The Christian is challenged to explain the universe or the apparent design in life. They say that God created it, but then the atheist responds, “But who created God?”
Christian response #1
The most popular Christian response is probably to attempt to invalidate the question by saying that God is uncreated by definition.

The answer is that [“Who created God?”] does not even make sense. It is like asking, “What does blue smell like?” Blue is not in the category of things that have a smell, so the question itself is flawed. In the same way, God is not in the category of things that are created or caused. God is uncaused and uncreated—He simply exists. (Source)
God by definition is the uncreated creator of the universe, so the question “Who created God?” is illogical, just like “To whom is the bachelor married?” (Source)

So have we somehow used a definition to create God? Or at least argue for his existence? Hold that thought, because that reminds me of a joke.

It seems that there was a dairy farmer with a large herd who wanted to improve milk production. He contacted the local university, and they assigned three professors to the project. After a month, they presented their work.

The psychologist showed how changing the wall color inside the milking parlor and playing soothing music relaxed the cows and improved milk production.

The mechanical engineer suggested improved pumps on the milking machines. Quicker turnaround meant more time eating in the fields.

The physicist was the final expert. He went to the blackboard, picked up some chalk, and drew a large circle. “Consider a spherical cow entirely filled with milk.”

Your reaction to the physicist is my reaction to the two quotes above. Sure, we can define God as “the uncreated creator of the universe,” but if that definition is supposed to be an argument for this God, then you’re as disconnected from reality as the physicist.
Don’t pretend that you can sit back with your arms crossed as if you’ve justified your position in any way. Your religion may say that God was uncreated, but that is no answer in the real world. If “Who created God?” exposes an unsupported part of your argument, then come back after you have justified the claim that God was uncreated. Make it a conclusion, not a presupposition.
Before you say that the Bible confirms that God is eternal (for example, “The hope of eternal life, which God . . . promised before the beginning of time,” Titus 1:2), remember that “the Bible says so” is theology, not evidence.
Response #2
Here’s an interesting angle:

As a logical refutation against God as creator and designer of the universe, the who created God question completely misrepresents philosophy of science. This is because, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, you do not have to be able to explain the explanation. In order to say that A caused B, you do not have to be able to explain where A came from. (Source)

So what are you saying? Are you admitting that you can’t explain where A (God) came from? If the ordinary questions (“Where did it come from?” or “How long has it been around?”) can’t be answered in an ordinary way, you don’t just assert that; you give evidence to justify it.
The typical response at this point is to argue that God is the unmoved First Mover or the necessary being required to create the first contingent being, but these philosophical approaches aren’t useful at the frontier of science. Science does have questions about the origin of the universe, but it has also answered many questions. Religion, by contrast, has taught us nothing about science.
Let’s return to that last source.

In order to say that A caused B, you do not have to be able to explain where A came from. For example if we came across a pit of ashes in a field, we would be justified in inferring that there was a fire, even if we had no idea whatsoever where the fire came from or what caused it.

Answer 1: Instead of a fire, I’d prefer to explain the ashes by a wizard. You’ll say, “But where did the wizard come from?” Sorry, that question is out of bounds and can’t be used to cast doubt on my explanation. Remember that you don’t need the explanation of the explanation.
Answer 2: I’ll accept fire as a reasonable explanation for ashes because fire is common and we know it creates ashes. Now tell me why I should find God’s actions in the world as familiar as those of fire.
Fires are common and unsurprising, but there is no good evidence for a supernatural anything (in particular, creators of universes). See the difference? Don’t draw a parallel between something common (fire) and something so uncommonly uncommon as to be nonexistent (God).
Response #3
A final response attempts to shore up the claim that God was uncreated. One Christian blog responded by saying that everyone says that the ultimate cause was uncaused and that if this challenge knocks down the Christian worldview, it knocks them all down. Atheists are living in glass houses when they demand justification for an uncaused beginning.
The problem, of course, is that there is no scientific consensus about the origin of the universe that says that it was uncaused. And when there is a consensus, it will be based on evidence.
Unlike how Christianity makes its conclusions about the questions of nature.
(See also: “How Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument Suck? Let Me Count the Ways.”)

Science continues to replace
God-filled gaps in our understanding
with all-natural ingredients.
And since we don’t need God
to explain the existence of the nature of the universe,
 we don’t need God, period.
— Mitch Stokes, paraphrasing an atheist argument

Image credit: Tim Green, flickr, CC

Paul Vitz was a professor of psychology. His Faith of the Fatherless (1999) attempts to use Freudian techniques to conclude that “modern atheism originated in the irrational, psychological needs of a few prominent thinkers.”
Which Freud are we talking about?  
Presumably this is the same Sigmund Freud who concluded that, according to Karen Armstrong in A History of God, “a personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever.” Armstrong continues:

[Freud concluded that] God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshiped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.

I wonder if Vitz really wants to hold up Freud as a reliable critic of religion or if he wants to cherry pick just the bits from Freud that he likes. (I’m guessing the latter. Vitz does a lot of cherry picking.)
The defective father hypothesis
Vitz uses Freudian thinking to conclude that atheists are atheists because of the absence of a good father. Disappointment in one’s earthly father leads to a rejection of the heavenly Father.
He’s yet another Christian apologist who concludes that atheists don’t exist and are actually theists. They aren’t atheists because there’s no god; rather, they know that God exists but suppress or reject that knowledge for psychological reasons.
Vitz supports his “defective father hypothesis” by listing believers such as Blaise Pascal, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had present and loving fathers and atheists such as Voltaire, Freud, and (wait for it … !) Hitler who had absent or unloving fathers.
(There’s plenty of reason to argue that Hitler was actually a believer, but let’s ignore that for now.)
This is the argument of a scientist? This is no comprehensive survey; it’s just cherry picking. This correlation that he’s selected can be easily turned around: it’s not that atheists are driven by a poor home life to petulantly reject the Father who is obviously there; rather, Christians are coddled by the strong and wise guidance of their father, and when they mature, they remain too weak to face reality without the crutch of a father who’s far more powerful than they. They then project a supernatural extension of that caring father onto the universe.
If I could provide the opposite list—famous Christians who had no father figure and famous atheists who did—would Vitz reject his hypothesis? For example, let’s take one of modern Christianity’s premier thinkers, C. S. Lewis. Here’s what Lewis said about his father: “God forgive me, I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel in the week.”
Would this cause Vitz to walk away from his poor-father hypothesis? Of course not. I’m sure he knows about this example but just chooses to ignore it. If I presented this defeater to his case, he would accuse me of biased selection of my examples. He’d be right, of course, but why is it okay for him but not me?
Uri Geller predicts the election
Uri Geller the mystic used the same empty reasoning in a recent Facebook post. He declared that Donald Trump will win the election. Why? Because “Donald Trump” has 11 letters and “11 is a very powerful mystical number.”
Not enough evidence for you? Well consider this, Mr. Skeptic: Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and more also have 11 letters in their names!
Like Vitz, Geller simply ignores the inconvenient counterexamples such as George Washington (16 letters), Thomas Jefferson (15), Abraham Lincoln (14), and Teddy Roosevelt (14), just to take the faces on Mount Rushmore.
Epitaph
What I find personally obnoxious about Vitz’s claim, and again we’re in the realm of anecdote and not statistics, is that my own father was present, strong, and loving. He also emphasized education and reason, and I’m the result. I could argue that this and many other examples refute Vitz, but he and his hypothesis are a waste of time.
I’d rather pass on a powerful story written by Charles Handy, an English economist and author. He describes the funeral of his father, a quiet and modest man who had lived his life as an unambitious minister of a small church in Ireland.

When [my father] died, I rushed back to Ireland for the funeral. Held in the little church where he had spent most of his life, it was supposed to be a quiet family affair. But it turned out to be neither quiet nor restricted to the family. I was astounded by the hundreds of people who came, on such short notice, from all corners of the British Isles. Almost every single person there came up to me and told me how much my father had meant to them—and how deeply he had touched their lives.
That day, I stood by his grave and wondered, Who would come to my funeral? How many lives have I touched? Who knows me as well as all of these people who knew this quiet man?
When I returned to London, I was a deeply changed man. Later that year, I resigned my tenured professorship. More important, I dropped my pretense of being someone other than who I was. I stopped trying to be a hot shot. I decided to do what I could to make a genuine difference in other people’s lives. Whether I have succeeded, only my own funeral will tell.
I only wish that I could have told my father that he was my greatest teacher.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/28/13.)
Photo credit: hnphotog, flickr, CC
 

So much of apologetics and counterapologetics involves men that I’m delighted to right the balance slightly with this guest post by Karen Garst, author of the just-released book Women Beyond Belief. Here is an excerpt of the story of one of the women she writes about.
Ceal Wright is a young woman who arrives on campus eager to learn and experience what university life has to offer. She meets the man of her dreams and falls in love. But this young man is not a Jehovah’s Witness like she is. A “friend” turns her in to the church because she has slept with a non-believer. A tribunal of three church elders is convened.
From the book:

“You must consider him a tool of Satan.”
My face refused to remain neutral as my ears took in this sentence. Did I hear him right? With an expression of incredulity and confusion, I looked back at the elder who’d just spoken and the two others on the panel with him, and replied, “Uh, I don’t see how that’s possible. I don’t think you understand—I love him. This isn’t just a crush—I love him—I wouldn’t be with just anybody. Jehovah is a God of love and this is love, so I don’t see how that is even remotely connected to Satan.”
“Satan is using him to draw you away from Jehovah and is disguising himself as this boy,” another elder chimed in.
Oh silly young Ceal, you hadn’t realized that you’d fallen in love with the devil.
The fluorescent lights became unbearably bright as I felt my body stiffen, preparing for my reply. I stood my ground and continued to refute their offensive correlation of my love with the devil. Trying to reason and explain my logical feelings (as opposing as that sounds) to this tribunal of elders was futile though. In this Church females were not given equal voice and stature; therefore, for me to come into the room prepared for anything but groveling for forgiveness was tantamount to disrespect. I had naïvely presumed they would treat me with the respect and openness that I had been raised to believe I deserved, and in the heat of that moment, I did not recognize the danger I was in by voicing my thoughts. After a solid two hours of back-and-forth, they left the room for an agonizing ninety minutes to deliberate, during which time I sat alone in the back room of the Kingdom Hall feeling confused, abandoned, and pissed.
Believing still that God was real and his Holy Spirit was directing the men outside, I was convinced by my conditioning that my case would be dealt with justly—after all, this was my first offense in my twenty-three years of life. Finally, they filed into the small room and sat back down.
They all read a scripture that they had personally chosen for me and then informed me that they were leaning toward disfellowshipping me—the highest punishment available to them—but by the grace of one elder who had known me for years, they decided to grant me a reprieve to think upon their counsel and come back repentant.
And in that instant, my faith shattered.

Ceal Wright is one of 22 women who tell their personal stories of leaving religion. Karen L. Garst has compiled these essays into Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion, which is available online and in bookstores.
Dr. Garst became incensed when the U. S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby in 2014. This decision said that because of its religious views, Hobby Lobby, a craft store, would not be obligated to follow the dictates of the Affordable Care Act and provide certain forms of birth control to its employees. Would the fight for women’s reproductive rights never end? Once again, religion has influenced the laws of our land. Politicians cite their religion in supporting restrictions on abortion, banning funding for Planned Parenthood, and a host of other issues that are against women.
Dr. Garst wants to add a focus on women and the role this mythology has played in the culture of many countries to denigrate and subordinate women. Religion is the last cultural barrier to gender equality. More and more women atheists are speaking out. And as we all know, if women leave the churches, they will collapse.
She has received support with reviews by Richard Dawkins, Valerie Tarico, Peter Boghossian, Sikivu Hutchinson and other atheist authors.
I encourage you to check out Dr. Garst’s blog at faithlessfeminist.com and order her book, Women Beyond Belief. At this writing, the book is Amazon’s #1 new release in Atheism.

We don’t worship cancer or hunger or a hurricane,
we don’t worship many things that have power to devastate us,
nor do we appeal for mercy to these things,
because we have an idea they’re not directing themselves at us….
Inside a snow globe no one can hear you scream,
and the person stops shaking it when they’re done being amused.
It’s pure delusion to think there’s a relationship going on here.
— commenter Kodie

This is a popular Christian attack: life without God is bleak. For example, Christian apologist Ken Ham said about the atheist worldview,

None of our accomplishments, advancements, breakthroughs, triumphs, or heartbreaks will ultimately matter as we face extinction along with our universe. This is certainly a bleak and hopeless perspective.

And yet this perception doesn’t sound like that of atheists who exist in real life rather than those that exist just in Ken Ham’s head. Since he can’t correctly describe their worldview, maybe he should try again.
But instead of having a young-earth Creationist ineptly tell atheists what they think and how they’re wrong, we can explore the idea of life without God through an article by atheist Julian Baggini, “Yes, life without God can be bleak. Atheism is about facing up to that.”
Baggini makes two reasonable points: (1) atheists see no good evidence for God and refuse to live as if there were, and (2) in focusing on the positive side of life in recent ad campaigns, atheists have glossed over the fact that for many people life sucks.
While I agree with his points, I don’t like how he gets there. Let’s examine his support of the Christian claim that life without God is bleak.
Baggini sees the popular stereotype of atheists within society as “the dark, brooding existentialist gripped by the angst of a purposeless universe” and fears that atheists have overcompensated. They’ve pushed the happy side of atheism (without much apparent success, if “brooding existentialist” is still what comes to mind), but atheists haven’t acknowledged that life can be meaningless and miserable.
Baggini again:

Atheists have to live with the knowledge that there is no salvation, no redemption, no second chances. Lives can go terribly wrong in ways that can never be put right. Can you really tell the parents who lost their child to a suicide after years of depression that they should stop worrying and enjoy life? …
Sometimes life is shit and that’s all there is to it.

True, but this is the human condition. It’s not like the Christian has an advantage. Will you say to the Christian parents who lost their child to suicide, “They’re in a better place”? Or “It’s all part of God’s plan” or “God must’ve needed another angel” or “You’ll be reunited soon”? Do these evidence-less platitudes bring the parents much comfort? Would the parent rather hear empty Christian phrases or an atheist’s honest offer of help and support?
Both the atheist and the Christian feel that this hypothetical child’s death was an injustice—life is just not supposed to work that way—but Christians actually make things worse for themselves. Christians must believe just the right thing to meet heaven’s entrance requirements. What if they get it wrong? The invention of heaven created a new anxiety that never burdens the atheist.
And what if the child got it wrong? I once listened to a theology podcast with a panel of pastors wrestling with this problem. A man’s twenty-ish son had died in an accident. Problem 1 was the obvious one: the man was grieving the loss of his son. Problem 2 was entirely of Christianity’s making: the man’s beliefs put his son in hell, in torment.
The atheist’s advice would be to drop the beliefs in a God who isn’t there (and have him take his nonexistent hell with him), but the pastors were obliged to tap dance around this enormous burden of their own making, unable to seize the simple, obvious, and complete solution provided by the atheist’s worldview.
Many Christians grant God license to do things that seem immoral. Drowning humanity with the Flood (for example) sounds barbaric to us but might make good sense to a God who is omniscient. If God has carte blanche, he might just refuse entrance into heaven for any or all Christians for no (apparent) good reason. Since God does things that seem illogical or immoral to us, the Christian must see this as a very real possibility and one to which they could make no protest.
Baggini wonders where atheist morality comes from.

Anyone who thinks it’s easy to ground ethics either hasn’t done much moral philosophy or wasn’t concentrating when they did.

Here’s the short atheist answer: humans are social animals like other great apes. Evolution selected for social behavior (trust, compassion, Golden Rule, and so on) because these traits improved evolutionary fitness.
Christians make unwarranted claims for the existence and accessibility of objective morality and ground all this in make-believe, and he’s concerned about what grounds atheist morality? When Christians bring something compelling to the table, perhaps I’ll see a need to justify atheist morality more than the short answer above.

Although morality is arguably just as murky for the religious, at least there is some bedrock belief that gives a reason to believe that morality is real and will prevail.

No, it’s not murky for the atheist. We can see why morality evolved the way it did for humans. By contrast, Christians have only just-so stories about a creator god who loves us, drowns us, and/or consigns most of us to hell, depending on his mood.

So I think it’s time we atheists ’fessed up and admitted that life without God can sometimes be pretty grim….
The journey can be wonderful but it can also be arduous and it may end horribly.

Life with or without God can be grim. You seem to imagine that the alternative to atheism is skipping through a meadow, hand in hand with Jesus, with all worries forgotten. Some Christians might imagine that, but any honest Christian occasionally wonders if their story is just BS. Many Christian sites have articles about dealing with Christians’ inevitable doubts.
Concluded on the next page.