By Davis Carlton
Christianity is under severe attack, and the primary rival to Christianity is quickly becoming secular atheism. One of my favorite topics is Christian apologetics. I watch many debates between Christian apologists and atheists. My favorite is the famous debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein. I’ve watched several other debates and I use them to sharpen my own sense of how I would defend the Christian faith. There are often many ways in which I disagree with particular Christian apologists in how they defend the faith. A major topic that is becoming extremely important in apologetics is the issue of Biblical morality. Most atheists are becoming well-versed in the moral precepts of the Bible as a means of undermining its authority in the minds of modern Western Europeans.
Most white people throughout the Western world have been trained to despise many aspects of Biblical morality whether they are professed Christians or not. Many Christians are unfamiliar with the teachings of the Bible on a host of subjects and this ignorance is particularly a problem when it comes to the Old Testament. Europeans across the board are taught about the manifold evils of their Christian ancestors, and many Christians attempt to explain this away by arguing that they simply weren’t behaving in a Christian manner. God shouldn’t be held responsible for the improper conduct of those who profess to believe in Him. This argument is fair enough, but falls flat with skeptics who are able to point out that our Christian ancestors were typically acting in accordance with what the Bible actually teaches when it comes to slavery, sexuality, social hierarchy, and gender roles.
A good example of this is a recent debate that took place in England between a Christian named Jonathan McLatchie and an atheist named Alex O’Connor who runs the YouTube channel Cosmic Skeptic.1 Alex lists2 several objectionable teachings of the Bible that contributed to him rejecting his Catholic upbringing and any profession of Christian faith along with it. O’Connor lists the Bible’s “advocacy of slavery, the condemnation of homosexuality, and the disparagement of women” as primary reasons to reject Christian morality. In particular O’Connor mentions the regulations for punishing slaves in Exodus 21 as well as God allowing the Israelites to take “sex slaves” from among the women of Midian in Numbers 31.3
These objections tripped up Alex’s Christian interlocutor Jonathan who at one point conceded that he has difficulty understanding these passages. I appreciate Jonathan’s honesty and I think that he did a fine job with the other aspects of the debate such as defending Christ’s Resurrection, but O’Connor’s complaints about Biblical morality need a more thorough rebuttal. Arguments against the Bible on the grounds that it promotes immorality are bound to resonate with a generation which has been thoroughly inculcated in egalitarian thinking. Here is my response to Alex’s complaints about Biblical morality.
A major issue is that atheism has no foundation for morality whatsoever. Jonathan brought this up in the debate when he mentioned that Alex identifies as a “moral subjectivist.” This point needed to be pressed further, because it completely nullifies any objections any atheist might raise against Christian morality. Alex is more aware of this fact than are most atheists, and has made several YouTube videos on the subject including this one in response to the moral claims made by fellow atheist Sam Harris.
Alex doesn’t seem to see the utter inconsistency of complaining about the moral teachings of the Bible while rejecting objective morality, but he and other atheists can’t get away with that kind of hypocrisy. If there is no God who created us with specific purposes in mind, then we amount to nothing more than a constellation of molecules, and are no more cosmically significant than inanimate objects. Alex elsewhere tries to assert that a sense of morality can be established based upon the subjective value of human welfare and then objectively analyzing and applying certain principles that contribute to that subjective goal. The problem is obvious. The idea of “human welfare” is vague and can be assigned virtually any meaning when it comes to moral discussions. For example, does Alex really believe that sodomy and transgenderism are beneficial to the welfare of individuals or mankind as a whole? (They aren’t.) Would his answer be rooted in objective facts or in his own liberal biases? Alex, like virtually all atheists, tries to establish a concept of morality based upon brute objective facts while ignoring those facts when discussing subjects like sexuality or the ethics of abortion.
Greg Bahnsen was famous for asking by what standard anything could be assessed. Bahnsen’s point was that only Christian theism provided the necessary framework for objective reason and morality. Atheists try to appeal to morality as an evolutionary construct in which morality “evolves” over the course of several generations in which good moral behaviors promote survivorship and reproduction while bad behaviors do not. The problem is that no atheist actually believes that we are morally obligated to pursue behaviors conducive to the welfare or at least survivorship of others or even ourselves. What would be the foundation of any obligations? While there are some passages of the Bible that are difficult to understand, Christian apologists must gently but forcefully maintain that atheism cannot provide a coherent alternative. Atheism is by definition a worldview that rejects objective meaning and transcendent purpose, and without this morality is impossible. In my next article I will address Alex’s specific comments about Ex. 21 and Num. 31.
1 I’ll refer to both Alex O’Connor and Jonathan McLatchie by their first names.
2 This remark occurs at about the 24:25 mark.
3 This discussion begins around 39:10 when O’Connor gives his reasons for rejecting Christianity.
I enjoyed your introductory article. I wish to comment on a few ideas presented.
“…the primary rival to Christianity is quickly becoming secular atheism.” I would argue that the greatest rival to Christianity since the days of the Apostles till the end of days is false christianity. Their numbers grow exponentially and is only eclipsed by the amount od self-righteousness they espouse. Their clueless victims over the last 2000 years fill the halls of Hell.
“O’Connor lists the Bible’s “advocacy of slavery, the condemnation of homosexuality, and the disparagement of women” as primary reasons to reject Christian morality.” Hmmm, lets see…the West has been so improved since the abolition of that minuscule amount of slavery occurring within its borders. The ancestors derived from former slaves are now such model free citizens, they built America you know! Oh lets us not minimize the value and virtue sodomites have provided to our lands of growing greatness. My children can be finally fully immersed in perversion, how they would learn such degeneracy without these “men of pride” I will never know. We can’t forget the blessing feminism has wrought onto our primitive Christians homes. Without liberated women how would we have destroyed our lands so quickly and completely. O’connor is correct, the Bible has nothing but destructive errors to teach us enlightened, egalitarian, environmental, empathetic, evangelicals. I guess we should have burned the Bibles with the bras.
“…as well as God allowing the Israelites to take “sex slaves” from among the women of Midian in Numbers 31.” Well even taking this false position seriously, what is worse, the ancient woman forced to engage in sexual acts under compulsion or today’s THOT’s freely delivering it to many strange men debased enough to take it from her?
“Atheism is by definition a worldview that rejects objective meaning and transcendent purpose, and without this morality is impossible.” Those not yet given up by God know that without the absolutes found only in the Bible meaning and reason is impossible. This is why so many atheists wallow in a pathetic life with only plastic purposes. It is the intelligent and honest ones who kill themselves, it is the dim-witted and in denial ones that pretend all is as it should be.