We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 12 in this series, and today’s topic is Soft Theism’s strongest argument, the First Cause argument.

Is human speculation futile?

Atheist: What’s your strongest argument for God?

Soft Theist: The First Cause argument . . .

A universe popping into existence out of nothing . . . the Big Bang . . . or . . . coming from an infinite never-ending regress of purely physical causes, seems less plausible to me, than a universe coming from some ultimate immaterial intelligence.

Cross Examined Blog: You’re just an ape looking up at the night sky. Science has taken you far from where your ancestors were just centuries ago, and it’s taught you about the Big Bang, evolution, and other mysteries. You intend to go farther than what science has taught you, but how?

You’re standing on the shoulders of giants, but you don’t bring any new equipment like the Large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope. Your only tool is common sense, an intuition shaped by millions of years of living in a middle world, logarithmically halfway between the size of our galaxy (about twenty orders of magnitude bigger than us) and the size of a quark (about twenty orders of magnitude smaller). That common sense is worthless at the frontier of science. You want to test your mettle, and bravo for that, but shouldn’t you be more humble?

And consider your demand for an explanation of the Big Bang. That sounds a bit like asking what’s south of the South Pole. Most scientific questions are answered in terms of other things. And now you want to go to the most fundamental particles, fields, and properties—what everything else is built on—and ask where they come from. But is that question even properly formed? Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein responded to the challenge of explaining the laws of the universe: “Explain in terms of what?”

The questions at the beginning

God, in theory, answers the question of where did the first thing come from? And I call that reasonable conjecture. . . . You call it making stuff up, or sticking magic in.

Reasonable? What good is it when it just replaces scientific questions with theological ones? Let’s stay in the science domain. Science has a track record, while religion has failed every time it’s been tested. Why hold your breath that today will be Religion’s lucky day?

Well, it’s not a valid argument to say that because we can’t explain it yet, therefore there must be a giant Invisible Person behind it all. The honest answer to the origins of the universe is that . . . we don’t know. Positing a God out of thin air without evidence is not justified!

Maybe our universe is just one of many universes. For all we know, there could be an eternal fluctuating quantum void, capable of generating universes from zero point energy, or some other explanation suggested by theories in physics.

But . . . that would not solve the infinite regress problem! Because, where, then, did the multiverse come from?

And “God did it” does solve the infinite regress problem?! No, it just brings up more questions, like where did God come from? What are his properties? And so on. Before you say it, “But God is by definition uncaused and eternal” counts for nothing. That doesn’t define anything into existence any more than “unicorns have one horn” does.

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To me, explaining the universe by discovering, “other matter,” or “other laws of physics,” only kicks the can down the road. I see science as explaining the physical world, every step of the way, all the way back to the beginning, but, once at the beginning . . . I think science can do no more, and a force outside of nature is needed to explain . . . nature, itself . . . to explain the emergence of matter from nothing, and, intelligence from matter. Now, I readily admit I don’t KNOW this; it’s only what seems most logical to me.

So science has won every battle, but for the most fundamental questions you want to discard this source of every reliable explanation and look to religion? Religion has loads of answers, but there’s no reason to accept any of them, both because they’ve never been right before and because religions can’t even agree which of their many contradictory explanations are the right ones. And if, as seems likely, science uncovers more questions as it answers what’s on its plate today, it’ll be you kicking the can down the road. We didn’t need God to answer the last batch of questions, you’ll tell us, but now we have some real puzzlers. Surely now “God did it” is the only possible answer.

There are lots of weird ideas at the frontier of science inaccessible through a layperson’s insight. Maybe some energy is negative, and the sum of all energy in the universe adds up to zero (the zero-energy universe hypothesis). Maybe our universe had a beginning but no cause. Maybe it’s eternal without a beginning.

We’re all probably familiar with the fundamental ideas that our universe didn’t expand into an existing space but that it is its own space and that time began with the universe. These ideas sound ridiculous, but that’s where the evidence points. We’re semi-comfortable with them only because we’ve known about them for years. If science makes new fundamental discoveries about time, space, and the universe—how they work and where they came from—it’s not likely that they’ll coddle our common sense either. When there’s a clash between evidence and common sense, common sense loses.

Cosmology has shrunk the palette of options to little more than quantum particles and the laws of physics, and you want to throw in the most complicated, least evidenced thing possible, a supernatural Creator? How does that help?

Why couldn’t the universe have come from some other uncaused force than God?

Well, if it did, then THAT force would be God.

An unintelligent force as “God”? Has that option been in your definition of God all along?

What to do when you don’t know?

You claim you are not employing confirmation bias, yet you start with the assumption that the universe must have been “created” by a powerful intelligence, because you can’t comprehend any other way. You’ve given no indication that you’ve ever seriously tried to understand any astrophysical hypotheses . . . theories . . . which predict very accurately the formation of the universe, galaxies, and planets. You’ve shown the very epitome of the confirmation bias that you deny.

Arggh! You’re not getting my perspective. I’m not denying anything about science, except that it does not have ultimate explanatory power. Science explains everything in nature, but it does not explain the existence and sustenance . . . of nature itself.

I think you’re making the category mistake atheists always make. You think that once you have A, B, C, and D figured out, you no longer need an agent, or force to make that process work. You’re confusing mechanism for agency. You’re focusing on HOW something works and calling it WHY it works. But the real WHY it works, the ultimate why it works, is a force that makes the whole thing work. Again, you’re right that the laws of nature explain things, but . . . what explains the laws of nature? We don’t know. I posit God.

You don’t know so therefore you do know? If you don’t know, just leave it at that.

Science will be very hesitant to posit a supernatural agent to explain anything. If we have A, B, C, and D figured out, what’s the point of the God hypothesis? To use Julia Sweeney’s metaphor, God is sitting on his suitcase by the front door. Let him go.

But it’s wholly unreasonable to hold that ‘we don’t know, therefore God’.

Not to me. It seems very reasonable to me. . . . Oh . . . I think we’re just exasperating each other.

Well, I’m sorry if this conversation exasperates you, but I’m actually enjoying it. I find it quite unusual to engage a believer who doesn’t resort to coarse insults, and threats, as soon as his worldview is challenged.

Oh OK, OK, good. Uhh . . . I’ve come across a couple of analogies that help clarify the idea of God as a First Cause. If you look at the universe as a set of trillions of interlocking gears all turning simultaneously, each making another turn, each being turned by another  . . . that doesn’t make sense, unless you posit at least one gear as the power source that causes all that turning.

Analogies to the First Cause argument

Or another analogy . . . if you look at the universe as a great chain of many links, each link held up in the air by the link above it . . . without a first link of a different nature, then the whole chain is held up by . . . nothing. You need a first link to hold up the great chain, a first cause that is not dependent of yet another link.

You’re trying to explain the origin of the Big Bang with “a suspended chain must have a topmost link” or “all those gears must have one to drive them.” But you’re not resolving the problem, just illustrating it. What suspends the topmost link? What drives the thing that powers all the gears?

While these analogies are easy to understand, they’ll be useful only after you’ve shown that there was an intelligent First Cause. Until then, your analogy only points to an empty place that has yet to be filled with evidence.

And why think that the origin of the Big Bang will be explainable with analogies this familiar? Imagine for example an easy-to-understand, accurate, middle-world analogy to quantum entanglement. Or quantum superposition. Or virtual particles popping into existence. Wrestle with these problems and imagine that the analogy for the origin of everything might be even more difficult. Said another way, if it’s easy, it’s likely wrong. This analogy will be from not-the-middle-world, and we’re stuck with middle-world minds.

But sticking God in is just unwarranted magical thinking.

I think . . . not sticking God in, is even less warranted. I . . . am postulating an immaterial cause, whereas you are postulating . . . no cause at all. Or you’re postulating an endless regress of physical causes. I think God makes more sense.

We can agree that it’s a puzzle. Where we disagree is that you want to resolve the impasse right now. My bold proposal is that when we don’t know, we say, “We don’t know.”

Next time: Exploring the nonphysical

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Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 11 in this series, where an advocate for Soft Theism lays out the ideas about the afterlife and we find a good metaphor for Soft Atheism.

Afterlife

Atheist: Does your belief in the probability of a God mean you also believe in the probability of an afterlife?

Soft Theist: Yeah. I think the two go together.

Cross Examined Blog: Why does a God have to create an afterlife? God can’t create the logically impossible, so how do you know that such a place is even possible?

While you’re providing evidence for the afterlife, don’t forget to argue for souls (or whatever form we’re in after death). And is the afterlife binary, with a Good Place and a Bad Place?

And what would the nature of this afterlife be like? Seems to me it would be pretty boring. And would raise all sorts of questions . . . like at what age would you exist? Your early 20’s, or when you died at 90? Who would you hang out with? Your first wife who died, or your second wife? All kinds of problems.

Christians also made a big deal out of bodily resurrection vs. a spiritual resurrection.

Right, right. But, I think the very first thing you have to assume, in contemplating an afterlife, is that it has to be different from the life we know . . . without the restrictions we experience now. We wouldn’t get bored, or be physical, or be a specific age, and so on.

Again, this sounds like theological sci-fi. Your hypothesis is an interesting one, but is it anything more than one dude’s musings?

The real purpose of the afterlife

I would characterize my concept of an afterlife only by the general term—”ultimate justice”—where everybody gets whatever they deserve . . . however that plays out. We have no idea. An afterlife might be an existence characterized by the full expression of things we cherish most in this life—love . . . justice . . . enlightenment . . . The cloud of unknowing finally . . . clearing.

It’s like you’re inventing the properties in a Dungeons & Dragons world. You’ve got a character sheet for each creature, and you must assign their properties—intelligence, fighting ability, spell casting, strength, armor, weapons, and so on. Moving on to the traits of the Afterlife, you’ve decided that one of its purposes is correcting the moral balance that was skewed in life.

Okay, but why? Why is that obviously something to be redressed in the Afterlife, and how will that happen, specifically? Is it hellfire and pitchforks, or is it mental anguish? Here’s an idea: once you enter the Afterlife, you get great wisdom, and you clearly see how imperfect you lived your life. Here’s a better idea: give humans that great wisdom in life, where they can make use of it. Everyone would have the free will to do evil, but with that great wisdom, no one would want to.

There you go—no more need for ultimate justice. In fact, no more need for the afterlife.

You’ll probably say that you’re simply doing the best you can with the facts we know about reality. For example, given that life on earth is sort of good and sort of bad, what does that tell us about the being that must’ve made us? And so on.

The problem here is that this assumes a deity. Better would be to grant yourself permission to conclude that there is no supernatural and no gods.

Is life absurd?

I think believing in an afterlife comes from the evolutionary fact that we’re the first form of life smart enough to understand we WILL die. So, our instinct to survive nurtures the fond idea that we can survive physical death. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. Pure speculation.

It IS speculation. But it makes more sense to me than the absurdity of life, with no ultimate meaning, no ultimate resolution. For my part, the existence of partial love and justice here on earth, points to the existence of ultimate love and justice, in an afterlife.

Philosophy has given “the absurd” a particular meaning: “the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.”

Right—there’s no reason to imagine inherent meaning in life, so this futile quest for meaning is absurd by this definition. Is this what you mean? And what are you saying in response—that it’s obvious that life does have objective meaning, so therefore life is no longer absurd?

That’s not what I see. We each find our own meaning. Lamenting the lack of objective meaning doesn’t do us much good. (I examine Craig’s position on life’s absurdity here.)

You also mentioned partial love and justice on earth pointing to ultimate versions in the afterlife. This is C.S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire, which we’ve touched on earlier in this conversation.

The homeopathic interpretation of Soft Theism

Commenter Michael Murray brought up the excellent idea of a homeopathic God in response to the second post in this series, and I’d like to riff on that for a moment. I think it provides good insight into what Soft Theism is and isn’t good for.

Consider the origins of homeopathy. Practitioners observed that some concoctions would cause bad symptoms if given to people—rash, nausea, diarrhea, and so on. They were poisons. But if a certain dose caused a bad symptom in a patient, what if you instead gave a tenth that dose? Then the symptoms would be much less! The idea of dilution was homeopathy’s insight, which I suppose wasn’t bad for the late 1700s. The more dilution, the better, and modern homeopathic quackery is often labeled “30C,” which means that the original poison was diluted by a factor of one hundred (C is the Roman numeral for hundred), thirty times.

Since all they can do is reduce the poison they give, homeopaths can only bring the bad component of the treatment down to zero. They have nothing to offer on the good side, like penicillin, insulin, or aspirin.

This is the problem with Soft Theism. Compared to Christianity, it has discarded Yahweh, the Bible, and church tradition with the goal of reducing the bad component to zero. But where’s the good side? Not Soft Atheism’s explanation of life, the universe, and everything, because that is given without evidence. The best this homeopathic philosophy can be is benign.

I’ll grant that that’s a lot better than the toxic forms of Christianity, but, like homeopathy, it’s best to stay home and save your time and money.

Next time: Soft Theism’s strongest argument

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Image from Joe Dyer (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 10 in this series, and the topics are Jesus and the problem of morality.

Jesus

Atheist: And what about Jesus? You still give Jesus a lot of respect, right?

Soft Theist: No. No. No. I respect his courage, but I do not respect his persona, or his message. I think he was a misguided religious extremist, who constantly overstated . . . You cannot present yourself as the all-compassionate one, and at the same time threaten people with Hell if you they don’t accept your theology.

People are so culturally indoctrinated to think of Jesus an ideal, good and wise, man. Same as people in the Muslim world are taught to think of Muhammad as embodying the highest ideals. But, I think both men . . . were religious extremists, if you study what they actually taught . . . objectively.

Cross Examined Blog: But you don’t accept the supernatural claims made about Jesus. It’s good to hear that you reject the wise and loving Jesus stereotype, but how much of the Jesus story do you accept? If you reject the supernatural claims, then is Jesus 100% legend, or do you think there was a real (though mortal) Jesus at the beginning?

Christians’ morality argument fails

Do you think the existence of morality is evidence for God?

I think the morality argument never gets anywhere.

Great to hear. I agree that it fails (more here).

Christians will say—If we’re just a bunch of chemicals, then there’s no such thing as morality. But we know morality DOES exist. We know . . . torturing babies for fun, is, objectively . . . immoral. There IS a cosmic moral order, an objective standard that exists, and, points to God. [Christian apologist William Lane] Craig says that without God, morality would be subjective, and we’d be lost in CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Craig must first show that objective morality exists and that we can reliably access it. He never does because he can’t. But that’s not a problem, because objective morality isn’t necessary to explain morality as it exists within human culture. Look it up and you’ll see that “morality” is defined without the word “objective.”

Religious and moral relativism

. . . But then—here’s where I think Craig’s argument fails—the reality is, that even WITH God, we are lost in . . . RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM, because, WHICH God is the right God!? The Christian God, the Muslim God, David Koresh’s God? Believers are not exempt from the problem of subjectivity. A theistic worldview guarantees nothing. ISIS thinks it’s operating under the . . . objective morality of its God.

You’re right that if God exists, he’s doing nothing to stop the continued fragmentation of Christianity into thousands of denominations. Worse, we’ve had two world wars and the Holocaust on his watch. Woody Allen said, “If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”

We also have moral relativism. Take any moral issue, and you will find Christians on opposing sides. Either objective morality doesn’t exist, or we humans can’t reliably access it. Either way, the moral argument fails.

And the Bible is full of outmoded moral attitudes on slavery, genocide, polygamy, and more with God’s moral stance looking very antiquated.

I said to a Christian that morality should be based on reason, and he responded by saying one person’s “reason” will differ from another’s. And I said right, but so will one person’s religion differ from another’s. That’s why I say the argument gets nowhere. The human condition is that we simply don’t have an unequivocal authority.

Well, Christians think they do and that their authority talks to them, but your point about religious relativism defeats that. There are now 45,000 denominations within Christianity.

[Michael] Shermer points out that even if there is no ultimate authority, no Archimedean point, shouldn’t lying and murdering, be wrong anyway? Isn’t it obvious?

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think Shermer has the right solution for identifying objective morality—use science, meaning social science and statistics, to determine ideas that result in the greatest well-being of society, without violating any individual rights. That would constitute objective morality.

We may have two different definitions of objective morality here. Craig defines it as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” But your definition of objective morality appears to be morality grounded in objective facts. To take a Sam Harris example of such a fact, women allowed to choose their own clothes thrive better than those forced to wear burkas.

Atheists’ morality

I think . . . evolution and the value of reciprocal altruism is a solid explanation for the existence of morality.

Yeah, I think that’s largely a good explanation, but, as Craig says, if morality is an evolutionary adaptation, then any deeper meaning is illusory, and morality is simply a human consensus. We might have a social contract not to rape, but that does not mean it’s really wrong; it’s just an agreement.

I disagree. Morality is a lot more than an agreement. Here is Penn Jillette:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

Where does Penn’s rejection of rape and murder come from? From his own makeup, which was shaped by evolution. This also applies to those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Yes, we are shaped by society (and vice versa), but there’s also our innate sense of moral right and wrong.

Now, on a personal level, aside from any intellectual argument, and, aside from any reciprocal altruism, I do intuitively feel a profound sense of . . . cosmic morality, that I think comes from God.

Next time: Afterlife and homeopathic religion

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Image from Joseph Vasquez (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 9 in this series, and the topic is the problem of poor design in nature.

Inefficient “design”

Atheist: So you think the universe was designed by God? With all this pointless inefficiency, and suffering? More than 99% of all species that have lived, have gone extinct!

Soft Theist: Well, in terms of efficiency, if God is all-powerful, using billions of years and billions of galaxies to get us here, is not a problem. I know some Christians who think atheists are incredibly . . . naïve . . . for expecting the universe “to be formulated in a way that makes perfect sense to us.”

Cross Examined Blog: Atheists don’t expect that—at least this one doesn’t. What they expect is that, if a perfect God created the universe, that it look like it. Instead, we see natural explanations being sufficient to explain what we see. If God can do efficient and elegant as easily as sloppy and enigmatic, wouldn’t you expect the former?

But we don’t see efficient and elegant. Most of the earth is inhospitable to humans (let alone the universe). The 93,000,000,000-light-year-wide universe obviously wasn’t designed for a single species on a 0.0000000013-light-year-wide dust speck. And life looks like it was designed by a bungler (or by evolution).

Is that proof? Of course not. But proof isn’t what we’re after. We’re simply evaluating the clues and tallying them on either side of the God hypothesis.

(I expand on this argument here.)

And [Christian apologist William Lane] Craig makes the point that God may be more like an artist than an engineer. Efficiency is a value only to someone with limited resources. So, I don’t see inefficiency as a big obstacle to positing a God.

Is God perfect? Then why would he deliberately be inefficient? Humans are inefficient because they have no alternative, but a perfect God could create any way he wanted.

However, in term of unnecessary suffering, there, I think you’re right, that is a problem. That IS a strong point against a supposedly loving God. That’s the Problem of Evil of course, and we should discuss that later.

Agreed—the Problem of Evil also counts against God.

Evidence of design

I do think the argument that a design requires a designer, is pretty solid.

First let’s figure out if there’s evidence of a design. DNA alone argues that animals aren’t designed. DNA contains pseudogenes, endogenous retroviruses, vestigial structures, coding for atavisms, and far more DNA base pairs than necessary. No designer would deliberately put all that in the code for his lifeforms. (I expand on this here.)

And if you insist on seeing design, there’s plenty that’s clumsy or cruel—chronic pain that serves no purpose, parasites, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and more. Sloppy results look exactly like what we’d expect from evolution, not a perfect Creator. (More.)

But Darwin showed how evolution and adaptive advantages and environmental filtration, advanced life. There was no purposeful intelligent designer behind that.

I disagree. I think physics itself, evolution itself, constitute God’s design. No matter how poorly the world seems to be designed, it DID end up with intelligence.

I like what Paul Davies writes—he’s a physicist—quote, “That the universe has organized its own self-awareness—is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence.”

Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees that life on earth appears designed: “The living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker.” But, as mentioned above, junk in DNA shows the other side of the coin.

Davies talks about meaning. Is there objective meaning—that is, meaning grounded outside humanity? The only meaning I see is that which we create. There’s no justification for objective meaning.

But why would God give us an appendix? Explaining that by . . . blind variation, and environmental filtration is so much more reasonable to me . . . than, positing a God.

Yeah, inefficient evolution gave us an appendix. And I’m saying . . . that God is behind . . . intentionally inefficient evolution.

Despite the fact that that’s not where the evidence points? You’re far too quick to accept a supernatural explanation.

Evolution is a natural process, and it’s sufficient to explain why life is the way it is.

Mechanism vs. agent: evidence for God?

Dawkins said in a debate that when you drop a stone, it falls, due to gravity. “You wouldn’t dream of saying, oh there must be a God pushing it down.” But . . . I thought the Christian had a good response here. He said that “God is an explanation at the level of an agent, not a mechanism.”

In other words, God created the . . . mechanism of gravity, which makes the stone fall. And that’s essentially the subtle difference I expressed earlier, that atheists never see—the distinction between how something works (the mechanism), and why it should work (the agent or force behind the mechanism).

I think, the inefficient design of the universe IS an argument against God, but the fact that it works is an argument for God.

First, show that you’re actually pointing to something. Your unease about what’s behind it all isn’t much of an argument for an ultimate being.

Yes, life on earth works, sort of, but in this do we see the hand of an omniscient creator? Charles Darwin said, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” He pointed to a wasp that lays its eggs in caterpillars so that the larvae can eat the still-living caterpillar, and he gave this as a reason to reject the idea of a beneficent creator. Insect larvae can invade animal brains, ants can be zombified by a fungus, the tusks of a pig can curve back and penetrate its head, and the Guinea worm is just one of the many parasites that plague humans.

Why drag God’s good name through the mud when you can just point to evolution?

Next time: Jesus and the problem of morality

See also:

• 5 Ways the Design Argument Fails
• Nice Try: the Christian Design Checklist

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Image from Zyada (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 8 in this series, and we move on to the Christian mindset. Today’s topic is theologians vs. science.

Seeing reality through God

Soft Theist: I strongly reject Christianity, but I think Christians sometimes make good points about the God issue. I’ve heard a Christian say, “The proof for the existence of God . . . is that without Him, you cannot account for anything. . . . Isn’t your very existence, proof of God?”

Cross Examined Blog: This sounds a bit like C.S. Lewis’s claim, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Now, I don’t consider that an argument that constitutes “proof,” but that is a way of looking at reality that DOES resonate with me . . . But, not you, uh?

Atheist: No, those are just empty words to me.

I agree. If you have God glasses on, you might say that everything makes sense only with God. My recommendation is to take them off, give yourself time to acclimatize (reality may be much brighter), and then see how things look. Millions of ex-believers will tell you that things make much more sense.

Answering the Big Questions

Christians say that you atheists cannot explain how a universe arose from nothing, how life arose from non-life, how reason, logic and morality arose from . . . matter, how mind arose from . . . mud, how consciousness arose from chemicals.

So what? Atheism is one answer (“No”) to one question (“Do you have a god belief?”). This is like pointing out the Chemistry makes no statement about morality. It doesn’t intend to!

Scientific questions are in the domain of science. Atheists are often well informed about those questions and eager to read about new developments, but that isn’t our topic here. Until those questions are reliably answered by science, atheists content themselves with “I don’t know.”

But if you’re saying you have a way to answer these questions with answers as reliable as what science gives, then share those reliable answers! But if, as I suspect, you just have answers without any reason to believe them, what good are they?

Robert Jastrow was an astronomer who held spiritual views similar to yours. He famously said:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Nope. We’ve learned nothing about reality from theologians. To take just Christianity, science has learned nothing from the Bible. The best apologists have is that they can point to coincidences where the Bible agrees with science. That the Bible kinda says that the universe had a beginning and was created from nothing (it doesn’t). Or that the earth is a sphere (it doesn’t say that, either). Coincidences found after the fact count for nothing. In fact, by conforming the Bible to science (and not the other way around), Christians admit that scientific claims are the ones with credibility.

In reality, scientists climb Mt. Ignorance and phone down all the surprising new things they’ve discovered. To this, the Christian apologist shouts back, “Oh, yeah. I knew that.” One wonders then why Christians haven’t been leading the research all along, using the Bible to peek at the answers in the back of the book of Nature.

But to say “God did it” provides no explanatory information!

Well, not any scientific information, no, but I think it’s a reasonable ultimate explanation for the emergence of these things.

“God did it” explains nothing. It replaces science questions with theological questions. It’s also not falsifiable, which makes it useless.

If you don’t have scientific evidence, then what do you have? Philosophical evidence? Metaphysical evidence? You need to step back and show us the reliability of philosophical or metaphysical evidence for something besides the God question. We can apply these disciplines to real world questions only after we’re on the same page that these disciplines can deliver reliable answers.

Naturalism?

[Christian apologist William Lane] Craig says naturalism is self-refuting. If you say no proposition should be accepted unless it can be scientifically proven, then that very claim itself is a proposition, that cannot be proven.

I don’t think much of Craig’s arguments. I’ve written many posts responding to his ideas (search and ye shall find).

And on this particular matter, the idea of the self-refuting argument is too often used by apologists as a rhetorical ploy rather than an honest response (I respond here). In practice, it often works out like this caricature: “There’s a punctuation mistake here, so the argument is invalid, and I can dismiss it!”

If I find a clumsily worded religious argument, I do the reverse: I try to find what the apologist is probably trying to say and respond to that. (Maybe being generous is easier for me than the Christian apologist. After ten years with this blog, I’m getting a little desperate for interesting arguments to respond to.)

For example, take Craig’s argument, that “No proposition should be accepted unless it can be scientifically proven.” I don’t say that but instead might say, “Arguments backed by the consensus scientific view have a good track record” or “Science delivers—show me that whatever you’re using besides science delivers as reliably.” These aren’t self-refuting.

[Saying that no proposition should be accepted unless it can be scientifically proven] would be . . . scientism, which almost no one subscribes to. Science can only study the natural world, by definition. Certainly, there could be things science cannot address . . . but . . . if something can’t be detected and studied in any way, then what’s the point of believing in it?

I guess the point is . . . curiosity. We humans want to know if there is anything beyond the physical world. So, we speculate.

You’re curious about science’s biggest questions? Great! Then don’t apply an evidence-free answer and think that you’ve answered anything.

Heh, your . . . mindset is, Why believe it if we can’t verify it? Mine is, why dismiss it entirely just because we can’t verify it?

My view is, “Why believe it if there’s insufficient evidence for it?” I agree that we shouldn’t reject something for which the jury is still out.

You say you don’t subscribe to Scientism or Logical Positivism but it seems to me you do, that you’re reducing all worthwhile knowledge to only that which can be measured or scientifically demonstrated. I think God is something that science cannot adequately address.

If your worldview is more than just speculation, you need to show that. Sure, philosophy can imagine various ways that God could exist, but this amounts to little more than sci-fi for theologians.

My suggestion of the day: if your worldview has a could in it (“Well, God could exist, couldn’t he?”), that part isn’t worth keeping.

Next time: Poor design in nature

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Image from Jordan Whitt (free-use license)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 7 in this series, and up next are theists’ rejection of other gods and the role of evidence and science.

“Atheists just go one god further”

Atheist: Hmmm . . . You don’t believe in Thor, or Jupiter, or the thousands of alleged Gods throughout history, do you?

Soft Theist: No.

Well, we atheists just go one God further than you, and don’t believe in ANY God.

Cross Examined Blog: I discuss this argument in detail here.

I think there’s a big difference between one God and no God. But, I see your point, which is important, that we have no trouble dismissing all these alleged Gods, why not dismiss the one currently in question? And my answer to that is that my concept of God is much more credible than traditional ones, ha ha.

I’ll play devil’s advocate. I agree that you’ve jettisoned from Christianity many of the things that make it hard to believe. Dropping the Bible alone probably eliminates half of my arguments against Christianity. The arguments still available to you are the deist ones (that is, the ones not specific to the Christian god) that are also in vogue now with many Christian apologists—the Cosmological Argument, Design Argument, Fine Tuning Argument, Transcendental Argument, Ontological Argument, Moral Argument, and so on. Skipping ahead, I see that you think another deist argument, the First Cause argument, is your favorite.

Yes, you’ve just eliminated some of your vulnerabilities, but you need some strong points in your favor as well. “My argument isn’t as easily attacked!” isn’t much of a selling point.

[Michael] Shermer says belief in God has all the earmarks of wishful thinking. And that religions have been demonstrably shown to be socially and psychologically constructed.

Yeah, I think that’s true. But, that doesn’t mean a more modern, credible concept of God cannot be true . . . I’m a big fan of Shermer’s by the way. I think the whole thrust of what he presents is a real force for good. I think virtually everything he says is right on the money. I just happen to disagree with him on the God question.

I have no proof that a god doesn’t exist, so yes, your view of God might be true. But with “more modern,” it sounds like you’re arguing for your position by saying that your spiritual views are chic and trendy. Maybe you mean that these ideas come from a society informed by science rather than the Iron Age people who wrote the New Testament. Okay, that’s an improvement, but we’ll eventually look just as primitive to our descendants. But I’m guessing you admit that and are doing the best you can with the imperfect insights we have at the moment.

Where is the evidence?

What is your evidence for God? You have no evidence! You’re just ASSUMING the supernatural exists. The only reason for you to believe that premise is that you already accepted that conclusion in the first place.

No, no. After I rejected traditional concepts of God, I asked myself the open-ended question, “Does a more general God, not tied to any particular religion, make sense?” My starting point was not a presumption.

Sounds like one, since you started with the God hypothesis. A less biased question would be, “Is there any evidence for the supernatural?” Give yourself permission to conclude that there are zero gods, and that would’ve been a more honest quest.

I think it’s YOUR position that starts with a presumption . . . that science is the measure of ultimate reality, period. I mean, the very definition of science excludes appeals to the supernatural. So, not surprisingly you will conclude there is no God.

I don’t exclude the supernatural and am happy to consider it. That’s what I’ve done for ten years with this blog. As far as I can tell, the only route to the truth requires evidence. The supernatural continues to fail every test, but I still look for arguments and evaluate them charitably.

You’re quick to say that science isn’t the only game in town. Okay, let me challenge you on that. What route to the truth do you recommend that’s not some variation on the scientific method? Give us an algorithm, like the scientific method, that would guide someone to the truth. Then actually use it to find something new we can all agree is the truth.

Without this, you’re just handwaving, “Science isn’t the only method, y’know,” or “You haven’t proven there is no God.”

Knowledge from outside science

I agree there is no hard evidence for the supernatural. But, I think it’s reasonable to consider . . . softer “evidence,” like logical arguments and interpretations.

But . . . to say “I believe there is a God” is not proof. It’s just an assertion . . . which requires . . . irrefutable evidence. And since we do not know, then that is the best position to take, that “We do not know.” Making up an answer is not . . . finding an answer, it’s just, making up an answer, don’t you see? Hypothesizing that there is a God is fine, but then you must test the hypothesis, to see if it has any basis in reality.

Mr. Atheist: I don’t ask for irrefutable evidence and certainly not proof, just the majority of evidence.

Think about it: if you had 100% certainty in X, you’d live your life as if X were true. But if your certainty were only 60%, wouldn’t you still live as if X were true? You’d be more humble in your conclusion and maybe more receptive to new challenges, but what would you go with if not the one that has the majority of the evidence?

You keep arguing from a strictly scientific perspective, and I’m arguing from a philosophical perspective. Requiring “irrefutable evidence” is not a reasonable standard for a philosophical issue. The God question is not a matter of physics, but of metaphysics. It’s a matter of interpretation, approach, opinion; it’s not a matter of hard science. Hypothesizing . . . is the best we can do.

While I applaud your careful outline of what you can claim, you’re not helping your case. Science is the discipline following the evidence, and I don’t know what Philosophy is doing besides sitting there and looking important. Without that evidence, why take a leap of faith? Don’t you want your worldview grounded in reality? You’re the guy who values Reason, remember?

Every year we see lists of the top scientific discoveries of the previous year, but we don’t see that for philosophy or metaphysics. I never see philosophers contributing to a field to which they are outsiders (despite much self-important harumphing to that effect from Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig).

I’ll grant that the opposite is possible, that scientists or mathematicians can arguably be philosophers. Perhaps Werner Heisenberg (a physicist) was doing philosophy when he came up with his uncertainty principle. Perhaps Kurt Gödel (a mathematician) was doing philosophy when he discovered his incompleteness theorems. Theologian Alvin Plantinga proposed an even wider view of philosophy when he said that philosophy was simply thinking hard about something. But we don’t see philosophers actually adding value to a scientific field of which they’re not a part.

I agree that hypothesizing is the best we can do, but “Well, God might exist” is hardly enough to support a worldview.

Next time: Theologians vs. science

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Image from Zach Vessels (free-use license)
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