Peter Kreeft and Atheists: A Response to Hemant Mehta

Peter Kreeft and Atheists: A Response to Hemant Mehta June 25, 2016

David Russell Mosley

PragerUKreeftBelief

Ordinary Time
25 June 2016
The Edge of Elfland
Hudson, New Hampshire

Dear Readers,

Something happened over at The Friendly Atheist, the other day. Now, I will admit to not being a regular reader of this blog. But a particular post was brought to my attention and it seems to warrant a Christian’s, or at least a theist’s, response. While I’m sure many others will comment on it as well, I thought I’d take a stab. The post in question, “Atheists Don’t Want God To Exist: A Response to Peter Kreeft” took a look at a video, which was something of a trailer for a free online class Dr. Peter Kreeft will be, or is, teaching through Praeger University. The class is called, “The Benefits of Belief.”

In the video, Kreeft lists a series of benefits for believing in God. Hemant Mehta responds to several of the points that Kreeft makes. I’ll tackle those in a moment, and a few others. The key, however, to Mehta’s response is the belief that Kreeft says that we, and by we Mehta means atheists, “should want God to exist.” It ought to be made quite explicit from the outset that Kreeft never actually says that. He does say toward the end of the video that if you’re uncertain if God exists, or if you’re an atheist who finds some meaning in the arguments for God’s existence, it may be difficult to change your beliefs, but it may be easier to change your actions. Kreeft’s video certainly ends on a strongly evangelistic note, but nowhere does he actually make the argument that Atheists should or do want God to exist.

Now, I need to make another confession. I’m not a Kreeft devotee nor a Kreeft cynic. My main interactions with his work have been through his Summa of the Summa and one or two videos he’s been part of. I understand that some Christians strongly dislike Kreeft and his approach to philosophy. I understand that others love him. I fall in neither camp. Rather, with the rest of this post, I’d like to focus on the issues Mehta had with the video and the actual arguments themselves.

God makes sense of everything

Mehta’s first critique is the claim that Kreeft makes that issues of evil and really life in general only make sense if God exists. Mehta sees this as simply wishful thinking. Mehta compares it to giving, “gullible people comfort to think that their loved ones died as part of God’s Master Plan (which always ends well) instead of a preventable disease or tragic accident or old age. Otherwise, humans might be responsible for fixing problems of our own creation.” Of course, Mehta misses out on the fact that what Kreeft is saying is not so much that God makes sense of existence, but that he gives it meaning. A godless world, for Kreeft, is one in which both good and bad things (even the very ideas of good and bad) are actually meaningless. Kreeft doesn’t state it out right, but he appears to be arguing that a godless society is a nihilistic one. At least some would say that atheist hierarch Nietzsche would agree.

Now, I would rather Kreeft have gone a step further and actually argued that God does not giving meaning nor make sense of created reality but rather is the meaning and sense of created reality. He almost says this, but not quite.

Morality and objectivity

Here Mehta confuses objective morality with morality as objective reality. He understands Kreeft as arguing that without God we’re just making things up as we go along. He sees morality as something being objective versus subjective. He then goes on to list a series of sinful beliefs and behaviors those who have called themselves Christians have attempted to justify by the use of Scripture. Mehta in that line of argument appears to confuse Kreeft with a sola scriptura Evangelical. Kreeft is a Catholic (and in truth, I’ve been unfair to Evangelicals). The greater point, however, is that Kreeft never suggests all we need for morality can be found in the Bible. Rather he is saying that accepting the existence of God gives an actual grounding for morality in reality. That is, morality isn’t merely objective, it’s actually written into the fabric of created reality because justice and truth and righteousness find their source in God. It isn’t that Bible is bereft for these things. Rather it is that the ultimate source of authority is not our religious text, but God himself through the Bible, Tradition, reason, and experience (to varying degrees).

Love and Chemicals

Mehta next attacks Kreeft for arguing that God gives meaning to our love rather than being a series of chemical reactions. Of course, he misses that Kreeft is saying a godless existence leaves love as nothing more than fleeting chemical reactions. Kreeft is neither arguing for nor against love as a chemical reaction. He is rather arguing, or implying since he is not explicit, that Godful existence means that love, like morality, is actually woven into the fabric of reality (because God is love). It is perhaps forgivable to a certain extent the Mehta misses this since Kreeft does not go into further detail, but in truth, the implications are rather evident, if one understands from the beginning that Christians believe that God is love.

Our significance

Mehta tips his hand by titling this section, “We should want God to exist because he makes us feel significant” (emphasis mine). Kreeft doesn’t argue that belief in God makes us feel significant; it makes us actually significant. Further, Kreeft goes on to say that in a godless reality we are no more significant than a rock on some distant planet. What Kreeft is getting at here is that if there is no God then we are reducible to being just a collection of atoms and therefore of equal value with all collections of atoms. Connor Cunningham has made this point numerous times.

Why favor a human being over a rock? Why favor normal cells over cancerous ones if we are reducible to nothing more than a collection of atoms? Kreeft is doing something similar here. This isn’t about feeling good about yourself (knowing that God knows you and values you can actually feel pretty terrible when you’re bound up in sin). It is about the fact that all created things have a particular value and are not simply reducible to atoms or chemicals.

Conquering Death

The last major point is that belief in God leads to the wishful thinking that there is an afterlife. Now, admittedly, I’m not terribly fond of the word afterlife. It seems to imply not simply continued existence, but that one’s proper end comes after death. This Scripture simply denies. It isn’t life after death that’s important, it’s eternal life, life after resurrection, life after the return of Christ. Mehta says there’s no proof or evidence of this. Ignoring, of course, the fact that not all things are necessarily scientifically verifiable. He also ignores, and this is partly Kreeft’s fault, that it would obviously be impossible to scientifically verify a future cosmic event (like the resurrection) until that even actually takes place.

Mehta ends by saying, “After all that, would I want God to exist? Not a chance. If the way Christians act is any indication, God’s judgment has been pretty damn awful so far. Adding God to our already volatile world would only make things worse. I’ll take humans, warts and all, over a God who dictates how we live through His capricious, irrational whims.” Here––and again Kreeft can bare some of the blame, though a single video can’t say everything––Mehta misses a fundamental point about what Christians (and many other traditions as David Bentley Hart has argued) mean when they talk about God. God, for Christians, is not something you can add to the universe. That makes it sound like Christians see God as one thing amongst others, which is precisely what we do not (or should not) believe. God, for the Christian, is the source of reality, not something that stands alongside or even in it.

Mehta seems to misunderstand many of the arguments as they were actually made by Kreeft in the video. He also seems not to know, or not to consider, the foundations behind some of what Kreeft says. The latter is simply what happens when you base your remarks off one source (i.e. a video). It’s quite likely I have missed some nuance from Mehta by basing my remarks solely on this one blog post; and I look forward to being corrected. Nevertheless, this doesn’t overcome the fact that many of Mehta’s responses don’t measure up, whether against the actual statements made by Kreeft or against the broader tradition from which Kreeft is drawing. This video is far from perfect and there are points at which I certainly disagreed––I have highlighted some of them. Nevertheless, it is not quite so easily dismissed as Mehta attempts to do. What can certainly be said is that the title is wrong in its implication.

Forgive me the length of this post, but I wanted to do what justice I could to the arguments and statements made by both Mehta and Kreeft.

Sincerely,
David


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