Questions from an atheist part 4

June 18, 8:58 AMSt. Louis Presbyterian ExaminerAlicia Donathan

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Major world religions (Christianity is maroon)

This article will be the last addressing this particular question (I promise):  

"Is it not likely that you are a Christian because your parents were?"  

Templeton led up to this question by asking a series of questions suggesting that if one were born in Saudi Arabia, one would be a Muslim; in India, a Hindu; in Jerusalem, a Jew; and so forth.  The underlying implication being that humans are conditioned in our beliefs by our environments.  

This I heartily affirm.  Therefore, I ask:  Is it not likely that Mr. Templeton is an atheist because he was born into a largely post-Christian, secular, agnostically academic culture?  It is most fashionable these days to be an unbeliever, especially if you are moving in any sort of educated or academic circles.  For that reason, we find far more people identifying themselves as atheists today than we would have found two or three hundred years ago.  Atheists, too, are conditioned by their environments.  

This is not to say atheists have no reasons for what they believe.  They do.  And so do Christians.  But those reasons are often mediated by their environments, and shared by a community (in addition to sometimes being acquired intuitively).  This is the case for all people.  

I believe that Jesus is Lord partly for the same reason I believe that Gordon Brown is PM of Britain: because somebody else told me so.  I could not have known it otherwise.  This is also, incidentally, how I came to know the multiplication table, the name of the U.S. president during WWII, and the rate of acceleration due to gravity.  Most of what we know and believe is acquired mediately, not through direct experience.  (I also happen to have other reasons why I believe Jesus is Lord, but they do not play into this discussion.)  

Further, I have noted that although we certainly are conditioned by our environments, we are not utterly determined by our environments.  Rather, humans (Christian or atheist) are free, and we exercise judgment and make personal commitments.  We respond to the constraints of our environments; we participate in the acquisition of our own beliefs.  

There is one more issue to be addressed in response to this question.  Clearly, as Templeton shows by his leading-up questions, the knowledge of God in Christ that Christians have is knowledge that is mediated through our environment, like so much other knowledge we have.  In fact, it is so to such an extent that we can say that it is largely geographically-dependent.  To be born and raised in a tribe of Australian aborigines such that one never comes into contact with other peoples is to necessarily have no opportunity to believe in Christ.  So naturally, such a person will not be a Christian; he will have had no chance to be.  

For Christianity, Templeton's introductory questions show that the knowledge of God in Christ is localized knowledge.  Like all historical knowledge, it depends on transmission.  If one lives in a hut in the deepest reaches of inland China, and has no cable, radio, internet, or newspaper, then one likely doesn't know that Jesus is Lord.  Just as one likely doesn't know that Barack Obama is president of the U.S.  This does not make Obama's presidency any less real.  It simply means that this knowledge is localized.  Nor does it have any bearing on whether Christ is Lord.  

This knowledge is localized, and its acquisition is mediated through geography and relationships with other people and communities.  

Nearly all knowledge, unless it is part of universal human experience (e.g., sexual intercourse leads to babies, water quenches thirst, etc.), is localized knowledge.  That is, it depends on human transmission.  Even science is this way.  Most people know calculus because they have been taught it.  It is only rare persons like Newton and Leibnitz who are capable of discovering such things intuitively.  (To be sure, calculus, like many things, can be confirmed intuitively.)  The vast majority of our scientific knowledge is mediated and thus, localized.  (And there are, of course, vast oceans of knowledge that cannot be known intuitively.  All of history is this kind of knowledge.)  

The conclusion of all this?  That the knowledge of God that Christians possess is of course mediated knowledge, like most knowledge is.  If one wished, one could draw the appropriate geographic associations (though with the advent of the internet that is becoming less and less true).  Because it requires human transmission, it is limited by all the factors that limit human transmission: time, place, technology.  

For all this, the Christian faith has spread surprisingly wide and far and rapidly.  By the end of the first century A.D., Christianity had reached some of the farthest corners of the Roman Empire.  Within a few centuries, it would be spread to the edges of the British Isles, the dark forests of Eastern Europe and what is now Russia, all of civilized Africa, and eastwards even to India.  Today there is hardly a country on earth where there is not some Christian presence, however small and limited.  This is because our localized knowledge is nevertheless of universal import.  The Christian faith is mediated knowledge with a mandate for universal transmission.  One day the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea (Is. 11:9).  

Does this mean that one's being a Christian believer is merely accidental, a chance result of the time and place of one's birth?  No and yes.  No, because (as we have already seen) humans are free beings.  We make choices, evaluate, consider, seek, find, reject, accept.  If one is unsatisfied with the beliefs one is taught, one can certainly seek something more satisfying (though the constraints of time and space may prevent one from ever finding it).  Even in the most Christianized of cultures, there have nearly always been unbelievers.  

On the other hand, yes.  Insofar as my opportunity to believe the Christian gospel is dependent on historical contingencies (contact with other believers, exposure to the Scriptures and their preaching, proximity to the Church, etc.), it is in that sense "accidental."  However, the world is governed by a sovereign God who orders all things far and nigh.  This means that every "accident" of history is not in the ultimate sense accidental at all; it is part of God's providential governing of history.  So the time and place of my birth, and my exposure to the Christian Church, were intentional, from God's perspective.  It is always God's mercy that governs the transmission of the Christian story far and wide.  God planned the circumstances of my life (and the lives of countless others) so that I would be able to believe in His Son. (This no doubt raises more questions than it answers, but there is not space for those questions here.)  

It is the case that the true account of reality, found in the Jewish-Christian Scriptures, is an account that was lost to many peoples of the world for a time; in its place, false stories grew up (Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or ancient Babylonian stories, e.g.) and were passed on.  These false stories appeared and replaced the true story because humans were rebellious, wishing to forget the true story because it required them to humble themselves and worship the true God.  For this reason, people living under false stories are lost and cut off from God.  But this is why the true story (the Christian story) is desperately needed.  It contains the truth of who we are, why we are, and whose we are.  And it contains the news of how we may be forgiven for our rebellion.  Through the hearing of this story, over and over again, men and women come, by God's grace, to embrace and keep it.  

So, in summary, yes, I am a Christian because my parents were before me.  Or more precisely, I am a Christian because I am conditioned by my environment, like all humans. I am also a Christian because I believe the Christian story to be true, over against all other accounts of reality.  Just as the atheist is an atheist because he believes an atheistic account of reality to be true, over against all other accounts.  But this is a different question.