Why do you encourage belief in Jesus but not Santa Claus?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: Why do you encourage belief in Jesus but not Santa Claus?

This question has come in response to a previous episode where I, frankly, begged the question – and I’m glad I did, because this question provides an opportunity for me to clarify precisely what or who the Christian God is NOT.

Implicit in this question is the view or argument that belief in Jesus is tantamount to believing in Santa Claus. As an argument, we might sketch it as follows:

• Belief in Jesus is like belief in Santa Claus
• Such beliefs are false
• Therefore, belief in Jesus, like belief in Santa Claus, is false

Or, more succinctly, I read one commentator say: “Santa is a fairy tale for children, God is the same thing but for children and adults.”

To respond to this question, I want to suggest three different criticisms for this line of argumentation.

First: The argument is logically flawed.

On a social level, we can see something is not quite right in the idea that belief in Jesus is the same as belief in Santa Claus. Ask an audience of people with different religious and non-religious beliefs if anyone of them came to believe in Santa Claus as an adult and, I dare say, you’ll get no response. Ask the same audience if anyone came to believe in Jesus as an adult and in all likelihood you’ll get a response.

So, to be blunt, it’s just insulting to human intelligence to suppose belief in Jesus is the same as belief in Santa. I mean, if belief in God is so ridiculous, then what’s even more ridiculous is giving lectures against his existence; trolling blogs and Facebook groups; writing popular-level books promoting unbelief, and so on. Frankly, there is a reason why no one has written a book called: The Santa Delusion or The Tooth Fairy Is Not Great – because even the ardent criticises of religion implicitly recognise that that belief in God, or more specifically Jesus, is not the same as these other human inventions.

But not only that, it’s insulting to the intelligence of those who suppose the two beliefs are the same. If we want to argue that:

• People believe in Jesus
• People also believe in Santa
• But because belief in Santa is false
• It therefore follows that belief in Jesus is also false

Then, by that logic, because I have two ears, and elephants have two ears, I might deduce that, therefore, I am an elephant.

Clearly, that’s invalid reasoning, and it is so because of the middle term: belief. Belief is not the problem; presumably those who don’t believe in Jesus believe their non-belief after all! The issue is not belief, but reasons for one’s believe, and how they correspond to truth and reality.

And that takes us to a second point.

Second: We have positive reasons to disbelieve in Santa Claus and positive reasons to believe in Jesus.

The pejorative comparison of belief in Jesus to belief in Santa Claus is nothing new. The 19^th century German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach – sometimes called ‘the Father of modern atheism’ – famously held the view that God is a projection of our idealised self-understanding; in other words, God is just a mental projection of human beings.

Now, on the one hand you can see why he would think that way. When we study the evolution of the idea of God or the gods, especially since the time of Charles Darwin, it is interesting to see how anthropologists have explored the assumption that God or the gods is or are magnified men with piques, passions, and somewhat local habitations.

I mean, take the many ancient gods of pagan Greece. While they were said to have immortal life, they were not without origin: Zeus is the son of Kronos, who went on to have many offspring that looked in many ways like human beings, yet were gods and demigods – deities which, while exercising superhuman powers, were nevertheless still limited; not completely all powerful or all knowing – when you read Homer, you see that not even Kronos or Zeus could escape the decrees of capital ‘F’ Fate.

Well, Feuerbach’s idea was hugely influential, right through 20^th century psychology, philosophy, and other academic disciplines.

For example, in the mid-20^th century, famed atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that he can no more deny the existence of God than he can deny the existence of a teapot orbiting in outer space, and yet he has no good reason to believe such a teapot exists. Similarly, evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist, Richard Dawkins, has argued that belief in God is like belief in a flying spaghetti monster; you can’t categorically deny that there isn’t in the outer ethers of existence a flying spaghetti, but neither do you have any good reason to believe such a creature exists. So, why perpetuate belief in the existence of flying spaghetti monsters? Now substitute flying spaghetti monster – teapot, Santa Claus – or what have you, with ‘God’, and you have Dawkins’ highly influential repackaged Feuerbachian criticism of religious belief.

But here again there is a problem. The reason adults disbelieve in china teapots orbiting in space, or flying spaghetti monsters, or, indeed, Santa Claus himself, is not simply because of a lack of evidence for such believes. To the contrary, it is because we have present evidence that no one has launched a teapot into orbit, nor have we any evidence from space exploration that such crockery has been placed into orbit by extra-terrestrial beings. We know what teapots are used for, and space orbit isn’t a proper use. Similarly, it is because we know what spaghetti is – delicious – and it is because we know what monsters are, those large, ugly, frightening imaginary creatures found in children’s books – that we can dismiss belief in flying spaghetti monsters as false. And same, too, with Santa Claus. We have positive evidence to reject belief in Santa Claus, because we know there is no such locale in the North Pole nor old man who flies around once per year in a snow sled delivering presents on Christmas eve, and we also know that the best explanation for the existence of Christmas presents is not Santa – it’s, for the most part, mum and dad.

Similarly, it isn’t because we don’t have evidence for Jesus that Christians believe in him, but to the contrary, because we have many positive reasons to believe in the history of his person and work: born a first century Jew in the town of Bethlehem, raised in the village of Nazareth; a travelling teacher and miracle worker, who had many followers; who was put to death by crucifixion by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, laid to rest in the tomb of a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, a tomb which is recorded empty three days later, without trace of his body except for records of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances in multiple places, multiple times, to multiple people who were collectively so swayed by their interactions with this resurrected person, that their faith in him sparked a worldwide worldview of salvation from sin by grace through faith, which eventually dominated the mighty Roman empire and remains to this day, the largest faith based worldview in human history.

All of this funnels into a third and final point:

Third: Who Jesus is – that is the object of Christian belief – is categorically different to Santa Claus.

When I ask you ‘what is the sound of purple’ or ‘what is the taste of hearing a phone ring’ you would rightly be confused. Why? Because my questions are confusing categories. Purple doesn’t have a sound and ringing bells do not have a taste.

Well, that kind of category error in logic is at play when we suppose Jesus is categorically the same as Santa Claus. Just like orbiting teapots and flying spaghetti monsters are analogies drawn from human creations, so the legend of Santa Claus is drawn from human history, specifically the 4^th century Bishop Nicholas of Myra. That is to say, they are all bottom-up inventions of human imagination expressed in limited, creaturely, terrestrial terms. By contrast, Jesus is not a bottom-up invention, it’s a top-down revelation; it’s a tale, not of human achievement or mental construction, but of human inability and divine condescension.

The incarnation celebrated by Christians at the time of year we call ‘Christmas’ is the belief that God – whom Anselm of Canterbury described as “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived” – took on a creaturely nature; God – who is so beyond our human creatureliness that we describe him by what he is not, such as in-finite, and e-ternal, that Creator God took on creaturely form. It’s a stunning belief for which there is no analogue, which is why it’s just silly to the point of embarrassment to charge that belief in Jesus is like belief in Santa Claus. We may not agree with either belief, but we cannot suppose they are of the same kind or category. If Santa Claus doesn’t exist, you may wonder for a short period of your childhood where Christmas presents come from; if God does not exist, you will wonder for the rest of your life how and why the universe came into existence from nothing for no reason.

You see, atheism is not as simple as merely holding “A belief in the non-existence of God” as though God were a ‘thing’ to not exist. For He is the very source of existence itself. His Being is the ground of all existing beings (including any “Flying Spaghetti Monster’s” we might find!).

So, to wrap it all up: why do you encourage belief in Jesus but not Santa Claus? Well, I hope you can see that this question are mistaken assumptions about the nature of belief, Jesus, and even poor old Santa Claus. What this question does is help expose who or what Jesus is NOT.

I don’t have any problems with people enjoying the charm and make-believe of Santa Claus, providing it is only ever understood to be that – make believe. Conversely, I don’t have any problems with people giving everything they have, even their very lives, for belief in Jesus… because I believe we have every conceivable reason to do so. Jesus said he has come “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10)… That is perhaps the most concise way to sum up the good news, what Christians call “the gospel”.

Human beings are lost to suffering and death without God, unable to resolve and satisfy our deepest desires and hunger and thirst for life… So God came to find. To do that he became a man, Jesus, who lived an ordinary human life, distinguished only by the startling fact that he never did anything wrong. He kept all of God’s laws, both internally and externally, and having done so, he transferred all the credit for that obedience to those who love and trust him. Belief in Jesus – who he is and what he has done for us – is all that is needed for us to be reunited with God… and it doesn’t depend on our own efforts, or even the strength and sincerity of our faith, because it’s not the quality of our faith that saves us, but the quality of the One in whom we put our faith: Jesus.

He is the reason, not only for the Christmas season, but for all of existence – including your own.