A number of us non-believers, myself included, think that the character YHWH as described in the Bible is an unsavory character. Some of us may have been rather vocal about it. As a brief refresher, (‘cause I’m sure you’ve forgotten!) Richard Dawkins sums up the OT case rather succinctly:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction; jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
And those qualities are benign in comparison to the NT God who supposedly created a universe in which most of his beloved children will suffer eternal hellfire because they don’t believe the right story. That is a seriously sadistic character.
As generously and frequently as we non-believers point out to our Christian brethren and sistren that their God is vile and nasty, it always fails to land. And that’s not just because all of us are here to preach and none of us to be preached to. Or because Christians are too highly defended to see the truth. It’s because for a Christian, it’s not true.
I’m not saying Christians don’t believe it’s true. I’m saying for a Christian, it isn’t true.
How can that be?
Knowledge is scaffolded. One layer of truth is built upon another layer. At the foundation lie our axioms. And for a Christian, it is axiomatic that God is Good. Per Oxford Languages (courtesy of Google), “axiomatic” means “self-evident or unquestionable.” With God’s goodness as the absolute foundation of Christians’ faith, no amount of “evidence” can persuade them that God is anything but good. Because if God were not good, God would not be God.
To me, it isn’t axiomatic that God is good. To me, it’s axiomatic that the best way to understand the nature of things (including “God”) is to use observation and reason. (It’s the best we’ve got, but it’s not infallible.) I start in a different place from Christians, so why should we be surprised that I end up in a different place? (Ha ha, I can hear some Christians chuckling at that one–different place, indeed!)
It’s worth noting here that the God that is good to the Christian is not the same God that is vile and nasty to the atheist. The Christian God (1) is real; and (2) is good, with everything else being details. The atheist God (1) is only real if the best evidence points to it being real; and (2) is subject to our assessments of whether or not it is good. If you step back and look at it that way, it is clear we are not talking about the same thing when we talk about “God.”
So dear Christian brothers & sisters, you need not be offended when we ridicule God as being stupid and evil. It’s not your God we’re talking about.
And dear atheist brothers & sisters, we need not think of Christians as monstrous for worshiping a monstrous god–the God they worship is not the God we understand to be a nasty sonofabitch.
And to both of you, who are probably thinking I’m being a Polyanna and trying to forge an unworkable peace based on a flimsy premise: I’m not. I’m not trying to make peace. I’m making a serious epistemological point: That when atheists and Christians talk about “God,” we are not talking about the same thing, and we never will be.
Of course, I will continue to argue with Christians as if we were talking about the same thing.
‘Cause that’s what we do.
[Note: Many Christians–but not all–hold a second axiom: that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. When mixed with the first axiom, this produces strange chemical reactions. But that is beyond the scope of this OP. Maybe later.]Questions:
- Do you agree Christians and atheists are not talking about the same God?
- What’s axiomatic for you?