A Steep Psychological Hill

It's an interesting fact that many very intelligent people acknowledge that the Christian worldview is superior in almost every respect - if not every respect - to its naturalistic rivals, yet they refuse to accept it.

French philosopher Luc Ferry, for example, in his 2011 book A Brief History of Thought an atheist and secular humanist, but one unusually sympathetic to Christianity, wrote this:

...compared to the doctrine of Christianity - whose promise of the resurrection of the body means that we shall be reunited with those we love after death - a humanism without metaphysics is small beer. I grant you that amongst the available doctrines of salvation, nothing can compete with Christianity - provided that is, that you are a believer. If one is not a believer - and one cannot force oneself to believe or pretend to believe - then we must learn to think differently about the ultimate question posed by all doctrines of salvation, namely that of the death of a loved one.

A couple of pages further on he writes:

I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting - except for the fact that I do not believe in it. But were it to be true I would certainly be a taker.

Ferry sounds like a man who wishes he could believe in the Christian narrative because nothing else offers a solid basis for meaning, morality, human rights, human equality and hope. Yet he does not believe. Why not? Unfortunately, he doesn't say.

In an article entitled The Secular World Has a Christian Foundation, political commentator and atheist Chris Berg says this about the impact of Christianity on the Western world:

The contemporary atheist movement has a scorched earth strategy – chop down Christianity, root and branch. I don’t believe in God either, but this strategy is entirely counterproductive.

Not satisfied to point out that elements of Christian belief are historically implausible, or that religion is scientifically unsubstantiated, the New Atheist movement wants to prove something more. That Christianity has been a force for bad, that there is something fundamental about religious belief that holds back progress, approves of oppression, and stokes hatred.

Berg doesn't specify which elements of Christian belief are implausible or how, exactly it would be scientifically substantiated or why it even needs to be. But this is not what's most interesting about his essay. The interesting part follows:

Yet virtually all the secular ideas that non-believers value have Christian origins. To pretend otherwise is to toss the substance of those ideas away. It was theologians and religiously minded philosophers who developed the concepts of individual and human rights. Same with progress, reason, and equality before the law: it is fantasy to suggest these values emerged out of thin air once people started questioning God.

He goes on to make a strong case that our modern concept of human rights is rooted in a Christian understanding of the human being and that even the doctrine of separation of church and state is a Christian idea.

Even so, he personally rejects Christianity.

Even though a world in which Christianity never arose would look a lot like ancient Rome in which a Darwinian struggle for survival made life nasty, brutish, short and cheap, still thoughtful people like Ferry and Berg cannot bring themselves to embrace it.

They may argue that they're waiting for proof before they'll believe, but there are few things in life that we believe because they've been proven. It seems more likely that they resist because to accept the claims of Christianity on one's life is to admit that one has been wrong about this matter for one's entire adult life and to recognize the need for both a sincere repentance and a humbling reorientation of one's priorities.

For some that amounts to a psychological hill too steep to climb.