Truth Unites - Is Richard Dawkins a Cultural Christian?

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund responds to Richard Dawkins' love for cultural Christianity without the doctrines. Speak Life: https://www.youtube.com/@SpeakLifeMedia   Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

A lot of people have been talking about Richard Dawkins claim to be a cultural Christian. This was not a new claim. He's said that for years, but it definitely strikes a different note than what he's sort of famous for in a book like The God Delusion, for example. I just wanted to make a short, simple video about this. It's not going to be super profound or lengthy, but I just want to say one simple thing in response. Let me just show, first of all, what he had to say. And what would be your Easter message? I mean, I've said a few things. What would be, what would you tell the nation? Well, I must say I was slightly horrified to hear that Ramadan is being promoted instead. I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian.

I'm not a believer. But there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols. And I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense. It's truth that statistically the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down. And I'm happy with that. But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches.

So I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we, certainly if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful. Now, what I want to say in response very briefly here is that it's very nice. naive to think. You can keep the cultural benefits of Christianity without Christianity wholesale and the doctrines of Christianity. To me, this is like if somebody says, well, I like nourishment and health, but I just don't want to eat food. Or I like sitting on this branch of the tree, but let's just saw off the trunk of the tree. I know it's maybe making the point a little bit bluntly, but Tom Holland made this point. Of course, you know, Tom Holland has amazing

book Dominion, where he makes his point at greater length. So someone on Twitter, someone was saying that this was a bizarre claim from Dawkins, and Holland responded by saying, not really because secularism and Dawkins' own brand of evangelical atheism are both expressions of a specifically Christian culture as Dawkins himself. Sitting on the branch he's been sawing through and gazing nervously at the ground far below seems to have begun to realize. So that's when I started thinking of this image of the branch and the trunk. And basically the concern here is there's a tremendous naivety in thinking you can so neatly

separate Christian culture and Christian doctrines fuel the culture and its historical influence. And Tom Holland, of course, in Dominion gives a very powerful argument that a lot of the values that we have here in the modern West are more Christian than we realize. You know, universal human dignity. It's not easy to see where you get that if you step outside the confines of a Judeo-Christian worldview and historically, it's not hard to see its influence coming through the Judeo-Christian tradition. This landed on me probably most powerfully when I was studying the Christianization of Scandinavia. I did a video on this absolutely fascinating topic, but one of the things I observed is it's just

really true that when Christianity got a root in this part of the world, 9th century, 10th century, this kind of time frame, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the islands around, it just had a huge cultural impact. not universally for good, but largely for good, reducing the amount of piracy, slavery, and rape, and so forth. And if you study human history, it's hard not to see this point, because the doctrine of creation in the image of God makes such an impact if people believe that. And the key is not just that it's sort of there as a fictional idea,

but that people actually believe that doctrine. The only kind of Christianity that can produce good culture and good fruits is the kind that's rooted in the doctrines of Christianity and so rooted in them that it's willing to oppose the spirit of the age. A liberal Christianity doesn't do that. It doesn't actually better the world because it just accommodates to the world. So if you're picking and choosing which doctrines you like

or I like the culture and I don't like the doctrines, you don't really have Christianity. You kind of have your own self-selected religion. Jay Greshamachin wrote his book is still relevant. Christianity and liberalism. About 100 years ago, different contexts. The context for that book was more anti-supernaturalism. So people wanted the ethics of the New Testament but not the miracles.

Today it's almost the opposite. A lot of people want the miracles but not the ethics, though the miracles are controversial too for some. But one of the things that he's arguing in that is if you strip away all the miracles and just try to retain the spirit of Jesus, then what you really have is not Christianity at all. He says what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy, one Christian doctrine after another is not Christianity. at all, but a religion which is so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct

category. And again, the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words, it was based upon doctrine. And the reality is that there simply is no Christian culture apart from the Christian doctrines. If you don't want Christianity and all of its wild truth claims, historical truth claims, like I'll talk about in just a moment, the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ, to Christian classically, distinctively Christian doctrines, that Jesus was born of a virgin, and that Jesus rose from the dead.

Those are miracles, those are doctrines. Apart from, if you want to leave off those things, you have no reason whatsoever to think that the culture can remain. And my friend Glenn Skrivener put out a great video. his video is better than mine on the dock and stuff. He had a brilliant response to it. I want to play a little clip from it. One of the things he's showing is that if you try to retain Christian culture,

but you leave off the doctrines, inevitably some other culture and some other ideology and worldview is going to come in. And he talks about this in connection to Joe Biden's recent announcement about a transvisibility day. The other problem that he's identifying is that in the absence of, let's say, Christian nationalism. But the phrase does not translate from the US to the UK. But anyway, but if he doesn't like a Christian society, well, guess what? You don't just get a neutral society. You get either what we're seeing in the UK, which is Ramadan's on the rise and mosque buildings on the rise.

We'll get into that in this video. Or you have the progressive kind of transgender and LGBTQIA plus and you've got that kind of settlement, which if you're going to place your Transvisibility Day on the 31st of March, which is Easter Sunday, you are saying that this is a day that should occupy sacred space. And it is not the case that if Christianity retreats, you just have this neutral place that is a kind of a spiritual Switzerland. No, other truth. claims other ideologies, other religions will flood into that space, whether it's Islam or whether it's some of the new religious ideologies and identities. On matters of gender and sexuality, it's not that when you get rid of Christianity, you just have very sane, rational, reasonable

arguments that we can all agree to in this secular space. What you have is Transvisibility Day occupying Easter Sunday in the popular consciousness. And Richard Dawkins is unnerved by that. He's unnerved by Islam. But what's his alternative? His alternative is a cultural Christianity that has no root. So what's the future of that? If you don't follow SpeakLife, I'll put a link to his channel.

Go check it out. He really does outstanding videos at every level. The aesthetics. I'm working on my aesthetics, but that's not my... You have no idea how much I didn't... When I first started YouTube, okay, this is an aside, I knew nothing about videography. All I knew about cameras is that you point them and click.

I knew nothing. So everything, I've just been learning as I go. And you can see that if you look at my old thumbnails or my old videos. So hopefully I'm moving in the right direction, but I'm just trying to have people help me get better at some of the basic stuff here. But he does well at all that stuff. But anyway, the question that I would just kind of pose here, and I want to finish with, is if that's true,

if there's a kind of inexorable connection between the doctrines and the culture, you can't have the good fruits of Christianity, which we see. I mean, how many hospitals and universities has Christianity spawned? A lot. Just look at their names. Look at their history, you know? And so many other things we could say. If you can't separate the doctrines on the good fruit, why not just take both?

You know, why not just embrace the doctrines too? Now, here's what was so interesting about this interview. Dawkins started asking the host, and he asked her on three separate occasions, if I recall, about her beliefs about Christianity and the doctrines and the issues of the virgin birth, and the resurrectioning came up, first the virgin birth. And so at first, the interviewer, Rachel Johnson, is sort of waffling about it, and she says she sees some kind of force in it. When you say you waver, I wanted to ask you, do you actually believe that Jesus had a virgin for a mother?

Do you actually believe he rose from the dead? I suspect you probably don't. Well, weirdly, since you ask, Richard, if I may, because I was at New College when you were, are you still a Don at New College? Well, I'm retired. You're retired, but you don't look anyway. Weirdly, I was just three weeks ago at the Church of the Holy Sepulch in Jerusalem where the Christians believe that Christ was crucified or there was the tomb or the Gethsemini was just there and Golgotha was there. And I have to admit that there is a real force.

I mean, it feels like the fulcrum of three world religions. It really does. And Christianity is palpable there. the place pulses with Christianity. But this is a little bit ambiguous, so he kept pressing, first about the virgin birth and then about the resurrection of Christ. Do you believe that his mother was a virgin? Well, maybe that was a mis-translation of... Well, that's biologically impossible, isn't it?

Of course it is, yes. But the Christian belief, I mean, today is Easter, and of course I don't believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I don't believe you do either. Do you? Do I believe that Jesus rose from the dead? I mean, you're really putting me on the spot. I would like to believe he did. Yes, I mentioned the resurrection.

And what comes into my heart as I'm watching this interaction is, first of all, a prayer for both of them, you know? Pray that God would give them grace to come to see the absolute wondrous beauty that is the gospel of Jesus Christ. But then also what's in my heart is to say, I know my answer to those questions. If someone ever asked me, do you believe in the virgin birth? Or do you ever, I mean, there's some doctrines that are more peripheral where, like,

Christians can disagree on them. But the virgin birth, I mean, there's a few people who have denied, like, Emil Bruner, denied the virgin birth. It's so weird. But these are like classical Christian doctrines. This is like distinctively Christianity, Apostles' Creed type stuff. And if someone ever asked me if I believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, I'll just say, yeah of course sign me up um if god exists he can do miracles the early christians knew these were miracles

they believed in it because they claimed to have seen the risen christ by the way there's a difference then from believing in an ideology and dying dying for that ideology then dying for an empirical claim the early christians claimed to have touched the risen christ and they died for that so it's either the of the resurrection is either true or it isn't. I find it plausibly true. Both the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. I can make another video of that. I'll come back to that and show up another clip from Glenn

at the end of this in just a moment. But the question for now is, if they're plausibly true, and if they lead to the good cultural fruits that we see, why not embrace them both? Here's a closing metaphor. Suppose that you are in love with a girl, but you're kind of worried about committing.

Now, if you go to this person, and you're kind of uncertain what to do, if you go, and maybe there's some things about her you're not sure about, and if you go to this person and say, you know, I like your personality, but I don't really like your plans and your career goals and what you want to do with your life. Or if you say, so I'd like to pick and choose, I just like this part of you, but not this part of you. Or if you say, I like your physical beauty, but I don't like talking to you. Okay, you're not going to have any of a relationship. with her. You lose the girl wholesale. If you don't accept everything, you get nothing. Right? We all know relationships work like this. It's the same with Christianity. If you don't, if you like the culture, why not commit to the whole thing, including the doctrines that have produced them? Religion and romance are the same in this respect. If you don't commit to everything, you really can't claim a right to anything. Now, you can't say, well, I want Christian culture, but the doctrine is nonsense any more than you can say, well, I like that person's looks, and I'd like to have a relationship with her, but I don't like her personality. She will be offended by that. That will not work. So the only really concluding

question to ask is, are these doctrines true? Once again, I thought Glenn had a powerful point about that. Now, I happen to believe that Jesus walked out of that tomb two thousand years ago, that on the first Easter Sunday, the non-living Jesus became living again. That is a miracle. in one sense that's really hard to believe. But the miracle that Richard Dawkins believes in is orders of magnitude more improbable. I think the non-living Jesus became living. Richard Dawkins thinks that all life emerged from non-life

and without a God of resurrection to work the wonder. That's quite the miracle, right? When I say, I believe that the non-living Jesus became living again, I'm not offering you one more absurdity that you can add to your worldview. I'm offering you the inner logic that explains a universe that would otherwise be absurd. You see, Richard Dawkins doesn't know how to answer the four most fundamental questions. Why have we got everything from nothing? Why have we got order from chaos?

Why have we got life from non-life? Why have we got consciousness from mindless matter? Why have we got any of these things? All of these are Easter-like miracles. All of these are life from the dead. All of those make a virgin birth and Jesus walking out of the Jerusalem tomb look like child. child's play. The miracles at the heart of the Easter story are there to explain what would otherwise be absurd. They are not themselves the absurdity. So at the very least, I would say this.

If you reject Christianity, don't think you've got some kind of non-mysterious alternative to it. Any worldview available to us on the market is fundamentally, deeply mysterious. We can't cover and canvas all of reality out there through science. Okay. And if you want to reject Christianity, don't naively assume you can retain the bits of it that you happen to like, like universal human dignity. The more you think about it, and I will say, the more you study human history, the more you see that's naive, it's really hard to see where you get these good fruits apart from the roots to change the metaphor a little bit. And a lot of people, you know, I think Tom Holland's metaphor was profound, sawing off the branch that you're sitting on. Once you get about halfway through sawing,

you start to wake up and realize, oh, this is not good. What's the alternative? How else do I ground these values that have shaped the modern world so much and that are so good? So for me, speaking for myself, I'm all in on both the doctrines and the fruit. I just embrace the whole thing. And to me, faith is a little bit like that. When I talked about falling in love with a girl, it's a little bit like that. You just give yourself to it fully.

And actually, a lot of people in the modern world are aching for something like that. I think a lot of people watch my videos are longing for something transcended to give your life to. you'll probably find something. Make it Christianity. It's plausibly true, and it's unbelievably beautiful and hopeful. The best thing to give your life to. All right, that's all I wanted to say. 12 minutes, and hopefully you didn't hear my kids too much in the background.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for watching, everybody.