Are you ready to test your wits by responding some (supposedly) bad atheist arguments?

I began a series of posts looking at bad Christian arguments almost five years ago. I titled it “25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid,” and after an initial flurry of posts highlighting 25 stupid arguments, more posts have trickled out so that now we’re almost to 50.

But two can play that game. The Bizarro World version of this blog is Frank Turek’s crossexamined.org, an evangelical Christian ministry aimed at college students. Turek’s blog recently reposted an article titled, “16 Bad Atheist Arguments and How to Respond to Them” by Jeremy Linn.

Do atheists have bad arguments as well? Let’s take a look.

Argument #1: Who created God?

“This question is asked under the assumption that God needs a creator. This assumption misrepresents the Christian understanding of God, where God is the necessary cause of all creation.”

Suppose a Christian apologist explains that the universe was created by God. An atheist might respond, “But who created God?” and the apologist would then say that God needs no creator by definition.

The apologist imagines a chain of causation that goes back to the ultimate cause, God, and there the chain ends. But simply making that claim isn’t the same as backing it up with evidence. If all those other things had causes, why not God? You can define God as “the necessary cause of all creation” (or anything you want), but that doesn’t bring it into existence.

Back in the real world, physics resolves the question of the infinite sequence of causes by arguing that some quantum events don’t have causes and that the beginning of the universe may have been one such quantum event.

(Click for more on the atheist justification for asking, “But Who Created God?” and the Cosmological Argument.)

Argument #2: Jesus never existed

“This objection flies against the conclusions of almost all scholars invested into Biblical and Roman history, along with evidence from both the New Testament books and extrabiblical sources.”

I don’t make this argument for two reasons. First, I haven’t read enough on each side of the argument to have an informed opinion. Second, and more importantly, I don’t see this as a practical argument. My focus is on apologetics—arguments and evidence for and against Christianity’s supernatural claims. From that standpoint, I don’t care whether at the beginning of Christianity there was an actual man or not. Each is compatible with my position that Christianity is false.

That doesn’t make this a bad argument (which was the initial claim), and maybe with more research I’d find that it is a bad argument. It’s just that other arguments make my case quicker and easier.

Argument #3: Atheists believe in just one less god than Christians

“There is a huge difference between a Theist (such as a Christian) and an Atheist. Theists believe in a supreme, personal creator of the Universe. Atheists don’t. This difference has huge implications for how each carries out their lives.”

But on the other hand, Christians reject Poseidon, Xenu, and Chemosh for the same reasons that atheists do—the claim that they are gods is remarkable, and there isn’t enough evidence to support it. Maybe theists and atheists aren’t so different after all.

Let’s not overestimate the commonality among theists. They can’t even agree on the most fundamental specifics: how many gods there are, what their names are, or what they want from us. Theists may all sense the supernatural, but either that sense is so muddled as to give radically contradictory views of the supernatural, or belief in the supernatural is just a many-sided cultural (and all-natural) phenomenon. My guess is the latter.

(Click for more arguing that “I just believe in one less god than you do” is a valid argument.)

Argument #4: Believing in God is like believing in Santa or leprechauns.

“The Christian claims to have evidence for God, and hardly anyone claims to have evidence for a real Santa. The alleged evidence for God cannot be simply dismissed with this silly statement.”

It all comes down to “the alleged evidence for God.” When atheists ask for it, what they get are the same tired, unconvincing arguments. The best that they’ve got are deist arguments that argue for the Christian god as convincingly as any other. These are arguments like, “Why does the universe look fine tuned?” or “Why does life look designed?”

Sure, let’s say that the evidence for God is not zero. For example, the 2+ billion Christians on the earth right now is evidence that their god exists. That doesn’t count for much—5+ billion non-Christians argue that they’re wrong, and 45,000 denominations argue that their perfect god is imperfect in getting his message across—but let’s grant that it counts for something.

Let’s not delude ourselves that evidence is what brings people to faith. Christians don’t monitor Shintoism or Jainism on a religious stock exchange, ready to jump ship if the evidence for another offering exceeds that for their current holding. In almost all cases, they don’t believe because of evidence, their intellectual arguments rationalize a position they hold for emotional reasons, and their preferred religion wasn’t chosen but was adopted from their culture.

I realize that God has a stick and can punish me, but Santa could put me on the naughty list. Neither entity is part of my worldview, so neither punishment bothers me.

Is there more evidence for God than for Santa or leprechauns? Adults do believe in God (unlike Santa), but Yahweh is just one of the gods that is in vogue at the moment. Millions of Romans believed in Apollo, whom Christians today quickly dismiss as mythology. The Christian argument begins to become compelling when they show how Yahweh isn’t merely fashionable (unlike Apollo) and isn’t a manmade god (unlike Allah or Shiva).

You’ve got evidence? Without it, God is indeed like Santa Claus.

Continued in part 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“7. Theists usually behave horribly.”

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

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

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

“8. Theism causes strife.”

Sometimes it does. But, so does soccer.

(Cleverly said!) The author continues:

Not enough reason to cast aside either.

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

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

“9. It’s cool to be an atheist.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image via Wikimedia, CC license

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Here’s something new—apologetics from a Muslim source. Pakistan Today recently ran the article, “Nine not-so-good reasons to be an atheist.” Since Islam is the official religion and 96+ percent of the population is Muslim, I 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 this blog 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.

“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.

In the Bible, God is very much cast in the image of man. 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 as interesting as some of the arguments alluded to. 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 (more on 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’ve written about 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 by that reason. “You would probably believe in Allah if you were born in Pakistan” is indeed 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.

We can 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? Supernaturalism has never explained anything that we can verify as true. Countless supernatural “explanations” have been overturned by scientific ones 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’?

Good point—that is an important question. There are 45,000 answers within Christianity. Even Islam, which isn’t as fragmented, has more than just the well-known Sunni and Shia denominations. 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? Seriously? 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 arguing 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 is living in a glass house. Has he ever read his own stuff?? It’s insane—floating ax heads, talking donkeys and snakes, 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 as an outsider. Only because you’re accustomed to your own view do you not see that it looks childish from the outside (in its own way) as all the others do.

Concluded in part 2.

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Image via Lex Kravetski, CC license

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Christian apologists, perhaps knowing that they won’t do well in the arena of argument and evidence, try instead to beat the atheist worldview by arguing that it’s more pleasing or happier. In several recent posts, I’ve responded to the claim that Christian hope is a strong plus for Christianity. It’s not. It incorrectly imagines that consoling is enough, it encourages Christians to not see reality clearly, it encourages complacency and magical thinking, it provokes anxiety when promises and reality don’t mesh, it makes God a jerk, and it infantilizes Christians.

Let’s now look at the big picture of each worldview. Compare Christianity and atheism, and atheism wins.

Positives of Christianity (and the negatives)

Let’s start with Christianity’s positive traits. The church can create community for its members, and it can catalyze their good works and charitable giving. As such, it is an important social institution. While this natural part of the church is a positive, however, the supernatural side doesn’t hold up as well. Let’s look at some examples. For one, heaven is a nice idea, but it comes as a package deal with hell.

And you’re told that God is eager for a relationship, but he won’t even meet you halfway when his very existence isn’t obvious.

Laying your problems at the feet of Jesus might be comforting, but they’re usually still there when you go back to check. Why are prayers answered at a rate no better than chance?

One of Christianity’s strongest selling points, we’re told, is that salvation doesn’t require works but is a gift. All you need is faith. But with so many interpretations of correct belief within Christianity, how do you know the Jesus you have faith in is the right one? You may be headed for hell if you guess wrong.

What is God’s goal when he allows bad things to happen to people—tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands or childhood cancers, for example? As an omnipotent being, he could achieve any goal without causing suffering.

Christians might deal with issues like these by compartmentalizing, by not asking questions, or by denying their doubt. But not being able to honestly raise your concerns, let alone resolve them, creates mental stress, not a healthy relationship.

Facing reality (and the positives of atheism)

When challenged with some of these concerns, a common Christian response is to argue that the atheist worldview is bleak and empty (as if “that worldview is depressing” is any argument against it being correct). But let’s consider that worldview—a world without God. This would be a world where praying for something doesn’t increase its likelihood; where faith is necessary to mask the fact that God’s existence is not apparent; where no loving deity walks beside you in adversity; where natural disasters kill people indiscriminately; where far too many children live short and painful lives because of malnutrition, abuse, injury, or birth defects; and where there is only wishful thinking behind the ideas of heaven and hell.

Look around, because that’s the world you’re living in. But this isn’t anarchy, it’s a world where people live and love and grow, and where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers. Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but are explained by science, and where earthquakes happen for no good reason and people strive to leave the world a better place than they found it. God isn’t necessary to explain any of this. Said another way, there is no functional difference between a world with a hidden god and one with no god.

It’s not that the atheist worldview finds no value in life. In fact, the opposite is true: the Christian worldview is the one that devalues life. Of what value is tomorrow to the Christian when they imagine they’ll have a trillion tomorrows? What value are a few short years here on earth when they have eternity in heaven?

There are consequences. If the atheist is right, the Christian will have missed seeing their life for what it truly is—not a test to see if you correctly dance to the tune of Bronze Age traditions; not a shell of a life, with real life waiting for you in the hereafter; not drudgery to be endured or penance paid while you bide your time for your reward; but rather the one chance you have at reality. We can argue whether heaven exists, but one thing we do know is our one life here on earth: a too-short life, no matter how long you live, that you can spend wisely or foolishly. Where you can walk in a meadow full of flowers, and laugh and learn, and do good things and feel good for having done them. Where you can play with children, and teach someone, and love.

I won’t be able to visit new places after I die; I won’t be able to learn another language, or comfort a friend, or apologize, or forgive, or simply stop and smell the roses. If it’s important to me, I’d better do it in the one life I know I have. Life is sweeter when that’s all you’ve got. Sure, there’s a downside to having a finite number of days on this earth. It’s a downside, but that’s why it’s an upside.

Atheism is far from being a depressing worldview—just ask any ex-Christian atheist. They’ll tell you how empowered and free they feel now that they can honestly ask questions and follow evidence where it leads.

They seek only the truth, but the truth is enough.

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Image via Sivesh Kumar, CC license
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