Dr. Curley's Opening Statement
1. O.K. I have places I'd rather be tonight.
And my wife certainly has places she'd rather have me tonight. But I am here
to argue against the existence of the Christian God. I am not here to defend
atheism, contrary to the impression Dr. Craig's talk might have given you. Look,
I think there are many ways of thinking about God. And I think some of them
are ways I might accept. I just can't accept the Christian God.
2. When I was a child, I was a Christian. As
I came to be an adult, I came to have doubts about that faith. For a while
I called myself an agnostic. These doubts led me, while I was in college, to
the study of philosophy and its history. Many of the philosophers I studied
were Christians, for whom the rational defense of their religion was very important.
My studies did not lessen my doubts; they increased them. Now I think there
is hardly any chance the Christian religion is true. 'Agnostic' no longer seems
the right label, not when we're talking about the Christian God.
3. The usual label for someone who once embraced
Christianity and then rejected it is 'heretic.' I have no objection to that
label, now that we've agreed to abolish the death penalty for heresy. (Laughter)
4. What started me on this path was reading the
prayer book my mother gave me when I was 16. At the back were printed the Articles
of Religion members of my church, the Episcopal Church, were expected to accept.
I had not read them carefully when I was preparing for confirmation. Then I
was only 13, and there was much I did not understand. Our minister was a good
man: highly intelligent, cultured, and humane. At 13, I was content to accept
what he told me, simply on his authority.
5. Then, at 16, I read those Articles of Religion,
carefully and critically for the first time. I was disturbed that my church
accepted predestination. Before the foundation of the world, the Articles said,
God had chosen some vessels for honor and others for dishonor. So far as I
could see, there was as good scriptural foundation for this teaching as there
was for any doctrine the church affirmed. One of the first principles of my
church was that no one should be required to believe, as necessary for salvation,
any doctrine which could not be proved from scripture.
6. There were also strong philosophical reasons
for accepting predestination. If God is omniscient, if he knows everything,
he must have foreknowledge of his creatures' fate. If he is omnipotent, can
do anything, or anything that is logically possible to do, then nothing happens
except by his will. So, if I wind up in Hell, he will have known that from
eternity, and he will have willed it from eternity.
7. Predestination is not so widely accepted now
as it was when my church was founded in the 16th century. I find many Christians
who reject it. And I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place,
certainly. I cannot believe that a just and loving God would create beings
he knew––and had predetermined––would spend eternity in hell. But Christians
can reject predestination only at the cost of ignoring the authority of their
scriptures and the implications of their theology.
8. Forget predestination. What about Hell? That's
a different situation. I see no philosophical reason for believing in an eternal
punishment for sinners. Philosophy is against it.
9. Philosophy teaches that the punishment should
be proportionate to the crime. Let's concede, for the sake of argument, that
we are all, in some sense, sinners. Which of us, looking into his heart, can
honestly say that he has never done anything seriously wrong, at least once
in his life? But the doctrine of Hell requires that most of us sinners will
suffer eternal torment.
10. In some cases that may be just. Hitler was
responsible for the horrifying deaths of millions of Jews, not to mention gypsies,
Slavs, and homosexuals. Perhaps for crimes of that magnitude eternal punishment
can be justified.
11. I am, in the sense I have specified, a sinner.
But, in all candor, I must say that to me my sins seem pretty minor compared
to those of Hitler. I haven't killed anyone, or tortured anyone, or been responsible
for anyone's torture or death. Yet, if the doctrine of hell is correct, I shall
be keeping Hitler company in Hell. No doubt I'm not an impartial judge in this
case, but it doesn't seem fair. (Laughter)
12. In spite of these difficulties, Hell was part
of the teaching of my church, and is part of the teaching of many Christian
churches. This is no accident. The doctrine has strong support in the Christian
scriptures.
13. Hell, too, is less widely believed in now
that it was when my church was founded. I find many Christians who reject Hell.
Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. I cannot believe that a just
and loving God would consign the majority of his creatures to spend eternity
in Hell. But Christians who reject Hell can do so only at the cost of rejecting
also the authority of their scriptures.
14. I conceded, for the sake of argument, that
we are all sinners. Now let me qualify that. Very likely all of us,
in this room, are sinners––provided it's enough, to be a sinner, that once in
your life you did something seriously wrong. But I don't concede that absolutely
all humans are sinners.
15. I have a granddaughter, whom I love. She's
a sweet girl, but she's seven. By now she must have committed quite a number
of sins. I know sometimes she doesn't mind her mother very well. Sometimes
she's mean to her baby brother. I don't find any of this serious enough to
deserve eternal punishment. But perhaps there are sins I don't know about.
In any case, she's not completely innocent. Probably no child that age is completely
innocent. And Jesus did say that we should be perfect, as our Father in heaven
is perfect. That's a tough standard.
16. But, when I think about my granddaughter at
an earlier age––lying, say, in the neo–natal intensive care unit, where she
spent the first few months of her life, with an oxygen tube, and a feeding tube,
and a heart monitor all taped to her tiny body––for she was born in the 29th
week of my daughter's pregnancy, and weighed less than 3lbs.––then, I cannot
think of her, at that stage of her life, as a sinner, deserving of Hell.
17. In the Christian tradition it is normal to
baptize infants at an early age because it is believed that they come into the
world tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. This is the doctrine of original
sin. I cannot believe in original sin. My granddaughter may be a sinner now,
but not when she was in the intensive care unit.
18. Original sin is less widely accepted now than
when my church was founded. I find many Christians who reject original sin.
I sympathize with them. Their hearts are in the right place, certainly. But,
Christians can reject original sin only at the cost of a substantial reinterpretation
of their scriptures and traditions.
19. Consistently with the doctrine of original
sin, it is common among Christians to believe that if we are justified, it is
by faith in Jesus. Since we are all sinners, we cannot earn salvation by our
works. But we can be forgiven and treated as if we were righteous.
The mark of our having been forgiven is that God, by an act of grace, gives
us faith.
20. This doctrine has implications I find appalling.
It implies that those among us who lack faith in Jesus have not received grace,
have not been forgiven, and will, if we continue in that state, go to Hell.
So the doctrine of justification by faith, which has strong support in the Christian
scriptures, leads inevitably to exclusivism, to the idea that all who
reject Christian doctrine must be damned, no matter how good they may be, by
ordinary standards.
21. If God chose the beneficiaries of his grace
on the ground of some distinctive merit they possessed, this might not be unfair
to those he didn't choose, whom we would presume to lack that merit. But that
would be contrary to the idea of grace, which implies a free gift, not something
given to someone who deserves it on account of merit.
22. So usually it is held that God has no reason
for choosing some and not others. He acts quite arbitrarily. It's a hard and
ugly doctrine, this doctrine of grace. I suppose that if you have already accepted
Hell and original sin, you may be grateful for having a shot at salvation––
even if it does seem to be a lottery in which the odds are not on your side.
Of course, if you think you have faith, then you may also think you have won
the lottery and you may set aside thoughts about the unlucky losers.
23. Well, so far my objections have been mainly
theological; they are objections to teachings whose basis is primarily scriptural
rather than philosophical. The main exception to that generalization is the
doctrine of predestination, which has philosophical grounds as well as scriptural
grounds. I know many Christians here tonight will not feel that their understanding
of Christianity requires them to accept all these doctrines, either because
they have a different interpretation of scripture, or because they do not regard
the Christian scriptures as absolutely authoritative in determining their beliefs
and conduct. I've said I think those Christians who adopt a freer attitude
toward scripture––and do not feel that their acceptance of Christianity commits
them to predestination, or Hell, or original sin, or justification by faith,
or exclusivism–– those Christians have their hearts in the right place, I say.
But I also think their feet may be planted on the slippery slope to heresy,
and that more conservative Christians, who would accord greater authority to
scripture, have a clearer right to call themselves Christians. How much of
traditional Christianity can you reject and still be a Christian?
24. Let's turn now to objections not so scripturally
based. It is common among Christians to believe that God is a personal being,
who created the universe, and who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.
Indeed, it is commonly said that God must possess all perfections.
25. Yet we observe that the world this perfect
being created has many imperfections: there is much joy in the world; but there
is also much suffering, much of it apparently undeserved; and there is sin.
We call these things evil. How can they exist in a world which owes its origin
to a God with the attributes Christians believe their God to possess?
26. The usual response now is to say that though
God could have created a world without evil, it was better for him to have created
the world he did, in spite of the evils it contains. The occurrence of those
evils was necessary for goods which are even greater. If God had so created
the world that it contained no evil at all, that world would have been less
good, all things considered, than it is even with all the evil it contains.
This is called the greater goods defense.
27. The Christian may say: We humans rightly
do many things we expect to cause avoidable harm. We build a bridge from San
Francisco to Marin County, knowing that in the construction some workmen will
fall into the water and drown. We could avoid their deaths by not building
the bridge. But the bridge is a great good. Given our human limitations, we
cannot build it without some people dying a result. So we build it and accept
their deaths as part of the cost of bridging those waters. And God's permission
of evil may also be justified by the greater goods it leads to.
28. An omnipotent being, of course, does not face
all the hard choices we do. If he wants a bridge across those waters, he need
only say, "Let there be a bridge." And there will be.
29. One question the greater goods defense raises
is: what kind of good could be so intimately connected with evil that even
an omnipotent being would have to accept the evil, as the price of realizing
that good? And what good could be so great that it would justify such a being's
accepting the amount of evil there is in the world as the price of attaining
that good?
30. The usual answer these days is: freedom.
There must be freedom, if there is to be moral goodness. And the price of giving
humans freedom is that sometimes they will misuse it. Even an omnipotent being
can't cause a person to freely do good. And freedom, with the moral
goodness which sometimes results from it, is a good sufficiently great that
it makes the evils which also result worth accepting. [This is what is called
the free will defense.]
31. There is a problem, of course, about appealing
to human freedom to solve the problem of evil when you also believe in predestination
and divine foreknowledge. This is a problem of long standing, which many philosophers
have wrestled with. No solution has gained general acceptance. If Dr. Craig
accepts the doctrines of predestination and divine foreknowledge and also appeals
to human freedom to solve the problem of evil, he will have worked out a way
of explaining how these things are consistent, and I will listen with interest
to that explanation.
32. In the meantime, though, there are other problems
about the appeal to freedom. There are evils whose occurrence has no discernible
connection with freedom. Theologians call them natural evils, meaning such
things as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, diseases, and so on. If a deer dies
in a forest fire, suffering horribly as it does so, that is an evil. It is
not only human suffering we must take into account, when we are weighing good
against evil in this world.
33. Now, if you accept anything like the theory
of evolution, you will believe there were other animals on this planet long
before humans appeared on the scene. Many of them must have suffered horribly
as their species became extinct. None of that suffering can be justified as
a necessary consequence of permitting humans freedom. We weren't around then.
So, none of it seems beyond the power of omnipotence to prevent without the
loss of that good.
34. Another objection: The greater goods defense
can easily lead to a kind of cost–benefit analysis which is deeply repugnant
to our moral sense. Consider the kind of case which troubled Ivan in Dostoevsky's
great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. A little girl is treated quite
brutally by her parents, who beat her because she has done something which made
them angry. Perhaps she wets the bed repeatedly, and they think she ought to
be old enough to control her bladder. Or perhaps the father is an alcoholic
who abuses his daughter sexually. The Brothers Karamazov is fiction,
but to hear about real cases like this, you need only listen regularly to the
11 o'clock news.
35. The free will defense seems to say, in cases
of this kind: well, it's all very unfortunate, of course, but this is the price
we must pay for having freedom. For the father to have the opportunity to display
moral goodness, God must give him the opportunity to choose evil. You can't
have the one opportunity without the other. And the father's having the opportunity
to display moral goodness is such a great good that it outweighs the fact that
he chooses evil.
36. But notice who gets the good here. It's the
father. And notice who suffers the evil. It's the little girl. Let us grant,
for the sake of argument, that the benefit outweighs the cost. Freedom is a
very great good. Still it makes some difference who pays the cost. Freedom
may be a great good, even a good so great that it would outweigh really horrendous
suffering. But justice requires some attention, not only to the net amount
of good, after you have subtracted the evil, but also to the way the goods and
evils are distributed. Some distributions just aren't fair.
37. The mention of Ivan Karamazov brings me to
my final objection. Ivan claims that if God does not exist, everything is permissible.
Dr. Craig believes the same thing. Dostoevsky, speaking through Ivan, may have
stated the problem of evil as powerfully as any atheist; but he was himself
a Christian, who believed that God must exist if we are to make sense of morality.
38. I think the opposite is true. I think Christian
belief makes morality, as we normally think of it, unintelligible. Consider
the story of Abraham and Isaac. One day God put Abraham to the test. He said
to Abraham: "Take your son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of
Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering." God gives no reason
for this horrifying command. And Abraham asks none. He simply sets out to
obey the command. And he nearly does obey. He has the knife raised to kill
his son, when God sends down an angel to stay his hand. God then says he is
satisfied with Abraham: "Now I know that you fear God, since you have
not withheld your son, your favored one, from me." In the end God does
not actually require the sacrifice. But he does require that Abraham demonstrate
his willingness to carry out the sacrifice.
39. What's the moral of this story? I suggest
it's this: as God's creatures, our highest loyalty must be to God, even if this
requires the sacrifice of our deepest human loyalties; God is our Creator, our
Lord, and we owe him absolute obedience, no matter what he commands––and he
might command anything. There are no constraints on his will; so we might be
required to do anything. There is no predicting what he might require; and
there is nothing to say that his commands will not change from one moment to
the next. At the beginning of the story, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac;
in the middle he commands Abraham not to kill Isaac.
40. If there is a God who is liable to command
anything; and if our highest loyalty must be to this God, there is no act––save
disobedience to God––which we can safely say is out of bounds, no act of a kind
which simply must not be done, even rape, to use Dr. Craig's example. If this
God exists, and we must obey him unconditionally, then anything whatever might
turn out to be permissible. This view is destructive of morality as we normally
think of it.
41. So there you have my opening argument. I
have offered seven objections––seven deadly objections, I would say: Christian
theism is committed to predestination, to Hell, to original sin, to justification
by faith, and to exclusivism; it has no good solution to the problem of evil;
and it is destructive of morality as we understand it. These are only some
of the objections which make it impossible for me to believe in the Christian
God.
