my friend and colleague Stephen Davis.
Stephen Davis, the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, is one of the world’s leading Christian thinkers. With a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD from Claremont Graduate University, Professor Davis has published over fifty scholarly articles in academic journals, and he is the author of thirteen books, such as God, Reason and Theistic Proofs (1997), Logic and the Nature of God (1983), and Faith, Skepticism, and Evidence (1978). Professor Davis’s scholarly expertise is wide-ranging and highly regarded within Christian circles, and he is specifically respected as an expert on Jesus; in books such as Risen Indeed (1993), he argues that the New Testament account of Jesus’s resurrection is factually, historically accurate.
Beyond his impressive scholarly achievements, he’s a warm, kind, and affable man. And regardless of our stark disagreements on matters of religion, and despite the fact that I devote much of my professional life debunking what he spends much of his professional life defending, he has always treated me respectfully. And he regularly agrees to visit my classes and speak to my students, providing them with an alternative take on God, religion, morality, and so forth.
The last time Professor Davis spoke to my class, he revealed something very interesting—and quite relevant to this discussion of the inevitability of theistic interpretation at the individual level.
It was a night class in the spring of 2017. About twenty-five students were present. Professor Davis was lecturing about God’s role in establishing morality, explaining to the students that God establishes clear moral rules and obligations that are objectively true, and he argued that without such a God-based, objective morality, ethics is reduced to nothing more than personal preference, subjective notions, relativism. He said that if morals and ethics were merely subjective and relative, then “anything goes” and it becomes impossible to claim that one’s own sense of wrong or right is binding on others. Such an approach to morality, he insisted, won’t do.
“Some things just are immoral,” he emphatically declared. “They are fundamentally, objectively wrong.” His example of such a thing? “Genocide.” As he explained, “Genocide just is wrong. It is immoral. Case closed.”
While all of my students were in agreement about genocide being fundamentally immoral, some of them had immediate difficulty understanding how Professor Davis could square his unequivocal stance on the immorality of genocide with his abiding faith in the biblical God. As one student asked: “If morality comes from God, and you claim that genocide is fundamentally, objectively immoral, then why does God actually command his followers to engage in genocide numerous times throughout the Bible?”
The contradiction was true, and just so glaring: here was the erudite Professor Davis saying that genocide is the ultimate example of something that is truly, unquestionably, manifestly immoral, and yet the very God he worships—and thinks establishes objective morality—both commits and commands genocide throughout the pages of the Bible.24
Professor Davis’s pat response: “Oh, I don’t think that those parts of the Bible in which God commands or commits genocide are true. I don’t believe them. I think those things were inserted there by people, but God didn’t actually command or commit them. They aren’t to be taken as historically true, or as literal. God would never command or commit genocide. I just can’t believe that.”
Here is a man who is a devoted Christian, a most thoughtful theist, who claims that the Bible is holy, and strongly believes that the New Testament’s account of Jesus dying and rising from the dead is factually, historically accurate—empirically supported by convincing evidence—and yet when it comes to different pages of the Bible, wherein God commands and commits genocide, he has no problem simply discarding those passages as untrue, historically inaccurate, and not to be believed. Because the God he believes in just wouldn’t do things like that. Because the deity that Professor Davis has devoted his life to would never approve of or engage in genocide, anything in the Bible that states the opposite he simply interprets as untrue.
This self-protective, explicitly illogical move by Stephen Davis is perhaps the most common, widespread form of theistic interpretation out there: individual God-believers simply dismiss anything God says or does that doesn’t comport with their own personal view of God. Or in a related vein, individual God-believers interpret something God says or does in such a way that it firmly squares with their own individual concept of morality. Or rather, God-believers adamantly insist that the God they believe in does or does not approve of this or that, as their subjective needs dictate. That is, people who think that slavery is a good and moral thing—or gay marriage, or higher taxes, or meat eating, or the death penalty, or recycling, or building a border wall, or corporal punishment, or smoking marijuana, or using condoms, or getting a divorce, or having multiple wives, or banning women from driving, or guns—each and every single one of them interprets God’s will in such a way as to snuggly support their own subjective position with regard to these various issues.
As George Bernard Shaw once quipped, “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says. He is always convinced that it says what he means.”25
Theistic Morality as Echo Chamber
To prove that people generally interpret God’s values so as to nicely fit their own personal, subjective values, a team of researchers led by University of Chicago Professor of Behavioral Science Nicholas Epley conducted a simple experiment. First, they asked people who believe in God to give their own personal views on various controversial issues in America, such as the death penalty and abortion. Next, they asked these people what they thought various prominent Americans’ views were on these same issues—people like Bill Gates. And finally, they asked them what they thought God’s views were on these issues. As to be expected, peoples’ own values on these controversial issues most strongly aligned with those values they also attributed to God.
But here’s what the researchers did next: they took a different group of people and had them engage in a variety of tasks specifically intended to influence or challenge their preexisting views and values on various issues. For example, subjects were instructed to do something like write a speech on the death penalty in which they had to take the position opposite their own. And then, after completing such a task, they were asked what they thought the values were on these controversial issues for various prominent Americans and also God. The result? People shifted a bit concerning the values they attributed to God, but not on those that they attributed to other prominent Americans. In other words, when their own social or political values were shaken up a bit and perhaps softened, this was reflected in what they thought God’s values were—which also softened a little, continuing to align closely with their own, newly softened values. But there was no change in what they thought various prominent Americans’ values were. Those remained the same. Given these findings, Professor Epley observed that “intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”26
Then things got even more interesting, neurologically speaking. Professor Epley and his team went on to use fMRI technology to scan the brains of the people volunteering in this study, looking at what parts of their brains were activated when they were thinking about their own values as well as the values of God and those of other Americans. In the first two—thinking about their own values as well as God’s values—the same parts of the brain became active. However, when they thought about what other Americans’ values might be, a different part of the brain became active—which suggests that theists literally, physically map God’s values onto their own.
As Professor Epley and his team concluded:
