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What makes a "good Christian" or a "good atheist"?

by James Barringer
8/25/2011 / Christian Apologetics

If you talk to an atheist for long enough, you're going to end up having to answer for the Crusades, which are widely seen as an unjust atrocity perpetrated on innocent Muslims by bloodthirsty Christians. (The historical accuracy of that perspective is debatable; historian Thomas Madden opines, "The Crusades were in every way a defensive war, the West's belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world...no more offensive than the American invasion of Normandy [in World War II].") Or perhaps they'll bring up the Protestants and Catholics killing each other, and various innocent civilians and British soldiers, in Northern Ireland. Perhaps they'll bring up that crazy lady from Texas who drowned her kids in the bathtub cause she thought that God told her to. Either way, the implication of this argument is clear: Christianity isn't better than any other religion, because plenty of Christians do violent and unethical things. Christianity's system of ethics isn't morally superior to anyone else's. How would you respond to such an accusation?

I would begin by observing that Christianity is ethically superior to atheism because atheism is not an ethic at all. Only Christianity provides us with grounds for believing that all humans are created equal, by virtue of being made in the image of God. Only Christianity, by that same doctrine, provides us with a logical reason for insisting that all humans be treated well. Atheism doesn't. An atheist might have that attitude, but it's not something that his atheistic worldview gives him. He could just as easily have the opposite attitude and believe that, since humanity evolved through Darwinian survival of the fittest, the best thing for him to do for the human race is to spread his seed and kill off the weaker humans so they don't reproduce. He would still be just as faithful to his atheistic worldview if he did.

See, Christianity does bring an ethic to the table, the strictest ethic known to any moral system in the entire world: love your neighbor every bit as much as you love yourself (which should be a lot, if you appreciate that you are made in the image of God). Treat other humans as well as you treat yourself. Love your enemies. Anyone who does otherwise - in the Crusades, in Northern Ireland, etc - is a bad Christian, not just bad in the moral/ethical sense, but bad in the sense of not conforming to the teachings of Christ. We could point to the Christians who do violent things and say, "Our shared ethical system gives me the ability to say that they are doing it wrong. That kind of behavior is not acceptable for a Christian and does not match Christ's ethical code."

An atheist has no such accountability. Thus, an atheist who tried his hardest to live a good life and harm nobody would be a good atheist, not good in the moral/ethical sense but good in the sense of adhering to atheism. However, Josef Stalin could murder thirty to sixty million people and also be a good atheist, holding to the atheistic world view just as perfectly as our imaginary hippie-athiest. No atheist has room, strictly according to his atheistic world view, to criticize anyone else's morals or ethics, because morals for an atheist are something decided separately from world view and grafted on top of world view. You can be a great person or a mass murderer and still be a good atheist. That's why Christianity is morally and ethically superior.

And besides, any atheist who does want to live an ethical life is going to quickly find that he has no logical reason for any of his ethical beliefs. "All men are created equal" is a problem for someone who does not believe that men are created at all. Even the phrase "All men are equal" is, quite obviously, a false statement: some men are smarter, some are more intelligent, some are more beautiful, and so on down the line; why should we treat them all as if this were not the case? Our atheist doesn't even have any compelling reason at all to be ethical, because ethical behavior frequently does not pay off during this lifetime, and he does not believe there is any future lifetime of judgment and reward. If he is intellectually honest, he must admit that there is no incentive whatsoever to even try and be a moral person. He might want to be a moral person, but he can't justify it logically. Doing something when there is no incentive - or, worse, when there is a strong disincentive - is a form of irrationality. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible to be a moral atheist; I'm just pointing out that there's no logical reason within atheism to say that morality is the only accepable way to live; you could murder thirty million people and still be a "good atheist."

The only atheistic motivation to good behavior is on pragmatic grounds, arguing that it's better for everybody if we all live morally. There are two problems with this. First of all, atheism still provides me with no reason to care about anyone on earth apart from myself. (Satanism and other forms of humanistic hedonism are at least honest about this fact, and don't even pretend to care about other people.) Why should I make a sacrifice here and now, live in a way I don't want to live for the sake of someone else's benefit, if I get no earthly reward and no eternal reward for doing so? That's irrational. The second and more pressing rebuttal to the pragmatic argument is: whose standard of morality should we all live by? If I decide that it's moral to kill off the weak in order to preserve the strong, to what standard can anyone appeal to tell me I'm wrong? Who says, and with what authority, that killing people is wrong - and if it is, does that include abortion, which many politically-liberal atheists favor? You see that the atheist's attempt to introduce morality to the world meets with nothing but logical disaster.

Christianity's attempt to introduce morality into the world meets with disaster as well, but for a totally different reason: it's such an impossibly high standard, and we as humans are so fundamentally selfish due to sin, that we can't possibly live up to the high moral calling that's been placed on us. Nonetheless, the Bible presents us with a very clear picture of what a community of truly Christian people would look like (Acts chapter 2) and offers a vision of eternity where all of God's people are cleansed of sin and given new bodies that are not even tempted to sin (1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 21-22). Using these glorified bodies, we'll experience eternity in perfect community, perfect moral and ethical harmony, with God and each other, in a way that we can only try to imperfectly mirror here on earth. That's why Christianity is morally and ethically superior to atheism. Some Christians make egregious ethical mistakes, missing the boat and becoming mockery for atheists and shame to us as believers, but those people are no more representative of my world view than Josef Stalin is of the average atheist's.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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