By James W. Miller
I guess I find myself stunned every time I hear it, but I heard it again recently.
“Christians settle for God as their explanation for everything because they’re intellectually lazy.”
Commonly the background experience of the speaker is one of growing up surrounded by an acculturated religion for which people have comfortably settled. She has come to the point where she’s given serious consideration to pressing questions about faith, and she found herself wanting for answers. As a result, she considers herself the intellectual superior of the churchgoing, the street evangelists, her parents, and perhaps a caricature of Christianity that she’s accepted as reality.
The problem is that if you question her about her skepticism, she’s put less thought into the foundations of atheism than she has into Christianity, and the worldview she claims to accept is just as mindlessly comfortable as Christianity was to the religious practitioners she has rejected. She’s never turned around and applied exactly the same level of skepticism to the atheistic worldview that she did to the Christian worldview.
As a result, she usually ends up in a kind of tepid agnosticism that remains unexamined. Agnosticism is not as much a conclusion of clear thinking as it is an act of “putting a pin” in Christianity so that one can come back to it later. Agnosticism is not a resolution; it’s tabling the question.
And that, to me, is what is so stunning. At the very moment she presumes to accuse Christians of intellectual laziness, she’s being intellectually lazy. If we define intellectual laziness as the willful refusal to exert mental energy to examine significant questions, there’s no doubt about it: agnosticism, the kind practiced by modern secularists, is as lazy as it comes.
This is not a snarky way of exchanging diatribes. Rather, it should reinvigorate the Christian intellectual effort. If we think of sin not simply as malice, but rather as the soul seeking out nourishment in the wrong way, we can gain a pretty good insight as to what the soul is longing for. The agnostic’s soul is longing for intellectual credibility. She’s not just sinning; she’s starving. The Church may need to have the humility to admit how often we’ve failed her on this front. We are in fact the ones who have settled into a comfortable, acculturated faith because it’s easier than holiness. And when we do that, we leave the world wanting something more. So rather than condemning the agnostic for what is obviously an intellectual laziness all its own, we might rather answer back with a vigorous, intentional, intellectually sound faith.
I remember going on a two week retreat with Dallas Willard at a Catholic Retreat Center in Southern California. He gave lectures to our small gathering all morning and into the afternoon. “Jesus was smart,” he said. “Of all the adjectives we use for him, we tend not to use that one. But Jesus was smart.”
We have not been ready with an answer (1 Peter 3:15), and the time has come.
James W. Miller is the author of Hardwired: Finding the God You Already Know (Abingdon, 2013).
I would love to hear you “answer back with a vigorous, intentional, intellectually sound faith.” Big, hardworking words followed by the laziest of them all.
If you can make a list of the reasons why you believe what you believe you are a lot less lazy than most people …
I see the point of this piece, but there’s a whole bunch of strawmen here. For starters, while I’m sure there are those who consider all sorts of other folk “intellectually lazy,” including believers and non-believers of all stripes, it’s a fraught statement. And anyone who expresses that sentiment, with those actual words, is displaying rather bad manners. It’s easy to dismiss rude people, which is why it is such a negative, unproductive tactic (not to mention lazy!) to be rude.
Saying, “you call me lazy? No, you’re lazy!” is actually a kind of childish echange of diatribes. Especially when there is no actual quote from a non-theist claiming intellectual laziness. That puts this piece in the “There are those who…” category. Not very rigorous for a forum of Christian apologists, who I always thought strove for intellectual rigor.
A better, more fruitful and interesting statement might be this: Atheists often describe religionists (including, but of course not only, Christians) of relying on “God of the gaps” reasoning. As science advances, many religionists have to find areas still resistant to scientific discussion in order to defend their territory. Hence the popularity of the anthropic principle among apologists.
There are many who are just not all that interested in the nature of the universe and its origins. They’re not necessarily intellectually lazy, just interested in other things. And saying “god did it” is just fine, if it provides them with a caring, supportive community and a sense of belonging. It’s human, it’s great.
And, of course, it is possible to be intellectually lazy and think that God is a highly improbable way for the universe to have begun. These folk might simply think, “eh, someone will figure it out, or not – who cares.”
Then, you have Richard Feynman, one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. He felt that the concept of God was simply not a useful way to think about things. If he didn’t understand something, he said he was perfectly comfortable saying he didn’t know. He was full of questions, not full of answers.
Its hard to be rigorous about Genesis.
Sure. Very true. Not that a lot of folk haven’t tried! I remember when I was a kid (in the early 60s) being exposed to many thinkers (don’t ask me who or where I saw this; I was 8, for goodness’ sake) who wanted to find naturalistic explanations for biblical phenomena. I was baffled then, and still am. I mean, if you resist “miraculous” explanations, then why believe the literal truth of the story at all? It’s as if the story these intellectuals wanted to believe was that the interlocutors who wrote the Bible were modern-style eye-witness “journalists,” writing things down as they happened, and only because they were of their time (I’m groping, here) chose a supernatural explanation for these grand events. The implication was that if a modern, scientific person had been around then, they would have understood the parting of the Sea of Reeds, for instance, as being a rare, but natural event; or the changing of the staffs into snakes as being an illusion crafted by a skilled magician for political gain.
I still see think kind of logic used on the Exodus story, at Passover seders. It is a rare seder-attender who dismisses the factuality of the story and treats it as the Hebrews national origin myth, but that same person will dismiss supernatural miracles, and try to explain manna (for ex) as some rare natural phenomenon.
I never understood what these writers won by thinking that. I suspect that it allows them to feel both bound to their Jewish traditions and stories, and also part of the modern scientific world, and not “superstitious.”
Nought so queer as folk, I suppose. But maybe that’s intellectually lazy!
Genesis is myth, in the true sense.
I think the apologist needs to spend some time studying early Church history especially the councils (at least the first seven) to see what the Church was up against and then put it in the context of today. This is a good intellectual starting point of contrasting what the early church did, how they did it. A thorough study of early Christian history and the early Church fathers lays a good groundwork for our contemporary society. Does anything really change? I don’t think so.
My atheism is something that I have spent years thinking, reading and studying about (I used to be a Christian). That also meant reading about religion a lot. Intellectually lazy is bad, as you have said, whether that applies to religious or non-religious people.