Our Village Atheist got to say his piece in today's paper

under a weekly column where people can express their religious beliefs.

His whole column was rather daft, and I may return to a piece-by-piece analysis of it sometime. But one thing he said, that echoes a common (and not very bright) refrain that we've heard a thousand times on the other forum is this: "I don't see how anyone can believe in some primitive idea that people came up with hundreds of years ago."

I'm interested in the atheist claim that religion is primitive. It can be usefully analyzed, I think.

Now one thing you can say about Jesus Christ is this: if God is going to be incarnated as a human being to live and walk among us, it does not in the least matter WHEN he does it. But what is certainly true is this--if he appeared in 2009 for the first time, people in 2309 would say "I don't see how anyone can believe in some primitive idea that people came up with hundreds of years ago." That is undeniable.

This is to say, any moment in history will always always always be a "primitive" moment in the typical messianic sense by which people judge their own moment superior to all preceding moments. We've heard from the same people who call the authors of the Bible primitive that America of the 1950s was primitive. I read an editorial today about gay marriage that said after it passes sometime in the future, we'll all look back on the present as a particularly primitive moment.

All of this just means that there is NO moment Jesus could enter human history and walk among us that some slightly later moment wouldn't deem primitive. So it is no more primitive (and no more embarrassing) that Jesus walked in first century Palestine than it would be had he walked in eighth century Gaul or 12th century Ethiopia or 19th century Russia or 21st century Uruguay. Not one of those places and moments would not be unable to be considered "primitive" by those who wanted later to deny the truth of Jesus.

The claim that it's primitive then can only mean that truth is ever-changing, so that even what we regard as true today will be falsified and seen as primitive a few hundred years from now (or a few decades from now).

This is a notion of truth that is radically skeptical and in the end nihilistic. For really, there are no truths at all. There may be a few facts, but no truths of any import at all.

As Lewis points out in Abolition of Man (echoing a point Chesterton had made a few decades earlier), this is the thought that kills all thought, the thinking that makes thinking impossible. Even the so-called truth of relativism must be, if we're consistent, relative and thus no truth at all. It's a way of thinking that feeds on itself and destroys itself.

What it doesn't do is consider what it would mean if the Incarnation really happened. Because if it really happened, it doesn't in the least matter when it happened in history. It makes no sense to call a truth "primitive" if it's still true. Euclidean geometry isn't primitive because Euclid lived 300BC.

So the village atheist has done a little sleight of hand to say that we should only believe in whatever is current, though we know that no one in the future will believe in what we hold current, since they will be under the same imperative to declare us and our era "primitive." In other words, our imperative is to hold things as true that we know aren't true in any meaningful sense at all.

I find that imperative easy to ignore.