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Reformed Classicalist

Which is Better for the World? Part 1

RTS Papers / Apologetics / Summer 2016

A Dialogue Between a Christian and a Secularist


Rob: I had to reply to the blog you wrote yesterday entitled ‘Pluralism and its Purge.’

Matt: What about it?

R: Really? A purge? Amidst all the pain and suffering of sunny Florida now!

M: I don’t see how the sunshine down here is relevant. The fact is that there are more Christians throughout the world being persecuted today than ever before, and —

R: Yes, yes, yes, and the freedoms we still have left are “rapidly slipping away” and so on and so on. Yes we’ve heard all this before.

M: Well, then, never mind predictions. Let’s talk presuppositions.

R: Happy to. But how are you defining that word?

M: By presupposition I only mean “a belief that takes precedence over another,” some of which are ultimate. They are commitments of the mind “over which no other takes precedence.”

All of us have presuppositions in our worldview. These are our answers to the big questions: What is God or ultimate reality? Who are we or why are we here? How do we know? What is right and wrong? What is wrong with the world, and how can what is wrong be made right?

R: As usual you ask questions like those as if science has not already settled them.

M: Then I will come back to whether those come first or else science. But I am assuming that you wanted to continue our conversation on which is better for the world — your secularism or my Christian faith — and I thought we should cut right to the chase to ask ourselves what are the necessary preconditions for such a “better world.”

R: Then let me start with something I found very objectionable about your post. That is tolerance. If history has shown anything it is that Christianity has led the way in intolerance. Even you will have to admit this at some level. And please don’t bring in the greater numbers of death by totalitarian governments in the past century. Any atheist can oppose those. In fact, many have.

M: I believe you that you consciously oppose totalitarian states. We have spent enough time together on political issues for me to know how consistent that belief is. I wonder whether or not your resistance to such regimes can be universal. After all there are many who opposed the communists who supported the fascists, and vice versa, even if this support was sometimes only for temporary expedience.

R: Yes but you know that I oppose all statism in principle. And I would add to that list of statist regimes the medieval statism that I regard to be consistent Christianity, as well as that even more backward statism of consistent Islam. The issue is tolerance and an open society. No one said it better than Christopher Hitchens, that religion poisons everything. The fact that secular societies often ape the intolerance of religion is nothing more than the triumph of a neurotic impulse in the species that manifests itself in both church and state. It is a psychosis that is shared by the abusive husband, the playground bully, and the office control freak: that loathsome need to rule over others with an iron boot. And from this ugly persona you have made a “god” in your own image. I’d say Feuerbach and Freud got it right.

M: Well that was certainly an impressive psychological profile of everyone who disagrees with you, but I don’t think it gets us any closer to which view can consistently justify tolerance.


TOLERANCE

M: Then let me ask you this, How did you come to know that tolerance is a good thing?

R: I knew it the first time I observed people being shouted down for expressing their opinions. And it was further confirmed in all those stories of Nazi Germany or even the Civil Rights movement in America — both instances of your so-called Christian morality coming to full bloom, by the way.

M: I will challenge the factual nature of your assertions in a moment. But even if I grant that there were countless professing Christians acting hypocritically in those chapters of history, your burden remains.

R: And what burden is that?

M: Showing what would have to be true for your morality to be true. What kind of a universe must exist for your moral judgments to have any teeth?

R: Showing the conditions for tolerance is not my burden. Tolerance is itself a precondition for conversations like this. It is self-evident. Either you have tolerance or you don’t have civil discourse or scientific advancement.

M: Apparently it is not self-evident, on your view, to all those intolerant Christians!

R: Precisely why Christianity has made itself such a nuisance to both civility and science.

M: But don’t you see that you haven’t answered the question.

If I ask you why there should be tolerance, and you reply, “Because it is necessary to civility and science,” is it not plain that my next question will be: “Why should anyone care about civility and science?” From a strictly secular perspective, it is not clear why either of these are worthwhile pursuits.

R: Now I think you are being dishonest. You and I both know that civilization and human knowledge are good things, and that what we call “civility” and “scientific inquiry” both require tolerance. Why are you plowing under a field we are both working?

M: You misunderstand my interest. I do not doubt that these are in fact good. What I doubt is whether you can justify why they are good. You have not been skeptical enough in your skepticism, and I am only commending to you a new level of doubt.

R: Nothing you say to me is new. I know what you are doing. You are trying to back me into the dilemma of either affirming or denying objective morality. If I affirm it, then I am supposedly forced to let the supernatural back in. If I deny it, then I lose my right to make moral judgments. But why should I accept this dilemma in the way that you put it?

M: You know me too well — but there is a good reason to accept this dilemma. As a secularist you must reduce all things to this time and this place. For your worldview to make good on its claims, then the objective reason for any “way things ought to be” will be independent of any finite, personal perspective. No individual, nor any group, could justify a moral “ought.”


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