Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

Christians’ Relative Approach to Reality (2 of 2)

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Do Christians have a proprietary avenue to truth? We’re critiquing a Christian presentation of advice on finding Christian truth in three points. We’ve covered the first two points (study scripture and seek wise counsel) in part 1.

3. “Seek the consensus of historic Christianity”

I’m guessing this is a polite way of rejecting Roman Catholicism, the denomination that eclipses in size all the Protestant denominations put together. I imagine that the presenter, Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason ministry, would say that Catholicism relies on tradition too much, while his flavor of Christianity discards those manmade accretions and gets back to basics: nothing but the Bible.

But this doesn’t help since the Bible itself was manmade. It was written by men, and the canon (list of official books) was selected by men. And we’re back to the problem from point #1 in the previous post, that the Bible is ambiguous. You can make it into a sock puppet to make it say almost anything you want.

Shlemon said:

What has the Church taught for 2,000 years? If the idea or the claim that I am considering right now is contradicted by 2,000 years of church history, or it is a completely new idea, then it causes me to become suspicious.

“Church history”? Here again is the problem of manmade ideas. If the Roman Catholic Church’s traditions must be rejected because they were made by fallible men, why stop there? Apocalypticism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, mystery religions, and more influenced Christianity in its first couple of centuries, and there’s no reason to imagine that the crazy quilt that came out of that religious Petri dish was divinely guided. Paul documented the confusion: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ’ ” (1 Corinthians 1:12). In other words, Christianity is what it is today because of fallible men, in more areas than just Catholicism’s tradition.

Shlemon is on thin ice when he wants to go back 2000 years. To take one example of doctrine that wasn’t in the Bible but had to be decided by committee, the doctrine of the Trinity was in a form that we would recognize only after the Council of Constantinople in 381. That was just the second general church council, and there were 21 of them.

When Shlemon says, “Gimme some of that old-time religion,” what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t like this newfangled acceptance of same-sex marriage, abortion, and Christianity losing its hold on the morals of Western society (more).

I wonder what he thinks about other newfangled ideas like making slavery illegal, which, in the United States, happened in 1865. His response might be to argue that American slavery wasn’t the same as biblical slavery. (Wrong. They were pretty much identical, and the Bible gave Southern pastors the stronger argument on the slavery issue.)

We’d know that Christianity was correct if it (alone among all religions and philosophies) was dragging society into a more moral world. It isn’t, and Christianity looks like all the other religions, a conservative institution uninterested in change and trying to hold on to the status quo.

Where would Shlemon have us go? Should modern Christians try to recreate Christianity as practiced in Paul’s churches in the 50s? Paul’s idea of Jesus was very different from the gospels’. Or maybe the version practiced in the first church to use Mark’s gospel in the 70s. Or John’s significantly different gospel in the 90s. Or maybe after the Trinity was added more than two centuries later.

That’s a lot of effort just to justify wagging your finger at the Gays.

We have been divided on a whole bunch of things for hundreds if not thousands of years in some cases. But when it comes to the question of marriage and sex, all of the church, Protestant, Catholic, and even the Orthodox traditions, have been unanimous for 2,000 years.

Unanimous? Then what are these churches I see in the Pride parades? How is it that many Christians are okay with abortion? Bronze Age morality—genocide, slavery, ownership of women, rules against homosexuality, and more—has no place within modern society, and millions of Christians understand this. The 10 constitutional amendments in the Bill of Rights are much more valuable to American society today than the 10 Commandments.

The three rules in this lecture—study scripture, seek wise counsel, and seek the consensus of historic Christianity—claim to be able to reliably and honestly sift “biblical from bogus,” but they are only useful to solidify your current Christian position, whatever it is. Christians boast about their grasp of objective truth, but take them for a test drive, and these rules are relative just like everyone else’s.

Faith is to believe what you do not see;
the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
— Augustine

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Image from Lopez Robin, CC license
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Christians’ Relative Approach to Reality

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Christian apologists are eager to report that they alone have Truth with a capital T. What’s their secret? Let’s take a look at one list of rules that, we’re told, will reliably lead someone through the maze of religious claims to the truth.

The problem is real. Paul said, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). That didn’t happen, and there are now 45,000 Christian denominations. The Bible is the perfect word from a perfect divinity, and yet it’s somehow so ambiguous that Christians can’t figure out fundamental issues of doctrine (more).

Our source is an article in Christian Post that summarized a recent lecture by Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason. Let’s see if this apologist shows us how to separate, as promised, “biblical from bogus.”

1. “Study scripture”

The first rule is that when you’re puzzled by an idea or claim, “we need to test it against Scripture.”

And there’s the problem, presupposing the Bible is correct up front. Why test an idea against the standard of the Bible? Since the Bible is full of contradictions and God has terrible morals, it should be the other way around. Presupposing the correctness of the Bible is a fundamental flaw at the argument’s foundation, but it isn’t even acknowledged.

Studying scripture gets into other dubious but popular rules of thumb like “let easy verses interpret difficult ones.” The idea here is that when you find some Bible verses that fit nicely into your Christian thinking but others that seem in opposition, don’t consider the obvious naturalistic possibility that the Bible was put together over centuries by different people with different agendas whose writings aren’t consistent. No, you should instead let the easy verses interpret difficult verses. And by this, they of course mean that you use the verses you like to reinterpret the unpleasant verses.

And there are more biased rules.

Let me respond with my own rule, that Christians must take four steps before they deliver their rationalization for why God looks like a Bronze Age barbarian. These hold Christians’ feet to the fire so they accept the consequences of their claims. I discuss them in detail here, but very briefly, Christians must:

  1. Acknowledge that God sure looks like a moral monster, even if you want to argue that, in fact, he isn’t.
  2. You say God might have his reasons for acting this way? Share them with us. Make a list of plausible reasons God might have for allowing a tsunami to kill 200,000 people or for letting a child die of leukemia.
  3. Show that this God plausibly exists. “You can’t prove no God” is no argument.
  4. A Greatest Possible Being could achieve goals without suffering. Justify why God didn’t take this route.

2. “Seek wise counsel”

Admitting that you don’t have all the answers and listening to others sounds like good advice, but the advice really is to seek wise counsel from people within your church or denomination. This isn’t a search for the truth, it’s a search for rationalizations that will keep you a Christian, preferably in the denomination of the person giving the advice. How do you know their denomination is the correct one? Not by following the evidence but by listening to faith.

Christian faith is fragile. The Christian vessel must be insulated as much as possible from outside influences. Christians acknowledge this when they fret about sending their children to secular universities, but they never stop to think what this means. If the claims of Christianity were easy to verify, who would have doubts? Why is Christian doubt even a thing? And isn’t it odd that Christians must reject, ignore, or reinterpret the doubts that their God-given brain tells them?

The religion from a real omnipotent and omniscient god would be unambiguous. It’d be simple. Christianity isn’t.

Rule 1 is “study scripture,” pretending that the Bible has a single interpretation. Rule 2 is “seek wise counsel,” but this can only be a quest to tamp down annoying doubts and maintain the status quo.

We’ll conclude with a final rule in part 2.

When it comes to Jesus,
as Albert Schweitzer pointed out long ago,
historians all too often have
“looked into the long well of history”
and seen their own reflection staring back at them.
— James Tabor at Bart Ehrman blog

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Image from commenter epeeist, used with permission
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Religions Continue to Diverge. What Does that Tell Us?

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Suppose supernatural truths exist, but we could only dimly perceive them. J.R.R. Tolkien expressed this idea this way: “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light. . . . Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour.”

What would this look like? How could we tell that we lived in such a world?

We might see a Babel of religions because of our imperfect understanding, but we’d also see convergence. As the disparate religious groups compared notes, common supernatural truths would become apparent. Positive feedback would take hold as we matched our tentative consensus against that rudimentary understanding of the Divine. And if that supernatural Divine wanted us to understand, it would nudge us in the right direction so Humanity would gradually cobble together an accurate understanding.

Of course, in the case of Christianity where God is eager for each of us to have a relationship with him, we should see not a nudge or a vague hint of the celestial truth but overwhelming and unmistakable evidence that he exists.

Follow the evidence

What we see is neither overwhelming evidence nor even dimly perceived evidence. Humanity sees no common truth that pushes religions toward a single consensus view—there isn’t even any agreement on the number of gods or their names, let alone what it takes to please him/them. Religion’s fragmentation is bad and getting worse. For example, Christianity has 45,000 denominations now, and that is expected to grow to 70,000 by 2050.

The U.S. has bred important new Christian denominations including Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarian Universalist Church, Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, Messianic Judaism, Shakers, Mormonism, and Pentecostalism. Outside of Christianity we find new religions such as Rastafari, Church of Satan, Cargo cults, Theosophical Society, Transcendental Meditation movement, Wicca, Neopaganism, and UFO cults such as Raëlism, Heaven’s Gate, Nation of Islam, and Scientology. Dozens of new religious movements spring up each year just in the United States.

The unstoppable growth of religious diversity is shown visually by the tree of world religions and the map of world religions.

If there is a supernatural truth out there and if beliefs are steered by reality (instead of wishful thinking, say), you’d think that religious claims would be tested and either kept or dropped based on how well they matched reality. With this view, we’d see humankind gradually converge on a single religious story. And yet we see the opposite because evidence doesn’t drive the search for religious truth.

Christian response

What then explains the popular Christian apologists who weave elaborate intellectual arguments for the strength of the Christian position? They’re simply supporting conclusions already made, and they get their support from Christians who want a pat on the head and assurance that there’s scholarly backing for beliefs they hold for no more substantial reason than that they were part of their environment growing up.

(Yes, adults do switch religions, but this is rare. Believers adopt a religion, not because it is the truth, but because it’s the religion of their culture. Only one percent of believers switch in as adults.)

The Christian response is often to emphasize Christianity’s unique aspects. “Okay, maybe Christianity wasn’t the first to celebrate a virgin birth or have a dying-and-rising god,” they admit, “but look how it’s different—look at its unique features!”

Sure, Christianity is unique. Every religion is unique. But the problem remains: if your religion looks like just another manmade religion, why would we think it’s correct? Why pick it over the rest? We shouldn’t, and since it looks like nothing more than a manmade religion, it should be rejected like the rest.

Another popular response is to argue that the one true God could have his reasons for not making clear the correct path. We simply don’t understand them. Yes, this is possible, but this is the “Aha—you haven’t proven me wrong!” gambit, which again is no justification for belief. You don’t hold beliefs because they haven’t been proven wrong; you hold them because there’s evidence that they’re right. Honest truth seekers follow the evidence, and it doesn’t point to Christianity.

Where does this leave Christianity?

Christians agree that people invent religions. That’s how they explain all those other religions. But in explaining away the other religions, they’ve explained away their own. Christianity looks like just one more manmade religion.

Religion is driven by human imagination and emotions, evolving as social conditions change, with no reality to tie it down. There is no loving god desiring a relationship who would make his existence known to us, and Christians use faith to camouflage this embarrassing fact. There’s not even a cosmic truth “seen through a glass, darkly” (that is, seen in a mirror, dimly). The glass isn’t dark; it’s black. There is no external truth nudging us in the right direction.

Christians, drop the pretense that this is an intellectual project. Admit, at least to yourselves, that your belief is cultural and built on nothing more solid than tradition.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/16/15.)

Image from Mike Mozart, CC license

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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga (3 of 3)

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Alvin Plantinga is a professor emeritus from Notre Dame. Given that he is a philosopher, you’d expect better arguments than these three that he used in a New York Times interview.

You’d expect wrong.

I wondered if these were casual arguments, tossed out without much thought during a live interview. Could that explain why they were so poor? Nope: the original article makes clear that this interview was done by email, so Plantinga’s answers were presumably carefully considered.

Let’s move on to the final argument that I will be critiquing (part 1 here). (And there are more. Read the original interview if you want more weeds to chop down.)

#3. Evolution gives us beliefs that are just as likely to be false as true

The interviewer said, “So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.”

Plantinga replied:

Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable. Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent.

Huh? Why imagine that beliefs are as likely to be false as true? We’ve seen this odd thinking before in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (I respond to that argument here). He begins with the valid observation that beliefs honed by evolution are useful for survival but don’t need to be true. (I’d argue that supernatural beliefs are an example.) His illustration is an imaginary Neolithic man who believes two odd things: that tigers are cuddly and that the best way to pet a tiger is to run away from it. The first belief is bad for survival and the second is false, but these two beliefs combine into a protective pair.

But why imagine it ends there? If every belief is a roll of the dice, our primitive man would have no beliefs shaped by reality. He might respond to sleepiness by drinking water, to thirst by finding a warm place, to cold by getting out of the sun, and so on. He’s too dumb to live, and that’s where evolution comes in. Reality is a demanding mistress, and beliefs not in accord with reality are judged harshly. If your beliefs for finding food, water, and shelter don’t fit well with reality, evolution will have something to say about it.

Plantinga clearly has little difficulty sifting true survival beliefs from false ones, and he’ll agree that we are all pretty good at this, too. And yet his hypothetical primitive man isn’t. I assume Plantinga concludes, via reductio ad absurdum, that such a man couldn’t exist, so therefore God must step in to impose correct beliefs on us. If evolution can’t be trusted to work for human beliefs, the same must be true for other animals, so God must impose survival beliefs on them, too.

I think I’ll go with the consensus view of the people who understand the evidence, not non-biologist Alvin Plantinga.

Extrapolate to many beliefs

There’s one more bit of childish logic that needs to be addressed.

Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability—say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true—our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

First, our beliefs aren’t independent. When one belief has proven itself to be reliable through repeated use, we might build on that foundation by trying out additional provisional beliefs.

Second, it’s true that the more imperfect beliefs you collect, the likelier that one or more are false. Plantinga’s probability of 0.0004 for 67 out of 100 beliefs to be true may be correct when these tenuous beliefs have only a probability of 0.5 of being true. Survival beliefs, whether instinctive (“things that smell bad can make you sick if you eat them”) or taught (“prey animals tend to congregate at water holes at dawn and dusk”), usually have a probability of being true far higher than 0.5.

And finally, Christians and atheists all agree that human brains are imperfect. They can be changed by an injury, drugs, or a tumor. They’re subject to mental illness, dementia, biases, and illusions. They work less well when we’re hungry, stressed, or tired. (The story of Phineas Gage is a dramatic illustration that the mind is a product of a physical brain and nothing more.)

Plantinga is correct that our brains are imperfect, but then he proposes that Christians believe them when they report that God exists? The Christian claims are about the most ludicrous possible, and they need a mountain of evidence. Plantinga doesn’t have it.

Instead of faith, science compensates for our imperfect hardware with the scientific method. Conclusions are always tentative. There are rewards for overturning the consensus view. The result is science’s imperfect but still prodigious track record of results. Religion has, not a poorer track record, but no track record of teaching us new things about reality.

These three arguments add to the pile of really poor apologetics from famous Christians. I hope they provided a little practice for you and that you’re now better prepared in case you come across them in the future.

Perhaps the most optimistic spin I can put on this exercise is Catherine Aird’s observation, “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”

If this is the best that theology can do,
theology is in big trouble.
— Dr. Massimo Pigliucci,
in response to this interview of Alvin Plantinga

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Image public domain
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga (2 of 3)

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Alvin Plantinga is an eminence within the Christian apologetic community, but even he can only play the hand he was dealt. He was interviewed by the New York Times and gave three arguments (or sub-arguments) so stupid that a high school student shouldn’t be allowed to get away with them (part 1 here).

One Christian responded to comments to the interview:

It appears that many of the commenters either didn’t read the interview carefully or didn’t understand Plantinga’s arguments. They’re much more sophisticated and formidable than some of the superficial dismissals of the commenters might lead one to believe.

Sophisticated and formidable? That certainly doesn’t apply to these arguments. See what you think.

#2. Moon no longer connected to lunacy

Plantinga’s interviewer asked about the God-of-the-gaps problem: explanation is a zero-sum game, and things that science explains well—like lightning, drought, and disease—no longer need the God hypothesis. The list of things that God could plausibly cause continues to shrink. The interviewer gave evolution as an example of something that science now explains much better than Christianity ever could and asked, “Isn’t a major support for atheism the very fact that we no longer need God to explain the world?”

Plantinga responded:

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy.

Right—we have lots of reasons to believe the moon exists. Drop “Of course the moon exists—how else would you explain lunacy?” and you have more reasons. By contrast, we have pretty much zero reasons to believe God exists, and Plantinga in this article does nothing to change that.

The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism.

As we saw in part 1, Plantinga’s definition of an atheist is someone who says, “I’m certain God doesn’t exist” rather than “I have no God belief, but I’m not certain.” I agree that evolution’s explanatory power doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist (and so can’t help atheist #1), but then that’s not my definition. I go where the evidence points (atheist #2), and by explaining the diversity of life on earth by evolution, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Richard Dawkins).

Here’s my distillation of Plantinga’s argument: we have many reasons to believe the moon exists, so if one reason goes away, we’re still justified in believing in the moon. No one questions the existence of the moon, in no small measure because can all see it! Contrast that with God: before modern science, Christians explained puzzles in nature with the stock answer, “God did it.” There was no evidence to support this claim, but (in Europe) Christianity was pretty much the only game in town. Now with science explaining things far better than Christianity ever could, Christians have even fewer reasons to accept the Christian claims.

Plantinga tries to salvage his discouraging situation by acknowledging that there are fewer reasons to believe in God now but pointing out that the number of reasons isn’t yet zero.

Let’s return to the opening point, “as a justification of atheism, [God being replaced by science] is pretty lame.” Redefine atheism as most of us see it (lack of god belief), and science’s incredible track record for explaining reality vs. Christianity’s inability to teach us anything new actually makes a powerful argument. Not only does the Bible not pass on any useful science (how about a recipe for soap or an explanation of how to avoid spreading disease?), but many of its claims about nature are wrong.

Imagine someone saying that just because some of the miraculous claims for alchemy are false, that doesn’t make them all false. That’s true, but we now know that they are indeed all false. Christianity has traveled the same road.

Concluded in part 3 with the claim that beliefs provided by evolution are as likely false as true.

Madness is rare in individuals,
but in groups, states, and societies,
it’s the norm.
— Friedrich Neitzche

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Image from Marc Arias, CC license
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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

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Famous Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga was interviewed in 2014 for the New York Times. He used three arguments that may have originated with him. These are not your typical arguments that end with “So therefore, God exists; QED,” but they could be elements in a larger argument.

The good news is that these are, at least to me, fresh arguments . . . but that’s the extent of the good news. Still, if you want some new chew toys, here you go. Have your way with these arguments and then read my critiques to see if I covered every point.

#1. Are there an even number of stars?

Plantinga said:

Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?”

His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’”

But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism. . . . Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

Let’s first address his statement, “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism.” For most of us, lack of evidence is excellent grounds for atheism.

The problem is his definition of “atheism.” A few sentences earlier, Plantinga had defined atheism as “the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.” That’s also the leading definition in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This strong atheism, which accepts the burden of proof, is probably not how most of us define atheism, but Plantinga is on solid ground with that definition, and he did make his definition clear.

That means his “lack of evidence . . . is no grounds for atheism” applause line is correct using his definition, but it’s irrelevant to the question of God’s existence. Lack of evidence is indeed grounds for atheism if “atheism” is simply a lack of god belief.

Plantinga said, “The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism,” and I am indeed an agnostic because I don’t know. I’m also an atheist because I don’t believe.

Determining the number of stars raises practical questions, but let’s ignore that tangent and simply imagine a star counter changing rapidly (perhaps thousands of times a second). All we care about is that last digit—is it odd or even at any moment? This is identical to the question of whether a flipped coin landed heads up or not. It’s a 50/50 question (that is, 50 percent likelihood of odd or even, or a probability of 0.5).

But is the God question just a coin flip? Is God’s existence as likely as not? Of course not, and his comparison fails.

Plantinga seems to imagine “God exists—true or false?” to be like a stranger saying, “I have a bumfuzzle in this box—true or false?” We don’t know what a bumfuzzle is, how plausible it would be to have one, whether it would fit in a box, and so on, so without any data, we’re stuck at 50/50. If forced to guess at this point on the truth of the bumfuzzle claim, we might as well flip a coin.

By contrast, we already know much about the claims for God. We don’t start at 50/50 (that is, complete ignorance) on the God question. For example, I’ve written a series of silver bullet arguments against Christianity. Any one of these arguments make the God hypothesis very implausible, and I’ve written 26 such arguments (and counting).

Would Plantinga give a 50/50 chance to the likelihood of every supernatural being existing—Xenu, Poseidon, Quetzalcoatl, and all the rest? If instead he assigns the existence of each of these gods a very low probability (as I’m guessing he does), then consistency demands that he accept our doing the same for his god.

Burden of proof

I suspect apologists like Plantinga are simply tired of shouldering the burden of proof, and they want to start the debate at parity with atheism. To see why this fails, let’s return to the two relevant kinds of burdens of proof from a recent post.

  1. The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proof, and the person making the mundane claim doesn’t. For example, if I state that many world leaders aren’t human but actually alien reptoids (and you argue that this hypothesis is false), I have the burden of proof because I’m making the extraordinary claim. If I fail to make my case, you are logically obliged to reject it.
  2. Anyone who makes a claim is obliged to defend that claim, whether it’s extraordinary or mundane.

In that post, I examined cases where apologists confused these two burden-of-proof situations. Plantinga argues that God exists, which clearly puts him in category 1.

No one cares about the number of stars, but religious views are enormously consequential for some. I can appreciate that Plantinga may be tired of shouldering the burden of proof, but in that case he should stop making nutty claims.

Notice the irony in this comparison. We know stars exist. We know that countless things exist. God is the odd exception where we can’t get into a discussion of his properties until his very existence has been demonstrated, and there’s a mountain of evidence against it.

Bertrand Russell’s teapot

The interviewer asked Plantinga about Bertrand Russell’s hypothesized teapot orbiting the sun. Wouldn’t that be a better comparison than even-star speculation? Yes, such a teapot might exist, Russell said, but we have no good reason to think so, and the same thinking applies to God.

Plantinga responded:

Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism.

He goes on to list a few things that argue against an orbiting teapot. Such a project would be in the news (like Elon Musk’s personal Tesla, which now orbits the sun), and a secret rocket launch would be unlikely. Space programs don’t have the budget for frivolous projects like this. Therefore, we have good evidence against Russell’s teapot.

Yes, Dr. Plantinga, I agree. Now apply that same skepticism to the God hypothesis and think of things that we would see if God were real.

  • Europe during the 1000+ years when Christianity was in charge would’ve looks a lot more enlightened than other world societies. It wasn’t.
  • Religion wouldn’t look like just another societal trait. It does.
  • The Christian god wouldn’t need praise and worship, like an Iron Age dictator. He does.
  • Christian televangelists would know that God’s favor would be far more consequential than mere financial donations, and yet they still ask for donations.
  • And lots more here.

So the God question isn’t a 50/50 proposition about which we have no good information (like the number of stars), and it’s very much like Russell’s teapot (which has strong evidence against it). Plantinga is now back at square 1, advancing a ridiculous hypothesis.

And where is Plantinga’s evidence for God? He handwaves a reference to his famous “two dozen or so” arguments for God. He didn’t argue for them, so I won’t respond here, but if you want a critique, Richard Carrier did his typically thorough job on them here.

These Christian arguments are embarrassing and stupid. According to reputation, Plantinga is one of the best that Christianity has to defend their position, but smart high school students could take his arguments apart.

Continue to part 2 for an argument involving the moon.

If your Bible (et al) cannot get the natural right,
why would I trust it to get the supernatural right?
— commenter from Castilliano

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Image from Lucky Lynda, CC license
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