Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

Christian defense of praise and worship: God’s greatness and our debasement

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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!”

Let’s consider some 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 the “know your place” lesson slave owners taught the people they enslaved.

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 described 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, debasing themselves) is a reassuring thing. Losing yourself in the embrace of something greater than you 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 deliver these psychological benefits.

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 it’s his creation or anything. Let’s only credit God with the good stuff because he might get sad if you pointed to “his” creation and demanded that he justify the problems.

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 or worship within science, the discipline that actually does get results. Perhaps then worship is an ancient vestigial artifact we have yet to get rid of.

Continue here.

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)

Christian defense of praise and worship: God needs it, and the Bible commands it

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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, offloading that burden from God (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. And then 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 proponents 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 hymn that has 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 here.

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

Christian defense of praise and worship: finding analogies in human relationships

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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 typically 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 typically 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 typically 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.

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 if 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 or cult leaders.

Consider the relationship between a bully and their victim. The victim might search for ways to compliment the bully, preferring the role of ass kisser to punching bag (though neither is healthy). Now we’re getting closer to the relationship between God and believer. Stoked by the fear of hell, many Christians are eager to tell God how great he is and how much they love him. (h/t commenter Michael Neville)

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. As noted above, you can praise your boss, but that’s tricky. A heartfelt paragraph with sincere praise every now and then would probably be well received. Much more, however, and it sounds like fawning. 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 by looking at church signs and Christian parlance.

A Christian defense of praise

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 infinity. 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 expand 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 here.

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)

God as Donald Trump: Trying to make sense of praise and worship

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President Trump wanted a military parade—a big one with tanks and a fighter jet flyover. Y’know, like those for dictators in the Soviet Union or North Korea.

President Trump liked cabinet meetings with public adulation, praise, and flattery.

While in office, President Trump and his sensitive ego turned the dial up to 11: “In the past 18 months, what was once nuanced praise has metastasized into obsequious fawning. Too much is never enough. Superlatives are tossed out like Mardi Gras beads on Fat Tuesday” (Washington Post).

Here’s a prayer that might satisfy America’s once Dear Leader (and which I’m sure he’d appreciate today):

Oh President Trump: Ooh, you are so big, so absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed around here, I can tell you. Forgive us O Great Trump for this, our dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery, but you’re so strong and, well, just so super. Amen.

(That was a prayer in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life, updated to switch the name of the celestial lord to our terrestrial lord.)

Was Trump’s thin-skinned demand for praise obnoxious? Offensive? Unbefitting a powerful leader? Why then does it make any more sense for the Christian god?

From Trump worship to God worship

I remember a church with a sign that said, “Come and praise God with us.” It got me thinking—why is it important to praise God? Surely God doesn’t care. Isn’t this like ants telling us how fantastic we are?

Obviously, God already understands his position relative to us. We’re telling him nothing he doesn’t already know when we say, “You’re so fantastic!” It sounds like sycophantic praise to an egocentric and insecure king. God is portrayed as having the ego needs of a spoiled child. Or Donald Trump. Does God really need to hear “Oh, what a good boy you’ve been!”? Wouldn’t he be above all that? Is this the personality of a perfect being? Even if the benefit is for us, wouldn’t worship be offensive to God?

I’ve searched Christian apologetics sites for their justification for worship and praise of God. Here are the arguments I’ve found.

1. Worship God because he deserves it

Why should we worship God?

We worship God first and foremost because He is the Creator of the Universe…. Respect, leading up to worship and praise, is all that much more to be expected, and the natural state of things. (Source)

You’re not explaining why. This is “You should worship God, just cuz.”

[Praise makes us] mindful of how much we owe to Him. (Source)

Praise is the joyful recounting of all God has done for us…. It is merely the truthful acknowledgment of the righteous acts of another. (Source)

You think God created you? Okay, be appreciative. Be thankful. But where does the worship come in? You can love and be thankful to your parents for bringing you into the world and expending much effort to raise you, but that’s not worship.

We are grateful to Him for dying for us on the cross, in order to make it possible that we can spend heaven in eternal bliss, with God. Just as we normally respect and admire and revere other human beings who do sacrificial and/or loving acts towards us, so we do the same with God, all the more so. (Source)

“All the more so”? Nope—with Jesus, it’s all the less so. Jesus can’t sacrifice because he’s immortal.

You allude to ordinary, fallible humans who sacrificed for other people, and I agree—their sacrifice can be remarkable and praiseworthy. But if they sacrificed their lives, they stayed dead. Jesus didn’t die; he was out of action for just a day and a half. (Read more on the illogic of the resurrection story.)

And why praise God for his goodness when, as a perfectly good being, he could do nothing less? We don’t praise water for flowing downhill—that’s just what water does. We don’t praise planets or rocks for doing what gravity makes them do. We praise people for doing something good because they might not have done it and it might have cost them something.

Curiously, Christian apologist William Lane Craig agrees:

Since God does not, presumably, issue commands to Himself, it follows that God has no moral duties to fulfill. While human beings may be praised for doing their moral duty, God therefore cannot be praised for doing His moral duty.

But WLC still advocates worship in the form of adoration and awe.

The biggest obstacle I have is that God isn’t worthy of praise or worship, adoration or awe. You only need to read the Bible to see that he’s a Bronze Age bully. There’s no need to go into this for regular readers, but for anyone else, here are posts to get you going on God’s genocide, human sacrifice, lying, support of slavery, and why “God is love” makes little sense.

Continue to part 2.

When I heard preachers making false statements about evolution,
I could no longer trust what they said about religion.
If they didn’t know what they were talking about
regarding things they could look up,
why think they know about things
they couldn’t possibly know?
— commenter Greg G.

More counter-arguments from a Muslim apologist

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An article in Pakistan Today 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 wrap up the final five arguments.

“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 add. 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 a witches’ brew of confirmation bias, ad hoc thinking, rationalization, cherry picking of evidence, and cognitive dissonance. Just because someone is smart and able to semi-plausibly defend nonsense doesn’t mean that what they say is correct (for examples that 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 and 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 Free Range 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 Pakistan Today 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. God can’t be “independent of 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 be too easy? That would be cheating?

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).

(My goal here has been to respond to these arguments as if they’d come from a Christian source, but of course a Muslim is not tied to the New Testament. This quote from 1 John wouldn’t be a response to a Muslim argument.)

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. (And I would never make this argument anyway.)

“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 present themselves particularly 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 are better than average on some positive social metric.

All this is irrelevant to the interesting question, which is, “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.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/

The rise of the Nones (those whose 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.

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

Response to ‘Nine Not-so-Good Reasons To Be an Atheist’

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Here’s something new—apologetics from a Muslim source. The article, “Nine not-so-good reasons to be an atheist” is from Pakistan Today. Since Islam is the official religion of Pakistan and 96+ percent of the population is Muslim, we can assume that this article is defending Islam. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few British spellings, this is just what an American Christian apologist would argue. Since the focus of my column is Christianity in the West, I will respond to these arguments as if they came from a Christian apologist.

Here are nine “not-so-good reasons to be an atheist” that, in the words of the author, “leave a lot to be desired.” See if you agree with me that the problem has been overstated.

The first not-so-good argument for atheism:

“1. There’s so much suffering in the world.”

This comes in many forms: There’s no justice in the world. Faith is rewarded to the same degree as unbelief. The resources are so unjustly distributed among people. If an omniscient, omnipotent and an all-good God doesn’t choose to prevent evil, He’s not all-good; if He is unable to prevent evil, He’s not omnipotent. All these arguments feature anthropomorphism—casting the deity in the image of man.

Read your Bible—God is very much cast in the image of man. In Genesis 1:26 we read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.’ ” Think of all the ways God and man are similar: God walked in the Garden of Eden like an ordinary man. God regretted making Man. God lied. God got a good thrashing by Chemosh, the god of Moab. Abraham changed God’s mind on Sodom. Moses talked with God “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.”

The Bible evolved over time. In the early years, the Bible’s religion was polytheistic. Yahweh was similar to the Greek and Roman gods, only gradually becoming omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

But anthropomorphism isn’t the issue. Some of these atheist arguments are valid. The Problem of Evil is indeed a problem for Christianity. An omniscient god could achieve any purpose he wanted without causing any pain. And a god who desired a relationship with humanity wouldn’t be hidden—excuses for his hiddenness are what you’d see if the god were manmade.

Good and evil are themes of mankind, not of God. Good and bad (like hot and cold, beneficial and harmful) are relative terms…. An Absolute God cannot be judged according to something else.

What absolute god? You give me a proposition such as “Yahweh is a good god,” and I must evaluate it. I judge claims for Yahweh, just like the Christian or Muslim would judge the claims for a god foreign to their worldview. And when I judge claims that Yahweh is good, he fails that test by his own holy book (read more on Yahweh’s failings in the areas of genocide, evil, human sacrifice, and slavery).

“2. Belief in God is an accident of birth.” 

You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan, probably in Jesus if born into a Christian family, in Krishna or Vishnu if born to a Hindu Brahmin. In much the same way as the Greeks believed in Zeus, or so the argument goes.

Yes, that correlation does indeed exist. I make this very argument: “Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan.”

Here’s the author’s concern:

The fallacy at play here is called the genetic fallacy: trying to invalidate a position by showing how a person came to hold it. The accident of birth theory—whether true or false—in no way invalidates all belief in God.

The genetic fallacy is about the origin of something (think genesis). Here’s an example: “Hitler was a bad man, and he was a vegetarian. Therefore, vegetarianism is bad.” There is no plausible cause-and-effect link.

But the argument here doesn’t fail for that reason. “You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan” is obviously a true statement. More than 96 percent of Pakistanis are Muslim, and a baby born there today will likely grow up to be a Muslim adult. People tend to mirror their environment.

We can clumsily shoehorn correlations like this into an absolute statement like “People tend to reflect the religion of their environment so therefore all religious belief is false and a mere cultural artifact,” but that’s not my claim. I say instead that people tend to reflect the religion of their environment, and this gives weight to the naturalistic hypothesis that religious belief is a cultural artifact. There’s no fallacy here.

“3. I am throwing in my lot with science.”

While science is wonderful in many respects, it’s a mistake to think that it addresses all aspects of humanity…. [For example,] there’s no matter-only explanation of consciousness yet. Probably there never will be.

Let’s assume that this is correct, and science will never fully explain consciousness (which I doubt, but forget that). So what? You think that supernaturalism will? Science may not be able to explain everything, but supernaturalism has never explained anything that we can verify as true. Countless supernatural “explanations” have been overturned by reliable scientific explanations based on evidence, and the opposite hasn’t happened once.

“4. How can one believe in flying gods and the like?”

Starting with the question of whether to believe (or not believe) in God means that one has already skipped a vital question; namely: what does one mean by the word ‘God’?

Yes, that is an important question. There are 45,000 denominations within Christianity with their own answers. Even Islam, which isn’t as fragmented, has more than just the well-known Sunni and Shia divisions. Like Christianity, there are also nondenominational Muslims who don’t fit into the handful of large denominations.

But that was an aside. The author has a different concern:

It pays immensely if this is addressed and the childish concepts of gods are ruled out.

So childish is your concern? You’re living in a glass house. Are there god concepts that are not childish?

Yes, there is much metaphysical or philosophical dust thrown up about God, but that doesn’t mean it’s not at root childish. I remember hearing world-famous theologian William Lane Craig argue that the noncanonical gospels didn’t deserve to be canonical because they were nutty. He asked, Did you know that the Gospel of Peter has a walking, talking cross?!

But Craig also needs to avoid throwing stones. Has he ever read his own stuff?? It’s ridiculous—floating ax heads, talking donkeys and snakes, raising the dead, three gods who are instead just one god, and an “all-good” god who condones slavery, demands human sacrifice, and drowns everyone.

Try seeing Christianity or Islam as an outsider. Only because you’re accustomed to your own view do you not see that it looks as childish from the outside (in its own way) as all the others do.

(h/t commenter Tawreos.)

This list of nine arguments will be concluded next time.

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— seen on the internet