Do we live in a world with a god? It doesn’t look like it (read part 1 of this series here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world.

25. Because God is hidden

God knows that if we don’t understand and get on board with his plan, we will go to hell. He doesn’t want that, but rules are rules, right? So what does God do to give us the basic information we need to know that he simply exists?

Nothing.

Christians might point to basic facts in nature—happy things like sunsets and puppies—but they ignore unpleasant things like tornadoes and cholera. Sunsets and cholera point to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or Satan) as much as they do the Christian God.

Or the Christians might quote Bible passages (“Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen . . . so that people are without excuse,” Romans 1:20), ignoring that the Bible is not binding on non-Christians.

A popular Christian response is to say that God’s making himself known would violate our free will. As C. S. Lewis said in Screwtape Letters, “[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

Nonsense. This is one of the weakest Christian apologetic responses in a vast arsenal of substandard responses. Our request is an unapologetically reasonable one, for God to make his existence (and properties) known to all. That he doesn’t is just one more reason to think we’re not living in God World.

Some meta thoughts

What got me started on this long blog post series was a Christian commenter at an apologetics blog last December. He asked what evidence I’d need to be convinced that God exists. He said he needed to know what a convincing argument would look like so he could work on providing one.

I said that our positions were similar with respect to non-Christian religions. I don’t think that Scientology or Islam or Hinduism are correct, and neither does he. I played up that symmetry of our positions by saying that I’d probably need the same kind of argument that he would need to convert to a foreign supernatural worldview. An argument for Hinduism (say) with a high enough standard of evidence to convince him would get my attention as well. Give me that same quality of evidence for Christianity—as a minimum, I’d need that.

So the answer to his question is: tell me what you’d need. I’d probably need something like that.

He wasn’t satisfied (no, I couldn’t figure out why), so I made more good-faith attempts to comply with his request before I realized that he wasn’t making his request with the goal of it being satisfied. He was asking questions to avoid having to answer questions, attacking so he wouldn’t have to defend. He was sealioning (h/t Ignorant Amos), interrogating with the goal of asking questions to drive the antagonist away. And it worked.

But that got me thinking. The reason I’m an atheist is because of all the clues that we live in a non-God world. You want to know what I need to know that God exists? Show me that I live in a world where God doesn’t have the traits that he does.

Show me that we don’t live in a world where the God is omniscient but also needs (or tolerates) praise and worship (reason #3).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where Christians feel so insecure in their faith that they want to strongarm the government to support them (reason #7).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where all-powerful God is so fragile that he gets praise but can’t handle blame (reason #9).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where perfect God’s perfect message is so confusing that Christians need thick books with rationalizations for Bible difficulties (reason #15).

In short, show me that I don’t live in the world that I live in.

The apologist might respond that this approach makes atheists unconvinceable. That might be true, though not necessarily because of atheists’ closed-mindedness. It’s because there is so little intellectual reason to favor the Christian view of the world. To justify the atheist position, I offer the Earth vs. Gaia comparison to explain why skeptics are obliged to hold their skepticism (find that in the second half of this post).

And now, over 10,000 words later in this post series, I have 25 positive, pro-atheistic reasons that I can offer a Christian apologist to explain why I don’t think that God exists. Seen another way, these are the obstacles that prevent me from seeing this as God World. These are obstacles that the apologist must remove.

The Christian commenter who prompted me to collect these arguments won’t be satisfied with this list, because I’m sure he’s made his position unfalsifiable. However, my job is not to satisfy him, it’s to honestly follow reason and the evidence.

We have reached the promised 25 reasons! Let’s continue, but first, I’d like to slightly readjust this category of argument here.

Share your own reasons in the comments.

.
Image via Retrogasm, CC license

Do we live in a world with a god? It doesn’t look like it (read part 1 of this series here).

Let’s continue our survey with the next clue that we live in a godless world.

23. Because of Shermer’s Law

Michael Shermer observed, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

Suppose someone absorbed a false belief during childhood—a superstition, a bias, or even a worldview. As they got older, they discarded some of these beliefs that weren’t supported by good evidence, but they held on to some, particularly those beliefs integral to their self-image. And here’s the interesting part: because they’re much smarter as adults, they can put together a plausible defense for those false beliefs, even if they hold them for no better reason than that they were indoctrinated in them as a child.

This isn’t like defending a belief that you know is false—such as, just for fun, creating as compelling an argument as possible that the Earth is flat. Shermer’s Law applies to people defending a false belief for reasons that they believe. There is no self-deception going on. The alternative is to admit to themselves that they’ve believed this false belief for years or even a lifetime, but the subconscious protects one’s self-esteem and prevents this. More here.

If God existed, belief would be defended with evidence.

24. Because Christianity evolves

A palimpsest is a manuscript page with its ink scraped or washed off that was then reused. In some cases, the pen marks from the previous (older) document can still be read.

We see a metaphorical palimpsest with the Bible. Taken by itself, some passages make little sense. For example, what does it mean that the water for Noah’s flood came from “the springs of the great deep” and the “floodgates of the heavens”? We can put the pieces together if we hypothesize that the ancient mythology of Genesis was built on still-older cosmology from the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian civilizations.

Of course, seeing Yahweh worship as built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation, but the point here is how the biblical story has changed. For example, God evolves through the Bible. In his youth, he wasn’t distant and omni-everything, he was rather like Zeus. He walked through the Garden of Eden and spoke with Adam and Eve like an ordinary man. He visited Abraham. He spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). He also wasn’t omniscient, and he needed scouts to check out the rumors about Sodom and Gomorrah that he heard. He regretted creating man before the flood.

By the time of the New Testament, things are remembered differently. “No one has seen God at any time,” (John 1:18). It tells us that God knows everything (1 John 3:20) and doesn’t change (James 1:17).

For an omniscient, unchanging god, he sure has changed a lot.

The most recent change to God is his retreat in the face of science. God used to cause lightning and drought, but not anymore—science provided a better explanation that could be tested. God used to cause cancer and plagues, but science explains them better, too. How about miraculous cures, then? Sorry—labeling a surprising remission as a medical miracle is wishful thinking. Only science has evidence that it can improve health outcomes or even eliminate disease. More here.

And what is “Christianity”? That, too, is a moving target. Christianity is like bacteria in a petri dish, and new denominations are now splitting off at a rate of two per day.

Consider Christianity in the early days and the long way it’s come. There have been 21 church councils, and the conclusions of each council were declared infallible (because magic, I guess). Then there are the schisms within the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation may come to mind as the most interesting, at least from the standpoint of Christians in the United States, but there have been dozens.

Nothing objective grounds the evolution of various doctrines and the declaring of some as orthodox and some as heresy. If you lived centuries ago, doing your best to conform to Christianity as it was preached in your church, but died believing what is now considered heresy, well, I guess it sucks to be you.

Even the canon (the set of books considered authoritative scripture) has been a moving target. It took until the Council of Rome (382) to get the canon more or less defined, but that list was amended within the Roman Catholic church by the Council of Trent (1545). Different Christian denominations still have different canons today. Since they disagree about the same canon, it’s obvious that no infallible hand guided its selection. Here again, there is nothing objective to ground it. The canon was a popularity contest, and theologians would argue for whatever set of books was in vogue in their part of the world.

If we lived in God world, it would look it. God’s a smart guy, and his message would be simple and unambiguous. More here.

Continued in part 13.

.

Image via Retrogasm, CC license

The rich young ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to earn eternal life. Jesus said that he must keep the commandments. He had done so his entire life, he told Jesus. The final requirement, Jesus said, was to “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21–2).

The man left in despair because he had to choose his wealth and power over Jesus.

What did Jesus demand?

Jesus passed Peter and Andrew fishing and told them to abandon their lives and follow him to become fishers of men. Jesus said to love your enemies and turn the other cheek. He said to not worry about impermanent treasure on earth “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He illustrated the importance of helping the needy by saying, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).

This approach would be difficult to sustain for a lifetime. Paul showed a similar short-term focus when he said, “Were you a slave when you were called [to be a Christian]? Don’t let it trouble you. . . . Each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:21–4).

We also find indifference to slavery elsewhere in the epistles.

Slaves, be obedient in everything to your earthly masters (Colossians 3:22)

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh (1 Peter 2:18)

The end is nigh!

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks, and remaining a slave or always putting others’ needs ahead of yours might be tolerable if you only need to sustain it for a couple of years. Turning the other cheek isn’t too hard if the End is around the corner.

Jesus saw the End coming soon, and that is apparent when he speaks in apocalyptic terms. Note that “apocalyptic” can mean “having to do with the end times,” or it can refer to the specific movement called Apocalypticism. This was a movement popular in Judaism during the intertestamental period (that is, the period after the Old Testament and before the New). We see this in the New Testament when Jesus was asked (Matt. 24:3), “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Apocalypticism taught that we live in a bad Age, controlled by a bad supernatural being but that a new Age with a good ruler would take charge shortly.

Apocalyptic books told their readers that the end was near. Daniel was one such book, and it said that the final seven-year period before the apocalypse (171–164 BCE) was already half over (more).

Jesus also spoke about an imminent end. He said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier, Jesus identified “these things”: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, [and] the stars will fall from the sky.” Since that obviously didn’t happen, some apologists handwave away Jesus’s statement about the imminent end by saying that it referred to the destruction of the Temple or some other first-century calamity. No, we’re talking about a cosmic catastrophe that no one would miss.

What to do with Jesus’s life philosophy?

So how noble was Jesus? He apparently didn’t intend for his policies to be a lifelong philosophy if the end was just months or years away. And while Jesus said that those following him would suffer persecution in this life, he said in his analysis of the rich young ruler’s actions that those who left family and occupations for him would receive a hundred times as much in return in this life and they would receive eternal life.

Of course, I’d like to see in society more of the self-sacrifice and generosity that Jesus preached, but know that we’re applying it in a different way than Jesus anticipated.

Taking no thought for the morrow is no way to live. Nor is excessive generosity—Jesus said, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matt. 5:40). Maybe that explains why he does a few healings but doesn’t bother to eliminate any disease. And why Paul tells slaves to just deal with it.

Jesus was speaking only to his peers. If we can mine useful wisdom from his story, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that Jesus addressed his message at us today.

.
Image via Pilottage, CC license

We’ve recently seen how poorly God fares when measured against his own Ten Commandments. Let’s move on to a classic argument about God’s relationship with morality.

Euthyphro dilemma

Is something good because God says so, or does God say so because it’s good? The first option makes morals arbitrary. They’re just whatever God says, and he could’ve made them something else. They’re not based on anything, including external facts.

If God couldn’t have made them anything else, then they’re constrained, and that’s the second option. But this is no better: morals are external, and God’s role in morality is reduced to messenger boy. God is bound by this external morality.

Here’s an analogy. If I’m a clerk in a store and need the price of something, I look it up. I consult an external, correct source. But if I’m the boss, I could just make the price whatever I want it to be: “For you, let’s say $5.95.” So which one is God? Is he the boss (morals are arbitrary and changeable) or the clerk (morals are external and fixed)?

It’s “heads you win; tails I lose” for the Christian. Either option is unpalatable—morality is either arbitrary or God is not sovereign over an external morality.

Christian response

World famous apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) responds:

The Euthyphro Dilemma has been refuted again and again as a false dilemma. We are not under any obligation to choose between saying something is good because God wills it or that God wills something because it is good. Those two are not contradictories. Those are not A or not-A. Therefore you can have a third alternative which is that God wills something because he is good. God is the good and his will is an expression of his essential nature.

How does this help? This simply changes the dilemma to: Is something good because God’s nature says so, or does God’s nature say so because it’s good? Is “God’s nature” changeable (morality could be something else) or fixed? If it’s fixed, what does God’s character conform to? And we’re back to the original problem, with arbitrary vs. external!

And what does it mean to say that God is good? We run into Euthyphro yet again: Is WLC proposing that this is true by definition (“good” is arbitrary—it is whatever God says it is) or that we can know that God is good by evaluating his actions against a standard (“good” is defined by an external standard)?

Make it a proper dilemma

If WLC wants a proper dichotomy, let’s give him one. Let A be the statement “Morality is within the control of God” (or “God’s nature” if you prefer). The two possibilities are now A and not-A. No other option is possible.

Consider the consequences:

• Option A is true, so morality is within the control of God/God’s nature. Morality can be anything that God says it is since it’s not bound by or evaluated against anything external, and morality becomes changeable. Murder would be a good thing, for example, if only God had said that. (And why couldn’t he? He’s not bound by anything.)
• Option not-A is true, so morality is not within the control of God/God’s nature. This makes morality external to God. God might accurately report morality to us (through the Bible or one’s conscience, say), but morality’s source is something besides God.

(The Transcendental Argument for God runs into Euthyphro in a similar way. Is God bound by an external logic? Then logic is what it is, and God is stuck with it. Or is logic just what God says it is? Then logic is arbitrary. More)

Sauce for the gander: how does this work for the atheist?

To be fair, we should consider what the Euthyphro problem would be for the atheist. How does the atheist explain morality? Let’s simplify and consider just the Golden Rule: why is the Golden Rule a fairly universal moral belief among humans? It’s because evolution gave us that as part of our programming. We’re social animals, and working and playing well with others had survival benefit.

Euthyphro’s question to the atheist would be: Is something good because our genetic programming says so, or does our genetic programming say so because it’s good? But there’s no dilemma here—the answer is the former. Our genetic programming (our conscience, in this case) tells us what is good and bad. (That is, seen from the human standpoint, our conscience tells us what is good and bad. Seen from an evolutionary standpoint, our conscience tells us what is useful to believe.)

God can’t just say, “Okay, that takes care of lying. The next item on my list is murder . . . hmm . . . oh, what the heck—let’s call that one bad.” We certainly don’t do it that way—we feel that murder is bad, and we get that by consulting our consciences.

Does God have such a fixed source of morality that he consults? Then Christians are caught on one horn of the dilemma. Or does the buck have to stop somewhere, and God is it? Then Christians are caught on the other horn. The naturalistic explanation seems a lot more reasonable.

.
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/1/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia