On Monday I start back at university. (Yay!) I use the phrase ’start back’ loosely, since I only have one lecture, but I’m sure there will be some queues to stand in for the rest of the day. Anyway, at some time during the first few weeks I will probably be approached by a member of Student Life, a campus club whose mission, according to their website, is to “[change] the world by turning lost students into Christ-centred labourers through out movements on campuses across New Zealand.” You may have heard of them since I understand they’re part of an international evangelism effort. I’m fairly sure they mean “lost” in a spiritual sense…

Incidentally, we also have a club called Christians on Campus but I have yet to encounter them. Actually, we have about half a dozen different Christian clubs, plus a few for other religions. Fortunately not all of them are evangelical, but it still seems a bit odd considering how un-religious New Zealanders generally are.

Background info: New Zealand is extremely secular. Click here and scroll down for the 2001 census stats. Being not-religious, agnostic or atheistic doesn’t raise eyebrows and, for the most part, has no stigma attached. The same is true of being a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or any other religion, provided you’re either fairly moderate or keep your fundamentalism to yourself. I’d say we care about what you do than whose name you do it in. Interestingly, most of the Student Life people I’ve spoken with have had American accents…

In our first year, my friends and I were approached by friendly pairs of survey-wielding Student Lifers so many times we lost count. Hopefully this was because we looked an affable bunch and not because we were sending out some kind of subconscious heathen vibes. We (two atheists and an agnostic) joked about finding some ‘tracts’ of our own to exchange for theirs and in second year I got as far writing a little pamphlet. Unfortunately, I chickened out when it came to actually handing it out (I’m like that. I’m working on it.) but we did have some interesting conversations.

Anyway, with round three imminent I’m again determined to be well-prepped to make my points. To that end, I’m going to try to answer all of these ‘Questions for non-believers’ which one of my aforementioned friends found on the local Student Life webpage. I’ll post my answers here and hopefully be able to articulate them more or less coherently should the occasion arise in the ‘real world’. Here goes:

1. How do you explain the high degree of design and order in the universe?

In a nutshell, I don’t. I leave that up to the experts. Expert biologists agree that a designer/creator is not necessary for the animals and plants they study to be as complex as they are. Evolution does the job just fine. As far as I know, expert physicists haven’t conceded the necessity of a deity for the creation of the universe yet either.

Perhaps one day I’ll be expert enough in my field to offer some insight on the subject myself (unlikely, given my chosen subjects, but you never know) but until then I’ll go to the doctor for medical advice and to books like Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene for advice on how the human eye got so complicated. I really should get around to reading that…

To give credit to God for “design and order” is to use a ‘God-of-the-gaps’ argument. That is, to say “I don’t know/understand any other possibility, therefore God did it.” Not good logic. Sometimes we just have to accept the unknown.

Anyway, what does this have to do with my becoming a “Christ-centred labourer?” If I am suddenly convinced that a supernatural explanation for the universe is the way to go, what’s to stop me giving the credit to pixies? It’s a massive leap from ‘we can’t explain the universe,’ or ‘a deity must have created the universe’ to ‘the Christian God described in the Bible designed the universe and sent his only son to Earth to pay for our sins and now wants us to worship him, rest on the Sabbath, and deny same-sex couples the right to marry.’ Right?

I was going to do two questions in this post but looking at the next one (How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places and people?), I think I’ll leave it for another day.

Make your stumbling stones stepping stones. Mr H, a teacher at my high school, said this during a supervised study period. It was one of the few teacher quotes we wrote down that wasn’t funny, stupid or slightly dodgy.