What 'Giving Up God' Means

Author Shalom Auslander wrote, “In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God.” The article was published on Good Friday of this year in the New York Times as an op-ed. Auslander claims that God is responsible for “war and violence” and for “oppression and suffering.” Because of these character traits, he suggests that people stop teaching children about God.

In 1986, the NBC television network presented a drama about the gripping and courageous story of Raoul Wallenberg and his attempts to save European Jews from their Nazi tormentor, Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Wallenberg’s efforts may have made the difference between life and death for nearly 120,000 Hungarian Jews.

During the story, the viewer is struck by an emotional scene of Jews being loaded into trucks for shipment to a concentration camp. A Jewish teenager turns to a rabbi and confronts him with a seemingly unanswerable question: “How can you still believe in God after all of this?” The rabbi does not take long to respond: “How can you still believe in man?”

This is our dilemma today: If we do not trust in God for meaning and morality, then man is all that is left. And as Cornel West has said, “We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.” This means the death of someone like Adolf Hitler and the most righteous person you know meet the same ultimate end with no consideration for meaning or morality. Atheist Todd May, thinking about death, wrote the following:

It is true that there are egregious wrongs perpetrated in the name of religion. Currently, a woman’s rights over her body are endangered by religious zealots. On the other hand, I have been involved in grass-roots political movements for decades and some of the most courageous people I know act out of their religious conviction. To take one example among many, at the forefront of those risking their freedom and their lives for undocumented immigrants are people of religious faith…. I believe, with some of the existentialists, that we’re not here for any particular cosmic reason or purpose. We just show up, live our lives, and then die. This doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t believe in things like morality; rather, I ground morality and values in another way.

“Egregious wrongs”? “Courageous people”? “Risking freedom”? “Morality”? How does an atheist account for such non-material concepts and “values”? He can’t without borrowing moral-and-meaning capital from the world of theism, specifically, the God of the Bible.

Without God, man is irrelevant and evil does not exist. Protest is impossible. A society that resists the solid foundation of God’s revealed law will build an ethical edifice governed by either anarchy or totalitarianism. An anti-Christ culture will either establish the god of self (libertarianism) or the gods of statism (totalitarianism). Joshua=s summary of the choice is clear and always relevant: “And if it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15).

In a world without God, human life is expendable if the cause is “good” enough. Who defines “good enough”? We kill animals for food. The impeccable and unchallengeable discipline of science has determined that homo sapiens are highly evolved animals. Animals, theoretically, to be consistent can be killed for any number of “socially acceptable reasons,” for example, over-population, high medical costs for the terminally ill, racial superiority, the inconveniences of too many children, and abortion by the tens of millions.

After a debate on the abortion issue some years ago, one of the participants had the opportunity to speak with some of the students in attendance: “[M]ost of the students already recognized that the unborn child is a human life. Nevertheless, certain social reasons are considered ‘high enough’ to justify ending that life. According to some of the women, examples of ‘high enough’ reasons include protecting pregnant teenagers from the psychological distress of bearing a child, helping poor women who aren’t able to care adequately for a child, and preventing children from coming into the world ‘unwanted.’ Many charged that pro-life philosophies are not ‘socially acceptable’ because they fail to deal realistically with these problems.”[1]

Communism’s horrors are often justified with the infamous quip, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” What eggs should be the first to be broken? How many eggs were broken to make the Communist omelet? The authors of The Black Book of Communism[2] estimate that as many as 100 million people died over 80 years from the implementation of the communist atheistic ideology. Stalinist apologists often dismissed the horrors of the “purge” because it was all for a good cause — the liberation of the masses

Marxism and Nazism are built on Darwin’s theory. “Given the close relationship between Darwinism and the horrific crimes committed by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Regime we are forced to conclude that ours has been the Darwinian century.”[4]

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a convicted murderer’s death sentence because the justices determined the defendant deserved a resentencing hearing because the prosecutor wrongfully quoted the Bible in closing arguments.[5]

Karl S. Chambers was convicted of fatally beating 70-year-old Anna May Morris while stealing her Social Security money. District Attorney H. Stanley Rebert told the jurors, “Karl Chambers has taken a life. As the Bible says, ‘And the murderer shall be put to death.’”[6] In many (maybe most) courts, witnesses are required to swear an oath to tell the truth. While doing this, their left hand is on a Bible. Presidents from the time of George Washington, except for Thomas Jefferson, took the oath of office with a hand on the Bible. The response is simple and direct: “So Help me God.”

Upon hearing the nonsense from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Mr. Rebert stated, “I don’t know of any God-fearing prosecutor that has not used some scriptural or religious reference in arguing to a jury. God’s law is the basis for Pennsylvania law and all law.”[7]

What if the prosecuting attorney had asserted that murder is wrong by referring to the Bible? Why is murder wrong? If there is no God, there are no rules. Survival of the fittest prevails. If I, as a consistent evolutionist, were defending Mr. Chambers during his resentencing hearing based on the ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, my line of argument would go something like this:

Defense Attorney (DA): Mr. Chambers, did you go to public school?

Chambers: Yes, sir.

DA: Did you have a class in biology?

Chambers: Yes, sir.

DA: Were you taught that man evolved over long periods of time and that the strongest organisms survived over the weaker ones?

Chambers: Yes, sir.

DA: Did you learn that these were the natural and positive consequences of evolution?

Chambers: Yes, sir.

DA: Were you taught the Bible in public school?

Chambers: No, sir! It was not permitted.

DA (to the jury): Ladies and Gentlemen. You spent your tax dollars educating this young man. It’s been said that our students are not learning what they’ve been taught. Now we learn that when a person does master his lessons, we put him on trial. You are here today because some strong ancestor eliminated a weaker ancestor on the evolutionary tree. We are proud of our evolutionary heritage. Look how far we’ve come due to the elimination of “weak” evolutionary links. How can Mr. Chambers be faulted when he simply followed the evolutionary tradition he learned in school. In addition, you heard the prosecuting attorney in the first trial tell us, “As the Bible says, ‘And the murderer shall be put to death.’” The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned Mr. Chambers’ death sentence because the prosecutor quoted from the Bible. The same Bible that says a “murderer shall be put to death” also states that murder is wrong. If the Bible is inadmissible in the one case, specifying punishment, then it ought to be inadmissible in the other case, specifying what constitutes a crime.

Richard Dawkins uses several vivid illustrations to describe how our evolved genes have pure survival instincts with no regard for the genes of other people:

Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.

If you want to get an idea of what Dawkins is describing, consider the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre that took place between two Chicago criminal gangs: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by George “Bugs” Moran. The goal of the shooters was to survive at all costs and to keep their selfish-gene boss happy. Given what Dawkins claims for evolutionary development, did the killers do anything morally wrong?

[1]“Students Defend Abortion For ‘High’ Social Reasons,” The Rutherford Institute, 1:2 (January/February 1984), 8.

[2]Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Adrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartooek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[3]S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist—Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[4]F. W. Schnitzler, “Darwinian Violence,” Christianity and Society, 4:3 (July 1994), 28.

[5]The Marietta Daily Journal (November 9, 1991), 6A.

[6]“Court Rejects Bible,” The Atlanta Journal (November 16, 1991), E6.

[7]“Court Rejects Bible,” E6.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources