A New Counter-Apologetic for Humanism

In the past fifteen years since my deconversion, I’ve had many conversations with many followers across a spectrum of denominations. Despite these conversations rarely turning overtly hostile, there were always implicit assumptions about my motivations for leaving faith. Over the years, I’ve noticed a shift in the “debate”-style conversations where my interlocutor will attempt to run the gamut of arguments for God. The “God as the Good” argument has been discarded for Divine Command Theory. These interlocutors have also dropped Aristotle’s unmoved mover along with Al-Ghazali’s omnipotent creator in favor of Van Til’s pre-suppositional apologetic. By contrast, the arguments for atheism (at least on the popular level) have remained largely the same: We mention the conflicting commands in scripture, its unreliability, the Outsider Test of Faith and The Problem of Evil. That last one is probably the most common of all; it would be a safe bet to say that few, if any, deconstruction stories don’t involve grappling with the Problem of Evil in some way, shape or form.

One constant response to the Problem of Evil throughout this same period has been, “The Bible isn’t wrong; people get the Bible wrong. I don’t blame the Bible for that.” I’ve often been puzzled by this response. It seems convenient that it cleanly divides peoples’ actions in a way that renders the proposition of the Bible being a source of moral truth unfalsifiable. If we can all agree that treating one’s neighbors as oneself is good, then command to do in the Bible is the correct interpretation. But if we can all agree that slavery is bad, then someone has interpreted the Bible wrong despite any verses in the Old Testament. How can we possibly know if the Bible is a source of moral truth if we have to evaluate the morality of an action before we can ask that question? I can see the logic behind this defense; it could be a way of rationalizing away the dissonance. But that makes it an effective rhetorical tool to avoid the possibility of being on the back foot in an argument rather than a tool for discovering truth.

Whether Christian ethno-nationalism collapses in the next ten weeks, ten months, or ten years, these events have given an entirely new dimension to the consideration of the Problem of Evil. It was one thing to discuss historical atrocities and ask, “Where was your god during all of that?” As described earlier, you were quickly assured that those Christians in questions were “not real Christians” and that they were getting the Bible wrong. I think it’s safe to assume that the reader is familiar with the stories that have escaped the internment camps run by DHS. The rapes, the torture and the sitting in cramped cells for weeks without humane accommodation or trial. But MAGA has gone to great lengths to assure us that God is back in the White House and that He (not Trump) is king. Which makes it perfectly reasonable to conclude that the implication is that these novel actions taken by this administration are done by divine right, or at least without divine objection.

As humanists, our worldview is often criticized as being an ineffective tool for promoting the well-being and happiness for people everywhere. That it is just a flimsy guardrail that breaks as soon as we need an excuse to justify our actions. I don’t think this objection works for several reasons (I happen to be a moral realist) but we could always appropriate their slogan and say, “Humanism isn’t wrong; it’s that people are imperfect humanists.” That’s certainly an option. But we don’t need to stop there, we can press the point harder. Here the theist is making the argument that their belief systems provide sturdy guardrails to prevent their adherents from committing atrocities either out of their own weakness or misguided piety. But what we are witnessing in our streets would be exactly the sort of behavior we would (at least supposedly) expect from an artificial ethos propped up by an equally synthetic cosmology. It would be surprising to find a transcendent ethical system align so perfectly with the sociological and geopolitical goals of its adherents entirely by coincidence. Why would the creator of the entire universe care about the ethnic composition in a specific region of one single planet?

We now find ourselves on the same footing in a way that would have been difficult to express even ten years ago. Christianity has shown itself to be equally capable of inventing reasons to justify its own geopolitical and ethnic goals as it has accused secular ethics of being apt to do. The Problem of Evil now has stopped being solely about why God permits evil acts committed by the undercommitted, but rather becomes the more poignant: “Why did God permit you to do this?” MAGA has already done the leg work of assuring us that they are, in fact, fully committed Christians with Biblical support.

This is important for all humanists to be aware of: Even if we couldn’t demonstrate that our worldview doesn’t prevent itself from being twisted to selfish ends, Christianity has shown itself to be as prone to that twisting as any other ethic. We no longer need to defend our position of secular ethics from a positioning of establishing that the amoral persons of the past were in fact Christians. We can simply refer to the fact that our dialectical opponents operate within a system that behaves exactly as they accuse the secular ethic of behaving, no stronger than the idealistic aspirations of its adherents. As we defend our beliefs at dinner tables, in office breakrooms, on the streets and on social media, we can make sure that future apologists don’t sweep these horrors under the rug as they advocate for their religion. Because a little boy, barely older than my son, and countless others like him will suffer for the rest of their life from the conditions in the internment camps that Christians were terrified that atheists would throw them into. We don’t need a god to tell us that’s wrong, but, apparently, MAGA does.