I have never really understood people’s disgruntlement at Christians’ attempts to convert them. I just can’t get on board with the whole “I’m fine with them doing whatever they want so long as they don’t try to force it on me” thing. Firstly, they’re hardly commandeering in their approach. In fact, they are always really, really polite and there is usually a toastie involved. Secondly, I personally would be insulted if Christians actually believed that there was an all powerful god who would provide us meaning and save us from burning for eternity in hellfire but they decided to let us just do our thing and wander aimlessly into the endless horror of hell.
In spite of my empathy with what the Christian Union were trying to achieve when I heard about their ‘Uncover Week’, I still seriously doubted that a single soul would be ‘saved’. I felt like they could throw all the free sandwiches and cookies they liked at it and not make much of a dent. I reckoned religion is something about which most Oxford students have probably had a reasonably long think and they have probably come to a pretty definite conclusion. You couldn’t really half-heartedly slip into faith by attending a lunchtime talk.
When the nice Christian Union representative came round to deliver my toastie and hand me the program of events I felt a little guilty. I didn’t want their effort to be wasted and so I agreed to attend one the talks. I have always been a pretty definite atheist. Faith in the Christian God, or any god, is to me completely incomprehensible. I can see how maybe this viewpoint is a creation of my circumstance. I also get that Christians raised in different circumstances may view my lack of faith as equally incomprehensible.
My parents are both non-believers and I have attended only one church service ever. Admittedly I did love that church service. It was such a novelty that the memory of it has stayed with me. I couldn’t believe that a group of educated middle class people had gathered in a hall, faced towards an icon of what they thought was a magical man sent on a special mission, bowed their heads, closed their eyes and muttered together to an invisible being. I remember thinking that the closest thing I had seen to this was a scene in the ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ film. There was a lot of humming and chanting, the characters almost sacrificing an actress to some god.
Nevertheless, I attended the Friday ‘Uncover’ talk on evil hoping to undo some of my prejudices. I believed there must be some element of Christianity that I was missing. I knew there were plenty of people much cleverer than me who were devoutly religious. I doubted I would be converted but I thought I might learn to empathise with their viewpoint a little better. I was wrong. I left that talk with a completely changed and burningly passionate approach to religion. I had been transformed. I was no longer an atheist but instead an angry Dawkins style anti-theist.
The title of the talk was “Evil: How do we make sense of it?” In his opening remarks the speaker smugly reminded the audience that in the talks he had already given, he had proven that Christianity was a rational religion, or an “examined” religion as he put it. It was one that could withstand logical rational scrutiny. He then began by alluding to some sort of scientific approach to an explanation by setting out that there were “stages” to be worked through in understanding evil. So far so promising, I waited to be shown a logical argument for the Christian faith in the face of the problem of evil. I awaited an answer to the age-old question that recently went viral having been re-articulated by Stephen Fry, “Why would an all powerful, all loving god create animals whose sole purpose was to burrow up through the eyes of children?“
What I got instead was a completely vacuous speech. The format was painfully familiar, the desperate obfuscation of the unprincipled politician or of my own essays in weeks where I haven’t done the reading and I don’t know what I am saying. The speaker filled the first fifty five minutes propping up his non-existent argument with snippets of bible verse, irrelevant truisms (see ten minute exploration of the sources of evil) and references to his own life which I think were designed to boost his credibility by showing that he had suffered evil (as if this was a unique and special qualification). This was all relatively harmless but a real wrong was done when he filled his time by ‘summarising’ and dismissing alternative philosophies. Primo Levi, author, chemist, holocaust survivor and great thinker had his works ‘summarised’ into a thirty second snippet. Levi’s suicide was held up as a demonstration of the way atheists cannot cope with evil in the world. “The eastern family of religions” was next on his hit list and, after an in-depth two-minute explanation of the entire Buddhist philosophy, its weaknesses were exposed and it was dismissed. With five minutes to spare he conceded he would not have time to properly and thoroughly address the manner in which Christians deal with evil but at last he did engage with the problem at hand.
He admitted that there is an inconsistency between the existence of evil and an all-loving and all-powerful god. His grand solution to this problem came in the form of an analogy in which French resistance fighters had to trust blindly in people during World War Two. I have some impression that this is a famous and nuanced argument but in his presentation it seemed pretty flimsy. This was partly because I think it would be pretty easy to distinguish the type of faith required by members of the French resistance and the type of faith required for the denial of a logical inconsistency. Its key weakness however was that in essence this great propounder of Christianity as an ‘examined’ faith had just attempted to answer this key question with a rephrasing of ‘God works in mysterious ways’.
As the speech came to a close I could feel nothing but revulsion at this most dishonest and slippery of non-answers. This was an inward-looking non-critical exercise in self-congratulation. His argument was a cult-like denial of proper debate or engagement with alternative ideas. If this is what Christianity is, not only do I not ‘get’ it, I don’t like it. I no longer feel admiration for a kindly moderate Christian’s gentle attempts at conversion. Instead I feel the same sadness and distaste I feel when I see scientologists offering a free cup of coffee to take their personality tests.
