Debating Whose God?

The April 9th issue of Newsweek carried The God Debate, a directed, informal debate between evangelical leader and Purpose Driven Life creator Rick Warren and the zealot for atheism and author Sam Harris. The debate was supposed to be about the (non-)existence of God, but sort of ranges all over. In general, I think Harris comes out the more convincing, using his intellectual prowess to force Warren into Christian platitudes like "life is a test" and "evidence for God is all around us." The sounding blow comes at the end of the debate when Warren ends by stating Pascal's Wager, the apologetic equivalent of retreating to Helm's Deep. As Warren puts it: "We're both betting. He's betting his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right, he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble." Good grief. Is that all Warren's faith is? A cost-free gamble?

Now anyone who knows anything about Warren knows that this isn't the case. Warren is a man of faith who puts his faith into practice. So why does he get so muddled by Harris' rhetoric?

I think its because Warren makes a common mistake oft made by Christians when debating the existence of God: he concedes, at the very beginning of the argument, to a generic, atheistic interpretation of who God is. He concedes that we can actually talk about whether there is a god without talking about whether or not there is the God. In other words, he lets Harris define who God is. Harris is then free to set up God as any number of strawmen and knock them down one by one.

The fact is that it is impossible to argue for the existence of a god. I believe it IS possible to argue for the existence of the God, but most atheists are not interested or not theologically sophisticated enough to take part in that debate. So in my discussions with atheists, I prefer to reframe the question, asking them a question: is there is no God, why do most people believe there is one? I always, always get the same answer. It goes something like "because people have emotional and psychological (and perhaps even biological) needs that are met by positing the existence of God."

This explanation makes sense by itself, when we are again talking about 'god' in the generic sense. But in the context of a conversation about the God of the Bible - a God who seems to value weakness more than strength, who actively pursues people out of love for them, who sacrifices his son and offers grace and forgiveness freely - the explanation falls incoherently dead on the floor. If indeed we (humanity) create gods to satisfy our deep psychological needs (and I concede we do), why would we create this God? Why would we make a god who is concerned with making us so aware of our shortcomings and creating in us a painful longing for that which we can never achieve? Why would we create a god who acts to put us in such debt to himself and then tells us we owe him nothing? The list could go on. When we get to this level of questioning, my discussions with atheists often break down. I am told such questions don't need to be answered, or that psychology will one day answer them for us.

It is striking to me that whenever this sort of 'debate' takes place, it is always about the existence of God and whether or not it is plausible. But the alternative - the idea that God doesn't exist - is seldom explored in detail. It is taken for granted that it is a coherent idea that God doesn't exist - that every god-oriented human activity can be explained by psychology - when in fact such explanations are not apparent at all.