Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
A better strategy for the libertarian atheist would be to concern oneself, first
and foremost, with whether a religious persons beliefs will expand or reduce
the scope of government. My Christian belief in humanitys fallenness and
propensity to sin, for instance, disinclines me to entrust government agents
with all-seeing omniscience. I would therefore be more amenable to
sweeping data collection without Christian principles than with them. If ones
the atheist asserts that an invisible platonic form is the source of his moral
duties, then it is actually this form that is demanding his suffering all the
while offering no reward in return.
An atheist might contend that my truck metaphor is invalid because it does
not depict me as wishing the man to be hit by the truck. Yet neither do
Christians want others to go to hell. If believers did not wish others to be
saved, then they would keep quiet about eternity and anti-Christians would
have no alleged threat to point to in the first place. This is a fact recognized
by libertarian atheist Penn Jillette.
Granted, while I do not endorse your standing in front of the truck, I certainly
do endorse the free will that allows you to do so. I also endorse the things
that allow the truck to hit you, like the human ability to innovate and the
physical possibility of speed. I endorse the existence of cliffs, of tools, and of
many other things you might freely use to harm yourself. I would certainly
not end free will or make the whole universe a padded cell in order to abolish
the reality of conditional consequence and I thank God for not having done
so.
Free will, said C.S. Lewis, though it makes evil possible, is also the only
thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
A History of Oppression
Its difficult to deny that Christians have historically made a
disproportionately large contribution to the sciences. Descartes, Pascal,
Newton, Linnaeus, Mendel, Pasteur, Marconi, Lematre and Collins come to
mind. Point this out to most atheists, however, and their reaction is a
predictable one: Christendom doesnt deserve any particular credit for its
scientists because it is old.
Ask militant atheists about the history of war, however, and this reasoning is
suddenly inverted. It seems that the old age of Christianity is no reason not
to credit it with the injustices perpetrated by some professing Christians. Its
a striking paradox that Christianity and religion in general is given no
credit for its great minds but full credit for its bad ones.
Yet religion and especially Christianity has not been the disproportionately
oppressive force depicted in online atheist caricatures. As Matt Rodgers has
pointed out, about 7% of the wars in recorded history have involved a
religious cause. These wars account for about 2% of all people killed by
warfare.
Conversely, the twentieth century was the bloodiest hundred years in human
history whether measured in sheer killings or in killings as a share of the
worlds population. From 1900 to 1987, nearly two thirds of those killed by
governments died at the hands of Marxists.