Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

BSR 4: Who Created God?

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When the Christian declares that everything must have been created and that God was the creator of the universe, the atheist can reply, but who created God?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Who created God?

Christian response #1: This question is nonsensical. God is uncreated by definition.

Give God whatever properties you want—zero calories, organic, lemon scented, made of soap bubbles, whatever. You still must justify those claims. Some Bible verses suggest that God is eternal, but that’s not evidence. You can start by showing that God exists.

We’ve seen this trick before, in Bite-Size Reply 1, where the apologist tries to disqualify an argument to avoid having to address it. “Who created God?” is a reasonable question that follows naturally from the apologist saying, “Everything must have a creator, and in the case of the universe, God is that creator.” Or if the argument is, “Everything but God has a creator,” then justify that.

Give God whatever properties you want (like “uncreated”), but you still must justify them. You can start by showing that God exists. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Everyone believes in something eternal—if not the universe, then what caused it. Christians just believe that cause was personal, which explains the personal attributes of existence.

Christians believe? “I believe” here is in the same category as “I have faith,” but it’s better to let belief follow from sufficient evidence. Let’s rely on evidence-driven science, the discipline that has taught us what we reliably know so far about reality.

Science doesn’t call the universe eternal. Time in our universe had a beginning, though there’s likely more to be discovered. Science has unanswered questions about the universe, but it has the track record of providing reliable answers. Religion also has answers, but each religion’s origin story is incompatible with the next, making none worth believing in.

Pointing out the gaps in scientific knowledge does nothing to bolster religion’s claims (for example, undercutting evolution does nothing to strengthen Creationism). If Christianity wants to provide answers to science’s unanswered questions, it needs to do the heavy lifting itself. “But science doesn’t have an answer!” is no argument.

“But science doesn’t have an answer!” is no argument. If Christianity wants to provide answers to science’s unanswered questions, it needs to do the heavy lifting itself and make a strong case. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Person A borrows from B, but if B doesn’t have it, they borrow from C. At some point in the progression, someone must actually have the thing. When the thing is existence, that someone must be “a self-existent, eternal, necessary Being.”

Borrowing existence isn’t like borrowing a hammer or a cup of sugar. What does “borrowing existence” even mean? Let’s find a charitable interpretation and see it as a variation on Thomas Aquinas’s Argument of the First Cause: you can’t pass the buck forever, and the buck stops with God. God grounds existence.

That has a common-sense feel to it, but relying on common sense at the frontier of science is to bring a knife to a gunfight. The Big Bang, the event that brought the universe as we know it into existence 14 billion years ago, might’ve been a quantum event, and quantum physics throws common sense out the window. It is completely counterintuitive—events without causes, virtual particles popping into existence, quantum entanglement, quantum tunneling, quantum superposition, and so on.

Before you hypothesize a Being that is the source of existence, show that natural explanations are insufficient. That is, don’t simply say that science has unanswered questions about the origin of the universe (yes, it does). You must show that no natural explanation is possible. Otherwise, the consistent record of failure of supernatural explanations means that we have no reason to expect such a thing.

Thomas Aquinas argued that you can’t pass the buck forever, and the buck stops with God. God was the First Cause. This has a common-sense feel to it, but relying on common sense at the frontier of science is to bring a knife to a gunfight. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 5: The Bible is full of contradictions  

For further reading:

Religion gives us certainty without proof;
science gives us proof without certainty.
— a modified version of an Ashley Montagu quote

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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BSR 3: Christian Hypocrisy Proves Christianity False

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Are Christians consistent in the standards of truth they use for Christianity vs. what they use for other religions? Or do they hypocritically apply an easier standard for their favorite religion?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Christian hypocrisy proves Christianity is false.

Christian response #1: And does atheist hypocrisy prove atheism false? Everyone is hypocritical!

The hypocrisy that I notice is Christians giving their god a pass that they’d never give another religion. For example, there’s a worldwide pandemic right now, which would be an excellent opportunity for God to do something, anything, in an overt and public way. But he’s perpetually hidden, and his human handlers can always invent some excuse. Would Christians accept this from another religion?

Or think of the many clues that we don’t live in a world with a god. God needs praise and worship. Religious beliefs are just cultural traits. Life on earth is trivial in an unimaginably vast universe. Prayer doesn’t work. There is unnecessary pain. Does this look like a world with a god?

Or consider Bible contradictions. The Bible tells us that Christians sin (or don’t). Women proclaimed the news of the empty tomb (or didn’t). No one can see God (or can they?). Faith saves (or maybe it’s works). Jesus predicted the End in the lifetime of his hearers (didn’t happen). People deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins (or not).

Christians don’t see the double standard but would spot these problems in an instant in another religion.

God is hidden, the Bible contradicts itself, and our world looks like a world with no god. Christians don’t see the double standard but would spot these problems in an instant in another religion. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The Christian moral standard is grounded in God’s perfect moral nature. Of course Christians will fall short of the mark!

“God’s perfect moral nature”? Guess again. Any person who committed the atrocities that God did in the Old Testament isn’t moral. God defined the rules for slavery, creating an institution pretty much identical to slavery in the United States. He called for genocide. He demanded child sacrifice from the Jews. He imposes eternal punishment in hell. His morality in the book of Job was “might makes right.”

What moral standard does God follow? Certainly no moral standard acceptable in the Western world today. Maybe God’s morals weren’t bad compared to other Bronze Age gods of the Ancient Near East, but that is far from perfect morality.

As for people falling short of the mark, blame my imperfections on my Creator. That God created imperfect people and then is outraged that they don’t meet his high standards is a doctrine unworthy of any thoughtful person. Christopher Hitchens lampooned this by noting that, in Christianity, “We are created to be sick and commanded to be well.”

Maybe God was pretty good compared to other Bronze Age gods of the Ancient Near East, but that is far from perfect morality. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 4: Who created God?

For further reading:

In response to Adam and Eve’s eating the apple:
“There were only two of them
and you couldn’t keep an eye on them?
There’s THREE of you! What were you doing?”
— commenter LeekSoup at
Godless in Dixie blog

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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BSR 2: Jesus Is a Copycat Savior

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Was Jesus a copycat savior, with traits copied from prior mythologies?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Jesus is a copycat savior.

Christian response #1: “Whether it’s Mithras, Osiris, Horus, or any other ancient myth, none of them resemble Jesus as much as skeptics claim.”

Jesus resembles Dionysus in that both died and rose again. He resembles Helen of Troy in that both had supernatural conceptions. He resembles Asclepius in that both miraculously healed the sick. He resembles the Oenotropae, three sisters who could change water into wine. These figures all preceded Jesus, and they all came from nearby cultures that influenced Palestine.

No, Jesus’s biography isn’t identical to that for Dionysus. If it were, we’d call him “Dionysus.” The claim isn’t that these other supernatural figures were identical to Jesus, just that they were each identical on one supernatural point.

What’s likelier, that the supernatural traits of the Jesus story are all true or, like the prior mythological figures that share those traits, Jesus is mythological as well? If Jesus were historical, he wouldn’t look like a copycat savior with a crazy quilt of supernatural features picked from neighboring religions. A real god would’ve done something lasting—eliminating disease or terraforming Israel from a desert into a meadow—rather than fleeting miracles.

What’s likelier, that the supernatural traits of the Jesus story are all true or, like the prior mythological figures that share those traits, Jesus is mythological as well? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “Why would you be surprised that ancient people, when thinking about the existence and nature of God, would think of Him in ways that are similar to the true God?”

What true God? Honest scholars don’t presuppose a god into existence and then show it’s compatible with the evidence. Instead, they follow the evidence without preconception and let the conclusion take its own shape. There is no “true God” to test human religious ideas against.

But let’s accept the premise and suppose the true god were only vaguely perceptible. First, this shy and reluctant god doesn’t sound at all like Christianity. And second, we don’t see every culture with a vague sense of the true divine, comparing notes and coming together. World religions are diverging. Look at Christianity: there are tens of thousands of denominations, and this number grows by two per day. We find this same fertility in the world’s other religions.

You can imagine the Christian story as true and reinterpret other religions as supernaturally anticipating Christianity, but the naturalistic explanation is much more plausible. It neatly explains the facts, by hypothesizing that nearby cultures—Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and others—invented supernatural properties for their gods, and then a Jewish sect incorporated them into its new religion.

You can imagine the Christian story as true and reinterpret other religions as supernaturally anticipating Christianity, but the naturalistic explanation is much more plausible. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: “Skeptics who claim the story of Jesus is similar to ancient mythological gods are exaggerating and cherry-picking.”

You can sift through history, searching for surprising similarities such as the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy (both presidents were shot in the head, both were succeeded by southern Democrats named Johnson, both assassins were themselves killed before their trial, and more). Searching through millions of potential pairings and keeping the handful with the most curious coincidences, like this one—that’s cherry-picking. Starting with Jesus and looking for precedents in the supernatural traits of the gods from surrounding cultures is simply resolving a sensible question.

This is a poor comparison. The Lincoln/Kennedy similarities are natural; by contrast, Jesus, Dionysus, and other gods are supernatural. Lincoln and Kennedy are from history, while Dionysus, Asclepius, and quite possibly Jesus are legend and myth. Kennedy’s biography wasn’t tweaked to make it match Lincoln’s, but the traits of Jesus might have easily been cherry-picked from earlier gods. The Lincoln/Kennedy coincidences are surprising, but the similarities between Jesus and other gods have an unsurprising natural explanation.

Similarities between Jesus and earlier gods don’t prove there was borrowing, but that’s the way to bet. The Jesus story is best explained as legend and mythology, not history.

Similarities between Jesus and earlier gods don’t prove there was borrowing, but that’s the way to bet. The Jesus story is best explained as legend and mythology, not history.  [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 3: Christian Hypocrisy Proves Christianity Is False

For further reading:

Never attribute to malice that
which is adequately explained by stupidity.
— Hanlon’s Razor

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Image from Ruth Hartnup, CC license
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BSR 1: There Are No Objective Truths

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What kind of truths can be said to be objectively true?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There are no objective truths.

Christian response #1: Subjective truth claims are grounded in individuals and their opinions, while objective truth claims are grounded in (and tested against) reality. Dismissing objective truth—what causes disease, how fire can be mishandled, or 1 + 1 = 2—would lead to a dangerous society.

Objective truth isn’t the issue. Yes, it exists. The interesting question is whether objective moral truth exists. Christianity claims to be the gatekeeper to objective moral truth, but this bold claim is made without evidence. We can use the definition of objective morality from Christian apologist William Lane Craig: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” No, objective moral truth isn’t merely strongly felt or universally agreed-to morals.

Objective moral truths? The burden is on the Christian to show that moral values grounded outside of people exist. And these moral truths are useless unless they’re reliably accessible by everyone.

These objective moral truths should be obvious, so where are they? Not only do Christians disagree among themselves on abortion, same-sex marriage, contraception, euthanasia, and every other current moral debate, but modern Christians disagree with the Bible on God’s support for slavery, his demand for genocide, and more.

Objective moral truths? The burden is on the Christian to show that moral values grounded outside of people exist. And these moral truths are useless unless they’re reliably accessible by everyone. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “If there are no objective truths, then the statement, ‘There are no objective truths,’ can’t be objectively true.”

People interested in the truth respond to the strongest formulation of their opponent’s argument. Instead of straw-manning their argument (erecting an intentionally weak version and then knocking it over), a more honest approach is the reverse. Before you rebut an argument, improve it to be so clear and effective that your opponent would be satisfied using it themselves.

The gambit used in this Christian response attempts to get an argument dismissed on a technicality rather than face it, but the gambit fails. It’s easy to change “There are no objective [moral] truths” to “I see no objective moral truths; please show that they exist” or something similar. With a moment’s effort, we’ve changed a statement that self-destructs into a challenge that puts a central claim of Christianity in the crosshairs.

Change “There are no objective moral truths” to “I see no objective moral truths; show that they exist.” With a moment’s effort, we’ve changed a statement that self-destructs into a challenge that puts a central claim of Christianity in the crosshairs. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 2: Jesus Is a Copycat Savior

For further reading:

Dorothy: “We want to see the Wizard of Oz.”
Gatekeeper: “That’s impossible.
No one has ever seen the great wizard.”
Dorothy: “Then how do you know he exists?”

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Image from Federico Pitto, CC license
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Bite-Size Replies to Christian “Quick Shots”

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How are arguments best presented? One approach is from the Cold Case Christianity ministry, which has a mobile app that provides brief responses to common arguments. These are mostly atheist arguments—that there are no miracles, the Problem of Evil, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster—though a few are from other spiritual perspectives—all roads lead to God and sincerity is good enough. There are 28 of these “Quick Shots,” and they’re available in blog format as well.

We’ve seen lists of “Top 10 Atheist Arguments” at Christian blogs before. What’s unusual here is the format. The attack to the Christian worldview is presented as a single sentence, and there are two or three responses, each less than 200 words long. A “click to tweet” summary ends each response.

My initial reaction was cautious, because I wouldn’t want Christians to think that, just because they’ve found a paragraph with a response, he’s necessarily answered the challenge. On the other hand, everyone has to start somewhere. Reading off a paragraph you’ve just discovered during a live argument isn’t much, but it’s something. Only by jumping into the conversation will Christians see how inadequate simple apologetic answers are. (And once they’ve discovered that, they can move on to learning how inadequate the complex answers are.)

I’d like to respond to these Quick Shots in kind—I’ll call them Bite-Sized Replies (BSR). It’ll be a challenge, because this is different than how I usually write. Lately, I often find myself writing two- or three-part posts of several thousand words total with links to posts of mine and to references outside my blog. Let’s see how it goes with this new format. (Just to be clear, I’m planning this new abbreviated format just for these 28 BSRs, while retaining the more in-depth approach for other topics.)

As this series progresses, let me know what you think.

Continue to BSR 1: There Are No Objective Truths

Confusing arguments don’t succeed,
convincing arguments succeed.
Confusing arguments usually go unchallenged.
— commenter I Came To Bring The Paine

 

That is success in apologist world.
— commenter Greg G

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Image from Daniel X. O’Neil, CC license
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Complete list of Bite-Size Replies with links

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Hey, Fundamentalists! How Do You Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?

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I’ve written before about the scientific consensus, arguing that we laymen are in no position to reject the scientific consensus and dismantling popular conservative arguments that encourage us to do exactly that.

The Discovery Institute, that fearless citadel against evolution, barfs on thoughtful discourse with its article, To Have a View on the Darwin Debate, Do You Need a PhD in Evolutionary Science?

Let me abstract this post by answering that question: you’re welcome to have a view, but if that view rejects the overwhelming consensus in favor of evolution then yes, you need a PhD. And to correct the title, there is no “debate” over evolution—at least not within biology, the only place where such a debate would be relevant.

The article begins with a tweeted exchange between Kevin Williamson (correspondent for the National Review) and David Klinghoffer (senior fellow at the Discovery Institute).

Kevin Williamson: Evolution, like similarly specialized fields, is not really subject to casual opinion.

David Klinghoffer: And that is why [anyone], if he’s more than a casual thinker, gives it the needed study

Kevin Williamson: ‘The needed study’ = graduate-level work in evolutionary science.

The author of the unattributed article disagrees.

Just as you don’t need a graduate degree in meteorology to understand why tornados will never turn rubble into houses and cars, you don’t need “graduate-level work in evolutionary science” to understand that unintelligent forces alone cannot cause civilizations to arise on barren planets, and for the very same reasons.

I agree that any process analogous to a tornado won’t drive an organism to change, adapt, and improve as happens on earth. But that’s not evolution. A tornado is just random, while evolution has random elements plus selection to pick the organisms that best fit their environments. (Why is this elementary error so common within Creationism/Intelligent Design proponents? Do they have no interest in understanding what they’re rejecting?)

And note that this quote says that you don’t need a graduate degree to understand much of science. Yes, that’s true, but you do need one to reject the scientific consensus.

The author moves from not-a-biologist David Klinghoffer as an authority to not-a-biologist Jay Homnick. Homnick is a commentator, humorist, and deputy editor of The American Spectator. His homey logic neatly punctures the evolution balloon:

Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident . . . you have essentially lost your mind.

That’s some tough love, folks. A not-a-biologist has used the Argument from Incredulity to cut the Gordian Knot and give us the painful truth. “That’s just crazy talk! It don’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true!”

Homnick apparently thinks that the process of evolution is nothing but accident. It’s not. (That demand for graduate-level education in biology for those who would upset conclusions about evolution is sounding better all the time.)

Back to the article:

Jay Homnick is not a scientist, but unlike Kevin Williamson, he understands that you don’t need a scientific background to realize something is terribly wrong with the scientific “consensus” on evolution.

Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re justifying someone deliberately rejecting the consensus and drawing his own conclusion about biology when that someone doesn’t understand biology!

You may need a PhD before people will listen to you as an authority, but you emphatically don’t need one to draw the correct conclusion for yourself.

But if you aren’t qualified to do the first, how are you qualified to do the second? You admit you’re not an authority, but then you grant yourself the ability to “draw the correct conclusion”? The author is saying that to convince others you’ll need credentials, but your own opinion isn’t that important, so—what the heck?—discard those experts and pick your own conclusion.

I bet the author wants a Kim Davis world where government employees use their own religious beliefs as the final guide to their official actions, and candidates for public office reject any unpleasant scientific consensus and substitute their own conclusion.

Often it seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present to these people, or how clearly you present it. They’ll just keep saying, “All our elite scientists reject ID, who am I to question elite scientists?”

No, the question is: “Who am I to question those people who understand the evidence, since I don’t?” Sometimes a little humility is appropriate.

Meanwhile, as the evidence piles up, those same scientists keep repeating, “Intelligent design is not science, intelligent design is not science.”

“Evidence piles up,” you say?? So you are in favor of following the evidence-driven consensus after all! If the evidence is piling up to create a sea change within evolution, then just give it time and then follow that new consensus. That the author doesn’t express it this way shows how little he thinks of this new “evidence.”

Maybe someday in the future, after a poll shows that most of our elite scientists have finally accepted the obvious, folks like Kevin Williamson will say, “Wow, imagine that . . . believing that the survival of the fittest was enough to generate human brains and human consciousness. I guess that was a pretty stupid idea after all.”

Wow, imagine that . . . the ideas at the frontier of science don’t always conform to common sense. Maybe we should listen to those smart people who bring science to us after all.

Let’s return to the question in the title: “How Do You Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?” Answer: you can’t.

People say they love truth,
but in reality they want to believe
that which they love is true.
— Robert J. Ringer

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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