Sunday Faith Series: God On Trial Again - Atheists’ Psychological Tricks

The only people who go on about religious faith more than believers are the unbelievers who seem utterly obsessed with convincing everyone else that God doesn’t exist. Of course, the arguments against Christianity have been so weak or so ill-conceived for so long that even the atheists themselves have probably lost confidence in them deep down. But they can’t let it lie, so they had to find a way to carry on dismissing Christianity while carrying the internal burden of not being persuaded by the strength of their arguments.

If you’re no longer persuaded by your own arguments, and you’re honest enough to not be in denial about how weak they are, and you want to carry on having the conversations, then you have two options: you can either come up with better arguments, or you can employ some psychological trickery to conceal the inadequacy of your position. The first one hasn’t happened – the arguments are ages old, and despite contemporary online atheist keyboard warriors speaking as though they have interesting and original contributions to make to the debate, the reality is, they are only rehashing old arguments that have long ago been shown to be deficient. This leaves the option of psychological trickery, which I’ve noticed is the approach most contemporary atheists have chosen, and it usually comes in one of two forms.

The first and the most squalid psychological trick is to simply dismiss anything to do with religious faith and the believers who have it as idiotic, thoughtless and without reason – thereby rendering it unworthy of any further consideration, and only deserving of mockery and hostility. That way, the atheist who employs this method gets to conceal all their own insufficiencies, intellectual defects, and personal ethical shortcomings, and erects the walls and places themselves captive in their own cognitive prison cell, never having to seriously engage with anything profound or meaningful.

The second kind of psychological trick is a level above the first, and does at least involve some superficial engagement, and even occasionally some thoughtful attempts to undermine Christianity - but it is to arraign God on the grounds that if He existed He would be morally inferior to the person condemning Him. Whether it’s God’s character in the Bible, the concept of hell, or the evil and suffering in the world, the psychological trick is to declare that He is consequently not worthy of praise and worship, but of moral judgement and condemnation, and therefore probably doesn’t exist.

Now, for the Christian, I do think there are elements to this line of thought that deserve honest consideration and deep contemplation, but it’s not like Christians haven’t been doing this for centuries, and it’s not like the atheists are coming up with anything new with this ‘God in the dock’ mentality. Dismiss God as cruel, tyrannical and unjust, and as being moral inferior to yourself, and you never have to engage with proper consideration regarding the profundity of the subject.

Besides, it just won’t do to write off God in this way, because the idea that He is unworthy or morally inferior to us doesn’t stack up. Some will tell us that the God in the Old Testament seems like a barbaric God. But yet in the New Testament we see God in the form of Jesus - as someone all-loving who takes our sins to the cross, and while suffering the most intense agony, asks God the Father for their forgiveness. That is not just a stupendous act of love and goodness, it is also a stupendous act of grace and mercy. The kind of God who did that for us, and who treated people as well as Jesus did (and encouraged everyone else to do the same) is clearly demonstrating the qualities of a God of supreme love and benevolence, in spite of some of the difficult things we experience in the Old Testament and in the hardships experienced in creation.

It would also be foolish to hold on to any idea that God somehow changes during the time from Old Testament to New. If we are to consider God under the terms He asks to be considered, then we must think only in terms of His being a perfect and good God. Therefore, understanding Him through the lens of the New Testament accounts of Jesus only increases the likelihood that those callow impressions of His being 'barbaric', 'genocidal' and 'maniacal' are examples of erroneous human-constructed conceptions of Him.

The Salvation Christ bought for us on the cross is intended to be a joy that offers hope to rescue the hopeless. But the atheist trickery is to turn it on its head and claim it to be immorally absolvent. Instead, they treat the cross as being morally repugnant, and as something that should elicit our disapproval, not our grateful response. At this point, the greatest act of love the world has ever seen, and the greatest evidence of God’s goodness that we have, is one of the main things being used against God.