Andy Bannister had a great weekend in Dumfries, delivering a shorter version of our Confident Christianity conference. Here he talks about the weekend, and Dumfries Baptist Church.

Andy Bannister had a great weekend in Dumfries, delivering a shorter version of our Confident Christianity conference. Here he talks about the weekend, and Dumfries Baptist Church.
Imagine if there was no religion. Would it really be as blissful and breezy as a chart-topping pop song? Despite the blame religion often gets for the world’s ills, some atheist writers today are realising the incredible benefits which Christian values and ethics bring to our society. As Dr Andy Bannister explains in this Short Answers video, these thinkers are facing a conundrum. If they don’t want to undermine these foundations for our society, they are facing an uncomfortable question: Is Christianity actually true?
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Gavin: Hi Richard, it’s great to speak to you, thanks for joining me.
Richard: Great to see you in person, at last!
Gavin: Most Christians probably know that their Muslim friends have a respect for Jesus – but they don’t know where Muslims draw their ideas from.
Richard: Fundamentally the ultimate source of authority and religious knowledge for Muslims is The Qur’an. The Qur’an is for Muslims the word of God, revelation from heaven, and that’s their starting place for understanding Jesus. Jesus is mentioned 25 times in the Qur’an, that’s not 25 individual places – there are a couple of chunks which are significant, as well as a few other mentions in the text. So that’s the most significant source.
Then there was a scholar named al-Tabari, the first major Muslim historian who put together a history which contains a range of traditions about Jesus. Then you have the Hadith, the sayings and oral traditions around what happened in Muhammad’s life, and things he said – and we find Jesus referenced there as well. Then the Sira, the biography of Muhammad is another early source for Muslims, which again contains references around Jesus, and interestingly the stories of the Apostles heading out as well. The other major source is the Qisas Al-Anbiya the stories of the prophets and that is much later, mystical writing. It contains stories, parables and narrative teaching about what a whole range of prophets did and said, and Jesus has a very major place in that writing. Now that source is much later, and sits in the mystical traditions (which wouldn’t be highly regarded by conservative Muslims); but all of these things are what informs the Muslim imagination about Jesus.
Gavin: Could you then give us an overview of the picture of Jesus which emerges from these sources – a picture which is very important for Muslims..
Richard: Well, the Muslim tradition starts with the Qur’an, but the picture you get of Jesus there is a bit “thin”, I suppose you could say. Muhammad, when he was reciting the Qur’an and mentions Jesus, had this expectation that his listeners would know who he was talking about. So they knew who Jesus was, they knew he was a prophet at least. He was even aware that his audience had encountered Trinitarian Christianity, so he was clear in his message that some people believe that Jesus is the Son of God – but he decisively rejected that idea.
So Muhammad didn’t give a huge amount of details about Jesus, but he drew on their shared knowledge; and insisted that Jesus didn’t do many of the things Christians claim. Rather Muhammad wants to say that Jesus affirmed the same message as him. So Muhammad insists that he stands in the same prophetic line as Jesus, but offers a correction to the Christian understanding of him.
Yet in the middle of that there are some affirmations that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he did miracles, that he was called the ‘Word of God’ and ‘the Spirit of God’, that he ascended into heaven and that he will return on judgement day and judge the world – dividing between those going to heaven and those being punished. That much is completely in line with Christian teaching, but then he says that Jesus is not divine, and that Jesus did not die on the cross. And that’s about all the Qur’an says about Jesus. There is strong focus on Jesus’ birth and the end of his life; but nothing of his teaching, or his apostles. Actually there is more about his Mother and his Grandfather than about him.
Now that pattern continues into the traditions. Al-Tabari for example, includes lots of stories about Mary and the birth of Jesus, and lots more about the judgement day when Jesus will return. But again, there is very little about his life or teaching. When you get to the Stories of the Prophets – only then do you start to get a bit of flesh put onto the story of Jesus’ life. However even there, there are no names, no places, – but there is a bit more about his miracles. Jesus is presented here as being a good believer who was ascetic, didn’t cling onto the world, lived simply, prayed a lot. He was portrayed there as never settling down, but constantly moving from place to place; but with no sense of where he was going.
Gavin: So the Muslims and Christian have some overlap in their views of Jesus’ biography, but key differences in terms of his identity?
Richard: Yes, I think that’s right. Although I think it’s worth emphasising that the Muslim traditions don’t bring anything new to the table. There are one or two flourishes around the start and end of his life, but they are not theologically significant. However, the main focus in Muslim sources is on correcting Christians and saying, ‘We honour Jesus, but no divinity and no death on the cross.’
Gavin: I’m fascinated by the titles ascribed to Jesus in the Qur’an, “Word” “Spirit” “Judge”. It seems extraordinary that they are used. In the book you suggest that those terms are used for Jesus in the Islamic tradition but then not explained or given any theological weight…
Richard: Yes, and “The Messiah” is even more significant. The two most common titles for Jesus there are “Son of Mary” and then he is very strongly identified as “Messiah”. So yes, in the Christian tradition all of those titles “Messiah”, “Word of God”, “Spirit of God” have a lot of theological substance – especially in terms of fulfilling Old Testament prophecy. So when Jesus turns up in the Gospels, so much of what he does is pregnant with the expectations of what the Jewish people expected of a Messiah. Now the terms have come across into Islam, but they don’t seem to be theologically significant in there. So for instance, while they call him “Messiah”, Islam doesn’t seem to have any need or space for a Messiah. There is no expectation within Islam that a Messiah will be required. We know what a prophet does – he brings messages, but if you ask someone in Islam, “Well, what is a Messiah, and why do we need one?” there is very little that they say. And that’s not just ‘in the street’, even within the Islamic scholarly tradition there are huge debates about what a Messiah is, and many, many definitions. But no one seems to agree, and of course the Qur’an itself is silent on it – and Islamic theology doesn’t seem to require one.
Gavin: So, in the book you’ve described this “thin” picture of Jesus in Islam, with these remarkable titles with undeveloped content to them. You also suggest that many Muslims are absolutely fascinated by Jesus, this character who lurks in their tradition. Why is that?
Richard: Well the first thing is that in Islam you are supposed to honour the prophets. So the fact that he has been granted prophetic status means that they are obliged to honour him in that sense – and that’s a theological reason. And a practical reason is that while there is very little about what he taught, the stories of Jesus are fascinating to Muslims. They are aware that he is a prophet, but they often don’t know what he taught, so that creates an interest. They are also told that the gospels, the Injil, are “scripture”. Now most Muslims would believe that these documents have been corrupted, but yet still contain a kernel of truth and are worth taking a look at.
So when you put these things together: Jesus is a prophet, the gospels contain at least a remnant of what he said; then add to that the fact that most Muslims are from traditional cultures that love stories, (and there are great stories about and by Jesus) that adds to the fascination.
There have been times when I’ve sat and told stories about Jesus, and recounted the stories Jesus told, to Muslims, and they’ve been in tears – at the power of the story, the power of his words and the beauty of his life. Jesus himself is an incredibly attractive figure, and Islam insists that he is someone worth honouring and listening to and that opens conversations.
Gavin: So you’ve sketched a picture of a Jesus who emerges from the Islamic tradition which many Muslims find absolutely fascinating, Which aspects of this Muslim view of Jesus do you find compelling and which do you find problematic? Because you tease a lot of that out in the book…
Richard: I find the later traditions completely fascinating and really appealing. So, I mentioned the Qiṣas al-‘Anbiyā’, the Stories of the Prophets, which were actually a form of devotional literature (which is why it’s hard to classify them, they are not scripture, more like poetry). And some of those draw quite directly from biblical material, and they present a very appealing ascetic view of Jesus. Not like he’s a monk sitting on a pole in the desert (!), he’s very engaged with his communities. I find that figure really very interesting. There’s a quest for personal intimacy, not a legalistic approach found there in some forms of Sufism which is fascinating.
I think the most problematic thing though is the cross, a point I make in my book. In the more orthodox Muslim conception of Jesus, he definitely did not die on a cross – and I think that’s problematic historically. Even if you ignore the Jesus of Christian faith, the death of Jesus is one of the few uncontested historical facts of his life. A major historical problem that Islam can’t seem to wrestle with is why all the eyewitnesses and non-Christian sources say that Jesus died on the cross. So while you might have an appealing ‘Jesus of Faith’ in Islam, he doesn’t seem to be strongly connected to the ‘Jesus of History’.
Gavin: It struck me while I was reading your book, while Christians engage with first-century eye-witness reports, the Apostles, document history (you cite Richard Bauckham on this), Islam makes very clear statements about Jesus, that don’t seem to be connected to historical sources – but that this gap doesn’t matter to Muslims…?
Richard: That’s right. And this really moves away from my book and into my research area! But very roughly, traditional Muslim thinking (and some fundamentalist Christian thinking too) says that (i) some knowledge is from God, and (ii) some knowledge is human, that we work out ourselves. Knowledge from God is direct, infallible and you can’t question it. Whereas human knowledge is questionable, so divine knowledge trumps human knowledge every time, and there is an impermeable barrier between those two things. So for a Muslim the Qur’an is ‘divine knowledge’. It is not even seen as a human document but is entirely divine. So whatever that says about Jesus just is true and if history doesn’t marry up with that, then the problem is with history, because that’s human knowledge which is fallible. That’s de facto, you can’t critique that, because that’s just the way it is. You can neither critique God’s knowledge, nor put human knowledge above it. That’s the mindset, the Qur’an trumps everything. Which if the Qur’an is the word of God, is fair enough, that’s a sensible thing to think. The question is whether the Qur’an really is the word of God.
Gavin: And one of the things you raise is that the Muslim view of Jesus, even the Qur’anic view of Jesus, raises more questions than it answers. What are some of the questions that get generated by the Islamic view of Jesus which are not adequately answered from within Islam?
Richard: There are things like, “Why have a Messiah?”, then why should Jesus be called “The Word of God?”, and “The Spirit of God”. That doesn’t seem to be a requirement for any other prophet- why then this one? And there is no explanation given. Another one is the virgin birth. God can do anything of course, but why was Jesus virgin-born, when no other person since Adam was born without a human father. In Christianity, we need a “new Adam” (it’s part of the theology, we were expecting a ‘new Adam’), but Islam has no space for that, so why a virgin birth? Mohammad wasn’t born of a virgin. Then why is it Jesus who comes back to judge on the ‘last day’? Why not Muhammad? And it is really hard to overestimate just how significant ‘the last day’ is in the Qur’an. Muslims literally live their life under the awe or fear of the coming judgement. It’s one of the three main things in the Qur’an, and it is just so striking that Jesus is the one we meet there, not Muhammad. Now God can do what He wants, but for me that raises questions. Why Jesus? I would have expected Muhammad to have had the higher honour.
Gavin: Then you suggest that some people want to develop a kind of blended view of Jesus, drawing on the Christian and Muslim traditions – and mushing them together – something that you resist quite firmly. One of the striking things at the very end of the book is that you say that we need to hold onto, and respect the differences. So why is that? You even push back on the idea that this might be a route to more peaceful relations between Christians and Muslims…
Richard: The first thing I want to say – and say this really strongly is that I am all on board with the longing behind that. The idea that there has been too much conflict between Muslims and Christians over the years is true. There has been too much antagonism, at times even fighting – and we need to do whatever it takes to be able to at the very, very least co-exist. Then we need to learn how to not just coexist, but far more than that, actually flourish and have meaningful, close friendships and be able to live together, So I love that longing.
What I question is the need for us to have a common understanding of Jesus to make that happen. It seems to me that it is a poorer model for harmony that says ’I’m only going to tolerate you – or be friends with you, if we can agree on all these things together.’ Or, ‘I can only be friends with you if I agree with you’ which sounds almost totalitarian! Only accepting people who agree with you doesn’t seem to me to be genuine tolerance or genuine friendship. The real challenge, (and what is really fruitful) is learning to live well with people you disagree with! That’s what we all need to do.
Also, Islam accepts nearly everything about the ‘Christian Jesus’, except what Christians would say are the two most important things, which are his divinity and his redeeming death on the cross for us. So for Muslims to say ‘let’s just agree on the things we have in common’, Muslims don’t have to compromise anything – we’re just getting the ‘Muslim Jesus’. So the Muslim saying to the Christian, ‘we can only be friends if you let go of the most important things you hold about Jesus’, is not a good recipe for friendship. If I were to say to you, ‘We can be friends – but only if you let go of your most cherished beliefs’, that doesn’t seem to work.
What we really here need is a commitment to love each other through disagreement.
Gavin: And that’s not just around Christian-Muslim relations, that’s a problem across society in today’s world – this idea that you can love people if they agree with you, and if they don’t agree with you they hate you… actually learning to love people you disagree with is a different language than people often speak today
Richard: Absolutely, which means that what we end up with is that whoever shouts the loudest wins, and you have to agree with them. And that is totalitarian, it’s not tolerant, or loving or capable of building society.
Gavin: So learning to love people, engage with them and have genuine community not predicated on the basis of mashing up what you actually believe…
Richard: Yes – and here’s a good example. In my family, we have Communists, Catholics, Protestants, Atheists. Does that mean I can’t get on with them? Of course not! We have a familial bond which holds us. So we need to find a bond in society, which doesn’t depend on us believing the same things about God. It comes down to a commitment to build society, and to care for each other though disagreement.
By the way in the book, the book was written in response to a particular Muslim journalist called Mustafa Akyol, who suggested that devotion to Jesus is a good thing for Muslims and Christians – which will lead to that heart of wanting to be generous to one another. So I at least agree with that. So I am happy for a Muslim to follow the Muslim Jesus because he was peaceful, loving, God-focused, humble, non-materialistic, a servant… and if that helps Muslims to embrace peace that’s brilliant. But I also think that if Christians properly follow ‘their Jesus’, the Jesus who came to bring peace, who was the Prince of Peace, then Muslims shouldn’t say to Christians, ‘stop believing in your Jesus, because that will lead to conflict’. if Christians believe in ‘their Jesus’ and that Jesus fills them with the Holy Spirit who can empower them to be a peacemaker, then surely that’s a way to build society as well.
Gavin: So you wrote in response to Akyol. But tell us why you wrote it, who you wrote it for, what you hope to achieve through?
Richard: Well, this might not sound very romantic, but I wrote it for SPCK (the publisher) who asked me to! But there were a couple of reasons why I said ‘yes’ to them!
I can’t think of another book about Jesus, written for Muslims. There may be some in Arabic that I’m not aware of, but certainly not in English – so there is a real gap here. I thought that was a problem, and one I could address. The other thing is that if there is one thing I want Muslims and Christians to talk about well, to understand each other about, to listen well and have a productive conversation about: it’s Jesus! Christians and Muslims have apologetic arguments about all sorts of things, and there’s a place for all that; but if Muslims want to talk about Jesus – that’s great, because that’s who I want to talk about. If I can create a book which facilitates that kind of conversation, and does it in a way that “gets” the Muslim mindset, as well as the Christian one, then that’s the goal. I just want to Christians and Muslims to talk profitably about Jesus.
Gavin: That’s fascinating, I enjoyed the book – and learnt so much. So it’s been great to speak to you in person. Thankyou!
Richard: Great to speak to you!
Dr. Richard Shumack is a philosopher of religion specialising in Muslim and Christian belief. He is the Director of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) in Sydney, Australia.
Jesus Through Muslim Eyes by Richard Shumack is available here.
Gavin Matthews hosts guest speaker Gilbert Lennox along with Gareth Black as they explore the many ways the Bible can be used in evangelism.
Everyone is afraid of evangelism. But guess what? Almost everyone in the Bible expressed fear when God called them. Maybe it is time to re-evaluate the role of fear in evangelism. For a bit of a re-think, and information on great practical initiatives like the Weekend of Invitation, we welcome Michael Harvey to the podcast.
Michael Harvey is married to Eike and they have three adult children Ben, Kirsty and Lydia. In 2004 Back to Church Sunday was birthed and Michael started to work with churches throughout the UK and eventually throughout the English speaking world and to his surprise started to notice a healing component in mission. He has spoken to thousands of church leaders and congregational members in his seminars and has to date seen hundreds of thousands of Christians mobilised to invite, resulting in 1 million+ accepted invitations. He launched the first National Weekend of Invitation in June 2018. He is author of the books Unlocking the Growth, Creating a Culture of Invitation and his latest book is Invitation to Heal. As an itinerant speaker and has a ministry across 18 countries and 5 continents. He is a member of the College of Evangelists.
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
Chili Rating: ? ? ? ?
It’s Monday morning. I am in a local coffee shop, queueing for a flat white. Music is playing in the background, and I can just about hear it over the hum of the conversations. A child is having a tantrum in the corner. But it’s okay, the smell of coffee reaches my nostrils. The Monday morning trip to the coffee shop is an experience of sights, sounds, smells and sensations all rolled into one. It is an instance of consciousness.
What exactly is human consciousness? Consciousness is hard to define. Consciousness is the reason for the first-person perspective and the inner narrative in your head. Consciousness is why you integrate everything at the coffee shop into a single experience: the aroma, the screaming, the music. As philosophy Professor Thomas Nagel puts it, to be conscious is for there to be something “that it is like to be us”. (1)
In philosophical terms, qualia refer to “what something is like”. Let’s return to the coffee shop again. There is nothing quite like the smell of a rich Guatemalan blend. But if someone asked you to describe the smell of coffee, how would you respond? It is an experience that cannot be reduced any further. If you want to know what coffee smells like, you need to smell it! Life is full of qualia, such as seeing the colour blue, hearing a musical note or tasting watermelon. Qualia are central to consciousness.
If you ask philosophers “What is the nature of consciousness?” a range of very different answers will come back. There is no agreed theory. However, one view in particular receives a regular hearing: the view that brain science can access and entirely explain (or will one day explain) qualia. This view is sometimes referred to as “reductive physicalism”. Conscious states are reducible (hence “reductive”) to the physical workings of the brain (hence “physicalism”). In other words, consciousness is the brain.
But is it true that scientific methods can access and explain qualia? A scientist can find out what’s in someone’s brain by measuring chemicals and electrical activity and recording MRIs. But can they measure what’s in their mind in quite the same way? To find out what’s in someone’s mind we need to ask the person to share their inner world with us. Scientists may help us understand certain aspects and states of consciousness, but they cannot get inside someone’s head and recreate their actual experience. They may make 3rd-person observations but cannot access the first-person conscious experience itself.
David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, describes the quest to account for qualia as the “hard” problem of consciousness. How do you get from brain cells firing to “what it is like to be you’? Or, as Baronness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford, recently asked,
How does the water of boring old brain cells and sludgy stuff translate into the wine of phenomenological subjective experience? [2}
Many would argue that the water of brain processes alone, are insufficient to explain the “wine” of the Guatemalan blend. Or, returning to the coffee shop one more time, knowledge of the chemical structure of caffeine or its impact on brain physiology is of little help in describing the smell of coffee. On this basis, we can conclude that conscious processes cannot be synonymous with brain processes. The two may well work closely together, but they are not identical. Therefore, reductive physicalist approaches to consciousness must be false. We are not just machines, we are more than machines. So what alternative explanations are there?
Some take the view that the brain generates mind and consciousness. When a number of different parts come together over time, a new thing comes into being. This view can be broadly referred to as non-reductive physicalism (NRP). The mind is generated by the physical brain (hence “physicalism”), but is not reducible to its foundational components (hence “non-reductive”).
Consider the case of a university. A university as an institution is made up of several different departments, each with its own subject area and expertise, and yet is more than the sum of its departments. A university also has an alumni network, an international reputation, a donor base, and develops ideas that shape culture. The institution is formed by its component parts but is far greater than all of them combined.
This view seeks to make sense of the close connection between mind and brain that is clearly demonstrated in neuroscience and clinical medicine, but it still doesn’t solve the hard problem. How exactly does consciousness emerge from a physical system? Max Tegmark, writing in the New Scientist book The Universe Next Door, is among a number of philosophers who explain the transition in terms of complexity. When groups of atoms are arranged in new ways, new properties emerge. [3] Higher and higher levels of complexity lead to more and more sophisticated abilities. But others argue that physical systems alone, however complex they may be, are insufficient to get us across the chasm.
Christians who are non-reductive physicalists take the view that the brain has given rise to the conscious mind but as the creative handiwork of a conscious being—God. In this view, the bridge to human consciousness is not traversed by greater and greater levels of brain complexity, but by humanity entering into a relationship with their Maker.[85]
Another alternative view begins by asking, what if conscious experience is a fundamental building block of life? If true, then we need to begin here and explain everything else in relation to consciousness, rather than the other way around. This view, reignited by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), holds that conscious states are independent of neurons and brain chemistry. In fact, there are two distinct, but interactive substances at play: a physical brain and a non-physical mind that is conscious. This view, known as substance dualism, argues that consciousness is beyond the brain.
The question of how a non-physical mind could exert changes in a physical brain poses concerns for many. If mind and brain are distinct, how do we explain the clear interaction between them? Proponents argue for holistic dualisms in which conscious states exist beyond the brain but are also causally connected to the brain. Holistic dualists accept the discoveries of neuroscience but claim they are not the whole story.
Dualists also argue that the non-physical can impact the physical in life. Consider, for example, the effect of bullying on appetite and sleep, or how good news puts a spring in our step and causes tears of elation. Words are non-physical but have a physical effect. Neurologists also speak of disorders for which there is no traceable physical cause. According to the World Health Organization, psychosomatic illness may affect as many as 20% of patients worldwide. Seemingly, the non-physical impacts the physical in daily life. So why not a non-physical mind interacting with a physical brain?
A decision about the nature of consciousness cannot ultimately be reached on the basis of science. It really comes down to worldview. What if we entertain the possibility that God exists? How would this help us with the “hard” problem?
The first sentence of the Bible says,
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1 v 1
If God exists, then consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos because the mind of God has always existed and has given rise to everything else. If God exists, then the system is not closed, and there is hope for solving the hard problem.
These early chapters of the Bible also poetically and creatively describe the formation of human beings,
The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Genesis 2 v 7
These verses are not necessarily at odds with scientific descriptions of the processes by which homo sapiens came to exist. But they imply that physical descriptions alone are not enough to describe the human person. The Hebrew word for “breath of life” is neshama or ruach, and means “God’s breath” or “God’s Spirit”. According to these verses, a person is far more than matter. Far more than a machine. They have been breathed into by God, and have been given a capacity to think about themselves and beyond themselves to other people and to God himself.
In other words, consciousness exists because God exists. We are conscious because God is conscious. God is a thinking, feeling, conscious being who is also relational and wants to extend consciousness beyond himself to people. Why? So that He can be not simply observed, but also known and experienced.
Sharon Dirckx is a Senior Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics (OCCA). Originally from a scientific background, she has a PhD in brain imaging from the University of Cambridge and has held research positions in the UK and USA. Sharon speaks and lectures in the UK, Europe and North America on science, theology, ‘mind and soul’ and the problem of evil. She has spoken at the Veritas Forum at the University of Oxford and appeared on several BBC programmes, including Songs of Praise, Radio 2 Good Morning Sunday and Radio 4 Beyond Belief. She is also the author of the award-winning book on suffering, entitled Why?: Looking at God, evil and personal suffering (2013). Her latest book, Am I just my brain? (2019) examines questions of human identity from the perspectives of neuroscience, philosophy and theology.
Further Reading:
• Joel Green and Stuart Palmer, In Search of the Soul: Four views of the mind-body problem (IVP Academic, 2005). A helpful book that presents and critiques four views of
the mind-body problem & references many other helpful books.
• JP Moreland and Scott Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (IVP, 2000). A careful and thorough treatment of the case for body-soul dualism from the perspective of a Christian.
• Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown, Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion: Illusions, Delusions and Realities about Human Nature (Templeton Press, 2009). A discussion of current views about mind and brain interwoven with Christian perspectives on human nature.
Notes:
1: Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, in The Philosophical Review, 1974, 83(4):440.
2: S. Greenfield, “The Neuroscience of Consciousness”, University of Melbourne, 27th November 2012.
3: F. Swain, The Universe Next Door: A Journey Through 55 Parallel Worlds and Possible Futures (John Murray, 2017), p 166.
In an interview originally recorded as part of the research for an article in Christianity Today, Andy Bannister asked Tom Wright about an appropriate Christian response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom’s book about this is available here.
Why do any human lives have value? How can we find a basis for a person’s worth, significance, and dignity—a basis that transcends their class, gender, race, or creed? In this timely Short Answers video, Dr. Andy Bannister shows how atheism offers no basis whatsoever for explaining why human life matters or why racism is wrong. By contrast, at the heart of the Christian faith lies one of the most profound statements about human value to be found in any religion—a statement that gives an incredible foundation for human rights and dignity.
Please share this video widely with friends or family and for more Short Answers videos, visit solas-cpc.org/shortanswers/, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit us on Twitter Instagram or Facebook.
Short Answers is a viewer-supported video series: if you enjoy them, please help us continue to make them by donating to Solas. Visit our Donate page and choose “Digital Media Fund” under the Campaign/Appeal button.
Gavin Matthews hosts guest speaker Lara Buchanan (Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics) along with Gareth Black for this exciting webinar exploring the question of whether the world would be better place without religion.
Tom Tarrants has had an extraordinary life. Shot by the FBI while trying to commit a racist hate crime, Tarrants completely rethought his views in prison and has spent decades working for racial reconciliation. The turning point for him was his discovery of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which changed both his mind and his heart. Gareth Black spoke to Tom for Solas:
Thomas Tarrants’ autobiography, “Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love” is available here.
Many thanks to Dr David Booth from Dundee for engaging in this discussion, and Aberdeen University Christian Union for facilitating it.
Here you will find links to the various resources we mentioned during the talk (and some bonus ones). I hope you find these useful!
First, get your free copy of the ebook, Islam In Context, via this link.
Next, check out Qur’an Gateway, the digital critical tool for digging into the Qur’an via this link.
We also mentioned these two books — I’ve linked to both of them for you:
For more information about the Solas Centre for Public Christianity that Andy Bannister leads, visit www.solas-cpc.org. In particular, do check out our SHORT/ANSWERS video series. Over a million people have now watched, downloaded, or shared one of these videos with friends. They’re a great, free evangelistic resource.
If you’d like to help support Solas’s work of evangelism and evangelism training across the UK, you can do for as little as £3 a month and we’ll send you a choice of one of several great books as a gift.
From classical literature to throw-away tweets, communication and language are part of how we reflect the image of a God who is revealed by his Word. This time on PEP Talk, Andy and Kristi speak with US academic and author Karen Swallow Prior, exploring the touchpoints we have with the entire human race in the great books and stories of our culture. How can we make use of these when sharing the gospel?
Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012), Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014), and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Literature (Brazos 2018). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Relevant, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, Religion News Service, Books and Culture and other places. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project, a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum, a Senior Fellow at the International Alliance for Christian Education, and a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society of the United States. She and her husband live on a 100-year old homestead in central Virginia with sundry horses, dogs, and chickens. And lots of books.
The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.
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In 1884, three English sailors were charged with murder. Their yacht, Mignonette, had sunk leaving them stranded in a tiny wooden lifeboat. Starving to death, they had killed and eaten the cabin boy. Their defence was that it was a necessity for survival.[1]
Their argument was purely utilitarian: one person was killed, but three people survived. And the cabin boy, unlike the older sailors, had no dependents and his death left no grieving children. However, I suspect very few people would agree with them. Rather I suspect most of us have a more visceral reaction: what those three sailors did was wrong—fundamentally wrong—because they violated the cabin boy’s rights, his dignity, his value.
Whether it’s a single murder in desperate circumstances, or a mass genocide, most of us would have the same reaction: it is wrong, evil even, to violate the dignity of another human being. This powerful belief is enshrined in the words of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world … All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.[2]
We’re passionate about human rights, but these rights, this dignity that human beings are claimed to have—where is it located? Are the noble words of the UDHR actually true?
Imagine we draw a circle that represents the genomes of every living thing on planet earth—everything from ants to aardvarks to human beings. Now, when we talk of human rights, what we are doing is drawing a smaller circle inside the larger circle and saying “If you live in the smaller circle, you have special dignity that anything outside doesn’t.” But here’s the problem: what’s to stop the white supremacist drawing a smaller circle inside your circle and saying, “No, dignity and rights only belong to a subset of the human family”. Both of you have arbitrarily drawn circles: why is one admirable and the other condemnable?
There are limited number of options here. The first option is just to bluntly assert that rights exist. When I debated one of the world’s leading secular human rights campaigners, Peter Tatchell, this was his approach: Peter basically said rights exist because they exist.[3] The problem is not merely that his argument is circular, but that a racist could employ it too. He can claim superiority to other races and when we ask why, reply, “because I am”.
Maybe we can locate rights by finding something special about human beings. Maybe it’s the fact we have speech, or consciousness, or moral agency, or folk music, or something. Well, this fails for a reason that atheist Sam Harris identifies:
The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals—intelligence, language-use, moral sentiments, and so on—will equally differentiate between human beings themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren’t more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and women with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them.[4]
Or maybe we can say that human rights and dignity exist because they matter to me; because they’re personally important to us. The problem, of course, is that when Martin Luther King cries “I have a dream!” how do we answer the person who says “I’m glad you care; but personally I don’t”. Isn’t the point about rights and dignity that we should all care? We need more than mere personal preference.
The last option is to appeal to the state. Human rights exist because the government grants them. The problem here is that if rights are something the state gives, the state can equally take them away. In 1857, an African-American slave named Dred Scott sued his owner for his freedom. The US Supreme Court ruled against Scott, the Justices stating that as a “negro”, he did not possess rights.[5]
One hears a story like that, 150 years on, and winces with embarrassment at how our ancestors behaved. Yet all the Justices did in that ruling was to draw a circle: simply a smaller circle than the one that most of us today would draw. But they are both arbitrary circles nonetheless.
How do we solve this problem? Many of us are committed to human rights but we can’t ground human rights? Perhaps history can help us here.
Father Francisco de Vitoria, is considered by many to be “the father of international law”. In response to Spanish colonial mistreatment of South Americans, Vitoria argued that all men were equally free and had the right to life, culture and property. Likewise Francisco Suárez, whose 1610 essay, ‘On The Laws’, argued that human beings have rights because they have been endowed with them by their Creator, using language later picked up by America’s founding fathers.[6]
These thinkers, who laid the first foundations of human rights, were not moralising in a vacuum. Rather they rooted their idea in the uniquely biblical belief that human beings bear the image of God.
One of the most influential atheist philosophers writing today, Luc Ferry, agrees. In, A Brief History of Thought, Ferry writes that in the Greco-Roman world, it was assumed that some people were inferior to others: slaves, women, and children, for example. He writes:
Christianity.. introduce[d] the notion … that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.[7]
As one of the most influential atheists of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche remarked:
The masses blink and say ‘We are all equal—Man is but man, before God we are equal.’ Before God! But now this God has died.”[8]
So, there is a stark choice: one can adopt a Christian understanding of humanity—that we have real value and real dignity, because we are made in God’s image.[9] Or you can reject that narrative, ignore the consequences, refuse to answer Nietzsche and pretend everything is okay.
The well-known Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that we can’t discuss human rights while avoiding the question of human purpose.[10] Sandel’s observation gets to the heart of what it means to be a human being. Are we creatures designed to seek justice, goodness, and fairness, or are we just primates that got lucky in the evolutionary lottery and whose genes are purely directed at reproductive success? As atheist philosopher John Gray memorably put it:
Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth—and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.[11]
Only if Gray is wrong and we are made for something can we talk about things like responsibility, about a way we should live.
If the Christian story is true, then we were made with a purpose, we were made for something. We were made to discover God’s love, to love God in return, and to love our neighbour. If Christianity is true, love is the supreme ethic—that’s what it means to be human and it gives an oughtness to human life.
Raymond Gaita, the Australian atheist, recognised this. He writes that all talk of human rights and dignity:
[Is best] derived from the unashamedly anthropomorphic character of the claim that we are sacred because God loves us, his children.[12]
As a Christian, I believe that human rights can only be grounded if love is the supreme ethic, built into the fundamental fabric of the universe by the God who created us in his image.
But if we say “human rights only works if God exists” that raises the question: which God are we talking about? In Jesus, we have a God who looks very different. Economic theory tells us that something’s value is determined by what somebody is willing to pay for it. Christianity says that God was willing to pay an incredible price for each one of us, the price of his son, Jesus Christ. That’s why we have value.
If the Christian story is true, humans have dignity, they have worth, and on that basis, you can talk meaningfully about rights and about responsibilities. Otherwise what you have are noble sounding words, but ultimately just hot air.
Andy Bannister is the Director of the Solas Centre for Public Christianity
Further Reading
[1] The story is told in Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010) 32.
[2] ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/, accessed 9 November 2019). Quotations from the Preamble and Article 1 (emphasis mine).
[3] ‘Unbelievable? Can atheists believe in human rights? Peter Tatchell vs. Andy Bannister’, Premier Radio, Saturday 1 April 2017 (online at https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-Can-atheists-believe-in-human-rights-Peter-Tatchell-vs-Andy-Bannister)
[4] Sam Harris, The End of Faith (London: The Free Press, 2006) 177-178. (Aphasia is the inability to speak, for medical reasons, typically having had a stroke)
[5] Scott v. Sandford – 60 U.S. 393 (1856), available online at http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/case.html “Negro” was the terminology used in that case, and is quoted here in its historic context.
[6] See the discussion in Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005) 133-150.
[7] Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011 [2010]) 72.
[8] Cited in Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008) 154.
[9] Genesis 1:26-27.
[10] Sandel, Justice, 207.
[11] John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003) 26.
[12] Michael J. Perry, Toward a Theory of Human Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 7.