Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? This concludes my response to the answer to this question from Christian apologist Tom Gilson. (Part 1 here.)

We’re in the middle of Gilson’s analysis of the speculation of atheist Lawrence Krauss* about the evidence he’d need to justify Christianity’s supernatural claims.

Who’s ready for an irrelevant puzzle??

We’re nearing the end of the article, still waiting for a direct, relevant answer to the question Gilson raised. What we get instead is yet another tangential puzzle:

So if God proved to Dr. Krauss that He exists, the famed physicist would still have to decide whether he wants God to exist.

No—go back. If God proved to Dr. Krauss that he exists, that would be huge. That would’ve actually addressed the question you set out to answer!

Let me say that again: Gilson imagines answering the question he introduced in the title of his article but, instead of considering the consequences of that remarkable result (or showing how it could happen), he tosses it aside to pick up a new argument, something by which to misdirect his audience. Again.

Gilson clearly can’t answer the question—if he had an answer, he would have given it.

He’s scuttled his own ship at this point, but let’s play along. Gilson challenges us: if we knew God exists, we’d “still have to decide whether [we want] God to exist.”

My answer: no, I don’t want God to exist if he’s the Bronze Age barbarian plainly described in the Old Testament, and yes, I do want God to exist if he’s actually a benevolent and wise god who wants the best for us and would make that happen. But why ask? How is our desire relevant? God either exists or he doesn’t. Gilson says he can resolve that issue, but he comes up empty. He wants to invent human shortcomings and focus on them when we’re simply asking a question that any Christian would find reasonable in any other context.

Once more, with feeling

Adding a final flourish to this turd of an argument, Gilson scolds his readers for not misunderstanding the problem as he does.

Getting the right answer to the question, “Does God exist?” isn’t the point. God won’t reduce Himself to being a mere true/false quiz answer.

Remember that Gilson’s article was written to answer the question, “Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious?” and, here again, he admits he can’t. He knows that’s embarrassing, so he uses tangents and bravado to pretend that the actual issue is elsewhere. He wants us to imagine that it’s demeaning to God (whom we’re assuming into existence for the purposes of this argument) when we demand evidence that he exists.

Huh? Let’s explore this ploy by asking, “Does Tom Gilson exist?” With this question, have I now reduced the significance of Gilson’s existence to “a mere true/false quiz answer” (whatever that means)? Have I demeaned or insulted him at all by asking and answering the question? If not, what does God have to whine about?

Gilson needs to rethink who his enemies are. Skeptics who ask reasonable questions are giving him and his claims the most respect they can. They assume that we’re all adults and that we agree that remarkable claims must be supported by excellent evidence. This is much better treatment than Gilson gets from those who dismiss Christianity with a laugh, giving him no chance to even make his case.

Gilson’s protecting God from demands for evidence is especially ridiculous when, according to the tales in his own book, God has no problem providing evidence. According to the stories, he supported Elijah in his public contest against the hundreds of priests of Baal, dramatically proving who actually existed. And Jesus did his healing miracles in part to provide evidence of his claims.

Not only do God and Jesus have no problem being tested, Christians delight in making evidence claims where possible—that the Shroud of Turin is tangible evidence of the resurrection, that the thousands of Bible manuscripts add to the Bible’s reliability, and so on. Evidence is apparently acceptable currency for God, making his hiddenness today unexplainable.

Conclusion

To call Gilson’s argument an argument is to call a rusty pile of spare parts a race car, but I don’t mean to single him out. This might be the best that he can do given the worthless hand he’s been dealt.

His argument does nothing to argue for God because he assumes God’s existence at the start. Either God’s absence is justified by his super-secret Plan, or it’s our fault for not perceiving it (our hard hearts blind us to the evidence, or something). But drop the God presupposition and follow the evidence, and the clues fit together easily. Natural explanations are sufficient, and God becomes unnecessary, just a solution looking for a problem.

We understand what good and bad relationships look like. Christians claim that a relationship with God is the best of all, but God’s role is unlike that in any healthy human relationship. When something goes wrong, it’s always your fault; you’re obliged to love God, but God has no obligation to earn that love; and God never stoops to show that he even exists. This is much like battered-woman syndrome, where the victim takes responsibility for any failings in the relationship, falls into learned helplessness, and fears for their safety if they do the wrong thing.

Gilson’s handwaving and subject changing make clear that he can’t answer his own question. “Where is the evidence for God?” is the question, and the answers suck. All this handwaving is just a “look—something shiny!” attempt to change the conversation away from the original one: why isn’t there good evidence for God? Why is God so hidden?

And to that, we’re given nothing.

More posts on the problem of divine hiddenness:

• Why is God Hidden?
• The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

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Image from Alexander Krivitskiy, CC license
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Update: commenter Ubi Dubium of the Question With Boldness blog pointed out that the “Lawrence Krauss” quote used by Tom Gilson in part 1 actually came from their blog. To minimize confusion, I’ve left the Krauss reference in (but now you know the actual source).

Gilson’s error doesn’t diminish the value of the quote, but it should encourage him to be more careful in his future research. Or, given the unconvincing argument that he put together, maybe not.

♦

Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? Christian apologist Tom Gilson attempted an answer, and this is the second part of my response. (I’ve responded to other articles by Tom Gilson on different topics here and here.)

At the end of part 1, Gilson considered a response by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. Krauss made a (seemingly) reasonable request for evidence, and Gilson had to step in to defend God, silent as always, to declare that that was somehow inappropriate.

Suppose God assented to your request for evidence—then what?

But Gilson is a reasonable guy. Krauss’s demand for evidence for remarkable claims is obviously out of line, but imagine that God gave him what he asked for anyway. Gilson says:

From what I’ve read of Krauss’s writings, he would admit he’d been wrong, and that God exists after all. Then from denying God, he would move immediately to resenting Him.

So our atheist would go from having no God belief to having a God belief. He wouldn’t be an atheist anymore. Isn’t that a really, really good thing from Gilson’s standpoint? Why not celebrate that? It’s because this would make Krauss’s demand for evidence reasonable and God unreasonable for not providing it, as common sense would dictate.

God just wants love

Gilson hurries on to his next complaint.

Bibles growing on crabapple trees [one example of the evidence Krauss asked for] wouldn’t make anyone love God or trust Him, which is what God really wants.

The issue is God’s hiddenness, so don’t change the subject. God’s providing evidence would resolve the Big Problem, which is God being indistinguishable from nonexistent. Stop apologizing for him. Stop putting words in his mouth. Does he exist? Then let him speak for himself.

And no, love isn’t what God wants. Read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. About God condescending to Job from the whirlwind. About the Flood. About God as the creator of hell. It’s like Gilson imagines God thinking about us when he looks at his “I wuv you THIS MUCH!” statuette on his desk. No—if God wants any reactions from us, it’s not love but some combination of fear, awe, adulation, and/or respect.

Gilson again:

He doesn’t just want people [to] believe that He is, but that He does good for those who seek Him (Heb. 11:6). He wants us to love Him.

Wow—that ship has sailed. Love is something you earn, and we would love God if he were love worthy. Love isn’t an intellectual project but follows from the conditions being right. Read the Old Testament, and you’ll discover that God is not worthy of our love.

Here again, you’re putting words in his mouth. The Yahweh of the Old Testament demanded genocide, supported slavery, and didn’t bother following his own moral code. He wouldn’t be distressed to discover that he wasn’t loved. Bronze Age storm gods and war gods didn’t care about such drivel. Feed them with food offerings and grovel appropriately, and they’re good.

A Christian correspondent once demanded to know what I’d need to accept that God exists. It was a more provocative question than I realized at first. I’d need to reshape reality to remove immovable obstacles to God belief. In response, I wrote a series of posts titled, “25 Reasons We Don’t Live in a World with a God,” which explored the things that would have to have been different in our reality for us to accept the God hypothesis. Similar reasoning could explore things that would have to be different in Christianity, the Bible, and reality for the Christian God to be lovable.

Is it possible that the God of the Old Testament actually does want us to love him and is worthy of that love? No, but suppose that’s the case. Suppose we’ve misjudged God by reading what he says about himself in his own book. Such a misperception can be corrected. We misjudge people all the time, perhaps because of a hasty first impression, and we’re accustomed to correcting that impression with new information. God, it’s your move.

Let’s return to God’s hiddenness, the point of Gilson’s article. Knowing that God exists would be the first step to Gilson’s goal of us loving him. Instead of changing the subject, Gilson should acknowledge and support our need for more evidence as the foundation of his goal to get us to (step 1) understand that God exists and (step 2) love him. He’s hurrying on to step 2, where he can argue that the lack of love is our fault and not God’s, and he’s hoping we don’t notice that he has nothing for step 1.

The reason, of course, is that good evidence for God’s existence doesn’t exist. If there were good evidence, he’d drop the misdirection and just point to it.

You wouldn’t want God to force his existence on you, would you?

Gilson moves on to another complaint.

God can only force so much on us. Yes, he could force the knowledge of His existence upon us just as the sun forces awareness of itself on us during the daytime, or as much as we’re compelled to believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4.

Yeah, lemme tellya—what I wouldn’t give to be able to turn back the clock to those blissful days before I knew that 2 + 2 = 4! And don’t get me started about what a burden it is to know that the sun exists.

God could make Dr. Krauss know His existence with the same complete certainty; He could “force assent” on him, as the philosophers say it, making it impossible for him not to believe.

Why bring in philosophers? Ordinary people have the superpower of believing in things for which there’s sufficient evidence. It’s not that tough.

Next, he again tries to dance away from the evidence question and return to what he thinks is his stronger point, the love question.

But [God] cannot force anyone to love Him. Knowledge can be pressed upon a person; love cannot.

Yeah, we’ve been over this. First, we have no good reason to believe the ridiculous supernatural claims of Christianity. And second, God is a dick. He gets what he deserves. Love happens for good reasons, and we don’t have those reasons with God.

Gilson approaches this another way. Notice his odd perspective in the second sentence:

God can’t force Krauss, or anyone else, for that matter, to love Him. Love must be freely offered, or it’s fake and ugly.

Gilson wants to see this from the person’s standpoint: “Love must be freely offered” by the person. This perspective allows Gilson to assign blame to the person if the result isn’t right. Of course, he goes into this topic unable to consider that God’s role might be imperfect. (Aren’t things so much easier when you assume your conclusion first? Here, Gilson assumes both that God exists and that God is without fault.)

Let’s recast that second sentence according to how love actually works in healthy human relationships. It goes from “Love must be freely offered” to “Love must be earned.” The burden goes from the person to God, where it should be. If love isn’t happening, the first thought isn’t to criticize the lover but to ask what’s wrong with the lovee.

Gilson is stealing a powerful word and redefining it in the context of battered-woman syndrome. God is a Bronze Age tyrant, and you must love him. If you don’t, the fault is yours.

Concluded in part 3.

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Image from WATARI, CC license
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Why doesn’t God make himself more obvious? This question may be Christianity’s biggest Achilles heel, and I applaud Christian apologists for frequently struggling with this gaping hole in their worldview. I just wish I could be as appreciative of their responses.

Tom Gilson is a Christian apologist and senior editor with The Stream, and he tackled this question. Let’s take a look at his justification of God’s hiddenness.

The problem (and a first try at a solution)

Gilson expresses the problem this way:

You say there are all these evidences for God, but I look at them, and every one of them can be interpreted another way. Why doesn’t God just prove Himself?

Yes, great question. I can imagine both Christians and non-Christians asking this.

The answer (more accurately, “answer”) is that “many people disbelieved in Jesus, even when they had proof before their eyes.” He gives the raising of Lazarus as an example.

Wow—where do you begin with something this naive? First, he’s pointing to a story in the New Testament, not a history book. Many questions hang over the reliability of our version of the New Testament. How much does it differ from the originals? We can’t say for sure (more on the problems with recreating the original New Testament here, here, here, and here). When the document holding miracle stories is suspect, so must be the stories.

And let’s assume that the New Testament originals did say that about Lazarus and other healings. So what? It’s just a story. Let me say that again because it’s easy to understand, central to the issue, and yet never brought up by the apologists: the gospel story is just a story, just words on paper. Did the gospels correctly document history? Was historical reliability even the authors’ goal? The apologist are responsible for arguing that it’s accurate history.

The Bible has loads of contradictions. Drop the idea that the New Testament is accurate journalism, and what we see is easily explained by it being just an imperfect human book, not the inerrant word of God. God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

The gospels were written decades after the events they claim to document. Few people from the time of Jesus would’ve been around to contradict them, and none would’ve been motivated to correct them. (This is the Naysayer Hypothesis, which claims that the gospel story is correct because, if it weren’t, there would’ve been naysayers who would’ve shut down the false story. I deflate that here.)

Finally, consider Gilson’s claim, “many people disbelieved in Jesus.” After Lazarus was raised (John 11), no one in the story said, “Wait, I know how that trick was done—Jesus had Lazarus up his sleeve the whole time!” No one in the story doubted that Lazarus was raised, so even the Bible says that Jesus performed a miracle and everyone understood it as such. The core of his claim is now gone. If he pointed to other stories besides Lazarus where people disbelieved, we’re back to it just being a story.

What can we reasonably demand of God?

Gilson points to cosmologist Lawrence Krauss as an atheist who has identified what he’d need to believe God existed. (I’m trusting Gilson for the quote, because he didn’t provide a valid link.) Krauss said:

[Suppose something happened] completely inconsistent with the operation of the universe as we know it, something impossible. . . . For instance, if the stars rearranged themselves to spell a different bible verse each night. Or if the tree in my front yard started growing KJV bibles instead of crabapples.

(As for me, I’d need more—crowdsourcing for starters. Even then, smart aliens is always a possible explanation.)

Update: Nope, that quote isn’t from Lawrence Krauss but from a 2016 post at the Question With Boldness blog! Thanks to Ubi Dubium, the author of that blog, for the correction. To minimize confusion I’ll continue to refer to Krauss as the author, since Gilson does.

In response to Krauss’s demand, Gilson said:

God isn’t going to do that. I know that, you know that, and Dr. Krauss has shielded himself quite well from having to worry about God proving Himself, because he knows God won’t do it, too.

Yes! You’re right—we do know that! God won’t show he exists in dramatic fashion through patterns in the stars, and he won’t show he exists in mundane fashion by simply hanging out with us so that his existence would be as obvious to everyone as the sun or a next-door neighbor.

We have more evidence for the existence of esoteric things like quarks and black holes than God. Praying, the official one-way communication route to God, works no better than chance, despite assurances from Jesus himself. This should tell you (and would tell you in any other situation) that God doesn’t exist.

Struggling to regain his footing, here is where your typical Christian apologist will bring up the need for having a mature faith. A mature faith means an outlook that understands that things in Christianity don’t work as promised, and yet you believe anyway. Someone with a mature faith has shed the constraints of evidence and just believes. Any doubts are nonexistent, suppressed, or examined only with the goal of finding out why they’re incorrect.

If this doesn’t sound like you, then your faith is immature, and that’s your fault. No, you’re not entitled to insist on evidence as you would in any other situation.

Continued in part 2.

More posts on faith:

• Faith, the Other F-Word
• How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

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Image from Isaac Castillejos, CC license
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