Monthly Archives: June 2021

The devastating Muslim test for Christianity

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Have Christian evangelists from street preachers to theology professors work their magic on atheists who know a bit about Christianity, and they’ll probably make little progress. Does that show that Christian arguments are empty and that it’s all just an ancient superstition?

Christians will respond that this experiment doesn’t count because the atheists are closed minded or too skeptical. They’ve made up their minds already and won’t give supernatural arguments a chance.

The Muslim test

Let’s test that. Let’s suppose that atheists are too skeptical. Imagine the same experiment but replace the atheists with Muslims. This more than meets the Christian evangelists halfway since Muslims already accept the supernatural, the first stumbling block for atheists. In addition, Islam is built on the stories of the Old Testament patriarchs just like Christianity, and Islam accepts that Jesus existed and was a prophet.

But if you explain the Christian gospel story to Muslims, they will reject it. Perhaps that’s not too surprising, since they’ve probably been immersed in Islam for their entire lives. An hour-long chat about the gospel isn’t enough. Perhaps more education is the answer?

Let’s try another version of the thought experiment and take a hundred Muslim scholars, well-trained within their tradition and well-respected within their community, and have them read the New Testament.

Again, I think we’ll still see little movement. Evangelists often imagine that the Bible is magic, and simply reading it will infuse the reader with the essence of the Holy Spirit (or something), but it doesn’t work that way. It’s likelier to push away the open-minded reader.

All right then, take #3: send these Muslim scholars to Bible college to give them a thorough education in Christianity. Focus on apologetics, the intellectual arguments for Christianity. There’s no emotional coercion, no love bombing, and no promise of asylum, but if the evidence points to Christianity, an honest and thorough evaluation from scholars accustomed to evaluating theological issues should do the trick.

After they’ve all gotten their degree, how many are Christian? I’m guessing few or none. The Christians may reply that this experiment still wasn’t fair, since these scholars were ideologically too entrenched. They were brainwashed before they started, and they had positions of authority back home that they couldn’t turn their backs on.

To respond to that, let’s try one final thought experiment. Now, it’s a hundred Muslim laypeople at Bible college rather than scholars. They embrace the supernatural, and after their course in Christianity, they thoroughly understand Christian claims and arguments. In fact, they’re far better educated than the majority of lay Christians.

So how about now? Do they agree that the resurrection was a historical event, playing out as the gospels describe it rather than how the Quran does? Have they gotten down on their knees to tearfully beg Jesus to accept them and forgive their sins?

Maybe a few, but not many (and of those that do, most will convert for emotional rather than intellectual reasons). The Christian response will likely be that these Muslims were brainwashed and so couldn’t be objective. But if that’s true for them, why isn’t that true of Christians? If most Muslims follow Islam because they were raised that way, not because Islam is correct, that’s equally true for most Christians.

See also: 

Theology is a subject without an object.
— Dan Barker

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/23/16.)

Image from Wikipedia, public domain

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Theism vs. naturalism: Christianity fails more tests

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Suppose Christianity were true. How would we know? What would that look like?

Christianity and naturalism make radically different claims, and their two hypothetical realities should look very different. We should be able to deduce which reality we’re living in by comparing the claims of each worldview with evidence from the real world.

Last time we looked at God’s hiddenness, the fragmentation of religion, scientific knowledge found in Christianity (or not), and the meaning of life. Let’s continue. The naturalism hypothesis is looking pretty good.

Morality

Theism predicts that religion’s moral teachings would be timeless and progressive. The wisdom of heaven might appear crazy to us simple humans, but time after time we’d follow it and discover that it did indeed improve society.

The Bible declares that Christians don’t sin: “No one who is born of God practices sin” (1 John 3:9; see also 3:6, 5:18). With the Christian church run by sinless Christians, the Church’s morality should likewise far outshine that of other institutions.

It doesn’t work that way. Not only is “sinless” not the attribute that springs to mind with many church leaders in the news, Christianity is conservative, not progressive. It is always late to the party, following society after it embraces a new moral outlook. Christianity must be conservative because it is built on the premise that it’s already got things figured out. New ideas—abolition of slavery, democracy, civil rights for all—catch the church off guard. Sometimes the church is mobilized on some of these issues (William Wilberforce against slavery or Martin Luther King for civil rights, for example), though invariably there are factions that resist these social changes. And why are these positions not plain in the Bible? Why did it take close to 2000 years to get on the right side of change? In these examples, the church was merely a tool used by change makers, not the instigator of change.

Christians were on both sides of these moral issues, as is true for any modern moral issue such as same-sex marriage, gay rights, abortion, or euthanasia. Pick the right Bible verses, and God can be used like a puppet and made to support either position. Pick other verses, and God admits to a long list of moral crimes.

As for the church clearly being a morally superior institution, the pedophilia scandals are merely a high-profile example. You can argue that there are just a few bad apples in the church and throw them under the bus for the benefit of the institution, but that simply makes a lie of the Bible’s claim that Christians don’t sin. The church becomes yet another large club that occasionally abuses power with no special claims of moral superiority over any other. So much for the guiding hand of God.

The Bible has a lot to answer for. The Old Testament in particular supports moral positions that modern society has long rejected—genocide, slavery, polygamy, and human sacrifice, for starters.

Christianity declares that morality is grounded exclusively in its god, but then it has a hard time explaining why other cultures without Christian dominance, both current and historical, seem to understand morality just fine. The Problem of Evil—the existence of gratuitous evil despite God taking a loving hand in our lives—also argues against Christianity.

Mind

Theism predicts a mind independent of the body that persists as a soul after the body dies.

In fact, “mind” is just what brains do. The mind’s capability is tied to the capabilities of the brain, and that changes as someone grows from child to mature adult to elderly adult. That capability changes due to physical causes such as being tired, sleepy, stressed, hungry, drunk, or drugged. Damage the brain with dementia or physical injury and you damage the mind, as the story of Phineas Gage illustrates. The fortunes of the mind parallel those of the brain, and no evidence supports an unembodied mind.

Not only do we have a natural explanation for the mind, but physics shows that there is no room for a supernatural soul. There is yet more physics to learn, but we know enough about the physics of our world to know that no as-yet-to-be-found quantum particles could hold or convey the soul.

Growth of religion

Theism predicts that heaven would favor the correct religion.

Christianity did thrive, but that wasn’t because of God’s beneficence but Rome’s. Christianity was just one religion among many until the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Naturalism predicts that religions struggle, rise, and fall and that none will have any supernatural success. And that’s what we see.

More

If Christianity were true, a single set of moral truths would be held universally, rather than morality varying based on culture.

If Christianity were true, believers wouldn’t use evidence-based reasoning everywhere in life but then switch to faith for evaluating the claims of their religion.

If Christianity were true, faith healers would go to hospitals and reliably produce healings that science verifies.

If Christianity were true, televangelists wouldn’t waste time asking for money from viewers but would get their expenses covered by praying to God themselves. Seen another way, God never gives cash to a ministry, and we should follow his lead.

If Christianity were true, Christians’ testable prophecies about our imminent end wouldn’t invariably be wrong. (Hilariously bad examples: John Hagee and Harold Camping.)

If Christianity were true, its Bible wouldn’t have contradictions, claims of prophecy wouldn’t suck, and it wouldn’t be wrong about the power of prayer.

If Christianity were true, we wouldn’t see its ideas mirrored in other contemporary religions of that part of the world like the Combat Myth, virgin birth stories, and dying and rising gods.

If Christianity were true, everyone would understand the same simple and unambiguous message from God.

Christian response

The typical Christian response is, “But God could have perfectly good reasons that make sense to him that you simply can’t imagine!” And that’s true. This tsunami of examples in which the naturalistic explanation beats theism and Christianity doesn’t prove that Christianity is false; it simply concludes that that’s the way to bet. This Christian argument fails by making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll in his debate against William Lane Craig said, “It’s not hard to come up with ex post facto justifications for why God would’ve done it that way. Why is it not hard? Because theism is not well defined.” Christianity is a moving target, not the unchanging wisdom of an unchanging god.

Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote about a time when life was discouraging. After prayer, he saw a rainbow over his house. He said,

Was it chance? It was not. It was God. Would that convince an atheist? Of course it would not, but then it was not a sign for the atheist. God was speaking through nature to me.

Nope. If it wouldn’t convince an atheist, it shouldn’t convince you. If evidence were important, this being nothing more than a nice coincidence according to anyone outside your religion is the clue that you’ve deluded yourself. And that you dismiss that and embrace your interpretation as reality makes clear that you don’t care about evidence to support your belief.

This is the sign of an invented worldview.

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/21/16.)

Image from Eye See You Two (license CC BY 2.0)

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Theism vs. naturalism: where does the evidence point?

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Which worldview explains reality better? The first candidate is Christianity/theism. Opposing that is naturalism, the belief that natural explanations are sufficient to explain the world we see. (To be more precise, I argue that naturalistic explanations of nature are better than supernatural explanations, not that the supernatural necessarily doesn’t exist.)

Each worldview makes predictions about how our world should look. We’ll consider those predictions and compare them against the evidence from reality to see which worldview does the better job.

God’s hiddenness

Theism proposes supernatural deit(ies) that engage with humanity. (Contrast that with deism, in which a deity could’ve started up the universe and then walked away.)

Our example of theism is Christianity, which tells us that God should be obvious: “God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It makes the same claim when it says that God is anxious to have a relationship with us, since understanding God’s plan and putting our faith in Jesus is mandatory for us to escape hell.

God should be obvious, and his message to us should be unambiguous. But when we look around, there is no good evidence for God, just as naturalism predicts. (I discuss this Problem of Divine Hiddenness in detail here.)

Fragmentation into sects

Even if humans invent religions, theism predicts that clear evidence for the one correct religion would outshine all the rest. Invented religions might always be background noise in the religious environment, but the correct religion—the only one actually supported by evidence of real god(s)—would quickly spread from its introduction thousands of years ago to become and remain the biggest religion by far. There would be no contest to any unbiased observer which religion was correct (more here).

But it doesn’t work that way. For all of human existence, the majority of people at any moment have always had the bad fortune to not believe in the one correct religion (assuming there is one). Religion is a cultural phenomenon. Christianity is the largest religion at the moment, though it might not be in fifty years when Islam is expected to become number one. Christianity is not the oldest religion, it didn’t become largest until centuries after its founding, and it’s never claimed the majority of the world’s people.

A single, unambiguous message doesn’t exist even within Christianity. There are 45,000 Christian denominations, a number that is growing rapidly.

The Bible itself documents how God’s fundamental properties have evolved.

  • God was initially just a guy who walked in the Garden to chat with Adam and Eve, but later he said, “No one may see my face and live” (Exodus 33:20).
  • God had to send out agents to get intelligence about Sodom and Gomorrah, but ask Christians now, and they’ll say that he’s become omniscient (“New and improved God 2.0—now with 1020 times more omniscience!”).
  • God was initially part of a pantheon, and only later do we get a clear statement of monotheism (Isaiah 43:10, for example).
  • God was initially merely powerful, and he apparently had limitations. Now we hear he’s invulnerable.
  • Like a superhero comic, the God story periodically reboots.

The map of world religions shows that religious belief doesn’t change with evidence like science does. Instead, it’s a cultural trait.

Relationship to science

Theism predicts that sacred texts would be useful in the real world. They wouldn’t be full of just-trust-me-on-this demands. Instead, they would be grounded in the real world so that we could see that their claims were both surprising (far beyond what was known in that society at the time) and reliable. We wouldn’t need faith to accept the supernatural; it would be obvious that this wisdom didn’t come from any human society.

Christianity is again a counterexample. Any scientific statement within the Bible that’s true was known by the culture that produced that part of the Bible, and all other scientific claims within the Bible are false. Mining the Bible to find verses that vaguely anticipate modern scientific discoveries is a popular hobby for some Christian apologists, but science has learned nothing about reality from the Bible.

You’d think that the Bible would at least make room for simple science that would greatly benefit people. For example, how about a recipe for soap plus basic hygiene rules? It would only take a paragraph, but we find nothing. Even Jesus’s healing miracles just reflect the superstitions of the time.

In the competition between science and religion, “God did it” was the answer for famine, plague, drought, disease, and even war in centuries past. Dogma rather than evidence pointed to God, and science has steadily produced reliable answers to replace God for countless scientific puzzles. The reverse has never happened. Shoehorning God into the remaining puzzles makes him a “god of the gaps,” a pitiful rearguard action that makes a joke of the all-powerful Creator of the Universe.

At best, apologists can say, “Well, science hasn’t answered this question,” unconcerned that Christianity hasn’t answered any question. Yes, science does have unanswered questions on its to-do list—that’s how science works. These aren’t questions that theologians have pointed out but are mostly obtuse questions that only science could raise.

Life

Theism predicts that life is designed and that life is the purpose of the universe.

Neither is true. A Rube Goldberg machine and a Swiss watch are both complicated but in different ways. Cells are complicated, but they’re more like the redundant and inefficient Rube Goldberg machine than the elegant watch. Designer-less evolution is sufficient to explain why life looks the way it does.

DNA is often cited as being so software-like that it must have come from a mind, but I disagree. The sloppiness in DNA alone is enough to defeat the Design Hypothesis (the argument that life must’ve been designed).

The theist will say that software invariably comes from minds, but they forget that minds invariably come from brains. If invariability is important to them, they must show us the brain that houses God’s mind.

And, no, software doesn’t invariably come from minds. Software can be evolved in a computer where it is randomly changed and tested for fitness, analogous to what happens in the real world to DNA.

The theist must look at the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, and say that all of that exists because of the humans on one planet in an insignificant backwater of one galaxy. Naturalism gets it right when it predicts no design and sees life as just something that happens now and then.

We’ll conclude this worldview comparison next time with a look at morality, the mind vs. the soul, and more. Go here.

We can’t observe quarks or black holes,
but we should see their effects.
We do.
We can’t observe the Christian God,
but we should see his effects.
We don’t.
— Victor Stenger,
“Faith in Anything is Unreasonable”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/17/16.)

Image from Image Catalog, public domain

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Irresponsible use of the awesome power of prayer

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Christian parents teach their children to pray, but is that wise?

The claims made for prayer in the Bible are hard to overestimate. Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Jesus said, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do” (John 14:12).

Having the all-powerful creator of the universe just a prayer away is a lot of power. It’s an inconceivable amount of power. And we’re going to trust that to children?!

God intervenes

Christians will say that there’s no cause for concern because God will make sure to only grant safe wishes, but that’s not what the Bible says. The verses above, in context, don’t have such a limitation. Little Tommy could pray for his rival on the football team to get sick so he can start in the next game. He could pray that Susie returns his affections. He could pray that his math teacher dies so he doesn’t have to take that test on Friday.

One Christian response is to say that prayer can come with caveats. For example, in James 4:3, we are cautioned that we won’t receive when we “ask with wrong motives,” and little Tommy’s motives are pretty selfish.

Skeptics have a couple of responses. First: what part of, “Ask and it will be given to you” do you not understand?

Second: at best this admits that the Bible is contradictory—prayer has constraints in one place but no constraints in another. Ordinary, fallible Christians are left putting the pieces together, trying to make sense out of the contradiction (or discarding it as manmade mythology).

Purposes of prayer

Another Christian response is to say that prayer has lots of purposes—confessing sins, thanking God for the good things in life, reassuring God that he’s fantastic, and so on. But this is a smokescreen, and the prayer of petition remains the primary kind of prayer in the Bible.

Let’s admit that prayer can be beneficial in the same way that meditation can, but when you’re praying for someone else, meditation is not the point. The idea behind person A praying for person B isn’t for person A to feel better, it’s for a specific good thing to happen to person B.

Prayer as described by Jesus is powerful medicine, though there are different kinds of medicine. A bottle of sleeping pills left in the kitchen where small children could find it is reckless . . . unless it’s homeopathic medicine, which is just pretend medicine. And that’s the key insight—that prayer is like homeopathic medicine.

Prayer can be given to children with the confidence that it can’t be used for bad requests because it can’t be used for good requests, either. It’s just pretend.

The recommended age
to use a Ouija board is 8 years old.
So . . . you need to be 21 to drink alcohol
but only 8 to summon demons?
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/9/16.)

Image from Nancy Big Crow (license CC BY 2.0)

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The Kalam Argument: infinite regress and more

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The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a modern variant of the old “But Someone had to be there to start it all off, right?” argument. It has a common sense appeal, but it falls apart under inspection.

This is the final installment of a critique of a Christian defense of the KCA (part 1). We’ll look at “Your explanation requires another explanation,” “God has no ‘but what created God?’ infinite regress” and a few more.

Here is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause

2: The universe began to exist

3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

Below, the skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.

8. Even if the universe has a beginning, there are possibilities besides God.

If you’re thinking of aliens or the multiverse, that just pushes the problem back a step.

What is it with this obsession for an immediate answer? Can’t we just say, “I don’t know”? That approach has done well for science because it puts the spotlight on interesting questions, which then tend to get answered.

Of course, it’s clear why apologists demand an answer right now. They know that science regularly replaces supernatural explanation with evidence-based explanations. Their time window is brief, and they want to score some points for “God did it!” before their question du jour is answered. Then they’ll move on to another unanswered scientific question and hope that everyone forgets that last one.

As one example of a non-God beginning of our universe, maybe it’s a computer simulation like the Matrix. Perhaps such a simulation will for advanced civilizations be no more difficult than a homework assignment. And there are plenty of theories with natural causes. We’re beyond “I don’t know” but haven’t advanced to “here’s the overwhelming scientific consensus” yet.

Let’s return to the Christian challenge that any explanation for the universe—aliens created it, or there’s a multiverse—just creates another thing that must itself be answered. These would indeed demand an explanation, but why imagine that God is it? God has never been the answer to anything. If God is the explanation, show that he exists first and then infer that he created the universe/multiverse. The Christian god who loves us and desires a relationship would be obvious, and the obtuse KCA wouldn’t be the way to find him. Every clue points to naturalism as the explanation for this and other unknown puzzles.

When religion begins to answer interesting questions like these, let me know. Until then, the idea that religion will provide the answers to questions it could never dream up is ridiculous.

9. Popular-level science teaches the universe had a beginning, but someone says the real science shows it doesn’t.

“We aren’t given any argument as to why it’s really the case that a potentially successful model for the beginning of the universe shows no finite beginning. We’re simply to take someone’s word for it, when we actually have physicists and scientists admitting these theories don’t work.”

There’s not much to respond to here, but I include it for completeness. I’ll just note that cosmologist Sean Carroll’s list of proposed models for the universe (there are many) includes a beginning-less universe (more).

10. The KCA relies entirely on current science, and science can change.

“First, simply because some claim remains open to change does not mean that claim cannot be accepted as true. . . . Of course we can claim it is true!”

I reject the phrasing of your statement, but you’re welcome to use science as the basis for an argument that concludes God exists. KCA isn’t a sound argument, as I’ve shown before, but have at it.

“Second, the KCA does not rely entirely on science. In fact, the second premise (“the universe began to exist”) can be defended solely on rational argumentation.”

I think we’ve found your problem: thinking that “rational argumentation” (do you mean “common sense”?) is reliable at the frontiers of physics (see claim #3 above). The origin of the universe is within the domain of quantum mechanics, remember? You check your common sense at the door.

Quantum mechanics has already defeated the first premise, “whatever begins to exist had a cause” (see claim #1 above).

11. Your first cause falls to the infinite regress problem. If God is your first cause, what created God?

God didn’t begin to exist. The First Cause must logically precede all else. There simply can’t be, by definition, anything that came before.

Be cautious when a definition brings something into existence. Like the Ontological Argument, which just thinks God into existence, that may be too good to be true.

You didn’t say this, but let me just add the caution that apologists shouldn’t respond to a scientific question with a theological claim. “My religion says that God was uncreated” is no answer in the real world.

So you’re telling us that God didn’t have a cause . . . just because? That’s magic, and I need evidence. Why does God not need a cause if everything else does? Why is God eternal, but nothing else is? How did God create something out of nothing? How can he create the universe when he was outside of time—doesn’t deciding and acting require time?

The most charitable view is that you’ve resolved “What caused the universe?” with God, but you now have these new questions about God. You’ve simply repackaged the question, not answered it.

And if God can exist eternally, maybe that’s true for the universe (or the multiverse).

Wrapup

The author concludes:

Each objection has been dealt with by providing an answer. This means that each Christian, and each person, is rationally justified in accepting the KCA. If that is true, then it seems that the KCA’s truth implies God—not just any God, but the God of the Bible!

Nope. My original post is intact. I leveled five attacks on the first premise and three on the second. None of those were addressed in this article. No, rational people are not justified in accepting the Kalam Kosmological Argument.

You’ve probably seen the famous Sidney Harris cartoon where one scientist points to an involved equation on the blackboard and says to his colleague, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two,” where step two says, “Then a miracle occurs.” God is the step two—the implausible savior of Christians’ apologetic arguments.

The universe that we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose,
no evil, and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

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I feel like I’m diagonally parked
in a parallel universe.
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/7/16.)

Image from NASA, public domain

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The Kalam Argument: How does God create before time?

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Life as a Christian apologist must be hard. They have to deliver weak arguments with enthusiasm, and the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is one of the most prominent weak arguments.

Here it is:

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause

2: The universe began to exist

3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

This is #2 in a three-part series responding to a Christian defense of the KCA (part 1 here).

Here are three more responses to skeptical attacks on the KCA. The skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.

5. The first cause is logically incoherent because it existed “before” time.

This isn’t an objection to either premise.

Oh, but it is; it’s an objection to premise 1. It questions whether there can be a cause of any sort given that time didn’t exist before the universe did.

The First Cause didn’t precede the universe, because it acted in the first moment—that is, the First Cause and the first moment were simultaneous. “So what we have is a timeless, unchanging (because it is timeless) First Cause whose first act is bringing the world into existence.”

This is metaphysical bullshit. The simple solution is to drop the idea of any cause (First or otherwise) for the universe. The God hypothesis is jammed in as the answer despite its not fitting into this puzzle at all. The naturalistic explanation doesn’t need a cause of the universe, and the KCA vanishes without one.

How could a god outside of time decide anything, such as that the universe should be created? “Timeless and unchanging” means frozen and inert. No conclusions, no changing of his mind, no initiation of any creative act.

“What could cause the universe if there were no time beforehand?” is like “How could a frozen and inert god do anything, like create a universe?” And they’re both neatly dismissed by hypothesizing no cause for the universe, as allowed by quantum mechanics. God becomes a solution looking for a problem. Apologists spend more effort keeping the God card relevant than using it to show that it explains things better than naturalistic solutions.

Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll debated Craig on cosmology (more on that debate here), and Carroll ticked off several models of the universe with no place for a First Cause such as a universe with a beginning but no cause and one that is eternal without a beginning.

And let me step back to marvel that this godly First Cause is advanced by apologists with no evidence whatsoever. Carroll noted that cosmology textbooks don’t rely on “transcendent cause” or “First Cause” or God, they use differential equations!

Even trying to put the Cosmological Argument in the best possible light, it doesn’t solve the infinite regress. You’ve still got God infinitely old who existed infinitely long before the Big Bang. How does he traverse that time? And while we’re puzzling over Christianity’s unexplained mysteries, how does a noncorporeal being affect our world? Do we just call it magic and move on? And if God created the universe, that must’ve been to improve things, but how is that possible since everything was perfect already?

Maybe this is really the Kalam Kosmological Argument, just a bit of fun that’s not to be taken seriously.

6. If some metaphysical truth is not well-established, one is unjustified in saying it is true.

Does “not well established” mean that philosophical truth is discovered by a poll? And how can new truth bubble to the surface if no one accepts it until a majority do?

When metaphysicians have a track record like scientists where they give us reliable new knowledge, then yes, polls would be useful. We laypeople could rely on them to know where they’ve reached a solid consensus, and we could treat that as provisional truth. But metaphysics has no such track record. (I argue that laypeople must accept the scientific consensus here.)

As for his concern about “a new idea is fine as long as it’s not new,” we must separate the experts from laypeople. In an evidence-guided meritocracy with a high bar for entry like science, the experts can dream up, advocate, and accept whatever they feel the evidence demands. While we lay outsiders can critique, we have no standing for accepting anything but the consensus (where it exists).

That describes science, not philosophy or metaphysics.

7. There could be other deities besides the Christian God.

This doesn’t object to either premise of the KCA. Let’s be clear that the KCA is used as natural theology (understanding God through nature), never revealed theology (understanding God from his personal revelations).

Nevertheless, the properties of the cause of the universe—timeless, spaceless, changeless, powerful, creator—do sound like the Christian god.

“Imagine, if you will, a timeless, spaceless, all-powerful Creator of the universe. Sounds like God, doesn’t it?” Well, it sounds like what Christians today think of God, but consider God before he hit the big time—back in the Old Testament when he was still doing vaudeville.

  • He had to personally investigate Sodom and Gomorrah to see if the gossip he’d heard was correct (Genesis 18:21),
  • he regretted having made mankind (Gen. 6:6),
  • he spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11),
  • he was beaten by the Moabite god Chemosh and couldn’t defeat tribes with iron chariots (more),
  • and he was just one of many gods in a pantheon.

He was more super than the rest of us, but certainly not the omni-everything god of today. God has evolved.

The final four arguments: The Kalam Argument: infinite regress and more

Astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace presented his
5-volume work on the solar system to Napoleon.
Napoleon wanted to know why it contained
no mention of the Creator.
Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/2/16.)

Image from NASA, public domain

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