Nonsense on Stilts

A recent column by Gary Abernathy in the Washington Post informs us that the reason a lot of Republicans are eager to reopen the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic is because the Republican party is made up largely of evangelical Christians who believe in an afterlife and who thus minimize the importance of this life.

It's nonsense, of course, but Abernathy isn't the only one who believes it. Here's the gravamen of his column:

This literal belief in eternal salvation — eternal life — helps explain the different reactions to life-threatening events like a coronavirus outbreak.

Among those who hold literal biblical interpretations is the certainty that waiting at the end of this terrestrial journey is eternal life in Heaven.

As far as many evangelicals are concerned, life passes quickly, suffering is temporary and worrying solves nothing. That’s not a view that comports well with long stretches of earthly time spent waiting out business closures or stay-at-home orders. It should be no surprise that a person’s deepest beliefs about the world influence how they measure the risks they’re willing to take.

This is misleading because there are many non-evangelicals, both Christians and members of other religions, who believe that life is eternal, but Abernathy's faulty theological understanding is not my concern in this post.

Springboarding off Abernathy's column MIT professor Steven Pinker recently tweeted that “Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals.”

Steven Pinker is a very bright man, a cognitive scientist, as a matter of fact, but very bright people often say very dumb things. This is one of those times. Glenn Stanton at The Federalist writes:

There should be an algebraic equation to calculate something we experience far too often in the public square today. It would determine the ratio between a person’s absolute brilliance in one arena – their uncontested expertise – and their regularly articulated ignorance in others.

This would then be multiplied by the confidence with which they say such things. It would be applied to things like Stephen Hawking’s pontifications on subjects such as religion being, which he called “a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark.”

What about the charge that belief in heaven is not only unsophisticated, but inherently malevolent? Does belief in heaven really diminish the value of life? Is it a death wish?

Stanton renders the Pinker/Abernathy argument as follows:

1. Re-opening our nation from lockdown will kill people.
2. Republicans are the ones calling for reopening.
3. Evangelicals who have their eyes set on heaven are the primary drivers of the Republicans.
4. Therefore, Evangelicals, and thus Republicans, don’t care if people die.

It doesn't take someone with training in logic to see that this conclusion is completely unrelated to the premises. It also, doesn't take much insight to recognize that premise 1 is trivially true - allowing people to fly on airplanes, drive their cars or swim in the ocean will also kill people - and that premise 2 is a partial truth. Democrats, too, want to be able to get back to work.

Stanton continues,

Essentially, believing in heaven makes those evangelicals impatient with life, eager for death. If you’re inclined to judge this reasoning as dumb on stilts, remember really smart people said it. They are right. You are wrong. 

Regardless, there is a spectacular demonstration of ignorance at work here. Ignorance in science. Ignorance in sociology. Ignorance of any type of entry-level understanding of Christianity. Ignorance of basic linear logic. 

Stanton teases out some examples of the ignorance he's talking about, but let's just consider the claim that Christians are so focused on the life to come that they don't care about the life they're living.

That's not only a silly libel, it's also perniciously false because it misleads the uninformed about the nature of Christianity and Christians. 

Stanton helps us to see this more clearly:

It doesn’t even seem worth the time to ask whether a serious belief in and hope of heaven translates into desire for an early death. But for those like Abernathy and Pinker who believe it does, consider this little thought game.

Think of those in your city who provide free clothes, shelter, food, medical help, vocational training, and substance abuse assistance, day-in and day-out for all who need it. Why do they do this difficult, costly, and often unrewarding work? They want to help people live “longer, safer, and happier lives,” to quote Pinker’s tweet.

Now ask who these people are and what’s the belief system that drives them in this work? Place a hundred bucks on whether these services are run by serious Christians because of their faith or by secular humanists. Pinker and Abernathy know which answer will lose them money.

The idea that the Christian belief in heaven is a death wish is dramatically contrary to the plain evidence of what Christians do every day in every city they inhabit around the world. It doesn’t take a rocket — or cognitive — scientist to understand this.

There's much more in Stanton's piece that's worth reading, but I'll just add that it's only because people in the West have for two thousand years believed that this life mattered because it mattered forever that all the progress we've made in our moral, scientific and medical understanding has occurred. 

It's only because brilliant thinkers throughout the last two thousand years have been influenced by the Christian worldview, including belief in an eternal existence, that we developed a concept of human rights, human dignity and human worth. Other than the Jews, no pre-Christian or non-Christian civilization, certainly not the Greeks and Romans, had any such concepts. 

This was historian Tom Holland's main point in his 2019 best-seller Dominion. As atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas puts it,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter. 

If Professor Pinker would bestir himself to read a little bit on the subject on which he's chosen to pontificate he wouldn't come across as such a benighted ignoramus.