The Need for a New Apologetic that Responds to the Relativism

I began to engage in Internet apologetics back in the early 1990s and continued to engage skeptics multiple times weekly until the late 2000s. If you are like me, you may remember those days: it was the time of the rise of the New Atheism led by Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins (two of whom have now died). Its proponents used harsh rhetoric against Christianity. These New Atheists believed that theism generally and Christian belief in particular deserved mockery. They argued that it was irrational for someone believe in the “big sky daddy,” and they somehow thought that the counter-example of the “flying spaghetti monster” somehow made Christian belief foolish. (Hint, it didn’t.)

It was difficult and required both study and imagination to respond. But respond Christian did, and as we responded, it seemed to make no difference. Those who were adamant New Atheists clung to their non-belief. (Of course, they would say that those of us arguing for Christianity were the ones who clung to our beliefs against all of the evidence.)

But, at least, when we had these discussions, we agreed on the foundational idea that some things were true and some things were false in an absolute sense.

Of course, the New Atheists contended that Christianity was false, and that was a statement that had meaning. It meant something in the absolute sense. Unless you believed ideas could be absolutely true or absolutely false there was no point in arguing against Christianity. If everyone’s truth was their own personal truth and did not have any more generalized application, what was the point in arguing that Christianity was false?

They weren’t arguing that Christianity was false for them, and we Christians should have it false for ourselves, too. No, they were arguing that Christianity was actually false and that such falsity applied for all people in all nations.

But there is an even newer breed of atheists than the New Atheists. I don’t know if they have a name yet, but they seem to be making a very different argument from the New Atheists because of their commitment to the widespread belief in relativism.

Relativism teaches that there is no truth or falsity because there is really no such thing as truth. I could easily point out that such a belief is self-referentially absurd because the statement that there is no truth is a truth claim that is either true of false in an absolute sense. But that does not matter to this new type of atheist. Logic ultimately does not matter to them because their commitment to relativism means that there is no absolute truth.

The debate seems to have become one of what corresponds with the individual’s personal experience and how it makes them feel. Passions control what is true; not logic and reasoning. And somehow, this new type of skeptic can hold a belief that is logically and rationally indefensible because it is “my truth.”

In a recent article on the Gospel Coalition entitled, “Once More with Feeling: Why Apologetics (Desperately) Needs Imagination,” Ted Turnau, the author, noted that he was experiencing this same phenomenon in the Czech Republic. He begins,

I’m going to read some books and prove you wrong!”
The young man who said this was an American exchange student in the comparative religions class I teach at a university in Prague, Czech Republic. We were working through a unit on postmodern religious relativism. I’d spent the better part of 90 minutes laying out a series of arguments that showed how relativism makes no intellectual sense and is actually intolerant of religious belief unless that belief is relativistic (“All paths lead to God”).
None of that mattered to this young man. What mattered was that relativism made sense for him, and therefore, whatever its logically fatal flaws, it was still true—for him. He perceived freedom and the good life as intimately bound up with seeing the world in just that way. If you’ve had discussions about religion and spirituality with someone who sees life differently, you know what I’m talking about.
People seem harder to convince nowadays; they think with their passions. However, this isn’t to suggest evidence and arguments are useless—consider how closely people pay attention to research around the climate crisis and the pandemic and adjust their lifestyles accordingly. But when it comes to ultimate beliefs, they seem strangely buffered against rational argumentation.

I believe that this is where the new New Atheists, which I will call for eant of a better term the Relativistic Atheists, are taking the argument. They are willing to argue about facts in the physical realm (such as arguing about climate change), but this isn’t because of a true commitment to truth as a real thing. Rather, when it comes to religion, spirituality, morality and other important ideas, they accept as true their feelings regardless of what evidence counters their worldview.

Moreover, the argumentation seems to take a very ugly turn whenever we raise the idea that relativism is not correct. If Christian say it is not possible for all paths to lead to heaven because the different paths have different demands, they become irate like we have just committed blasphemy. But there is a reason for that.

It is true that different religions have incompatible beliefs. Most religions that even believe in heaven have some type of work requirement(s) to get into heaven, but Christianity has a system that says we cannot work our way into heaven; rather, we need to accept salvation only through the finished work of Jesus Christ. Many other religions have multiple gods, but some religions (most notably, Christianity, Judaism and Islam) all believe in only one god.

When you point this out, then the temperature gets much hotter because, in pointing it out, you are really attacking the only true god to them – the god of relativism. Christians are, of course, identified as hateful for saying that there is only one way to get to heaven and the other religions will not get you there. Christians are prudes and hateful for not accepting that each of us gets to make up our own morality.

I could go on, but Christians need to understand that, as Ted Turnau argues, we need to be more imaginative in our apologetics. We need to recognize that these Relativistic Atheists are not really believing in atheism; their core belief is relativism. And they believe in relativism because it allows their desires to be at the center of the story. After all, if it doesn’t matter what is true about God and heaven, then any belief will do, including beliefs that would not correspond with what what C.S. Lewis called the Tao – a basic set of morals that have largely been accepted across all societies throughout time.

As Ted Turnau argues, we need more imagination in our apologetics. We need to think of new ways to attack this commitment to a self-serving relativism. We need to think of new ways to disabuse people of the belief that existence is ultimately about them and what they want. We need to have them see that the things that we value most do not arise from a self-centered worldview. Only Christianity presents a chance for real meaning with an explanatory reach for all of life.