Richard Dawkins writes that “atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, is vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent.” This criticism makes sense only if you presume that the Christians made the whole thing up, which would be horrible of them to do to their God. Christians view the atonement of Christ as a beautiful sacrifice. Somehow God not only became man but took on all his sins and burdens in order to make him eligible for the heavenly kingdom. As San Diego pastor Bob Botsford puts it, “Christ paid a debt he didn’t owe because we owe a debt we cannot pay.” Christ on his cross literally assumed all the darkness, loneliness, and sin of the world. Thus, through the extremity of Golgotha, Christ reconciles divine justice and divine mercy and provides man with a passport to heaven. The bridge man was unable to build to God, God has built for man.

“Christ offers us something for nothing,” C. S. Lewis writes. “He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer.” So what is the difficulty? The difficulty is in realizing that we are sinful and that there is nothing we can do to solve this problem. A related obstacle is accepting God’s authority and His plan for our life. The obstacles, in other words, are those of human pride. Better hard liberty, one of Milton’s devils truculently asserts, than “the easy yoke of servile pomp.” The serpent’s temptation in the Garden of Eden was also lethally directed at human pride: Why should you serve? Why not choose your own future, which will perhaps be a better future than the one God has planned for you? Why obey God when you can be as a god, a law unto yourself?

The hubristic resistance that many people feel to God’s authority is eloquently conveyed by Hitchens: “It would be horrible if it were true that we were designed and then created and then continuously supervised throughout all our lives waking and sleeping and then continue to be supervised after our deaths—if that were true, it would be horrible…. It would be like living in celestial North Korea. You can’t defect from North Korea but at least you can die. With monotheism they won’t let you die and get away from them. Who wants that to be true?” Hitchens helps us understand the psychology of atheism, which is often based not on inability to believe but unwillingness to believe. That is why the atheist embraces the scientific way of knowledge as the only way, not because this is necessary to operate his cell phone or iPod, but because this is how he can deny the supernatural, on the basis that it doesn’t show up in any laboratory experiments.