Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister. She’s also an atheist.
In 2015, a review committee from her denomination found that she was “not suitable” to continue in her role because . . . wait for it . . . she doesn’t believe in God. If Vosper had been let go by her church and denomination at that point, she likely never would have made the news. But when her two-hundred-member congregation insisted on standing by her, despite the fact that she no longer preached about Christianity, it created more than a few headlines.
One loyal church member’s comment may sum up the feelings of the many others who stayed: “It’s not about coming to hear that I’m a sinner. That is so yuck. This fulfills my need to feel upbeat. The services are more happy and joyful, more interested in community and justice.”1
Vosper has authored several books, including one called With or Without God: Why the Way We Live Is More Important Than What We Believe. On her website, she emphasizes, “We’re not going to stop trying to make the world a better place. We hope you don’t either.”2
Vosper and her church community are obviously committed to living lives that benefit the Earth and those who live on it. They’re presumably doing many great things for society, and that’s commendable. But is it true that how we live is more important than what we believe? That’s the conclusion many today have reached: we should all just be good people, do good things, and forget about religion.
The underlying question of what we should do with our lives is fundamental to our human existence. In this chapter, we’ll see how the answer, once again, depends on whether God exists. Along the way, we’ll also see that saying how we live is more important than what we believe is nonsensical from both an atheistic and a theistic perspective.
What We Should Do with Our Lives—without God
Anytime we hear the word should in the context of an atheistic worldview, our “inconsistency alarm” should go off.
If God doesn’t exist, there’s no objective reason why anyone should live in any particular way. Should implies a moral obligation. But if we’re all just molecules in motion, to whom would we be morally obliged? To other molecules in motion? Clearly not. In an atheistic world, no one can prescribe a way of living for anyone else because there’s no moral authority and therefore no objective basis for doing so. How a person “should” live his or her life can be only a matter of opinion. One way cannot be morally better than another way.
With this in mind, let’s return to Vosper’s statement (and the common sentiment) that how we live is more important than what we believe. In the context of an atheistic worldview, this claim has three significant problems:
What should we do with our lives if God doesn’t exist? No one has the authority to say. It’s simply a matter of opinion. And we likely don’t even have the freedom to form that opinion if we’re nothing more than molecules in motion.
What We Should Do with Our Lives—with God
My husband and I recently drove by a local church that was promoting a Wednesday night class called “Submitting to Authority.” My husband looked at me and said, “I’m sure that title is really going to pack the room!” It makes me laugh every time I think of it.
Most people feel at least some innate resistance to authority. The idea that we can live our lives however we want sounds appealing. But if God exists and has created human beings with a purpose (see chap. 25), the reality is that he’s the authority over our lives and how we respond to that authority matters. The good news, of course, is that the Christian God is all-knowing and all-good, so we can trust that he knows what’s best for us and will do what’s best for us—any negative views we have of earthly authority figures don’t apply to him. While we might initially bristle at the idea of attending a “Submitting to Authority” class, there’s no reason to do so if we’re talking about God as the authority.
So what does the Bible say God wants us to do with our lives? As we learned in chapter 24, we should strive to live in a Christlike way. When we put our faith in Jesus, we are a new creation and the Holy Spirit works through us to bear godly fruit in our lives (Gal. 5:22–23). In other words, according to the Bible, there is a direct connection between what we believe and what we do—good works flow out of our belief in, knowledge of, and relationship with God. The apostle Paul writes of this connection in Colossians 1:9–10:
We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.
This tells us that Spirit-led discernment is what helps us determine what we should do with our lives. The Bible doesn’t dictate specifics on things like what career to choose or where to live but rather says that people have been given different gifts with which to glorify God (1 Pet. 4:10–11). When Christians want guidance on how best to utilize these gifts and how to make specific life choices, they can seek God’s will through prayer.
With this discussion in mind, let’s return once more to Vosper’s claim that how we live is more important than what we believe.
From a Christian perspective, what we believe about Jesus has eternal significance. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Romans 10:9 says, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” These verses make the importance of belief very clear: belief in Jesus leads to eternal life. Furthermore, John 14:6 says that Jesus is the only way to God: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
If the Bible is true, how we live cannot be more important than what we believe—what we believe determines where we will spend eternity. But this doesn’t mean that the way in which a Christian lives his or her life doesn’t matter. To the contrary, the Bible says that “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (James 2:17). A genuine love for God results in a life of good works for God’s glory. In a Christian worldview, therefore, belief and action go hand in hand. Without belief in Jesus, people remain in their sins; without action, faith is dead.
As we’ve seen, the statement that how we live is more important than what we believe is an objective truth claim that isn’t consistent with atheism or theism.
The Difference God Makes
People, regardless of what they believe about God, can do good things with their lives. Christians, atheists, and people with all kinds of other beliefs help the homeless, give money to charities, participate in environmental causes, fight child abuse, advocate for crime victims, and much more. For atheists, doing such things, which Christians and other theists would call “good,” is a matter of preference. While some atheists might say all people should live to make the world a better place, we saw in this chapter that such a claim is inconsistent with an atheistic worldview. An atheist who chooses a life of crime because they don’t believe there’s any moral significance to our existence is living more consistently within an atheistic worldview than one who claims all people should do good things.
Living consistently within a Christian worldview, however, means living a life of good works as the fruit of a love for God. Because Christians believe there’s an objective moral standard and that God’s moral law has been revealed in the Bible, they have an objective basis for determining what it means to live a good life. This doesn’t mean Christians always live as they should, however. Christians still sometimes sin (Rom. 3:10; 1 John 1:8). But 1 John 1:9 tells us, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” As the overly used bumper sticker says, Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. This doesn’t mean we should sin because we know God will forgive us but that we acknowledge when we do sin and repent accordingly.
The lives of atheists and Christians can look similar in the good works they do, but the similarities don’t make believing in Jesus any less important. The Bible is clear: belief matters in an eternally significant way.
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