The second section of Dan Barker’s book godless is entitled, “Why I am an Atheist.” It concludes the following chapters: Chapter 5: Why I am an Atheist; Chapter 6: Refuting God; Chapter 7: Omni-Aqueous; Chapter 8: Cosmological Kalamity; and Chapter 9: Dear Theologian. In this present post, we are going to take a look at what Barker says in chapter 5.
Now, if you expect to find in Barker’s fifth chapter, “Why I Am an Atheist,” a well-articulated argument as to why he is now an atheist, you will be somewhat disappointed. To be sure, Barker does mention things that shed light on why he is an atheist, but it isn’t really well-articulated, well-organized, or internally coherent. As I said in my first post, Barker’s writing style and mode of argumentation is almost an exact reflection of the tactics of YECist Duane Gish and his (in)famous “Gish Gallop”—galloping around from one point to the next, one half-formed thought or partial truth to the next, in such rapid succession that there simply is no way to process what he says or evaluate its merits. Perhaps one needs to come up with a catchy phrase to characterize Barker’s tactics. Perhaps we can call it the “Barker Bolt.”
In any case, I am going to limit my comments on this chapter to five things. So, let’s get right to it.
Problem #1: God isn’t Something One “Proves” Through Scientific Inquiry
The first problem with Barker’s chapter lies in the way he even sets things up. Barker begins his chapter by stating that he is an atheist because there is simply no reason to believe. He then says that a truly impartial investigator of anything will start with what can be known, and then proceed from there. Fair enough. But then what Barker does is a bit of a bait and switch, for he then immediately says, “We should start with nature. We should start with the nonexistence of God and then the believers should argue for God’s existence, not demand that atheists argue against it. The burden of proof in any argument is on the shoulders of the one who makes the affirmative claim, not the one who doubts it” (92).
The problem with that is that Barker is making an assertion, namely that all that can be known is nature. By doing so, he is smuggling in his atheism and his philosophical naturalism into the equation of what is possible to be known. The result is that he is defining all of reality as being comprised of solely the natural world. He has “rigged the game” from the start to where he cannot lose with those rules. Instead of first asking, “Okay, what can be known?” he asserts two things: nature is all that exists, and God doesn’t exist because he isn’t a thing in nature. And after that, he confidently says, “Okay, now point to something in the natural world that is God,” thus making it sound like “proving God” is proving a scientific theorem. And, of course, that is something you can’t do, because God isn’t a “thing” in the natural world. Unless one is a pantheist, God is understood to be a being that is in some way over, above, and beyond the natural world.
Problem #2: We Don’t Need No Education!
A second problem in this chapter is found in how eerily similar he sounds to the young earth creationist Ken Ham when he dismisses the need for any kind of informed, educated understanding of the Bible. He writes:
“Some believers claim that it is unfair to reject Christianity until the bible has been completely studied and correctly interpreted in the context of history and the ‘total unified message of Scripture.’ If we doubters just had a better understanding…if we would just hold off a little longer, if we could read it in the original Greek and Hebrew, if we would study under the right teachers, if we would take a course in hermeneutics, if we would earn a Ph.D. in history or theology or philosophy, and so on. They demand that we be ‘qualified’ before making a final decision. But is this a fair request?” (93)
To answer is question, YES…it is a fair request! Perhaps not to the extent of getting a PhD or anything, but yes, before you start to criticize the Bible, you had better make sure you understand the original literary and historical contexts first. Those are the contexts that make it possible to understand the Bible better, so that you will be in a better position to critique it.
But apparently, Barker doesn’t think that is necessary. Like I said, I find his statement to be exactly like the kind of argument Ken Ham says when he attacks biblical scholars and theologians who don’t agree with his wooden literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1-11. Both Ham and Barker essentially are in the same boat, or should I say ark of wooden literalism when it comes to reading and interpreting the Bible. And when confronted with their decontextualized, literalistic interpretations, they both essentially say, “We don’t need no fancy learnin’ to understand the Bible! We just read it the plain way it’s written…in English!”
Problem #3: Miracles and Philosophical Materialism
A third problem with Barker’s arguments is that he allows the presuppositions of his atheism/philosophical materialism to determine what is, and what is not, even worth looking into. This can be seen in the following statement about the Bible:
“Everyone knows that the bible contains accounts of miracles, and that is reason enough to conclude that there may be better uses of one’s time than studying Scripture. (And, no, this is not an a priori dismissal of the supernatural. It is the same criterion of natural regularity that Christians use in evaluating other religions.) (94)
Essentially, his thinking is that if he reads anything that does not contort to his presuppositions that the natural world and natural laws are all that exist, he immediately dismisses as not worth his time. If this is not a sure-fire way to make sure one’s views are never even challenged, I don’t know what is. And, despite his clarification, his statement is an a priori dismissal of the supernatural. Saying that some Christians dismiss miracle stories in other religions doesn’t change that. All that shows is that some Christians do the same thing with other religions.
Problem #4: A Complete Misunderstanding of What the Christian Faith Is
This is perhaps the most glaring problem in this chapter. When it comes right down to it, Barker presents “faith” as something antithetical to science, as essentially as “believing something exists without being able to scientifically prove it.” This is a false dichotomy if there ever was one.
One of the first absurd analogies Barker gives is one that involves him making the claim that a book on a table just instantaneously materialized. He then says, “Who would believe such an absurd claim? But if you don’t, why believe the even more absurd claims of the bible?” (94). And thus, he attempts to equate the Christian faith with believing a book instantly materializes out of thin air.
He then makes the claim that Christians say, “Since faith is a virtue, proof of God’s existence would deny us the opportunity to impress God with our character. If belief were easy, it would count for little in demonstrating our loyalty and trust of our Father” (101). Barker than says that faith “is what you use when you don’t have knowledge. If faith is valid, then anything goes” (101). And to show that is exactly what the Bible says faith is, Barker quotes Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” “In other words,” Barker adds, “faith is the evidence of non-evidence. It is a free lunch, a perpetual motion machine. It’s a way to get there by not doing any work” (101).
By contrast, scientific confidence is not faith, for science is “a tentative acceptance of the truth of a hypothesis that has been repeatedly tested, and it is subject to being overturned in the light of new evidence” (103).
To be blunt, everything Barker says about “faith” is completely wrong. It is a caricature, a cartoon. Let’s just start with Hebrews 11:1. In order to understand Hebrews 11:1, you have to understand the overall Gospel that the early Christians proclaimed. People have written books on this topic alone—I’m going to try to condense it in about two paragraphs. Here goes…
The Jewish worldview of that time saw things in terms of two ages: the old age, in which there was sin, death, demonic possession and foreign oppression; and the coming new Messianic Age, when God would establish His kingdom and there would be the resurrection of the righteous and the renewal all of creation. They essentially thought it would happen all at once, like the turning of a page.
The Christian Gospel, though, tweaked the Jewish worldview. The proclamation was that the Messiah had come and had begun to establish the Kingdom of God. But then he had died and had been resurrected. His resurrection, along with the out-pouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, were declared to be the “firstfruits” of God’s new creation. The full consummation of God’s Kingdom was yet to happen, but it had already begun and had broken into the current old age. Essentially, the new creation had invaded the old creation and was in the process of renewing it from the inside out.
Simply put, the Christian message was that there was an interim period between the old age and the consummation of the new Messianic Age. Given that, when we come to something like Hebrews 11:1, we shouldn’t read it the way Barker interprets it. It isn’t saying, “Faith is believing something exists that you don’t have scientific evidence for.” It is saying, “Faith is having confidence that God will complete the very thing you have already witnessed, experienced, and known in part.” Faith looks at the resurrection of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, realizes they are the first tastes of the coming Kingdom and new creation, and has confidence and hope that God will eventually bring about what they do not yet see.
That is a very different understanding of Hebrews 11:1 and the Christian faith than the caricature Barker gives. Even if you don’t buy it, the simple fact is that Barker’s depiction of the Christian faith is a complete mischaracterization of it.
Problem #5: Did Barker Hold Up the USSR as an Example of Atheist Altruism?
One final problem I want to point out is possibly the most humorous parts of the book. In one part of the chapter, Barker decided to talk about hospitals, specifically the fact that there are countless of Christian hospitals around the world. He writes that whenever Christians ask him if atheists ever built any hospitals, he says, “Yes, they have. The obvious example is the Soviet Union, with an officially atheistic government, where hundreds of hospitals were constructed” (100).
Just stop and think about that statement for a moment. Barker has actually pointed to the USSR—as he himself acknowledges was an official atheistic government—and said, “Look at all the hospitals they built! Take that, Christians! Atheists are good and moral too!” Someone might want to tell Barker that that officially atheistic government (along with that atheistic government in Communist China!) committed the worst atrocities in human history: the USSR murdering over 40 million people and China murdering over 70 million people, many of whom were murdered specifically because they were Christians! In fact, many of those very “hospitals” were in the gulags, where people were sent to be killed.
So no, appealing to the USSR is not the smartest thing to do if one is trying to argue that atheism is all about altruism and caring for the sick and needy.
That doesn’t seem to bother Barker, though. Instead, he completely overlooks the systematic murder of over 100 million people, and then tries to turn things around to make it look like those nasty Christians are the problem. Atheists, he says, don’t flaunt their views by putting their names on hospitals, (i.e. like “St. Mary’s, for example). Besides, many of those Christian hospitals “receive public money, and they all charge the same high rates, so there is very little ‘charity’ offered. The religion gets the credit, but the taxpayers get the bill. Until religious bigotry is lessened, how many believers would choose to go to First Atheist Hospital?” (100).
That’s right, in Barker’s world, the atheist hospitals of the USSR are held in high esteem, and those nasty religious hospitals are the problem. And yes, we’re just getting started going through his book.
Barker ends this chapter with the following statement: “The bible says that the ‘ungodly are like chaff which the wind blows away’ (Psalms 1:4). That’s fine with me. I prefer the winds of freethought to the chains of orthodoxy” (103). When I read that, I just rolled my eyes and thought, “Your ‘free thought’ has led you to (a) construct an argument that completely insulates your philosophical presuppositions from being challenged, (b) completely misunderstand what the Christian faith is, and (c) actually hold up the USSR as an example of morality….not to mention completely butcher the meaning of that verse.
In my next post, I will look at the next couple of chapters in Barker’s book, in which he engages in semantics and theological gymnastics.
Here’s a few things to think about concerning your five critiques. These are my own thoughts. Do not see them as an attempt to defend Dan Barker.
1 and 3: I would say that we need a starting point we can all agree with, which is the nature we are a part of and can sense with out senses. Beyond that we need additional evidence. For instance, if a person has seen a genuine miracle himself, then it would at least be easier to believe the reports of miracles in the Bible. But for a person who has not seen a miracle, such as myself and millions of others, it is much, much harder. It would be like me believing a person who said they have a dog that speaks five human languages without ever having seen a dog that can speak even one human language. I would need a lot of evidence to convince me.
The common answer seems to be something like, “Do you believe in love? Do you believe in beauty?” Upon answering “Yes.”, the response is, “Can you see love and beauty? Or smell them? Or touch them?” Well, no, but we can sense them since they are an internal construct that our brains create. We could argue about how our brains create them, but the bottom line is that without a consciousness, beauty and love simply do not exist. What happens when the sun sets on Earth remains the same, but it is not beautiful unless a mind sees it and interprets it that way. As they say, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” It could be that God is like that. It’s individual minds interpreting what they know in a certain way. Perhaps that is why it seems that there are as many views of God as there are people.
2: Do we really need to spend hours and hours of study before we reject the Bible? If so and we should not reject any religion a priori, we would need to spend an equal amount of time on them all. I think this is a foolish proposition. Some people would enjoy such a venture, but most just want to know what to accept and believe and get on with their lives. There is much to do such as choosing a field of study, having a career, falling in love, engaging in hobbies, eating, and just having fun. No one has the time to investigate every possible belief system. That is why most people just fall into their society’s or parents’ preferred beliefs and reject everything else out of hand. Of course, many simply reject them all and carry on their lives the best they can.
4: Given there are so many interpretations of the Bible, it appears that no one can really agree on what the correct understanding of the Christian faith is even if they are a Christian. Dan Barker was an evangelical preacher for 19 years, so I believe he had a pretty good understanding of the faith that accorded to a great extent with millions of other Christians. That may not accord with your understanding, but that’s just the way it is with faith. There is no consensus among the faithful.
5: I don’t know that Dan was in anyway saying the USSR was good. He was probably just saying simply. The USSR is atheistic and they build hospitals. Period. Beyond that, Europe has become very secular and they build hospitals. The reason the US doesn’t see atheist hospitals is that traditionally there have been very few atheists in the US. With the great majority of people being Christian, it only makes sense that it would be Christians that build our hospitals. Had our nation been founded by atheists and it remains atheistic over the years, I believe hospitals would still have been built.
Hi Randy,
Some quick responses…
1. My basic point is that it is somewhat of a bait and switch to reduce “proof” of God to solely natural causes. It is to equate God with something in the natural world. An inquiry of the existence of God is something more than just a scientific proof. I think the place to start, if we were going to begin to ask if God exists is to yes, acknowledge that human beings are part of the natural world, and are indeed biologically related to the animal kingdom. But then at the same time, there are things unique about human beings that (despite what Barker will argue) cannot be explained scientifically with something like evolution.
2. A basic understanding of the Bible is probably necessary if one is going to spend their career trying to tell people the Bible is a bunch of crap, which Barker essentially does. No, one does not need a PhD, but one should at least try to have a basic understanding of the Bible. And, despite Barker’s 19 years as a minister, it is clear to me that he doesn’t have that.
3. About miracles. Let me recommend the book “Miracles” by Craig Keener.
4. This kind of piggybacks onto #2. But to the point, throughout his book, Barker sets up “faith” and “science/reason” as opposites. That is simply a faulty comparison and a misunderstanding of faith. Now, sadly, a lot of Christians (especially fundamentalists) hold to the same dichotomy–but it still is a false dichotomy.
5. My point about the USSR hospitals. Obviously, I don’t think Barker endorses the genocide that the USSR and Communist China inflicted. But let’s be honest, if you are going to try to argue that atheists are moral, making ANY appeal to the USSR probably is not the smartest thing to do! It is just a lame point that probably doesn’t need to be made.
1. I guess the biggest issue is getting people to come to an agreement about what constitutes proof, or at least strong evidence, of the supernatural. Then agreeing on how to go about obtaining that evidence.
2. My point is he does have an understanding of the Bible, just not what you think it should be. As you have stated many times you also don’t think that Ken Ham and many other believers who have not left the faith do not have the proper understanding either.
3. Thanks for the recommendation.
4. After much reading about quantum physics and string theory I realize that there is much about the physical world we still don’t understand and may never. And I personally don’t exclude the possibility that another realm exists beyond the physical. Even science takes much on faith based on indirect evidence. So I personally don’t see a dichotomy between faith and science. They are both needed to function as humans. But there can be a problem when a person rejects the facts in favor of a belief.
5. Agreed. Not the best example.
1. Yes, but stating up front that you won’t consider any evidence of the supernatural unless it is natural is rather odd.
2. I think I will be able to prove this in the course of my posts. If he does have an understanding of the Bible, then he is being purposely deceptive in the way he presents it.
3. It’s a two-volume book, but quite interesting.
4. My point is that a biblical understanding of faith isn’t just some sort of “believing certain things exist without scientific evidence.”
5. haha…yeah, not the best!
As for Randy’s point no. 1, (hi Randy) and humans needing an agreed-upon starting place (nature) but needing proof of anything beyond nature, I would argue that the fact that down through history in all ages and times most cultures have believed in an invisible spirit-realm is a pretty good starting place for a consideration of such a “supra-natural” realm. For most of recorded history people have agreed that there’s an unseen reality that is bigger than themselves.
If religious faith was a recent innovation in human history Randy’s point would hold and yet in every historical culture for all of recorded history people have believed in an unseen spiritual reality which is bigger than them that they couldn’t “prove” in any concrete way. CS Lewis analyzed this in *Mere Christianity* and I think he was right to do so. Lewis basically argued that humans “sense” if you will, the existence of a Moral Law because an awareness of it was built into us. NT Wright makes a similar argument in *Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.* I think both men are right: for example, as Wright argues, most human beings, if they’re totally honest, know that the world doesn’t operate the way it should. We can see the rampant injustice all around us, and that longing for justice is one of those “echoes of a voice” that he talks so much about. Same with spirituality. We can “sense” intuitively that there must be something bigger than us. Naturalistic Darwinism says it’s because humans *need* to believe God exists. By *why*? Why do we *need* God to exist? Apparently sharks don’t need to believe in God so if humans are simply more highly evolved animals, why should we need to believe in something bigger than us?
Even some avowed atheists look for something bigger than themselves, as when they attempt to explain how life evolved on earth by arguing that ETs did it. In *Star Trek the Next Generation* it was revealed that all sentient life in the galaxy was “seeded” by a race of powerful primordial extraterrestrials. While STTNG was obviously science-fiction, many professed skeptics/atheists argue that ETs may have created life, or seeded life, here on earth.
I think Dr. Anderson’s point was, is it rational or logical to start off by ruling out *a priori* anything we can’t subject to scientific scrutiny? With him I would argue that it isn’t rational at all, and contrary to that, as I’ve said above, throughout recorded most people *didn’t* rule it out. The reason that for over 1,00 years the medieval Catholic Church was the primary sponsor of scientific inquiry (Dr. James Hannum, a Cambridge-trained historian of science, has written a great book on this subject, *The Genesis of Science*) is *because* they believed in God and wanted to understand how his creation worked.
As for his point no. 2, just because one doesn’t have time to do a detailed study of comparative religions doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary or wise to do so. But a detailed intensive study of that kind really isn’t necessary anyway. One can find good summaries of the major beliefs of all of the major world religions in order to compare/contrast them. I just mentioned two good ones relative to Christianity above. And while it’s true that because of an accident of birth people wind up Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Bahá’í , etc.That in itself says nothing about which, if any, of them one of them, is true or not. Lots of people born into these different faiths have converted to another faith. To me, it’s telling that many people spend more time choosing a heart specialist or oncologist than they do choosing a faith. Heck, many people spend more time, put more thought and effort, into buying a car than they do choosing (or not choosing) a faith system.
But since many of these faiths constitute a *world-view,* esp. Christianity, it’s important to decide which one, if any, adheres to reality. I think Christianity adheres to reality very well. For example, it calls “evil” “evil” and doesn’t try to relativise evil as some faith systems do. Among all the competing faith-systems, including atheism, Christianity for my money offers the best explanation for why the world doesn’t work they way we all instinctively know it should work. It satisfactorily explains the existence of evil and death. Furthermore, it tells me why life of any kind even exists at all; it tells me why there’s *something* rather than *nothing.* To me it isn’t any more irrational to believe that God or a god created the universe than it is to believe the universe somehow spontaneously came to exist from nothing. To me this second option takes waay more faith to believe.
As for his point no. 4 that Christians can’t agree, I would say that all of the orthodox Christian traditions (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant) agree on the fundamentals. The rest, as far as this particular argument goes, is window-dressing. There’s a big difference between *unity* and *uniformity.* Orthodox, Catholics, fundamentalists and evangelicals are all united on a shared belief in God as a Trinity; the incarnation, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, the sacraments (at least baptism and communion), the inspiration of Scripture, etc. What we disagree on are peripheral details (as important as they may be).
As for the USSR building hospitals, Christians build hospitals primarily, to borrow a phrase from St. Paul, because “our faith compels us.” Because our faith demands that we treat others the way we would like to be treated, and to love our neighbors the way we love ourselves, Christianity has throughout history believed it was a requirement, albeit infused by God’s Spirit a joyful requirement, to build hospitals, schools, etc.. As Rodney Stark points out in his recent books on the triumph of Christianity, one of the things ancient pagans found compelling about the early Christians is the way they nursed, not only their own sick, but the sick of their non-Christian friends and neighbors, too. For example, during the 2nd c. plague, when physicians like Galen were heading for the hills, Christians stayed in the cities to tend to the sick, and many even died because of it. There was nothing like this in any of the pagan cults. When mid-4th c. Roman Emperor Julian abandoned Christianity for paganism he tried to unify and reform the pagan cults in order to get them to be more charitable and benevolent but it was a failure because the idea of an organized program of charity based out of religious duty was so foreign to paganism. But it’s built into Christianity.
Now take the USSR. The USSR built hospitals primarily in order to keep the masses healthy enough to keep production going. The state always trumps the individual so under communism whatever was best for the state in the long-run took priority, and certainly not out of any humanitarian impulse. Basically, the USSR built hospitals because it *had to,* not because it was the *morally right* thing to do.
Sorry for writing a book!
Pax.
Lee.
As for Randy’s points above (hi Randy), wouldn’t it be rational to consider the existence of the supernatural since for all of recorded history various cultures have taken the existence of a supernatural realm for granted? If religious belief was a new phenomenon that point might hold but it isn’t.
CS Lewis examined this phenomenon of humanity’s historically/culturally shared belief in something bigger than itself in his *Mere Christianity* and concluded that it was more evidence that God or a god and a Moral Law existed. Furthermore, Lewis believed that people normally “sense” the existence of that Moral Law because the ability to sense it is built into us. And because it’s built into us, Lewis argued, is why various different societies share a *baseline* morality; for example, one culture might say you’re limited to one wife, and another culture might allow multiple wives, however they *all* say you can’t just have any woman you want anytime you want. Or the fact that every recorded culture we know of valued/values bravery but not cowardice.
So for most of human history people have agreed that there was an unseen power/spiritual realm that was bigger than them. Thus it seems irrational to me to *a priori* exclude any discussion of said unseen realm from the debate before it’s even begun. Why should we begin with the preconceived idea that reality is limited to *only* what we can prove exists scientifically?
We accept things we can’t see or prove scientifically on a daily basis. As Christian apologist Mark Mittlblerg, for example, argues in *Choosing Your Faith,* he takes it on faith that when his wife gives him a glass of tea that she hasn’t put poison in it. This isn’t blind faith, it’s a faith based upon the fact that it’s his wife, who over the years of their marriage has demonstrated her love for him and based upon that he takes it on faith that she would never hurt him, coupled with the fact that all of the times in the past she’s given him tea it wasn’t poisoned yet nevertheless it’s faith.
As for hours and hours of studying various religions, just because it might be tedious does that in fact mitigate against it? It might be tedious interviewing contractors to build my new house but it’s worth it in the end to make sure I get the right one who knows what he’s doing and won’t rip me off. Yet people often put more time and effort into choosing a contractor, or buying a car, than they do a religious faith.
As for the argument that most people are simply born into their faith, that’s true. But many people don’t *remain* in the faith of their birth due to study and consciously thinking about it. And anyway, being born a Muslim in no way addresses whether or not Islam is objectively true or not.
Because most of the various religious faiths are *worldviews,* lenses through which their adherents view the world and reality; certainly Christianity is a worldview, one that to me, out of all the other faith-worldviews makes the most sense and adheres to reality. For example, Christianity doesn’t attempt to relativise evil or say that it doesn’t really exist, as some faith-systems do. It doesn’t try to tell me that the space-time universe is a mistake, as ancient Gnosticism did, or that it’s a cheap copy of an unseen reality made from inferior materials, as Platonism did. Furthermore, it tells me *why* there’s *something* rather than *nothing.* Nor does Christianity ask me to check my brains at the door in exchange for a blind, unquestioning faith. On the contrary, it tells me to exercise my mind and to be able to provide a rational defense of the faith when non-believers ask me why I’m a believer.
And as for Christians disagreeing in their interpretations of scripture, this is true, however if you examine them, all of the orthodox Christian traditions, whether Orthodox, Catholic, mainline Protestant, fundamentalist or evangelical are agreed on the fundamentals of the faith (God as a Trinity; the incarnation, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus; the sacraments of baptism and communion, etc.), so that what we disagree about are the peripheral details (important though some of them may be). Those fundamentals are the baseline which establishes what constitutes an “orthodox” Christian tradition. There’s a difference between unity and uniformity; we’re united on the essentials but differ on non-essentials.
As for the USSR and hospitals. Christians build hospitals out of altruism. To borrow a phrase from Paul “the love of God compels us.” Built into our faith is the command to love our neighbors and do to them what we’d like done to us. Contrast that with the USSR which built hospitals primarily to keep the workers healthy enough to ensure production. There was no altruism at work. But this altruism is one thing that attracted ancient pagans to Christianity. As sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates in his books on the triumph of Christianity, ancient Christians nursed not only their own sick, but those of their non-Christian neighbors as well. Thus when, for example, in the 2nd century physicians like Galen were heading for the hills Christians risked sickness and death to stay in the cities to nurse plague victims. When mid-4th century Emperor Julian renounced Christianity for paganism he tried to reform and centralize the pagan cults to make them more like the Church when it came to works of charity and benevolence, yet his efforts failed. Because paganism just wasn’t equipped to think in those terms. No one in the ancient would’ve said “The love of Zeus compels me to build a hospital.” The pagan cults were individualistic rather than corporate in nature. It was the individual and her veneration of the gods and whether or not, the gods being fickle, they would respond favorably to her supplication.
Sorry to write a book.
Pax.
Lee.
NT Wright, CS Lewis, Rodney Stark. Very good taste in books!
I try to keep up. As Lewis said an atheist can’t be too careful in his reading, I think the same goes for Christians.
Pax.
Lee.