Aquinas’s Summa Theologica or Pascal’s Pensees or C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or the Nicene Creed or two thousand years of serious Christian philosophical reflection. He has never been that God. Not in any century. Not in any serious theological tradition. The portrait that the contemporary skeptical culture has spent decades triumphantly demolishing was never hanging in the gallery where they claimed to find it.

This god is a strawman. And the cultural machine has been knocking him down for decades and calling it a victory over Christianity. But defeating a position that nobody actually holds is not a victory. It is a performance. It is the intellectual equivalent of shadow-boxing and then claiming you won a fight.

Richard Dawkins, the most publicly celebrated atheist of the last thirty years and a man whose confidence in his own conclusions is truly something to behold, described God in The God Delusion as, and I am quoting directly because the quote has to be seen to be believed, “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” He delivered this description with the air of a man who had done his homework and was presenting the results.

William Lane Craig, the philosopher and theologian who has debated Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists more times and more thoroughly than perhaps anyone alive, makes the point that should stop every serious person cold: this description bears almost no resemblance to the God of classical Christian theology. Dawkins is not arguing against the God of Augustine, who spent his Confessions wrestling with a God of overwhelming beauty and restless love. He is not arguing against the God of Aquinas, whose Summa presents a Being of pure actuality, the ground of existence itself, subsisting being rather than a being among other beings. He is not arguing against the God of the Nicene Creed, the maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, whose nature the greatest minds of the ancient and medieval world spent centuries trying to describe with appropriate precision and appropriate humility about the limits of human language.

He is arguing against a cartoon. A cartoon that serious Christian theologians have themselves found inadequate and rejected for most of the last two thousand years. Writing a devastating demolition of that cartoon and presenting it as a refutation of Christianity is like writing a crushing review of a book you have never read, based on a two-sentence summary provided by someone who despised the author, and then presenting yourself as the book’s definitive critic. The performance may be impressive. The target was never the book.

John Lennox, the mathematician at Oxford who has debated Dawkins directly and on his own ground, which is the intersection of science and the question of God, makes the point that cuts even deeper than Craig’s. Atheism, Lennox observes, is typically smuggled into the conversation not as a scientific discovery but as a philosophical assumption, brought through the back door before the argument has properly started, and then presented as though science delivered it through the front. This matters because the two things are categorically different and the conflation is doing enormous work in the contemporary skeptical conversation.

Science is the most powerful tool human beings have ever developed for explaining mechanisms. How things work. What the processes are that produce the phenomena we observe. What the physical laws are that govern the behavior of matter and energy. At this task science has no peer and the achievements it has produced are breathtaking in their scope and precision. Nobody serious disputes this. Certainly no serious Christian theologian disputes this, whatever the cartoon version of Christianity suggests.

What science cannot do, and what it has never claimed to do in its honest moments, is explain why anything exists at all rather than nothing. It cannot explain why the universe is rationally ordered in a way that makes science possible in the first place, why the deepest structures of physical reality turn out to be mathematical in character, why a universe that had no obligation to be comprehensible turns out to be comprehensible with uncanny precision. It cannot explain why mathematics, a purely abstract human construction developed with no particular reference to the physical world, maps onto that physical world with an accuracy that the physicist Eugene Wigner famously called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. It cannot explain why human beings have moral intuitions that transcend survival instinct, why we respond to the suffering of strangers on the other side of the planet who share none of our genetic material and can offer us nothing in return, why love consistently feels like more than the chemistry it can be reduced to without anyone who has actually been in love finding the reduction adequate.

These are not gaps in scientific knowledge that future discoveries will close. They are structural questions that operate at a different level than the questions science is designed to answer. The question of why there is something rather than nothing is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical and theological one. The question of why the universe is the kind of place where science is possible is not answered by science. It is presupposed by science. The New Atheist movement has built its cultural dominance in significant part on the impressive achievements of the scientific tradition, and then quietly extended the authority of those achievements into domains where that authority does not actually reach. The result is a confidence about the ultimate questions that the science itself does not support.

The God of Christian theology was never the kind of being whose existence or non-existence could be settled by a telescope or a particle accelerator. The God of Augustine and Aquinas is not a large object somewhere in the universe that better instruments might eventually detect or fail to detect. He is, in Aquinas’s precise formulation, the act of being itself, the reason why there is existence rather than non-existence, the ground on which everything else stands rather than one more thing standing on the ground. You cannot look for that God with a microscope any more than you can look for the laws of logic with a microscope. The instrument is not wrong. It is simply not designed for that question.

This is not a retreat to mystery as a defensive strategy. It is a clarification about what the question actually is. And the clarification reveals that the New Atheist movement has spent thirty years winning arguments against a God that classical Christian theology would not recognize, using a method that classical Christian theology never claimed could settle the question, and presenting the combination as a decisive refutation of the Christian intellectual tradition.

It is not a decisive refutation. It is a category error dressed in the clothing of a victory.

The God of the Nicene Creed is not small enough to mock in thirty seconds. He is not a tribal mascot or a celestial bureaucrat or a cosmic egomaniac who needs your Sunday morning to feel good about himself. The God of serious Christian thought is philosophically demanding in ways that require sustained engagement rather than a punchline, morally serious in ways that make the cartoon version look like a child’s drawing next to a Rembrandt, and intellectually coherent in ways that the most rigorous philosophical minds in Western history have found not just defensible but compulsory.

Pascal, who was not a simple man, who was one of the finest mathematical minds of the seventeenth century and the inventor of probability theory, sewed a piece of paper into the lining of his coat after an experience on the night of November 23rd, 1654, that he described as fire, not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. He wore it against his chest until he died. That is not the behavior of a man who had been defeated by a cartoon. That is the behavior of a man who had encountered something that the cartoon was never designed to represent.

Aquinas, who constructed the most rigorous philosophical defense of theism in the history of Western thought, also said at the end of his life that everything he had written seemed to him like straw compared to what he had seen. Not because the arguments were wrong. Because the reality they pointed toward was larger than the arguments.

The skeptic’s greatest intellectual victory has been over an opponent who was never on the field. The cartoon god has been thoroughly defeated and the defeat was deserved and nobody serious is mourning it.

The real God has been watching from somewhere else entirely, patiently, in the manner of someone who has been misrepresented before and knows that misrepresentation is not the last word.

He is not offended by the memes. He is, if the tradition is to be believed, rather more interested in whether the people making them are doing all right.