The Stupid Christian Stereotype is Wrong

I know this guy on Twitter who is intelligent, articulate and passionate. He’s a sports fan who loves to cut through the clichéd commentary on sports with links to studies and thoughtfully reasoned critiques that show those clichés to be flimsy and stupid. He believes things only if they are based on established facts or borne out by academic study. He is an evidentialist – wherever possible, his thought is guided by the evidence. He is an atheist. His name is Bob. I like Bob.

"Stupid toy" by duncan c / CC BY-NC 2.0

Bob believes that Christians are poorly educated, simple-minded and sometimes wilfully anti-intellectual. He thinks that we blindly believe in God regardless of what the evidence says. And because he thinks we swallow “fairy stories” about God, he draws the conclusion that those of us who are educated and intelligent are lunatics. In Bob’s mind, Christians are either stupid or crazy for believing Christianity to be true.

Bob obviously has a stereotype in mind when he makes this claim. Perhaps all the Christians he has known have fit this mould. Perhaps the Christians he knows mistakenly adopt an anti-intellectual view of their own faith. Or perhaps it’s more convenient to dismiss a caricature of Christianity rather than to investigate it thoroughly. I should probably ask Bob why he thinks his portrayal of Christianity is true.

At the end of the day, it’s just a stereotype. To dismiss Christians as stupid or crazy without acknowledging the enormous amount of scientific, historical and philosophical evidence that Christians can draw on in defence of their beliefs is not a genuine or serious critique.

Christians have plenty of good reasons to believe that Christianity is true. For example the evidence that the universe had a beginning, and therefore requires a cause that exists and operates independently of time, space, matter and energy – unless you believe that things can create themselves (which falls flat when you realise a thing must first exist in order to create itself).

The beginning of the universe also requires an explanation that can account for the delicate fine-tuning of the universe that allows life to exist. There are a whole set of constants and quantities in the universe that need to be extremely finely calibrated in order for life to be able to exist. If one of these values were even slightly off, life would not be possible at all. The probability of each of these values falling within the extremely narrow life-permitting range by chance is almost incomprehensible, meaning it is far more likely we find ourselves in a universe designed to support life. 

There are many observable, knowable realities in life that also need to be accounted for by any successful worldview. For example, the existence of objective morals (it’s always wrong to kill babies for fun) and duties (so I must never kill babies for fun) is inexplicable on a worldview based purely on molecules, atoms and physical forces. Without God, morality can be whatever I want it to be. Yet when it comes to killing babies for fun, we find an activity we can’t justify without engaging in serious self-deception.

Morality is only one element in a long list: The existence of reason, logic, intentionality, meaning, information and many other features of the observable world also cry out for an explanation – and a cohesive explanation that solves the entire puzzle must be preferred to explanations that only give us a series of disconnected possibilities. These are really no explanation at all.

Also consider the historical evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in addition to the personal spiritual experiences of Christians, and the cumulative weight of the case for the truth of Christianity becomes hard to avoid. 

As atheist philosopher Michael Ruse says, "I do take Christianity very seriously, it is a grown-up proposal to answer grow-up questions - it works if it is true."

And that should be our only concern as truth-seekers. Not to belittle stupid, crazy Christians, nor to vilify sceptics and atheists - but to investigate the evidence that determines whether or not Christianity is true.

I hope you’ll do that yourself this week, no matter what kind of truth-seeker you currently are, theist or atheist.