In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living podcast, we talk with Andrew Sach, who has recently released a book with Jonathan Gemmell entitled, “Are You 100% Sure You Want To Be an Agnostic?” Andrew discusses the difference between agnosticism and atheism, and thinks about how we can share the gospel with our friends who might be agnostic or who might have other beliefs.
Links referred to:
- Are You 100% Sure You Want To Be an Agnostic? (Jonathan Gemmell and Andrew Sach)
- Our next event: Casual sex or sacred sexuality? Our bodies and relationships under God with Philip Kern (22 May)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 25:40 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been edited for readability.
Introduction
Peter Orr: In today’s podcast episode, I’m going to be talking with Andrew Sach. Andrew has recently released a book with Jonathan Gemmell entitled, Are You 100% Sure You Want To Be an Agnostic? Andrew and I will be talking about the difference between agnosticism and atheism, and also thinking about how we can share the gospel with our friends who might be agnostic or might have other beliefs. I think it’s a very helpful, encouraging conversation, and I hope you enjoy the episode.
[Music]
PO: Welcome to the Centre for Christian Living podcast! I’m Peter Orr and today I’m joined by Andrew Sach. Andrew serves at Grace Church at Greenwich in London as a pastor and also a tutor at the Cornhill Training Course in London as well.
Andrew, welcome to the podcast.
Andrew Sach: Hi Pete! Good to see you.
PO: As we start, could you tell us a little bit about yourself—how you became a Christian and how you got involved in Christian ministries?
AS: Yeah. You said a little bit about me. My cool fact about where I live is that I’m on the zero degree longitude line. The east-west line through the world pretty much runs through my room, where I’m recording this podcast now. [Laughter]
I became a Christian at university. I was a church-goer before that from the age of nine, because my piano teacher was in the local church choir and suggested that I join as well. But I didn’t hear the gospel at that church and I was pretty cynical about it when I was a teenager. I met some Christians at university who shared the gospel with me. After a long period of struggling with them, I became a Christian.
Although, I did discover later: I was reading the Bible later one-to-one with a friend at church in London and he asked me where I was from. I said, “This town.” He said, “Oh, my great-aunt used to live there! She went to this awful church, because she was too infirm to travel further, and she would often argue with the vicar because he hadn’t preached the gospel. She prayed for the boys in the choir.” So it turned out there was actually one faithful Christian at that church who had been praying for me!
PO: That’s wonderful!
Agnosticism vs atheism
PO:Now, that ties in to the topic of our conversation today. You’ve written a book with your friend Jonathan Gemmell. The book has a wonderful title: Are You 100% Sure You Want To Be an Agnostic? Briefly, what’s the difference between agnosticism and atheism?
AS: Yeah. Atheism is the belief that there is no God. It’s quite a dogmatic position: you’ve got to be quite confident to say, “I really think the world is here by chance, and the material world is all that there is”, and so on.
Agnosticism just means “I don’t know”. I think it appeals in our culture, because it just sounds much more humble. I’m not saying I’m right; I’m not saying anyone else is wrong; I haven’t made up my mind. I’m on the fence. I think it appeals because it’s humble. It seems more peaceable: I’m not going to take a stand that’s so dogmatic that I’m going to get into an argument with somebody else. But I’m not really that bothered about it.
I think that’s actually where a lot of my friends are now: they’re not vigorously against Christianity; they just can’t be bothered enough to take a view one way or the other, because they don’t see why it matters.
The present-day popularity of agnosticism
PO: Twenty years ago, we had the rise of the New Atheists with Richard Dawkins and people like that. Do you think that sort of humility maybe touches something of our culture today, which is why agnosticism is becoming more prevalent, rather than that aggressive kind of atheism?
AS: Yeah. I guess there still are the loud atheists around. But I don’t think they speak for the majority. I think people are more indifferent. In one way, that’s good, because you don’t have hostile opposition. But on the other hand, it’s quite bad, because people are too apathetic to want to engage at all.
Three types of agnosticism
PO: In the book, you talk about three types of agnosticism. Can you tease out for us what those three types are and how your book addresses each type?
AS: Yeah. This is not an official classification; we just made up three types. [Laughter]
1. You haven’t checked
The first kind is you don’t know because you haven’t checked. In the book, Jon says he’s agnostic about how many helium balloons it would require for his wife Aileen to fly. It would be possible to find out. It’s quite a simple experiment: they could tie one balloon on, tie two balloons and she’s still on the ground [Laughter], tie x number, and then off she goes into orbit. But because she’s scared of heights, it doesn’t seem particularly kind to do the experiment [Laughter].
There’s lots of things that we don’t know about that we could check. You could do the research Or you could do some reading or whatever. I think some people are agnostic about Jesus in that way: they’ve just never looked at him. They’ve never asked the questions. It would be possible to know, but they just don’t know.
That’s quite an easy agnosticism to solve. If you want to solve it, you’ve just go to do some reading.
2. You can’t know
The second kind is a more dogmatic, absolute agnosticism: someone is saying, “I know that you can’t know”. I guess this is like the philosophical position of scepticism. But it’s a bit ironic, because that kind of agnostic isn’t very agnostic about their own agnosticism. They’re saying, “I am sure that I can’t be sure.” [Laughter]
The question is, “How can you be sure?” To say, “I know there’s no evidence for God” is like saying, “I know there’s no treasure hidden in Leicester—the area in the middle of England.” How could you know that? You’d have to have dug absolutely everywhere. You may not have followed the story, but under a local car park in the middle of Leicester, it turns out that the bones of King Richard III were buried. We only found that out a few years ago. So to know that something doesn’t exist means that you’ve checked everything and you’ve bottomed out every philosophical question. Of course, no one has. That position is a bit silly, I think.
3. You don’t really want to know
“I don’t know because I haven’t checked.” “You can’t know” is incoherent philosophically. That leaves the third kind. I think this is the most common kind: it’s “I don’t know because I don’t really want to know. Just leave me alone, Christian! I’m getting on with my life and it’s fine.”
With this, it isn’t so much a failure to have not investigated, it’s a “I don’t want to investigate because I fear that Christianity would suck all of the joy out of my life.” It’s not about a fear that Christianity is not true; it’s just a fear that Jesus isn’t good for me. I can kind of relate to that, because I think that’s what I was as a non-Christian at university: I just had this fear that Jesus would ruin my life. If Christianity had a colour, it would be grey. If you could summarise the Christian ethic in a word, it would be “don’t”. That was my view of Christianity.
One of my friends described how surprised he was to discover that Jesus turned water into wine. It wasn’t the extraordinary sign that impressed him, because God can adjust the laws of chemistry if needed. He was just surprised that God wasn’t instead going around the world, turning all the wine into water [Laughter], because he just thought that God was desperately worried that people might be enjoying themselves too much and it had to be stamped out.
If that’s your view of God—if you think he’s anti-life—then you’re going to want to avoid it. I think a lot of people do worry about that: they think, “Religion will ruin my life, so I better keep it at arms’ length. I’ll just say, ‘I don’t know’ as a way of keeping the Christian at bay.”
PO: Would you say your book is aimed at all three types of agnosticism? Do you focus in on one?
AS: Well, I think the second one—the dogmatic agnostic—there’s not much you can do with them. We say a couple of times, “If you’re not open to the possibility of this—if you’re not willing to think about this—then it’s not a game that we can play.”
We’re kind of aiming at the person who’s not really very interested, but maybe they’re interested enough to read the first page. Each time, we’re thinking, “We’ve got to earn the right to get the reader to read the next page.” The chapters are short. We try to have cliff-hangers at the end of each one [Laughter] and it’s a “Bear with us: I know you’re not interested yet, but you might be interested if we can get you on the hook.” It’s that kind of aim.
PO: It’s very helpful and helpful as we think about our own friends who might identify as agnostic and who think there’s more behind that than simply just, “I don’t know”. Thinking about what motivates them is very helpful.
Biblical and eyewitness testimony
PO: One of the things you talk about is the value of the Bible’s testimony and the eyewitness testimony. You have what was a fun story for me to read, but maybe it wasn’t fun for you to be involved in [Laughter].
AS: It wasn’t very fun!
PO: It was a story about eyewitness testimony and the value of it. Do you want to just give us the flavour of that?
AS: One of the chapters begins, “On the 12 May 2013, I was arrested.” [Laughter] I’ll tell you that discovering this without any more detail has actually been the thing that’s persuaded some of my friends to read the book, because I said, “I won’t tell you any more. You’ll have to read it for yourself.”
It wasn’t a very nice experience. Basically what happened was a kind of road rage incident. I was on my bike and a guy in a van got angry with me: he overtook me, blocked my path, got out of his van and wanted to beat me up—he pushed me to the floor. Thankfully, God was very kind to me: a security guard came out of the building just opposite and it all stopped. Otherwise, I would have been beaten up. He called the police. The police arrived. They said, “What’s happened?” I said, “I’ve been assaulted” and the guy driving the van said, “No, I’ve been assaulted.” So they arrested both of us pending the investigation of what had actually happened. I was released half an hour later, and he was eventually convicted.
That was my only first-hand experience of the British court system. It was just to make the point in the chapter that on the basis of eyewitness evidence, magistrates can decide what happened enough to sentence somebody in a criminal court. You might say, “Oh no, I’d have to have seen it for myself. I can’t believe anything second-hand.” But actually we live in countries where in the justice system, you don’t want to believe something fourth or fifth-hand, but second-hand is okay, if you’ve got witnesses.
Also, there’s also all sorts of tests. Did I bribe the witness? If it turns out that one of the witnesses who appeared had a massive donation in their Swiss bank account from me, that would undermine their credibility. There’s questions you can ask to check out witnesses. But eyewitnesses can be very reliable.
PO: The eyewitnesses we have in the New Testament: are they reliable?
AS: Yeah, on all sorts of criteria. One of the important ones is they don’t really benefit from their testimony. It’s quite a contrast with, say, a religion like Islam, where Muhammad was very successful, very wealthy, very powerful, whereas the early Christians were marginalised and persecuted. The way in which they speak about themselves is not self-glorifying. You think of Peter denying Jesus three times: that goes into the oldest documents. The witness for that was Peter himself: he says, “You’d better put that in.” So it’s not an airbrushed picture where they come out of it looking great; it’s an honest picture where they come out of it looking like failures, but they just wanted to say what actually happened.
We made the point in the book that lots of the early Christians were persecuted. Some of them were killed. People do die for causes that aren’t true. So if you believe in something enough, there are things like these awful suicide pacts you sometimes get with the cults, or people flying an aeroplane into a Manhattan tower, thinking that they’re going to go to paradise. I guess they sincerely believed that this was their ticket to paradise, and it’s not; it was untrue. But people definitely wouldn’t give their life for something they knew to be untrue.
The thing about the Christian eyewitnesses is the same people who are suffering for it are the people who are in a position to know whether it’s true or not, because they were there. So I think the idea that they made it up and then it cost them so much, even to the point of their own death, doesn’t make sense. Whereas, if they actually saw Jesus alive after he was dead, and therefore they were really certain that he could get them through death, then their willingness to be martyred kind of does make sense. They’d think, “Okay, kill me, because I know that he can raise me. I’ve seen the evidence of that myself.” So I think they’ve got nothing to gain. That’s a key thing.
Also, the corroboration with each other: the fact that you’ve got different accounts. I used to think the so-called contradictions between the Gospels were a problem. An absolute contradiction would be a problem. But what it really is little divergencies, which are exactly what you’d expect in multiple sources. I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer who did a massive public enquiry in the UK and interviewed hundreds of soldiers about something that had happened in the war. He said, “When all the soldiers tell you exactly the same thing, that means they’ve colluded. When they have accounts that don’t quite match, but they got all the main facts in common, then you think, ‘Oh, brilliant: we’ve got multiple sources confirming the same things.’”
So all sorts of things like that. There’s other books that are more detailed on this topic: Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams is outstanding. This is just one chapter. At each point, we’re trying to say, “Don’t dismiss it on this grounds”. We’re saying just enough to keep you listening so that we can say a bit more. That’s the idea.
[Music]
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PO: The sexualisation of society is not new. But the untethering of sex from all relational foundations has posed new problems. No longer is sex between a man and a woman, or even between a boyfriend and girlfriend, and nor is it even with another person you’ve met through an app; sex can now be with whomever you want, in whatever way you want—even with non-human devices.
Christians may not engage in these practices, but they are still immersed in the same cultural space. Our ideas of sex and sexuality can easily be shaped and changed by the world around us. How do we engage these topics in this new cultural space? How do we cling to what God in his word says is good for sex and sexuality? How do we respond to those who say that it is time to let go of our beliefs in the name of progress? Join us as Philip Kern, Head of New Testament at Moore College, brings us back to what the Bible says about relationships, our bodies and sexuality.
Philip has been working on a book on what the New Testament says about sex and sexuality, so it will be great to hear his insights on this very important topic.
And now let’s get back to our program.
Copies of the New Testament
PO: You say a little bit about the copies of the New Testament, because sometimes that’s the charge—that we’ve just got copies of copies of copies. How do we know we have a record of what’s originally written? Do you touch on that helpfully as well?
AS: Yeah. Sometimes people liken it to the game—what do call it in Australia? The telephone game?
PO: The telephone game.
AS: Yeah, where at a birthday party, one child whispers a message to another child, who whispers it to another child, who whispers it to another child, and after twenty children, the message has become hilariously altered. They say, “Look, that’s what’s happened to the New Testament.”
But there are some key differences between copying the New Testament manuscripts and the game of Telephone [Laughter]. The first one is that one person is copied by multiple other people. Rather than the message passing along one person at a time in a line, it’s branching out, branching out—like a tree. Say Mark’s Gospel: he writes the original and then five people say, “Oh, Mark: can I copy that please? I want a copy of that to take my Christian friends in Alexandria.” Someone else says, “Oh, well, if you don’t mind, I want to translate it into Latin, because I want to take it across to Rome.” It’s branching, branching, branching, and then along comes the textual critic—the scholar in the twenty-first century—who can access copies from all over the world, from all over this branched tree. So it’s basically impossible for it to have been changed without somebody noticing.
We give the example of a rogue scribe who decides to change Jesus’ mother’s name to the “Virgin Amy” instead of the “Virgin Mary” and he, accidentally or deliberately, to be mischievous, writes “Amy” instead of “Mary”. That means that all the people who copy him are going to have the “Virgin Amy”, but all the people where the manuscripts are going in other directions around the world are going to have the “Virgin Mary” and will immediately notice they don’t match. So you can’t just secretly introduce a change without it showing up, because your changes are only going to reach the geographical region where you made your change. But manuscripts heading off in all sorts of directions around the world won’t.
I think it’s brilliant: it’s basically impossible to make a change undetected. Modern scholarly texts of the New Testament have all of these different manuscript variants all open to see. There’s no conspiracy; everyone can check.
History and subjectivity
PO: But really, Andrew, can we know anything about history? Surely all history is subjective? [Laughter]
AS: It depends what you mean by “subjective”. History is recorded by people, and the people who recorded the life of Jesus believed in what they said. That doesn’t mean, by definition, that they were lying. I sometimes give the cheeky analogy “People say you can’t trust the Bible because it’s written by Christians” and I say, “Well, you can’t trust medical textbooks because they’re written by doctors.” Doctors do believe in medical textbooks; that’s why they write them. But the fact that you believe in it doesn’t mean that you’re not telling the truth. You might be lying, but more likely you’ve got some reason behind wanting to say so.
Sure: the New Testament writers are biased in that sense. They want to persuade you that something is true. But only because they themselves think it’s true, and I think they’ve got good reasons to think it’s true.
One of the questions I like to put to people I meet—say, on a train—is “Look, I met you half an hour ago and you’re already pretty sure that I’m not God.” [Laughter] They laugh. I say, “Because I’m just a bloke on a train. But imagine if you met me and spent three years of your life with me, and at the end of it, you were absolutely certain that I was God. What would it take? What would you have to have seen in me that made you draw such a crazy, crazy conclusion?” This thing about Jesus’ friends—fishermen, ordinary people, tax collectors—they spent three years with him and then, at the end of it, they were all sure he’s God. They must have seen something pretty convincing to persuade them of that. I just want people to be curious enough to ask, “What was that? What made them think that?” as an invitation to read the Gospels for themselves.
PO: That’s very helpful.
Spiritually seeking
PO: Just stepping back a little bit, you talk about the way that some people, even if they’re an agnostic, see themselves as a “spiritual seeker” and almost see that as a kind of virtue. Do you want to say something about how you respond or think about that attitude?
AS: Yeah. I think we think we’re very neutral and very objective. The Bible disagrees with that and Jesus doesn’t think that’s true. He thinks we’re hiding and that God’s looking. Ever since the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, in their shame for having disobeyed God, they hide. They’re ashamed of their nakedness. They true to cover themselves. Even the fear of being naked is a sign for the fact that we’re not totally comfortable with ourselves being exposed. The exceptions would be if there’s innocence—like with a child, because they don’t mind being naked—or when there’s intimacy, like with a partner.
With God, the innocence is gone and the intimacy is gone. So we hide. Jesus describes himself as one who’s going looking: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). He describes himself like a shepherd. He rejoices when he finds a lost sheep. I remember one British preacher saying, “Oh, we need to update this parable, because Jesus doesn’t seem to realise that we’re all looking for him and that he’s the one who’s hiding. Maybe we need to update it to The Parable of the Lost Shepherd: all these sheep are going around saying, ‘Do you know where that shepherd is?’ ‘Oh, I’m not sure that there is a shepherd.’ ‘I’m pretty objective and I’ve looked at all the evidence of for shepherds, and I can’t really seem to be sure about it.’” We kid ourselves that we’re on the hunt for God. God says, “No, you’re actually hiding from me, because you’re ashamed and you don’t want it.”
Jesus talks again in John 3 about how “everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed (John 3:20). That’s Jesus’ verdict on us. I certainly know it was true of me as a non-Christian: I was hiding and I wasn’t really in a hurry to find out about it. I guess that’s Jesus’ challenge to us: maybe that’s true of us too.
The danger of being an agnostic.
PO: You do have this sobering note that being an agnostic is dangerous, or remaining and agnostic is dangerous. We kid ourselves that it’s a virtue of humility. You draw out the danger in being an agnostic.
AS: Yes, and it’s because Jesus makes a diagnosis about us that says we’re in mortal trouble. We’ve got a disease called sin and it’s going to kill us. Therefore, we use a medical analogy—I guess because Jesus talks about people being sick (Matt 9:12; Mark 2:17). If you’re sick and you go to the doctor, and they say, “You’re sick and you need this treatment”, and you go to another friend and they say, “Oh no: you look okay to me, Andrew” and I say, “Well, the doctor said I was sick.” “No, no! You don’t want to trust that doctor. You look fine.” You’ve now got two opinions about your health: the person who says you’re in bad health and you need treatment, and the person who says you’re fine. But what’s the agnostic position, then? Do you go, “Well, I just don’t know. I’m not sure which person was right. Maybe I am ill and maybe not ill.” Okay. So are you going to take the treatment or not, then? There’s not a neutral option about being sick and needing treatment. If you just remain undecided and you don’t take the treatment, that’s actually the same as gambling on the fact that you’re okay. If Jesus is right and we’re not okay, then we need the treatment. There’s not really a neutral option when it comes to medical treatment, and I think therefore there’s not really a neutral option when it comes to Jesus’ diagnosis and our need to be forgiven.
Encouragement to evangelise
PO: It’s a wonderful book. It’s a very helpful book for us to read as Christians. I think it’s a very helpful book for us to give to our friends. Just stepping back a little bit and thinking about us as Christians and wanting to share the gospel with our friends, it seems in the world that we live in that evangelism is getting more difficult. Any encouragement for listeners in their evangelism?
AS: I think the biggest encouragement is God is still an evangelist. It’s not like God’s given up drawing people to Jesus just because it’s the twenty-first century. It’s been very difficult at other times in history too—I mean, arguably, a lot more difficult. There have been times in history when people would have killed you for your faith, and right now, people just go, “Oh, I’m not that interested.” [Laughter]
There are still people who are becoming Christians. I’m too pessimistic and I’m always surprised that people are more interested to talk about Jesus than I expected them to be [Laughter]. So I almost sort of pre-judge: “Oh, you won’t want to know about this!” and then they do want to know about it! [Laughter]
I think just being a little bit provocative and a little bit cheeky. That’s the sort of tone we try to take in the book. But it’s also the tone I try to take with people as well. Make people curious. I think people are interested.
I try to—and I’m not brilliant at this—but I try to talk in the same way to my non-Christian friends as my Christian friends. If I’m encouraged by a sermon at church, I’ll tell my next-door neighbour. I’ll say, “How are you, Anne? I’ve had a really good morning, because I’ve just been thinking about the resurrection of Jesus, and it’s been encouraging to me, because I’ve got this friend who died recently.” Rather than talking about resurrections with Christians and talking about gardening with non-Christians, just try and be the same. That’s my attempt.
Conclusion
PO: Wonderful. Andrew, thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you to Jonathan as well. We thank you very much for your time on the podcast. Thanks, Andrew!
AS: Thanks for having me, Pete!
[Music]
PO: To benefit from more resources from the Centre for Christian Living, please visit ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a host of resources, including past podcast episodes, videos from our live events and articles published through the Centre. We’d love for you to subscribe to our podcast and for you to leave us a review so more people can discover our resources.
On our website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre.
We always benefit from receiving questions and feedback from our listeners, so if you’d like to get in touch, you can email us at ccl@moore.edu.au.
As always, I would like to thank Moore College for its support of the Centre for Christian Living, and to thank to my assistant, Karen Beilharz, for her work in editing and transcribing the episodes. The music for our podcast was generously provided by James West.
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Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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