It's 12:30pm as I walk through the village to meet a friend of mine at the local café, but it still looks like morning. These sodden Auckland days make all times seem the same. The person I am meeting for late breakfast is Johan, he's a very talented postgrad university student, and an agnostic. He sits there waiting sipping coffee, because I am slightly late as usual. The usual wooden interior of the café with the fake vines and the smiling faces greet me at the door.
However this gathering of two minds today also has a difference beyond the usual, we've come to discuss an intriguing topic, at Johan's suggestion, the sorts of beliefs Christians should abandon. After an animated breakfast we drive back to my flat caffeinated up to discuss the topic of beliefs, and over a large wooden table, two cups of earl grey, and a recording app, this is the conversation we had.
PETER: So here we are to discuss some of the beliefs you think Christians should abandon. Johan I think you wanted to kick this off with a discussion of ways to find common ground between Christians and agnostics/atheists of your ilk.
Common Ground
JOHAN: I think it's important for people of differing beliefs to have a common language. It comes from me reading I guess this Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It's all very well to share a proper common language, so something like English. But to have an understanding or some kind of rapport between people you need more than this. A couple of common concepts and shared beliefs between each other. So we're both drinking tea right now, and if I was to say 'Peter can you make me some tea', we both have this concept of tea, we both speak the language English and we both understand what is meant by tea. And it seems to me a problem, especially in the debate between New Atheism and Christianity, that they both speak the same language but they don't have shared concepts or shared understanding. And at least in my view, in some of the debates, there is someone to blame for that, namely someone holds an unreasonable belief that they should shed. This is why I think this project is important.
PETER: So are there any particular beliefs, in this particular context, that you think Christians should abandon in order to create a better environment for dialogue.
JOHAN: My first thought is a general thought about faith. It seems to me one shouldn't just have faith, they should have faith when it is reasonable to have faith. So there are reasons to have faith and there are reasons not to have faith. There is this kind of Pentecostal belief that it is simply enough just to have faith, and that's a defence of you having faith. But I don't think it is. My thoughts are probably more stringent on this because I'm an agnostic. But even for a Christian there are points at which you should not have faith, like, because you're a Christian, you don't have faith in the God of Islam. You can't have faith in everything so you're going to have to pick your battles.
PETER: So this is where faith comes in from a different angle, because there are certain accounts within Christianity and the Old Testament in which people seem to take actions based on Faith or Trust in a particular agent, in this case God, without full understanding of the action they are taking. Maybe even the character of God is relevant to this discussion. I see that we should have reasonable faith but it's also slightly different because the way that we think about God is not grasped in the same way.
JOHAN: It does seem to me true that you could believe in God even if you can't grasp every aspect of him. Especially since God is meant to be something that can not be fully understood. But I think this is true also of everyday ordinary beliefs that we have. But you still believe in them because you have reasons. If you think faith comes before evidence though then you have got it round the wrong way. The only reason to be a Christian should be because you think it is true, that the Judeo Christian God is the right one and he exists.
Creationism
PETER: Perhaps we can come back to the definition of faith etcetera later. A few weeks back we discussed briefly a debate between creationist Ken Ham and science educator Bill Nye. What were your impressions about that? Do you think that sort of debate is good for Christianity or relevant?
JOHAN: Well, my thoughts about that debate are, first of all, it shouldn't have happened.
PETER: Do you think it's relevant in the sense that there is this demographic, especially in the southern American states, that do believe in creationism. And even some in New Zealand. Although in many cases it might stem from a general ignorance of the relevant scientific aspects, or why others deem evolution Scientific. Why do you think such debate is detrimental to discussion?
JOHAN: This is an example of somewhere where there is no common ground.
PETER: In regards to the debate, Ken Ham makes this distinction between observable and unobservable Science, and he called Evolution unobservable Science. And I notice most of the experts he used to back up his opinions were engineers and people who work in this 'observable' Science (quote on quote). So did you think Ken Ham is grounded in a sort of quasi-Science in that way, without adopting unobservable Science.
JOHAN: I reject his distinction, basically. And I think any reasonable person upon reflection should also share this belief. Suppose you're a fire investigator, a lot of the time they can get things right and find the cause of the fire, but some of the time why the fire investigator is called in is because no one has observed the fire. So they're observing the evidence of the fire even though no one saw the house burn down. But a fire investigator can find the point where the fire started and what was used as an accelerant. They use observations from the present to find out what happened in the past. I think things happened in the past, I think history is a thing. I didn't observe Egyptians being there, but there is evidence that they existed, there is evidence in the present that they existed in the past. It's the same with Evolution. We can observe microevolution, selective breeding of domestic wild foxes to reduce aggression etc, but macroevolution, by its very definition, can't be something we can observe before our very eyes. That doesn't make it not Science. If evolution was not a Science then even something like Cosmology would not be Science, because we can't observe things like the creation of the universe.
PETER: I agree that making such a distinction and dismissing large swathes of Science is not beneficial to Christianity at all. So I think we can put that point aside as agreed upon. One thing I think is dangerous about this debate as well is the way, especially in America, people package Evolution up with some sort of Atheism. Because a lot of prominent atheists adopt Evolution as a part of a particular worldview. So in a way Creationism is a reaction against Evolution being supposedly atheistic. I don't accept that distinction.
JOHAN: For me the purpose of this discussion is to clear the ground and to get Christians to shed some of their beliefs which are just entirely unreasonable and which hinder conversation with reasonable atheists and agnostics. So in the Ken Ham Bill Nye debate I think there is an unreasonable person in this debate, you may be able to guess who it is, who holds really unreasonable beliefs. I think that's Ken Ham. Additional point, it's simply not good faith to engage in a debate were you don't think you could be wrong or you don't think your opinion could change. I don't think Ken Ham was willing to be moved at all. If you asked him what if you found evidence to suppose creationism wasn't true, would you accept that? I think he would simply reject that there could be such evidence.
PETER: Because of some Bible belief.
JOHAN: Yeah. And the existence of Ken Ham has a cost to Christianity, and the cost is having a person who has a lot of publicity and also has these insane beliefs. And it puts a bad face on Christianity.
PETER: I agree with that actually. But for most Christians watching Ken Ham they don't agree with him and think he is misguided, they don't see him as influential. But on the other hand some atheists it seems see him as representing Christianity is some ways, whereas a lot of Christians who don't believe in Creationism, just see him as a fringe figure. There are a number of prominent Christians in the US promoting Evolution and Christianity together, Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller etc
Evolution and Faith
JOHAN: I've heard it said many times that it takes just as much faith to believe in Evolution as it does to believe in God, or something like that. I think that's unreasonable and messes up distinct terms. And does harm intellectually.
PETER: So what do you think someone means when they say Evolution is a faith based belief? Because for me that whole issue seems confusing. Applying the word faith to evolution, I don't really even understand what they're talking about.
JOHAN: Evolution is a view based on Evidence. You accept the evidence and it's not a faith based argument.
PETER: (laughs) It's as hard for me to make sense of what someone means by 'evolution takes faith' as it is for you. When I think of faith I think of it in a personal context. Faith is something like trust that does sometimes go beyond the evidence, but is not contrary or in spite of evidence at all. Maybe I can cover that in some future article.
Peter Rope is a Financial Economics and Theology graduate from Auckland.
Peter Rope's previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/peter-rope.html