Kristof's Interviews

The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nicholas Kristof has over the last few years been writing a series of pieces based on interviews with prominent Christians in which he poses to them some interesting questions about orthodox Christian beliefs (e.g. the plausibility of miracles, Christian exclusivism, the necessity of believing in the deity of Christ, etc.).

Last month he had an interesting dialogue with philosopher William Lane Craig.

The best questions, though, were among those he asked of Pastor Tim Keller two years ago. In that interview he opened with this:

NK: As a journalist, I’ve found skepticism useful. If I hear something that sounds superstitious, I want eyewitnesses and evidence. That’s the attitude we take toward Islam and Hinduism and Taoism, so why suspend skepticism in our own faith tradition?

TK: I agree. We should require evidence and good reasoning, and we should not write off other religions as ‘superstitious’ and then fail to question our more familiar Jewish or Christian faith tradition.

But I don’t want to contrast faith with skepticism so sharply that they are seen to be opposites. They aren’t. I think we all base our lives on both reason and faith. For example, my faith is to some degree based on reasoning that the existence of God makes the most sense of what we see in nature, history and experience.

Thomas Nagel recently wrote that the thoroughly materialistic view of nature can’t account for human consciousness, cognition and moral values. That’s part of the reasoning behind my faith. So my faith is based on logic and argument.

In the end, however, no one can demonstrably prove the primary things human beings base their lives on, whether we are talking about the existence of God or the importance of human rights and equality. Nietzsche argued that the humanistic values of most secular people, such as the importance of the individual, human rights and responsibility for the poor, have no place in a completely materialistic universe.

He even accused people holding humanistic values as being “covert Christians” because it required a leap of faith to hold to them. We must all live by faith.

NK: I’ll grudgingly concede your point: My belief in human rights and morality may be more about faith than logic. But is it really analogous to believe in things that seem consistent with science and modernity, like human rights, and those that seem inconsistent, like a virgin birth or resurrection?

TK: I don’t see why faith should be seen as inconsistent with science. There is nothing illogical about miracles if a Creator God exists. If a God exists who is big enough to create the universe in all its complexity and vastness, why should a mere miracle be such a mental stretch? To prove that miracles could not happen, you would have to know beyond a doubt that God does not exist. But that is not something anyone can prove.

Science must always assume that an effect has a repeatable, natural cause. That is its methodology. Imagine, then, for the sake of argument that a miracle actually occurred. Science would have no way to confirm a non-repeatable, supernatural cause.

Alvin Plantinga argued that to say that there must be a scientific cause for any apparently miraculous phenomenon is like insisting that your lost keys must be under the streetlight because that’s the only place you can see.

I think that Kristoff's last question contains an error that should be highlighted. Belief in human rights, though it's certainly popular among moderns, is not at all consistent with the assumptions of modernity. If there is no God, then man is not created in His image nor loved by Him. If human beings do not contain the Imago Dei, nor are the objects of God's love, then there are no moral obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.

We can pretend there are, but it's only pretense. Nothing in the modern naturalistic worldview requires it nor offers a basis for it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If we're simply the products of materialistic evolutionary processes, then selfishness, exploitation and egoism are fundamental ethical principles, ingrained in our genes, and there's nothing morally wrong with them.

On the other hand, if one believes we do have objective moral obligations to help the poor, to not exploit the earth, to avoid war, etc. then one is logically compelled to be a theist. If one is not a theist then it's irrational to insist that anyone has any objective duties at all.

The next question in the interview is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult for Christian theists to answer. Kristof prefaces the question by stating that what he admires most about Christianity is the "amazing good work it inspires people to do around the world."

This is true enough, and again, there's nothing in naturalism which inspires anyone to do anything for anyone to whom they have no emotional attachment. Why, on naturalism or atheism, would it be wrong in a moral sense for people in the first world to refuse to help those languishing in misery in the third world? What reason can the atheist give for why we should do with less to help others have a bit more?

Kristoff then follows with these words:

But I’m troubled by the evangelical notion that people go to heaven only if they have a direct relationship with Jesus. Doesn’t that imply that billions of people — Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — are consigned to hell because they grew up in non-Christian families around the world? That Gandhi is in hell?

It seems to me that both Craig and Keller could've done better with this question. My favorite reply is that of C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce. That story is an extended and imaginative answer precisely to Kristof's challenge, but it unfortunately doesn't sit well with many orthodox Christians.

Anyway, the exchange with Craig elicited a lot of comment, some of which, as one has come to expect in these times, was both rude and uninformed. You can read Craig's polite response to his critics here.