Watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionith time last weekend, and still loving every minute of it, a thought struck me: Could an atheist or an atheistic culture have produced such a movie? Most of us would probably consider that a rhetorical question, with no as the obvious answer. This is also partly inspired by a book I read not long ago, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, and one I’m reading now, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West.
Many modern atheists and agnostics, especially the most vociferous, argue that religion is a dangerous delusion and mostly destructive force. Yet what exactly has atheism given the world? What does asserting a Godless universe inspire in human culture? Your average atheist would probably say, saving us from religion, and mostly Christianity. And being a Christian, living in the West, that is what I refer to when I say religion.
The enemies of religious belief are fond of citing the Inquisition as an example of the evils of religious intolerance and dogma. Recently I heard a figure of 3,000 people being killed, but even if we say that number is 30,000, or 300,000, and even though Christians have done other nasty things over the centuries, that record isn’t even in the same universe as the number of casualties of state-sponsored atheism in the twentieth century.
For some reason, which atheists alone claim to own (i.e., reason), Christianity bears complete blame as a de facto cause of something like the Inquisition, yet atheism stands blameless for the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, et al. So in the contest of producing evil, death, and destruction, atheism wins hands-down. Atheism claimed more than 100 million victims in a single century, a staggering number that our atheist friends simply ignore or claim, on their spotless authority, doesn’t matter, doesn’t apply, or says absolutely nothing about the atheistic faith.
Does that sound logical to you?
In addition to that Christian-inspired holiday favorite film and many others, what else has Christianity given the world? How about Western culture, and all the art, music, and stories that have come down to us because of Christianity’s influence? Does anyone really think that atheism would have given the world Shakespeare? Or Bach? Or Michelangelo or Rembrandt?
Who was it that saved the documents and knowledge of antiquity? Medieval monks and the Catholic Church. We would know very little of ancient Greece and Rome without them.
How about science? Despite what atheists continually assert, the foundations of modern science were produced by men of faith in a personal, creator God. It was the only worldview that could have and in fact did result in science.
How about hospitals and charity? The former were started by Christians, and the latter is acknowledged as a central element of living a Christian life. To this day, those who attend worship services more often give more to charity. What a coincidence!
How about universal literacy? After the Reformation, people were motivated to learn to read because the Bible had been finally made available in the vernacular.
How about schools? One hundred and six of the first 108 colleges founded in the United States were founded by Christians to teach, among other things, the Christian faith. Those include Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Without the Christian faith there would have been no “Enlightenment,” no Hume or Locke, no Adam Smith and no capitalism. There would not have been any Puritans fleeing persecution to found America, no Washington, Jefferson, or Adams, no liberty and freedom in the founding of the United States. Atheists love to minimize the Christian influence on the Founders, but all the philosophers and thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries swam in a ubiquitously Christian Western culture. Their thinking could not exist without the Christian faith.
Of course the atheist will say this is all beside the point. None of it means Christianity is the truth. Fair enough. But what is it, again, that atheism has given the world? Certainly not a wonderful life.
Hmmm, this is a tempting analogy, but it just won’t wash. First of all, I completely reject the implied moral equivalence between the Inquisition and totalitarian mass murder in the 20th Century. Several thousand people died by the former, and over one hundred million by the latter.
But let’s not talk about theism, but rather Christianity. I would agree with you that Christianity is certainly not to blame for the widespread mentality in the middle ages and through the age of the Reformation that heretics must be killed. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament should tell us that. Loving your enemies and praying for those that persecute you isn’t exactly the stuff of totalitarian nightmares. The fulfillment of the law and the prophets in loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself is not logically fulfilled in the Inquisition. And I could go on.
However, without a God, without a transcendent source of moral values, the will to power is really the only arbiter of right and wrong. Nietzsche was absolutely right. You cannot get moral values from a purely material reading of reality. It’s simply impossible, although many have tried for hundreds of years. In fact you might say that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot where the most consistent materialists/atheists of all time!
Theism is blameless for the Inquisition. Roman Catholicism is not. Atheism is blameless for the atrocities of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; totalitarian communism is not. Get it?