Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

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

God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship (part 4)

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Why would a perfect god accept praise or worship? Donald Trump would, but how could this make sense for a perfect god?

Let’s continue with Christian apologists’ justifications for praise and worship of God (part 1 here).

6. “By praising God, we are reminded of the greatness of God!”

I’ve used lots of quotes to illustrate the Christian position.

[God is] saying, “if you serve Me things will go well with you because this is how I intended the whole thing to work. I love you and want only the best for you. It’s good for you to acknowledge the natural order of things: the way things simply are.” (Source)

Sounds like what slave owners taught their slaves.

Praising God is useful and favorable for us. By praising God, we are reminded of the greatness of God! (Source)

According to the Bible, our purpose, the reason we are here, is for God’s glory.  In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will. This is what glorifies him. (Source)

We are not worthy even to gather up the crumbs under your table (from the “Prayer of Humble Access” from the 1993 Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church).

When Christians say this, it’s not with head hung and feet dragging. Telling God how fantastic he is (and, conversely, how worthless they are) suits them just fine. The people in church praying with their eyes shut and hands forward to collect the holy baryons (or whatever the custom is in your local church) are getting an emotional reward.

Here’s how one person describes the experience. Here is their response to the lyrics, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, / oh my soul, / worship His Holy Name / Sing like never before, / oh my soul, / I’ll worship your holy name”:

The first time I heard this praise song it melted my heart and brought tears to my eyes.

I didn’t know the name of it. I didn’t know who wrote it or who was singing it. I just knew my heart was bursting with praise and that I was in the presence of the Lord.

To some, a worship song is just a song. But to the believer, a heart of praise is a surrendered heart to the will of God, and open to the moving of the Spirit.

For some, the process of praising a god (and, in so doing, putting themselves in a subordinate position) is a reassuring thing. Losing yourself in the embrace of something greater than you are can be comforting. If there’s a god that’s vastly smarter, more powerful, and more compassionate than you, then you’re in good hands. It’s a way of patting yourself (since God won’t) and saying, “There, there—everything’s going to be all right.”

Worship can have meditative benefits like prayer, and it can keep our egos in check. But these are benefits in the here and now. God doesn’t have to exist for worship to be a thing.

Debasement feels good

You don’t need to be born again; you need to grow up. The problem is that the church is not your ally. As John Shelby Spong observed, “The church doesn’t like for people to grow up because you can’t control grown-ups.”

I’ve written about how Christianity infantilizes people here and here. Let’s explore that a little more.

Worship is the art of losing self in the adoration of another. . . . To truly worship God, we must let go of our self-worship.

. . . The physical acts often associated with worship—bowing, kneeling, lifting hands—help to create the necessary attitude of humility required for real worship. (Source)

The worship habits that feel good—that scratch that psychological itch—will stick and become part of a church’s custom. The priesthood is motivated to help. These are natural reasons that help explain the custom of god worship. No actual god is needed.

Here’s a sensible bit of caution.

Too many people say that they cannot praise God while refugees wander without a home, while people freeze to death for lack of shelter, while children remain hungry, while hatred runs free in our streets, and on down the list of social ills. (Source)

But they have an odd solution.

Perhaps this is part of the reason for everything feeling overwhelming or out of control; we have forgotten how to sing God’s praises every day. . . . If the world is overwhelmed with hatred and poverty and fear, it is not God’s doing. God is still God in the midst of the mess we have created.

Yeah, when the world sucks, don’t blame God. It’s not like he created everything. Let’s only credit God with the good stuff because he might get sad if you pointed to “his” creation and demanded that he explain himself.

You paint a pathetic picture of your god. How can you praise God when he helps without cursing him when he doesn’t? More than 1000 garment workers died when a building collapsed in Bangladesh in 2013. The last survivor pulled from the rubble had survived an incredible 17 days. Her sister said, “We got her back just when we had lost all our hope to find her alive. . . . God is so merciful.”

If that was God being merciful to you, then he was being a mass murderer to the families who lost loved ones.

The self-debasing attraction of worship has a natural explanation. Worshipping God simply because he’s powerful is like worshipping a natural disaster because it, too, is powerful and deadly, which is kind of what ancient people did. Perhaps Christianity personifies nature.

Note also that we see no equivalent within science, the discipline that actually does get results. Perhaps then worship is an ancient vestigial artifact we have yet to get rid of.

Continued in part 5.

The most preposterous notion ever conceived by homo sapiens
is that the Lord God, creator and shaper of all the universe,
wants the prayers of his subjects, and the adulations of his subjects,
and that if he doesn’t get this flattery he becomes petulant.
This absurd notion, without a trace of evidence to back it up,
pays for the biggest, least productive industry on Earth.
— Lazarus Long
(quoted by Ray Romano at the 1995 AAI Convention)

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Image via Stephen O, CC license
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God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship (part 3)

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Why would a perfect god accept praise or worship? Donald Trump, sure, but a perfect god?

Let’s continue with Christian apologists’ justifications for praise and worship of God (part 1 here).

3. Worship isn’t for God’s benefit but Man’s

We don’t worship God because He needs it (He needs nothing and is entirely self-sufficient), but because we need it. . . . God “needs” no worship whatever because in Christian theology, He needs nothing. He’s completely all-sufficient and self-sufficient. It’s for our sake that we “render unto God’s what is rightfully God’s.” (Source)

Don’t tell me that God gets no benefit from human actions. Burnt offerings are a “pleasing aroma” in the Bible, but this wasn’t like incense, where God could take it or leave it. This is explicitly labeled a food offering 27 times in the Old Testament. And in the Garden of Eden story, God created Adam to be the gardener (Genesis 2:15).

Getting onto more cerebral or emotional needs, God refers to “everyone . . . whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:7). No, God isn’t “entirely self-sufficient” when humans support his Maslow’s pyramid, providing food and labor at the bottom and glory and esteem at the top.

Christianity confuses itself because God evolved dramatically through the Bible. Perhaps an apologist could cherry pick Bible verses later in the Bible to show that God is aloof from human actions. Maybe this god sings along with Simon and Garfunkel, “I am a rock / I am an island.” But early in his development, God needed humans, and that included their worship.

4. Or maybe worship is for God’s benefit

It must be maddening being a Christian apologist. You’ve just taught some manners to an insolent atheist cur with the back of your hand and a powerful argument when a fellow Christian comes along and undercuts it.

Argument 3 declared that worship is for our benefit, not God’s. And 4 says the opposite:

God created us for His pleasure (just as we create delightful things for our pleasure). Praising God—acknowledging His goodness, love, perfection, and all the incredible things He has done for us—brings Him pleasure. If you have children, you know what a beautiful thing it is to have them praise you. (Source)

Yes, I have children. No, I don’t want them praising me. Love, appreciation, thanks, and so on (as appropriate) is great, but not praise.

We praise children. God is like a child in this sense—or like a happy performing artist. Creation is like a great performance in which the artist loves to create and also loves to be praised for creating. Praise of God is a gift to be prayed for, not a duty to be performed. (Source)

We praise God like a child? I suppose “Aren’t you the smart boy for tying your shoes?” becomes, “Didn’t you create a nice earth?”

And “Nice job destroying Sodom and Gomorrah. You’re so thorough!”

And “What a pretty rainbow—and the bunnies are so fluffy!”

Maybe you ought to talk it over with the source for argument #3 to get your story straight. Like the poor analogies in argument 2, the Christian might retreat by saying that analogies only go so far. Fair enough—if the analogies are poor (like God as a child) then don’t use them.

5. Why worship? Because the Bible tells me so.

You might think that praise is the same as saying “thank you,” but there is a difference. . . . All believers are commanded to praise God! (Source)

The Bible commands it. As the Psalmist says, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord” (Psalm 150:6). (Source)

Why is praising God important? The reasons are countless. First, God deserves to be praised and He is worthy to receive our praise: “For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods” (Psalm 96:4). (Source)

There are a mountain of Bible verses with this demand.

“If you do not listen, and if you do not resolve to honor my name,” says the Lord Almighty, “I will send a curse on you, and I will curse your blessings” (Malachi 2:2–3).

Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water (Revelation 14:7).

At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth (Philippians 2:10).

This isn’t God wanting praise simply because it’s the best thing for us. This is a demand.

We laypeople get a piece of that with the song with the phrase, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and mighty! / God in three persons, blessed Trinity!” And then Revelation talks about the four living creatures who say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” (Revelation 4:8), forever.

And Christians wonder what is weird about worship when their god tolerates that.

Continued in part 4.

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father,
expects or requires no worship or praise from us,
but that He is even infinitely above it.
— Benjamin Franklin

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Image via Pixabay, CC license
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When Christian Arguments Backfire

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Christians need to more carefully check the arguments they use. Sometimes these arguments blow up in their faces.

One example is William Lane Craig’s use of A.N. Sherwin-White’s rule of thumb about the growth of legend (discussed in detail here). Craig proclaims that legendary growth is slow when he wants to argue that the gospels are reliable history, but then he’s happy to point to legendary growth when he wants to reject the dozens of noncanonical gospels!

Gospel contradictions and airplane crashes

Apologists walk a similar knife edge with the problem of contradictions between the gospels.

The skeptic will demand, How many women went to the tomb? Was the tomb already open when they got there? How many angels were there? What was the women’s emotional reaction at the tomb? Did the women tell the disciples? The gospels disagree on the answers. (I document a long list of contradictions here.)

That the most important part of the Bible is full of contradictions about the easy part—the basic facts of the story—raises questions about reliability of the supernatural parts.

Neil Mammen responds to this challenge with “Gospel contradictions? Why they don’t exist. A Little Experiment to Teach Skeptics about NT Accuracy.” He uses a 2005 incident at Chicago’s Midway airport in which an airplane skidded off the runway in heavy snow to highlight the fallibility of journalists’ reporting.

He looks at five media sources written within days of the event. Each is a one- to three-sentence summary. Here are the inconsistencies he found across the sources.

#1. According to the first source, the plane went through a “boundary fence,” hit two cars, and killed a child in one of the cars.

#2. Now only one car is mentioned, there’s no fence, and it’s a “6-year old boy.”

#3. The two cars and one death are mentioned, but the fence has become a “security wall.”

#4. Now it’s a “safety barrier,” and the car(s) and death are not mentioned.

#5. No cars, no fence, and no deaths.

He wonders what to make of this, since the accounts vary so widely. Which is it—one car or two? A dead boy or a dead child or none? Some truths, some lies, and some errors? Or all lies? Or all errors? Is it a legend? A total fabrication?

He parallels this with complaints about Bible contradictions. You have multiple sources in the airplane story, which is a good thing, because each source can bring new insights. The same is true for the gospel accounts.

The airplane story and the resurrection story each have inconsistencies surrounding their own common core. In Chicago, did the plane hit one car or two? In the Bible, did one, two, three, or more women come to the tomb? And so on. Let’s be consistent, he says—if you want to reject the resurrection story for inconsistent accounts, do the same for this airplane story.

He also emphasizes that this doesn’t point to the gospel story being “a fabrication.”

Just a few quibbles

  • First, notice the brevity of the accounts—that’s because they’re photo captions! They work as an abstract of the story, but no one would argue that they’re complete or that they attempt to be. Read the accompanying stories and then let’s talk about serious inconsistencies.
  • Caption 4 is just one sentence long. It doesn’t mention the car, thought the accompanying photo might have told that part of the story. For example, here is one such photo. Also, the title accompanying this summary is, “Plane slides off Chicago runway, boy killed,” which adds yet more information. Taking these into account, the inconsistencies go away.
  • Caption 5 (here) has been truncated. Add the next sentence, and the boundary fence, car, and death are back in.
  • The only arguments I ever hear about the gospel story being fabricated (that is, deliberately invented, like a hoax) come from the Christian apologists. It’s a fun straw man to knock over, I suppose, but it’s a waste of time since that’s not the argument.

And now, let me agree

Using photo captions makes this experiment useless as a comparison, but the larger point is correct. Yes, journalists can be wrong, and articles can be incomplete. Let’s start with this point of agreement to see where that takes us in an analysis of the gospel stories.

Modern journalists are trained to focus on the facts. For some media, fact checkers double check to verify that the story is correct. Journalists can be penalized for errors in their stories. Now instead of modern journalists, imagine the followers of a religious leader in pre-scientific Palestine. Their Truth may not have been bound by any sense of journalistic accuracy.

Now add over forty years of oral history before the gospels are written.

Now make that forty years happen in a foreign culture, a Greek culture already familiar with miracles such as turning water into wine, virgin births, and dying-and-rising gods.

Now separate our oldest copies from the gospel originals by centuries. That’s a long time for rival traditions to fight it out and for copyists to add or delete as their own beliefs demanded. (I’ve discussed this long journey here, here, here, and here.)

Now how much confidence can we have in the account?

The Christian may respond that the Holy Spirit didn’t much care about preserving accuracy. It pleased him to trust fallible human processes to document the Greatest Story Ever Told. He was content to let the gospels look no different from other supernatural musings that we justifiably dismiss to the bins of Mythology or Legend.

Neil Mammen might ask us to look to the overlap of the gospel stories to find the truth, but with this approach, we’ve lost Jesus’s last words, the location where the disciples were to meet the risen Jesus, Paul’s 500 eyewitnesses, and even the explanation for how the story spread (in Mark, the women keep silent), but no matter.

Does this approach work elsewhere—when there are competing stories, do we assume the overlapping part must be true? We usually don’t do this for UFO abduction stories. Or the stories from people who saw the 1917 Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal, an accepted Catholic miracle. Or claims from alchemy. Or the accounts by the eleven Mormons who claimed to have seen the golden plates. Competing tales that are supernatural or at least extraordinary can be and usually are all wrong.

Mammen’s article argues that professional reporters can’t be trusted to get the details right on a mundane story that happened the previous day. But then it expects us to believe the gospel accounts (already suspect because they are full of the supernatural) that were written down decades later? His “little experiment to teach skeptics about NT accuracy” seems to have blown up in his face.

Christians, consider your arguments lest they backfire.

’Tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard
(that is, blown up with his own bomb).
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3, scene 4

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/10/14.)

Image via Alexis Breaux, CC license

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God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship (part 2)

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Why is praise and worship a thing within Christianity? What god would need or want praise? God demanding worship is like Kim Il Sung (or Donald Trump) demanding worship.

Let’s continue with Christian apologists’ justifications for praise and worship of God (part 1 here).

2. Because God’s relationship to us is analogous to those of other people whom we praise

Many Christians point to people we praise—our parents or our children, for example—and then imagine an analogy with God. Let’s look at these human relationships to see if the analogy holds up. Pay close attention to the verbs used in these relationships.

Your relationship can be to someone nominally lower in status—your children, your employee, or someone serving you (like a flight attendant, wait person, or barista). You might praise, love, or congratulate your child. You might praise or thank your employee or server. But this has nothing to do with worship.

Your relationship can be to someone nominally equal in status—like your neighbor or romantic partner. You might love or adore your spouse (and obviously, that’s romantic love). You might respect, appreciate, or thank your neighbor. Praise might fit in, but it does have a hint of superiority. If I’m praising you, I’ve put myself in the role of a judge, and I’ve judged your behavior to be noteworthy. Here again, we see a poor fit to one’s relationship with God in that there is no worship.

Finally, your relationship can be to someone nominally higher in status—your parents, your boss, or a celebrity (like a well-known actor, politician, or scientist). You might honor, respect, or even revere your parents. You might celebrate or congratulate a politician or scientist. Here, again, praise has its place, but it’s used sparingly. “Jim, I’m impressed by how quickly you finished up that last job” works if Jim is your employee or son. But if Jim is your boss, this might sound like flattery (unless it quickly moves on to a larger discussion). The risk of flattery rises the more often you say it.

The best case for praise might be with a celebrity who doesn’t know you (“Senator, your getting that bill out of committee for a vote was brilliantly handled!”). Flattery wouldn’t be a risk assuming they were in no position to benefit you. Worship is possible with those higher in status more so than any other relationship, but we universally see this as a dysfunctional relationship. This is the domain of dictators.

Look at the verbs used in healthy human relationships. Not only is worship not one of them, but praise is primarily used when talking to a subordinate—your child or employee, for example. Inverting that relationship can be weird. You can praise your boss, but that tricky element of judgment comes into it. “I’ve evaluated your performance, boss,” you say, “and a couple of points stand out. I’d like to go over them, if you’ve got a moment.”

A heartfelt paragraph with sincere praise every now and then would probably be well received. Much more, however, and it sounds like flattery. And if it’s weird praising up in the domain of human relationships, imagine praising God.

One response might be that “praise” isn’t really the precise word for whatever it is you’re supposed to do to God, but if not “praise,” then what? You wouldn’t know it’s a poor fit looking at church signs and Christian parlance.

Let’s return to the Christian defense of the idea that God is way, way higher than any person and so deserves or demands way, way more praise:

God is inherently infinitely greater than we are. He created the universe. He gave us life (as parents also do in a lesser sense). He loves us and blesses us in so many ways. So we praise Him and worship Him for Who He is. . . .

[We can agree] that respect would be appropriate. . . . I don’t think it’s inconceivably far from that to conceptualize worship, in proportion to how great a Being is. (Source)

So we start with human relationships but then crank the dial to ∞. It’s like the relationship of you to your father (or spouse or employee) except infinitely more so.

But “more so” how? Take your relationship with your father, then imagine your father becoming more sage-like so that human failings fall away. He’s now very wise, very patient, very knowledgeable, and so on. Now make him more sage-like than any person. Now more than any sage of fiction. Now make him perfect, godlike.

We’ve stretched the you/father relationship to its limit, and it could change in two ways. First, your praise and adulation could stretch to fill the gap. You go from giving your father appreciation, respect, and thanks to giving him praise, adoration, and worship. This is the Christian logic in defense of worship.

But it could happen another way, a more reasonable way. An ordinary father might like a little adulation now and then, but as he travels this progression from ordinary person to sage to god, those human desires fall away. Donald Trump might say, “I liked that; tell me again how great I am!” but no sage worthy of the label would, and no perfect god would tolerate praise and worship. Instead, they’d coach humanity into a more mature relationship. They’d leave behind a static relationship built on worship, as summarized by the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Instead, it would be a dynamic relationship focused on human society learning and growing.

The Christian response will be that, like it or not, worship is central to humanity’s relationship to God and that the Bible and tradition confirm this. But they are convicted by their own analogy. That Christians see their god as a petty Bronze Age tyrant rather than a wise sage is more evidence that Christianity is manmade.

Continued in part 3.

the most inconsistent, the most monstrous
and blasphemous representations of God
that can possibly be conceived by the human mind
— deist Minister Joseph Barker,
referring to the Bible (1854)

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Image via Pixabay, CC license
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I’ve Seen the Future of the Church

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In 2014, I visited the famous Mappa Mundi, an oddly un-maplike map, at Hereford Cathedral in England (more here). A few blocks away is All Saints Church. The current church building was completed around 1330, about the time the Mappa Mundi was completed. After a recent restoration, the church was reopened in 1997.

As churches go, this one is smaller than those that usually capture the tourists. It is certainly smaller than the magnificent Hereford cathedral, for example. What is unusual about this church—and it’s a working church, with four masses each week—is that part of it is now a café.

From the church’s web site:

We have played host to a variety of events, from Shakespeare to flamenco, homegrown jazz to the finest touring classical musical groups.

Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (or “God and mammon,” as the King James Version memorably translates it), but this church seems to have found a workable balance. It has found new roles as a meeting place and community center.

Christianity is always changing. At 45,000 denominations and growing (more here), it evolves faster than Ken Ham imagines animals evolved after the Flood. How must it adapt as conditions in the West change?

Harold Camping’s Family Radio is an example of a failure to adapt. You may remember Camping as the idiot who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011. It’s almost like he didn’t believe his own billboards, because he didn’t sell his assets even though he was telling everyone else that there would be no use for them after that date. If he had sold, there could now be a $100 million Christian foundation doing good works in the world—not a bad consolation to ease the humiliation of Camping’s being so hilariously wrong. But he held on into a world that he was convinced wouldn’t exist. The organization’s assets lost tens of millions of dollars of value, a pathetic reminder of one foolish man’s hubris and overconfidence in ancient stories.

Another option is what I’ve called Secular Christianity or Christianity 2.0, a “religion” where believers and nonbelievers would all be welcome because belief in the supernatural wouldn’t be a requirement. The focus would instead be on community, inspiration, and service. It might be a gentler landing than church buildings simply becoming quaint museums (or bookstores, markets, art galleries, breweries, event sites, condos, and more).

All Saints Church is reaching out to make peace with the secular. Maybe it’s an early adopter of what religion will become.

Progress is born of doubt and inquiry.
The Church never doubts, never inquires.
To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—
the Church does neither.
― Robert G. Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/5/14.)

Image by Bob Seidensticker
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Response to “Nine Not-so-Good Reasons To Be an Atheist” (2 of 2)

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An article in Pakistan Today recently attacked nine atheist arguments. Though they probably came from a Muslim perspective, I responded with rebuttals as if these were Christian arguments (part 1 here). Let’s finish up.

“5. Free will and belief in God are incompatible.”

Nobody can believe in responsibility and culpability of humans, and at the same time believe in an omniscient God. If God already knows what one is going to do, how is one free to do anything to change the future (which is already known to God)? Either we are automatons or are responsible for our actions; and the latter rules God out.

Nicely stated! I leave free will arguments alone, knowing only enough to realize that it’s a big, contentious topic about which I have nothing interesting to say. But that’s not really where the author is going:

The error in this form of argumentation is that it places God inside the framework of time. According to any sophisticated theistic concept . . .

Whoa—stop there. Any sophisticated theistic concept? What does that mean? Confusing? Complicated? And how is “sophisticated” measured? A claim about reality should be measurable by how well it fits with the evidence, but somehow I think that evidence isn’t what the author wants to use here.

Perhaps “sophisticated” means thoughtful. I’ve read countless apologetic arguments that claim to be thoughtful but turn out to be some witches’ brew of confirmation bias, ad hoc thinking, rationalization, cherry picking of evidence, and cognitive dissonance. Just because someone is smart and able to defend nonsense doesn’t mean that what they say is correct (for examples we can all agree on, look to apologists from any foreign religion). Give William Lane Craig a year to build a case for the flat earth hypothesis, and he’d have as compelling a case as the one he uses for Christianity.

And I can’t ignore the slightly tangential Courtier’s Reply. This fallacy imagines one of the emperor’s courtiers responding to those rubes who declared that the emperor was newly unclothed, but it then maps this situation onto Christian defenders annoyed at Richard Dawkins because of his book The God Delusion. The Reply ends: “Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste.”

In the same way, too many apologists try to shield poor, defenseless God from critique by inventing ever more roadblocks for atheists to get around. “You haven’t responded to McConnell’s Inverted Counterclockwise Gluten-Free argument for god,” they’ll say. “I can recommend a couple of books that cover that one thoroughly. And if you get past that one, which I doubt, I’ve got plenty more.”

The author isn’t making that argument, but I do get a sense of “you’re disqualified from offering an argument until you have far more theological training” when I read that only “sophisticated theistic concepts” need apply.

Back to the article:

According to any sophisticated theistic concept, God is independent of time, and therefore it’s meaningless to apply words such as ‘future’ or ‘already’ to God.

Be careful: a god outside time is frozen and inert. Only with time can God judge, decide, take pleasure in things, and so on—all actions that the typical Christian apologist says God does. What does “God is independent of time” mean? Is that like being a time traveler? Or is it that he’s above time? But how can he be above time without being outside time and therefore inert?

All this science fiction needs to be justified. Apologists try to say something profound, but then they expect a pass so they needn’t justify their exuberant claims.

“6. Where’s the proof for the existence of God?”

Just to be clear, I don’t ask for proof, just for compelling evidence that God is better than any other explanation.

What would be so special about a god who existed like everything else?

So if your claims about God’s existence were easily tested, that would defeat the purpose? Nope—you make a claim, and then I see if I can verify it. That’s how it works with everything else, and that’s how it must work with this, the claim that you say is the most important of all. That’s certainly what you’d demand from an evangelist from another religion.

You claim God exists? Okay, I’m listening, but don’t expect any special accommodation. I demand at least as much evidence as you’d demand from a foreign religion.

God is Absolute (the most Basic) and is the reason for all existence. He is not a theorem that can be proved by starting from more basic assumptions.

So God is both hidden and eager for us to know him? You may want to recheck that.

It’s easy to make this claim—that everything relies on God—but I need evidence. Show us, for example, that since everything including our familiar logic rests on God, a godless universe would have different logical axioms.

“7. Theists usually behave horribly.”

This is text-book ad-hominem. This is like rejecting relativity on ‘grounds’ that Einstein abandoned his daughter. How a person behaves has no bearing on the validity (or otherwise) of his belief systems.

You underestimate the New Testament, which makes clear that someone sins if and only if they are not “born of God”: “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. . . . No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God” (1 John 3:5–9).

No, it’s not an ad hominem fallacy; it’s yet another example of putting the Bible’s claims to the test and seeing them go down in flames.

“8. Theism causes strife.”

Sometimes it does. But, so does soccer.

(Cleverly said!) The author continues:

Not enough reason to cast aside either.

I’m interested in whether God exists, and strife is irrelevant. This is the negative side of popular Christian arguments like “Christians have less divorce” or “Christians are more generous.” Christians in the U.S. actually don’t show all that well in comparisons like this (studies show that they have more divorce than average and are no more generous than average), but that’s not my point. I’m happy to concede that if you pick the right subset (American Christians or worldwide Christians or fundamentalists or Baptists or whatever), you’ll find some areas where they have more of some positive trait.

All this is irrelevant to the interesting question, “Does God exist?”

“9. It’s cool to be an atheist.”

There was a time when being an atheist was cool; when merely by being an atheist one appeared sophisticated and enlightened. In many cases it had some justification too, because being an atheist was rare, and usually it wasn’t something inherited. Now atheists can be found under most rocks and it’s no more fashionable because of being rare.

Dang! Now I’ll have to return to wearing my baseball cap backwards to prove I’m cool. More to the point, I’m surprised to hear that “atheism is cool” was ever a thing in Pakistan, where atheism is punishable by death.

As for no longer being rare, that’s correct. The Rise of the Nones is one of the biggest news stories of American Christianity in the twenty-first century. “No religion” as a belief category was steady in the U.S. through the seventies and eighties but then began to climb. It went from 6% in 1990 to 20% in 2012 and continues to climb.

Here’s a projection of that trend into the future.

Graphic copyright 2015, Pew Research Center. Permission to reprint graphic provided by Pew Research Center.

The rise of the Nones (my religion is “none of the above”) is a big story, whether atheism is cool or not. But here again, this is irrelevant to the truth of theistic claims. Atheism isn’t a fashion statement or an act of youthful rebellion. Rather, I see theism’s fundamental claims being challenged with increasing boldness, and the statistics report a steady decline, first in western Europe, now in the U.S., and perhaps later in the rest of the world.

Acknowledgement: this article was brought to my attention by thoughtful commenter ThaneOfDrones.

Truly I tell you,
if you have faith as small as a mustard seed,
you can say to this mountain goalpost,
“Move from here to there,” and it will move.
Nothing will be impossible for you.
— a tweak on Matthew 17:20
from commenter Lark62

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Image via Wikimedia, CC license

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