Let’s continue with our critique of Eric Hyde’s analysis of atheist arguments, “Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments, and Why They Fail.” (Begin with part 1 here.)

“3. God is not all-powerful if there is something He cannot do. God cannot lie, therefore God is not all-powerful.”

Just for completeness, I’ll share Hyde’s response even though it makes little sense. Hyde argues that God’s properties are subordinate to his free will. He doesn’t lie because he wills to not lie, and he could just as easily will to lie. While we’re at it, God could also will to not be good or to not exist . . . which raises more questions than it answers. As for the “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” category of paradoxes, he says that God can’t “overpower Himself.”

Much has been written about the contradictions that arise when pitting God’s perfect qualities against each other, and there are lots more examples than “God can’t lie, so he’s not all-powerful.” For example, if God is omniscient (knows everything), he knows the future. But how can he be omnipotent (can do anything) when he can’t change the future without violating his omniscience?

How can there be “necessary suffering” when God is omnipotent? Isn’t he powerful enough to achieve his ends without causing suffering? Or is he just not omni-benevolent?

Does God have a personality? How can this be when personality traits have a negative side? For example, there’s no pleasure in victory without the risk of defeat, and an overabundance of kindness makes you a doormat. But if a personality is an odd thing for God to have, what would a personality-less god be like?

Our universe isn’t eternal. Before God created it, reality was either perfect or not. God wouldn’t have allowed an imperfect reality to exist. But if it already were perfect, what motivated God to create the universe? How could the universe have satisfied a need of God when a perfect being wouldn’t have needs? And if creating the universe satisfied no needs, why would he create it?

How can God be all-just (that is, giving everyone precisely the punishment they deserve) and merciful (giving less punishment than people deserve)?

How can God have a purpose? A purpose implies goals and unfulfilled desires. But that’s impossible for a perfect being.

If God is all-powerful, he can just forgive our sins, which sounds reasonable since we’re imperfect and sinful because he made us that way. That would eliminate the bizarre tale that God had to sacrifice himself to himself to make a loophole in a law that he made himself so we could get into heaven. (And, in fact, God has forgiven sins and then forgotten them.)

We typically give Christians a pass when they list God’s properties—it’s their religion, so why not? But the Bible gives some very human limitations on God.

• God changed his mind: “The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32:10–14). He dithered about whether Balaam (the one with the talking donkey) should go on his trip or not (Numbers 22).
• God doesn’t know everything: “I will go down [to Sodom] and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Genesis 18:21).
• God isn’t all-powerful and is defeated several times in the Old Testament.
• God isn’t especially moral.
• God regrets.
• God lies.

“4. Believing in God is the same as believing in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Hyde says that God is different from the other three. Christianity has developed over thousands of years, it’s had martyrs, and it’s endured religious persecution. The Bible has “historical and geographical corroboration.” Compare that against fairies, Santa, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which no adult believes in. “It’s strawman argumentation at its worst.”

Yes, Christianity is old. Hinduism is older. That doesn’t mean that either one is correct. And look what longevity has done to Christianity: there are now 45,000 denominations of Christianity. Christians can’t even agree what their own holy book says, and the religion is becoming more fragmented, not more coherent, with time.

Yes, there have been Christian martyrs and Christian wars. Some evaluations of the Thirty Years’ War, in which Catholics and Protestants fought in Europe in the early 1600s, estimate that it killed up to two percent of the entire world’s population (I explore the deaths due to religion here). Religious violence is no evidence that Christianity is correct.

Yes, the Bible does refer to some places that history or archeology have corroborated. This Argument from Accurate Place Names isn’t much to brag about. Getting the basics of history and geography correct—countries, rivers, kings, cities, and the like—earns you no praise. It simply gets you to the starting line. No one would say that The Wizard of Oz is likely true because Kansas really exists.

And speaking of Kansas, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may sauce be upon Him) was invented by Bobby Henderson in 2005 in response to a proposal by that state’s board of education to include intelligent design along with evolution in biology classes. He concluded his argument:

I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Yes, Pastafarianism was deliberately made up, and Christianity wasn’t. Doesn’t matter—if the evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Yahweh are equally weak and we are certain that one of them is false, what does that say about the other?

Continued in part 3.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/29/15.)

Image from Dr. Partha Sarathi Sahana, CC license

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Patheos Evangelical Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds recently shared his list of the five worst atheist arguments. I responded here. Today, let’s consider another list, “Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments, and Why They Fail” by Eric Hyde.

I do my best to take seriously attacks against my favorite arguments. The result is better arguments. Let’s take a look at these charges that popular atheist arguments fail.

“1. There is no evidence for God’s existence.”

Hyde begins by asking what “evidence” means. My answer: good evidence is facts or argument of sufficient quality that, if the tables were turned, would convince you the other guy’s argument is strong. Too often, defenders of Christianity will bring out weak arguments—“There are fulfilled prophecies in the Bible!” or “Just yesterday I prayed because I was late and got the perfect parking space!”—that they’d laugh at if said in support of a rival religion.

Look at how conventional Christians will lampoon Mormonism or any other religion. They’re just as skeptical as I am, and they argue just as forcefully. It’d be nice if they’d consistently apply the same thinking to their own position.

Hyde critiques this argument:

Asking a Christian to prove God’s existence is like asking someone to prove the existence of civilization. What is one to do but point and say, “look, there’s a chair, and there’s a building,” etc. How can one prove civilization by merely selecting a piece here and a piece there as sufficient proofs rather than having an experience of civilization as a whole?

Nearly everything the Christian lays eyes on is proof of God’s existence because he sees the “handiwork” of God all around him in creation.

“Look, there’s a building.” Right—a building that had designers and builders. I know where buildings come from because I’ve seen them being built. Is this supposed to be an analogy with God and reality? A building had a designer so therefore reality must also? I see the analogy, but without any evidence for God, the analogy fails.

But this is hardly sufficient evidence in the court of atheist opinion, a court which presupposes that only what can be apprehended by the senses rightly qualifies as evidence. For the Christian who believes in a transcendent God, he can offer no such evidence; to produce material evidence for God is, ironically, to disprove a transcendent God and cast out faith.

Ah, the old “Science can say nothing about God because God is immaterial” argument. If your point is that God hides in his supernatural realm, which science can’t access, then I agree. But your God then becomes not only immaterial but irrelevant. God is only relevant to our reality if he changes our reality—tweaks evolution, causes miracles, answers prayers. And those interactions in our reality are things that science can (in principle) test for. You need to pick—do you want a God holed up in his supernatural tree house who never interacts with our world or a God who does interact and is therefore testable by science?

As for atheists demanding evidence, well yeah. How else do we reliably understand something? If you sense a truth in a vague way that no one else can experience or verify, that may be important to you, but it is useless in convincing others. You wouldn’t be convinced by that argument from some other religion, so why should I accept it from you?

Hyde moves on to ask what one means by evidence for God’s existence.

If one means, “that which has come into existence,” then surely God does not exist because God never came into existence. He always was; He is eternal.

Checkmate, atheists! . . . except that this is merely an assertion. Without evidence for the remarkable claim that God always was, it fails.

The atheist argument remains. I wouldn’t say that there is no evidence for God—the very existence of Christianity is evidence—just insufficient evidence to support what may be the grandest possible argument, that a supernatural being created the universe.

“2. If God created the universe, who created God?”

Those who use this charge as some sort of intellectual checkmate have simply failed to grasp what Christians understand as “eternal.”

No, I think we’re all on the same page here. The issue is simply that your claim that everything had a cause must apply to God as well. By your logic, he must’ve had a creator.

The next move in the chess game is to apply some sort of “except God” caveat to the everything-has-a-cause rule. For example, the first premise in William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological argument is, “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” That clumsy phrase is supposed to be his Get Out of Jail Free card because God always was. God had no beginning.

And what justifies this? Incredibly, Dr. Craig defends the claim this way, “[This] step is so intuitively obvious that I think scarcely anyone could sincerely believe it to be false.” Apparently, world-class Christian philosophers want their arguments accepted just because they feel right without having do go through all that difficult justification stuff.

If Eric Hyde has a better justification, he doesn’t share it with us. Apparently, we’re to accept that God doesn’t have a creator just because. Sorry—I need more.

I’ve responded more completely to the charge that “But who created God?” is a fallacy here.

Continue in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/24/15.)

Image from Dave Catchpole, CC license

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Evangelical blogger John Mark Reynolds is trying to help out atheists with a survey of “The Five Worst ‘Arguments’ (or Claims) Made by Internet Atheists.” It’d just be rude to not open this gift.

Part 1 looked at the first three arguments. Let’s continue to see if these atheist arguments are all that terrible.

Bad argument 4. “Stalin was trained in a seminary and his tyranny was really a religion not True Atheism.” 

Atheism is just one answer (“No”) to one question (“Do you have a god belief?”). So, yeah, you can’t find Stalin’s tyranny in atheism. There is no atheist bible that would guide Stalin’s actions.

Reynolds falls back on his 2015 post that took “Stalin was bad,” combined it with “Stalin was an atheist,” and spun a scary tale to spook the kids at the campfire.

Stalin was an atheist before he was a communist. He found a worldview to fit his atheism. He allowed a “state church” since atheism is so counter-intuitive that even with great persecution, theism kept cropping back up.

Stalin was bad because he was a dictator. Atheism is relevant only because a dictator couldn’t have a competing source of power, the Russian Orthodox Church, second-guessing his orders. Shutting down the church and imposing atheism was a consequence of his being a dictator, not the other way around.

Atheism isn’t at all counterintuitive, but religion thrives in desperate times. That a familiar and comforting religion pops up in a bleak Soviet Union says nothing about religion’s truth value, and if the traditional Russian religion had been something besides Christianity, that would’ve “kept cropping back up” the same way.

Atheism says nothing about morality. Christianity, on the other hand, says a lot about morality, and much of that sucks (more on genocide, the Flood, and slavery).

I rebut Reynolds’ Stalin argument here.

Bad argument 5. “Faith is believing things despite the evidence.”

“There are out of the two billion Christians (not even counting the other theists) surely someone who asserts this.”

I bet more than someone asserts it. The popular book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norm Geisler and Frank Turek makes clear in its very title that “believing things despite the evidence” is exactly how they’re defining faith. Just in case it wasn’t clear, they say in the book:

The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge. (p. 26)

If Reynolds wants to say that Christians using this kind of faith is embarrassing, I get it—it is. But he can’t pretend that it isn’t a widespread idea within Christianity.

Here are a few more examples of this interpretation.

[I don’t understand to believe but rather] I believe to understand. (Anselm of Canterbury)

If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. (Dr. Kurt Wise, geologist)

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (Dr. William Lane Craig, philosopher)

Snake handlers have much of the unevidenced kind of faith. Pastor Jamie Coots died after a snakebite in 2014. If anyone knew that God doesn’t protect believers from snakebite it was him, since that was his ninth snakebite. In the face of this evidence, these Christians maintain faith in the (noncanonical) words of Jesus, “In my name . . . they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all.”

Here’s a final quote, this time from Reynolds himself:

Almost all the world’s Christians will use the world “faith,” but they have varied understandings of what “good faith” would be. . . . When Soren Kierkegaard uses “faith,” the term is different in important ways than when Saint Thomas Aquinas uses it.

Returning to Reynolds’ quote above, yeah, I guess someone thinks that “faith is believing things despite the evidence.” If Reynolds is frustrated by the various ways evidence and faith fit together, I suggest using “trust” to mean belief well supported by evidence and leave “faith” for the fuzzier version.

Reynolds says that he’s annoyed when atheists tell him what he means by faith, and I see the problem. Important words like “faith” often have multiple meanings, so we should make sure we’re not talking past each other.

6. “Bonus: Jesus did not (or probably did not) exist.”

“This is so foolish, I have never met more than one relevantly trained atheist who believed it.”

You need to get out more. I’ve met two, Dr. Richard Carrier (doctorate in history) and Dr. Robert M. Price (two doctorates: one in Systematic Theology and another in New Testament).

I’m not well read on the historical Jesus issue and so don’t make this argument, but I also avoid it because it’s tangential. There are much simpler and more effective attacks on Christianity.

Some religions start with real people who actually lived (Joseph Smith for Mormonism, Mary Baker Eddy for Christian Science, Bahá’u’lláh for Bahá’í), and some may not have (Buddha for Buddhism, Lao Tzu for Taoism, Zoroaster for Zoroastrianism). “Jesus was just a myth” is hardly a radical claim. Said another way, providing overwhelming evidence that Jesus was historical would be a difficult challenge.

If having good historical foundation at the birth of a religion is important, I’m surprised that Mormonism isn’t more attractive to evangelicals like Reynolds. No one doubts that Joseph Smith existed. We have a painting of him and might even have photos. And every historical argument Christians make about the New Testament (lots of manuscripts, short time from event to autograph, short time between autograph and best copies) has a much stronger equivalent within Mormonism. If they value historical grounding as much as they say they do, these Christians should become Mormon.

Agreements

Reynolds is right that some atheist arguments are poorly framed or thought out. I’ll summarize these six arguments and try to highlight points of agreement.

1. The church had enormous power in Europe for 1500 years, and yet this was a period during which social conditions regressed before progress returned. Since God promised bounty on those who followed him, what we should’ve seen instead was Europe making remarkable, unexplainable (from natural means) growth to a universally healthy and prosperous society. What we saw instead was natural growing pains in a society handicapped by wars, famine, and disease.
2. I agree that we should confidently comment only on those things we have competence in. Nevertheless, Plantinga’s modal ontological argument was a bad example. That argument doesn’t point to a God, and Plantinga himself admits it. Reynolds’ rejection of evolution undercuts his demand that we rely on competent experts.
3. Science delivers. Philosophers who pretend to be scientists add nothing.
4. Yes, Stalin was a bad man. No, atheism didn’t drive his ruthless policies. Atheism was a consequence of his being a dictator, not the other way around.
5. Faith defined as “believing things despite the evidence” is a perfectly good definition and is widely held within Christianity. If you want faith to mean trust, I suggest you start using “trust.”
6. The Jesus-was-a-myth argument is widely rejected by New Testament scholars. I don’t use it, partly for that reason, but also because it’s a tangent.

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Image from Simone Berna, CC license
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A blogger in the Evangelical Christian channel at Patheos has helped us out by identifying atheists’ worst arguments. The post is The Five Worst “Arguments” (or Claims) Made by Internet Atheists by John Mark Reynolds.

Are these arguments as shallow as Reynolds tells us? Let’s put on our waders and jump in.

1. “The Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, because ‘religion.’” 

This isn’t quite the argument I make, though it’s an intriguing area of research. During the medieval period in Europe, the church punished incorrect science (which to them wasn’t science poorly backed by evidence but science that offended or contradicted the church). Galileo wound up on the wrong side of this, for example.

What if there had been no Christian church dominating the conversation? No Witches Hammer to guide the torture and punishment of witches. No easy “God did it” answers or “That’s blasphemous!” restrictions to shut down inquiries about nature. No Index librorum prohibitorum (list of forbidden books).

On the other side of the ledger, the church did create religious colleges and primitive hospitals, and it funded artwork and cathedral building.

But that’s not the issue here. Let’s return to Reynolds.

Historians do not call the period of Western European history the “dark ages.” They were not dark.

The Dark Ages (roughly 400 – 1000 CE) can mean several things. The term can refer to the lack of historical records (that is, our view of that period is dark), or it can refer to the slow progress during the time between Roman times and the Renaissance (that is, it was a time of intellectual darkness).

Richard Carrier argues for the latter interpretation with charts showing dips during the Dark Ages for metal production, shipwrecks, urbanization, and wealth over time.

Quibbling over labels isn’t interesting. What is interesting is that Christianity presided over a regression of progress. In much of Europe during the Dark Ages, old Roman roads, buildings, and aqueducts were still in use but beyond the engineering ability of the civilizations that inherited them (more here and here). That sounds pretty dark to me.

Second, the discussion ignores the Eastern Roman Empire that maintained a secular “university” tradition for almost all her history as a Christian area.

Guess what event shut down higher education in Constantinople. It was the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during one of the Christian Crusades.

And support for higher education (not really universities) in the Byzantine Empire doesn’t change the fact that Christianity had a huge influence in Western Europe during this time with little to show for it.

Remember what the Bible promises. Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38). He made many assurances that prayers will be answered without qualification. For example, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:14). The Bible tells us the beneficence of God:

No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (Mark 10:29–30).

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it (Malachi 3:10).

The religion of this generous god was in charge of Europe for 1500 years? You certainly wouldn’t know it from the slow rate of progress.

2. “I do not know modal logic, but Plantinga’s version of the ontological argument is bad.” 

If I can’t read Russian, I shouldn’t judge the Russian version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “Since I do not read Russian, I must go with the consensus or cite and follow responsible dissident scholars. . . . In the same way, I cannot evaluate a modal argument, if I cannot read a modal argument.”

Let’s go to the source. Here is Plantinga’s conclusion on his own argument: “Our verdict on these reformulated versions of [Anselm’s ontological] argument must be as follows. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion.” Plantinga himself says that nothing can be built on this argument.

I put in the tedious hours to understand this argument, and, just as I suspected, this was just more dust thrown up to obscure things. The various ontological arguments are effective, not because they’re accurate but because they’re confusing. They’re caltrop arguments. Lay Christians can easily point to arguments like this that are opaque to them and demand that the atheist answer it. It doesn’t convince them, and it’s not important to support their faith, but it’s an effective apologetic tool because it’s a confusing argument put forward by a respected scholar. Gee, the atheist thinks, maybe there’s something to this one . . .

Nope, they’re crying wolf again. My critique is here.

But back to Reynolds: he’s right, of course, that we should have good reasons for our conclusions and fall back on the experts (where there is a consensus) in areas where we’re unqualified. He concludes, “Opining or constructing counter-arguments with no training or ability is like attacking Tolstoy’s Russian with no Russian.”

There’s more than a bit of hypocrisy in this good advice when we discover that he’s a young-earth creationist, even though he’s not a biologist, cosmologist, or geologist.

3. “Philosophy is useless. We just need science.” 

“This is, of course, a statement of philosophy and not science. The statement refutes itself.”

Then fix it. Don’t say, “Aha! You didn’t say ‘Simon says’!” to get off on a technicality. I’ve written more about the cowardice that’s sometimes behind Christian charges of self-defeating statements here. (Reynolds does, to some extent, strengthen this argument and respond to it.)

I’m happy to give philosophy its due. I do notice, however, that there are annual top ten lists of science and engineering developments but none for philosophy. Science delivers.

Was Werner Heisenberg doing philosophy when he came up with his uncertainty principle? Maybe so. But that was a physicist putting on a philosopher’s hat. The problem is when a philosopher puts on a physicist’s hat as (for example) William Lane Craig tries to. His bringing philosophical truisms (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause” or “Out of nothing, nothing comes”) to a cosmological issue is to bring a knife to a gun fight.

I explore the limits of philosophy here.

To be concluded in part 2.

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Image from micadew, CC license
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I’ve written several posts in response to version 2 of the Stalin Argument. Version 1 is often stated this way: “Don’t talk to me about Christian excesses. Look at the deaths from atheist regimes in the twentieth century! Stalin alone is responsible for millions of deaths.”

John Mark Reynolds has given this a fun new V2.0 twist by looking forward to what atheists might do when society’s back is turned. Here’s my paraphrase: “While atheists as individuals might be nice enough, they’ve invariably created murderous regimes when given the chance. They can’t be trusted with power!”

Reynolds’ post has given me a chance to respond to the popular Stalin Argument. I’ll conclude my critique of his latest (read part 1).

Is religion ever part of the problem?

Reynolds assures us that anti-theists (atheists who “actively dislike and work against religion”) can’t be trusted with power, while Christians are no problem.

The universal problem has not been official state religion, but official state irreligion.

Nope. Official state religion has indeed been a problem.

In response to my previous post on Reynolds’ claims, some commenters were quick to point out incidents where religion has much to apologize for. Some of these examples are small and some are huge. In some, religion was the driving force, while others simply highlight atrocities done by religious people who should’ve known better.

• Christian: Hutu genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, up to 1 million dead
• Catholic: Leopold of Belgium ran the Congo Free State as his personal plantation, killing up to 15 million
• Muslim: Armenian genocide, up to 2 million
• Christian: witch burning (mostly in the Holy Roman Empire), about 35,000
• Shinto/Buddhist: Japanese atrocities against civilians in Korea and China
• Christian: European settlers to Australia, South Africa, and the Americas killed indigenous people
• Catholic: extermination of Cathars in France
• Hindu: Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka
• Christian: pogroms against Jews and the Holocaust, for which Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic writings must take some blame
• The Taiping Rebellion in China killed 20+ million in the mid-1800s (the Taipings wanted to convert China to their version of Christianity)
• Catholics vs. Protestants: French Wars of Religion in the late 1500s killed up to 4 million
• Catholics vs. Protestants: the Thirty Years’ War in the early 1600s killed up to two percent of the world’s population. By contrast, if we say that Stalin was responsible for 10 million deaths, that would be just 0.4 percent of the world population of 1950.
• Catholic vs. Muslim: the Crusades also killed up to two percent of the world’s population
• The Nazi Holocaust of Jews was driven by German anti-Semitism encouraged by Luther
• And more

Reynolds would respond to this list by saying that he never claimed that Christians were perfect. But if we agree that Christian moral principles can be subordinated by an unethical agenda (land grab, religious hysteria, racism or tribalism, or whatever), then acknowledge that atheism can also be hijacked in the same way.

Others respond with elaborate forms of the tu quoque fallacy: Christians have done it too. Well, so we have, but we have also not done it which puts us well ahead of anti-theists in the use of power.

Make it an apples-to-apples comparison. Bring out the atheist regimes that were not dictatorships.

Can’t do it? Then we’re back to dictatorship as the obvious cause of the problem.

Atheists today are simply living off morality taught by Christianity

As a tiny group in most nations, [atheism] tends to live off the cultural patrimony of the majority (or the historic majority). For example, Western Europe has a larger group of atheists [than in the United States], but the society they live in came of Christian social movements at the end of the Second World War.

Christianity has driven positive social change. A century ago, social change was everywhere in America, and Christians were leaders in women’s suffrage, the treatment of immigrants, prison and asylum reform, temperance and prohibition, racial inequality, child labor and compulsory elementary school education, women’s education, protection of women from workplace exploitation, equal pay for equal work, communism and utopian societies, unions and the labor movement, pure food laws, and more.

Today, Christians make more news by their resistance to social change, but we must give credit where it’s due. Christians have done a lot to improve society. But it’s not like they taught us information found only in their holy books. Each of these social improvements is a rejection of the complementary principle in an Old Testament theocracy. Most of this improvement wasn’t driven by Christianity but by people who simply happened to be Christian.

Atheism vs. secularism

Small, persecuted religious groups have often fled to form new groups. Small religious groups, like the Quakers, develop cohesive beliefs and establish communities. Some of these have been mostly good and some have been mostly bad. Atheism has not managed to do so.

How about the Puritans? They were a cohesive community, but they were also an intolerant Christian theocracy. Contrast them with American society today, which isn’t an atheist society but rather a secular one. One of the greatest gifts the United States has made to the world is the example of the first society governed by a secular constitution.

As for his imaginary atheistic society, what does that even mean? “I have no god belief” provides no guidance for how to build a healthy and fair society. It’s not supposed to. By contrast, Christianity has much to say about society and morality, and lots of that is crap.

Atheists and even anti-theists like me don’t want an atheist dictatorship. If there are Western anti-theists chafing at the prohibitions against killing Christians or imposing atheism, I’ve never heard of a single one. A secular government suits them just fine. We’re happy to simply point out the flaws of Christianity in the secular public square.

I am proud of the fact that despite its shortcomings, the United States which has always been overwhelmingly Christian has a decent track record of tolerating atheist dissent.

Thank the founding fathers. America has been tolerant despite Christianity, not because of it. Christians make news in this country when they want to exceed the bounds imposed by the Constitution—injecting religious messages in schools, teaching Creationism in the science classroom, putting up “In God We Trust” in government buildings and Christian displays on public property, praying before government meetings, and otherwise expecting special treatment for their religious beliefs in the state-supported public square.

And what’s “tolerating atheist dissent” supposed to mean? The assumption is that Christianity is the default, and everyone else is a dissenter? Nope—read the Constitution.

It would be comforting if my anti-theist friends would at least admit there is no happy human experience with anti-theist governance.

It would be comforting if my religious friends would at least admit that this dictatorial anti-theism bogeyman is unwanted by both Christians and atheists. No one is calling for a Stalinist dictatorship. The closest we get in America today are tiny voices calling for Dominionism (Christian theocracy) and Sharia law (Muslim theocracy). The status quo in the West, where a secular society rejects both religion and anti-theism in the public square, is the best thing for everyone.

Conclusion

I agree that anti-theism was important to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. They were dictators! Dictators can’t have the population confused about whom to give allegiance to, so they eliminate Christianity as a competing source of power. Atheism in their hands was a tool, not a goal. Reynolds has claimed otherwise but given us no reason to reject this obvious cause-and-effect relationship.

I want the First Amendment guarantees of speech, religion, press, and assembly defended for you just as strongly as I want them defended for me. If you can’t speak freely, I can’t expect to, either.

The secular government we have in the West today is the best for all. We must govern with reason rather than faith. We have yet to see a society that suffered from an excess of reason. I’m an anti-theist in that I would like to see religion gone from the world and I’m outraged at Christian excesses, but prohibiting religion or persecuting believers isn’t the way to go.

I don’t want religion made illegal. Instead, I want to see society to grow out of its need for religion.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/6/15.)

Image from WikiArt, CC license

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Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote a provocative post titled, “Hoping Atheists (Or at Least Anti-Theists) Do Not Kill Us This Time.” This apparently is what atheists do in his mind. Once they get power, they turn into Stalin.

I responded. Fellow atheist blogger Keith Parsons responded. And Reynolds came back with “Anti-Theists are Sure They Will Not Kill You This Time.” Let’s take a look at this rebuttal.

First off, anti-theists are all from the same mold.

Reynolds states his central thesis over and over.

In all human history any anti-theists who have formed a mass political movement and gained power have been that horrific.

(I was thinking of running for dog catcher in the next election, but my world-controlling agenda would probably work against me, so perhaps not . . .)

Reynolds is determined to poison the well. Stalin, Richard Dawkins, Bob Seidensticker—anti-theists are all the same when they get power, so Christian voters must beware!

Second, atheists in America will never amount to anything.

Next, he undercuts his argument by assuring atheists that there’s no point in even trying to attain power.

There is no evidence that American anti-theists will ever develop a mass movement of anti-theists capable of exercising power. . . .

Atheism worldwide is a shrinking community. In the United States it is growing, but from a tiny base.

Reynolds is surprisingly out of touch given that the unexpected and remarkable rise of the Nones (those unaffiliated with any church, which includes atheists) is one of the top religious news stories of the decade. Nones in America have risen from 6% in 1990 to 23% today and are now the largest “faith” group, edging out Evangelicals and Catholics. (Granted, most of the Nones are spiritual, not atheists, but atheism has increased dramatically as well.) Europe leads the way, where atheism is often uncontroversial.

As for worldwide trends, a recent Pew Research study projects that by 2050, the big worldview loser due to adherents switching out of that belief will be Christianity, with a net loss of 66 million worldwide. A nearly equal number will be switching into the Unaffiliated category (chart).

I have no fear of organized American atheists or anti-theists.

One wonders then why the inflammatory title of the initial piece, “Hoping [Anti-Theists] Do Not Kill Us This Time.”

There is no example of a state with atheists in power as atheists that did not persecute the religious.

There are zero atheists in Congress who are out, simply because people like you have made them unelectable. This proves only the Machiavellian success of your efforts, not that atheists are evil leaders.

Thank you for fighting the good fight to ensure that only people who believe like you can get elected, despite the clear guarantee in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.”

What causes a Stalin?

Reynolds doubles down on his theory of how atheist dictatorships form.

At least some anti-theists picked their politics to match their anti-theistic worldview. Stalin became an atheist first and then picked a political view to match his anti-theistic atheism.

So first Stalin became an atheist (and—who knows?—maybe also a stamp collector and a knitter). Then he fell in with Communists. Finally, he became a brutal dictator who indirectly killed millions. Are you saying that it was the stamp collecting that triggered those deaths? Or maybe the knitting?

If not the stamp collecting or the knitting, why the atheism? By showing priority, Reynolds has done nothing to show cause and effect.

Some critics have responded that “yes anti-theism came first” but that anti-theism did not play a causal role in the selection of socialism and the persecution of the religious. This seems implausible. It is very hard to establish that anything causes anything else, but if developing an anti-religious view is not an important motivation in the persecution of religious people, I am not sure what a motive would be!

It’s implausible that you’re mistaken? Your theory is hard to establish? What kind of research is this? Did you click Publish when this article was only in draft form?

Yes, someone who persecutes Christians would have an anti-religious view, but would someone with an anti-religious view (like Stalin) necessarily persecute Christians? I have an anti-religious view, depending on your definition, and I don’t persecute Christians. The overwhelming majority of atheists in the U. S., if magically made Dictator, wouldn’t dream of persecuting Christians.

This theory fails because we have nothing to argue that Stalin’s atheism and not the needs of his government drove the persecution of Christians.

And what fraction of Stalin’s victims were Christian? Once the Communist government put pressure on the church, the number of citizens that could have been killed for being Christian dropped.

To show that religion and atheism were simply tools for Stalin, note that Stalin allowed churches to revive during World War II to encourage patriotism. He also supported a (Muslim) Uyghur revolt in China’s northwest to harass the anti-Communist Nationalist government.

But don’t worry about Christians with power!

Reynolds is kept up nights worrying about atheists, but “there is not a parallel worry about Christianity,” he assures us.

No nation on earth with a Christian state church that bans atheism or sends atheists to labor camps.

Make it a Christian dictatorship, then get back to me. Look at Muslim theocracies today—atheism is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and ten other countries. The lesson isn’t hard: religion or atheism in a democracy is peaceful, while in a dictatorship it’s not. It’s the dictatorship that’s the problem.

And Reynolds has no leg to stand when he frets about atheist genocide when his own Bible makes clear that God was delighted to use genocide when necessary.

Here’s a fun detour: Reynolds was provost of Houston Baptist University, which is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which in turn partners with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The SBC split off in 1845 as the explicitly pro-slavery Baptist denomination and only apologized for its support of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy in 1995. Given Southern Baptists’ track record, should we insist on assurances that any who get into power won’t try to reinstate any of these racist policies? We could rework Reynolds’ own line: “Christians Racial minorities are not paranoid to worry and would be foolish not to do so.”

To Reynolds or anyone else who is outraged by this suggestion and comes up with responses why it makes no sense, I suggest they apply those responses to Reynolds’ argument, which is no stronger (h/t commenter wtfwjtd).

Back to Reynolds:

Nobody has denied that every atheist regime in the world has been horrible.

Hmm. That’s a good point. And how many countries are we talking about—two hundred? Three hundred?

Oh—so it’s only three countries, you say? And every one of them a dictatorship. Your study suffers from too small a sample size. It also suffers from the lack of atheist countries that are not dictatorships to see if (dare I say it?) the dictatorship is the problem.

Concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/4/15.)

Image from Wikipedia, CC license

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