Tim Barnett is attacking ten atheist arguments in a recent Red Pen Logic video. Here’s how he recalls stumbling across them.

So, a few days ago, I’m scrolling through the comments section of this channel, and I came across something that left me speechless. At first, I wasn’t sure if this was serious or if it was just a joke.

Wow—the atheist argument is in tatters before we even begin! Let’s poke through the rubble and see if anything is still standing after Barnett’s savage analysis.

For the first two arguments, go to part 1.

3. How could God cause the Big Bang without time to do it in?

Atheist argument: “There was no time before the Big Bang, so that means that there was no time for a God to exist in or create things in.”

Christian response: “Christians have traditionally held that God is a timeless being, outside of time, prior to creation.”

My response: Make up whatever properties you want for God, but that won’t magic away the problem. You must first show that this God exists. With evidence. The Bible makes vague hints at God’s timelessness, but the Bible is no authority. Iron Age thinking isn’t helpful when dealing with 21st-century physics.

And be careful what you wish for, since God as a Time Lord calls down a rain of new questions. How can you create anything if you’re outside of time? In particular, how did timeless God create time (or turn it on or however you’re inventing God’s relationship with time)? Isn’t timelessness permanent, since causes require time? How do you go from being timeless to within time?

And do you really want to imagine God outside of time? Such a god would be inert. Only within time can God judge, decide, punish, create, have emotions, take pleasure in things, and so on. Some of these actions of God—like deciding to create time or loving other members of the Trinity—supposedly happened outside of time.

All this science fiction must be justified. Apologists try to talk their way out of a logical predicament of their own making, but then they expect a pass to avoid having to justify their exuberant claims.

God’s properties—exalted or mundane?

“Since the universe is space, time, matter, and energy, then the thing that made the universe needs to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful. The timeless nature of the origin of all things is another piece of evidence for God.”

Reshaping God to cooperate with modern physics is a recent project. The original hearers of what became the first books of the Bible roughly 3000 years ago had no concept of this debate. Back in God’s early days, he had to personally investigate stories he’d heard about Sodom and Gomorrah, he spoke to Moses face to face, and he was beaten by rival god Chemosh (more). Omniscient and omnipotent God was a later invention. An unchanging god who nevertheless evolves over time isn’t the Creator. It’s just fiction.

Evaluation: 8/10. Most listeners won’t be comfortable with this concept of being inside or outside time (it certainly makes no sense to me), but the argument works.

4. What’s good for the goose . . . 

Atheist argument: “The Abrahamic God cannot exist because it wasn’t the first God to be created. There are other gods that have been proclaimed to exist before this God. They can’t all be true. So, if we can deny the existence of one of these gods, we can use the same method to deny them all.”

My response: I interpret this argument to be the copycat argument (the Bible copied stories from earlier local religions, which shows it was invented) plus a demand for consistency (whatever arguments Christians use to invalidate other religions must be applied to Christianity, and if Christianity is special, they have the burden of proof to show that).

Christian response: “If this is a good argument against God, then it’s also a good argument against science since older false concepts are often replaced by newer true concepts. On Doyle’s logic, since the older geocentric view is false, we can just deny the newer heliocentric view by the same method.”

Science and mythology aren’t evaluated the same way. To see this, imagine a murder crime scene. If you know it was a murder, you also know that there were one or more murderers. The murderers may be unknown to the police, but you can’t have a murder without at least one. Contrast that with astrology. Many different incompatible astrology systems have been developed, and none are valid. You can have a pseudoscience without any valid theories for how it works.

Science is like the crime scene. You may not know the scientific explanation, but there must be one. Religion is like pseudoscience. It’s quite possible that none are correct. (The Monty Hall problem is related.)

This is like saying that fake van Goghs prove there are no real van Goghs.

No, it’s observing that every single religion could be false. By talking about fake van Goghs, you’re acknowledging that one or more real van Goghs exist (or did exist). Again, the two camps are like astrology (for which there are zero valid systems) and murder (for which there must be at least one murderer). There could be zero real religions, but there must be one or more real van Goghs to make sense of the concept of a fake van Gogh.

This comparison of science with religion is a false analogy. We evaluate scientific theories with evidence. A new theory might supersede the old, the old might still be standing after the challenge of the new, or a third theory might overthrow them both. There is no “current champion” within religion, because they’re cultural traits. Shintoism won’t come to America and vanquish the reigning champ in a few decades, as could be the case with an upstart new scientific theory that better explains the evidence than the old one. (The map of world religions comparison expands on this.)

The progression of religions through history

I assume we agree that people make up religions. We see the fingerprints of the (human) creator in Mormonism, Scientology, and others. Christianity has the advantage here because those new religions have a paper trail, and Christianity’s origins are clouded by time. But having an obscured beginning is hardly a selling point for a religion trying to prove the truth of its supernatural claims.

The Bible story picked up elements from neighboring cultures. Genesis describes earth’s geology as water in the sky and under the earth, taken from an earlier story from Sumer. Noah’s flood had parallels in the stories of Gilgamesh and others. The supernatural conception of Jesus followed those of gods and kings, and his resurrection had precedents, too.

What should we look for in the Bible to show that it, unlike the other ancient myths, is actually true? We’d look for its story to be unique. We find instead that world religions make up a family tree like we see with world languages, with Christianity just one more entry, more similar to religions from nearby areas and less similar to distant ones.

Or see the comparison another way. If Christianity were the single correct religion, it would look radically different, like Disney World, with the other, manmade religions more like a trailer park. There would be no contest. Instead, we see Christianity fighting for market share like the rest with no particular reason to think it’s more likely true than others.

However the Christian evaluates and rejects other religions, Christianity is cut down with the same scythe. The Christian might acknowledge much of this but insist it doesn’t prove that Yahweh is false. I agree, but that’s the way to bet.

Evaluation: 10/10. This one was poorly worded, but I think the copycat argument plus a demand for consistency—that Christian be evaluated with the same critique as the other religions—works well.

Continue to part 3 for arguments God allows the devil to exist + other gods exist.

.

Image from Martin Sanchez (free-use license)
.

The Problem of God’s Hiddenness, where God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him (but refuses to make his existence obvious), is what I believe is the most powerful argument against Christianity.

We’ll conclude our critique of a rebuttal of this argument by apologist Greg Koukl (part 1 here).

What do other apologists say?

C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters tried to explain it this way: “[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo,” but this relationship analogy fails. In an ordinary human relationship, the very existence of the other person is never the question. No party to a relationship “ravishes” by simply making their existence known. The rare examples where someone is fooled into believing someone exists become man-bites-dog stories. (Consider the surprising story of Notre Dame football star Manti Teʻo.)

Augustine had similar advice: “Do not understand so you may believe; instead believe so you may understand.” But why? You don’t pick a belief system first and then select facts to support it; it’s the other way around. You follow the facts to their logical conclusion. Christians are forced to imagine a trickster god who plants vague clues to the most important truth.

What does the theist admit when using this argument?

Consider the theist’s desperation in advancing an argument like this. For any reasonable claim of existence, we are given evidence. You want to know what “the sun” is? Just look up on a sunny day. You want to know what a black hole is? That’ll take a lot more effort, but there is plenty of evidence for black holes, too. And yet for God, we get just a suggestion of a shadow. If God loved us and dearly wanted us to know him, he would make his existence known. He doesn’t.

So—option B—we assume God’s existence and say that he wants to be an enigma for reasons that are unknowable to us. But, of course, if he wanted to be hidden, he would be so! If you’re playing hide and seek with God, you will lose. He’s God—he could leave no trace, and there would be no enigma.

That leaves the Christian with option C: God isn’t deliberately hidden but instead leaves just the vaguest of clues—only enough to tease the seeker. This is rarely enough to give complete confidence, so the Christian is always on edge, never quite sure whether he’s got it right or is instead going to hell. This is a god who plays games with people’s lives.

So where does this leave us? A God too shy to even make his existence known contradicts a God who wants a relationship—he can’t be both. Koukl’s handwaving about how people would respond to an obvious God (lots of people would still disbelieve; they’d have their own selfish reasons for rejecting God) ignores the fact that this would remove the legitimate obstacle of too little evidence for millions or even billions of people.

And how hard would it be for God to make everyone believe he exists? I could convince any sane person that I exist. Can’t God do the same? If I can do it, couldn’t an omniscient god a billion times smarter than me do it, too?

Or take another example: Imagine a child who doesn’t believe you that touching a hot stove will hurt. That child will, upon touching the stove anyway, believe immediately and completely that you were right. God apparently has less ability to convince than a stove (h/t commenter MNb).

Koukl might say that God’s hiddenness doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist, which is true. But it certainly gives us no reason to believe in him. We can’t prove that God is nonexistent, but he’s functionally nonexistent.

More on Greg Koukl’s answers to skeptics’ questions, which he answered on the same podcast:

• How Does Prayer Work? And What Does that Say About God?
• Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/12/16.)

Image from Martin Cathrae (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

.

The Problem of God’s Hiddenness, where God wants a relationship with us and knows that hell awaits those who don’t know him (but refuses to make his existence obvious), is the most powerful argument against Christianity.

We’ll continue our critique of a rebuttal of this argument by apologist Greg Koukl. (In part 1 we analyzed the free will response and the “Yeah, but that wouldn’t convince everyone” response).

What requests for evidence are reasonable?

Koukl said that the evidence people have today for God is “fully adequate.” He clarified his position this way:

[Doubting] Thomas had fully adequate evidence but then made the ridiculous request that I wouldn’t believe until I stick my finger into the nail holes. . . . That was really above and beyond what was really required.

Bullshit. Beyond a certain point, apologists’ making excuses for God just gets embarrassing.

So Thomas had clues indicating that his teacher had validated his claim to be the creator of the universe in human form, but it would be rude to check them out? Wouldn’t Thomas have been smart to firmly ground his evangelical message with solid answers to the questions skeptics would obviously ask about the facts of the resurrection? “How do you know it wasn’t a lookalike?” “Did you make sure it really was the same guy?”

It’s not like God has a rule against providing public evidence. In Elijah’s contest with the priests of Baal, God lit Elijah’s waterlogged sacrifice (1 Kings 18). God enabled Moses to perform magic tricks to convince the pharaoh (Exodus 4). Later, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” Jesus did his miracles in public, in part to convince people of who he was. But today God won’t even show us that he exists?

I wonder if Koukl is this gullible in response to claims from other religions. Would he read the Book of Mormon without making the ridiculous request to see if its claims of horses and elephants in the New World held up? Would he accept that the “Hindu milk miracle,” where statues drank milk from spoons, was indeed a miracle, or would he make the ridiculous request to see if scientists have a natural explanation?

Skeptical Thomas demanded strong evidence for an unbelievable claim. No apology is needed for this reasonable request. Gullible Greg makes quite a contrast. God gave you that big brain to use, Greg.

In his quest to denigrate evidence, Koukl then said that if God appeared right in front of you, you wouldn’t go to God, you’d go to a psychiatrist.

Wow—that’s a great point! What does that tell you about the plausibility of the Christian message and the reasonableness of atheists’ demands for excellent evidence?

Rhetorical tricks

Throughout his response, Koukl added an undercurrent of bluster. Every couple of minutes, he dropped in a confident, evidence-free, off-topic claim that his position was the right one:

I’ve seen what people have done with enormous evidence and how they’ve often rejected it.

My evidence for God is quite good, and I think it’s available to many people.

Atheism’s not even in the running for me because the problems are so much bigger than anything I face in Christianity.

There is so much evidence all over the world, and we’re constantly offering that kind of evidence as apologists. . . . We have lots to say, but for some people it just simply isn’t adequate, and I wonder why because the rational aspects (it seems to me) are certainly covered here. There must be something else going on in the minds of people who reject it.

If he were backing the winning argument, he’d let the evidence do the blustering.

He complains when non-Christians are given “enormous evidence” but reject it. I’m pretty familiar with Koukl’s work, and I’ve responded to some of it in this blog (for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). No well-informed atheist would be impressed by his tired, retread arguments.

I presume he wants to shift the conversation to his hand shadow figures rather than the topic at hand, God’s hiddenness, to which he has responded poorly. His argument has become, “Yeah, but Christianity is true, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t respond to this problem!”

Koukl again:

From where I sit, I think the evidence is absolutely overwhelming, and the problems with atheism are so much more massive than anyone can come up with for theism that there’s no contest between the two.

Yet again, this is stated without evidence, and our Problem of God’s Hiddenness alone defeats Christianity. If God wants a relationship, where is he? Christianity has promised too much, its god is a no-show, and Christianity is no longer a worldview candidate.

Thought experiment: God World

Koukl says that if God appeared to us now, some people would have a hard time believing. He imagines that people like me wouldn’t want to believe because we enjoy sinning so much, but Koukl’s thought experiment is flawed.

To see the problem, consider an Earth-like planet without natural disasters—let’s call it Gaia. If you visited Gaia and asked the people there to imagine tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and so on, many couldn’t. For them, a violent and unpredictable Nature would be inconceivable because the concept is completely foreign.

Now suppose that on this gentle planet natural disasters began to happen like they do in our world. An earthquake that kills 20,000 people? A tsunami that kills 200,000? Disasters that we think of as inevitable natural events would be to them unbelievable tragedies. They’re familiar to us but inconceivable to them.

Natural disasters on Gaia would be hard to accept, just like God suddenly appearing on Earth would be hard to accept. The lesson from the Earth vs. Gaia comparison is that natural disasters are easy to accept if they’re simply an ever-present part of reality. And God would be easy to accept if he were an ever-present part of our reality—if we lived in God World.

The lesson here can be seen from two viewpoints.

• Telling people on Earth about God is like telling people on Gaia about natural disasters. The people of Gaia would have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so. It’s a completely foreign idea without precedent.
• Telling people on Earth about natural disasters is easy. We already know all about them. But convincing people on Earth about God is difficult. They’ll have a hard time accepting the idea, and they’re justified in doing so.

If Koukl wanted to preach the idea of natural disasters, Gaia is not the place to do it. And if he wants to preach the idea of God, Earth is not the place to do it. For each place, these are foreign concepts that should come with evidence but don’t.

He wants it both ways. He wants to imagine God making his existence known but many people still not believing. He also wants to imagine that “the evidence [for God] is absolutely overwhelming.”

Concluded in part 3, where we discuss other apologists’ approach to this problem plus some unexpected weaknesses in the apologists’ position.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/11/16.)

Image from Old Book Illustrations, public domain

.

It’s our lucky day! Someone else wants to lecture atheists on how best to live as an atheist. Let’s see how the attack holds up this time.

Transhumanism and worldview

Transhumanism is technology to augment human frailties, and Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) dismissed any hope that it would give atheists what the Christian worldview has.

It’s difficult to live with the conclusions of an atheistic worldview. The kind of nihilism that atheism implies, I think, is existentially unbearable. And therefore one will either be profoundly unhappy if one tries to live consistently, or, more probably, in order to be happy one will simply choose to live inconsistently, and one will grasp for these substitutes, these surrogates [that is, technologically-driven approaches to human life extension], for God and immortality.

I am continually amazed at WLC’s arguments. It’s difficult for him to live with the conclusions of an atheistic worldview . . . and so what? That says absolutely nothing about the correctness of atheism! He has two doctorates. He knows this. But by example, he’s encouraging his followers to pick their conclusions first and ignore any evidence.

Think of what they imagine WLC giving them license for.

• Atheism says that you won’t be playing canasta with Jesus in heaven a million years from now? No problem—just reject it. Evidence is for losers. Just follow your heart.
• Evolution makes baby Jesus cry? No problem—declare that the Bible (or tradition or your pastor) trumps science.
• Policies to reduce climate change might be expensive or inconvenient? No problem—just find a PhD who says whatever you’d rather hear. All you need is one.

Wishful thinking like this instead of an evidence-based argument would be rejected in middle school. Is this an approach to knowledge what WLC would teach his philosophy students? This childish thinking does not help produce a durable society able to adapt and improve.

I thought (wrongly, obviously) that being on their best intellectual behavior was what Christian philosophers did to polish the reputation of their philosophical arguments. Most of us abandoned this kind of thinking when we stopped being six years old.

I realize this isn’t news—it’s just what conservative Christians do. But I’m amazed at the lack of a fig leaf, the lack of even a pretense of applying those two doctorates.

Rant over; back to the argument

(Sigh.) So where were we? WLC says that atheism is existentially unbearable, but I follow the evidence, and the evidence says that we live and die and that’s it. There’s no evidence of a heaven, so we shouldn’t believe in one. A finite life isn’t perfect, but dealing with unpleasant realities is what adults do. Wishing for a happier reality doesn’t get us anywhere.

He then ponders the distant future (the very distant future):

These futile gestures toward the prolongation of human existence [such as putting human consciousness into computers] are all ultimately futile because the universe itself is doomed to destruction in the thermodynamic heat death of the cosmos. . . .

It’s so sobering it’s almost unbearable to face.

He ought to hang around atheists more to marvel at their superhuman abilities of acting like grownups and realizing that sometimes you don’t get what you want.

Let’s try to grasp his concern. Suppose scientists and engineers eventually extend human lifetimes to a thousand years. No—suppose they could extend lifetimes to a billion years. WLC wonders, why would they bother? The universe will still end eventually. For him, it’s all or nothing, infinite life or finite life. A longer life still has an end, and that’s unbearable.

Now return to the “heat death of the cosmos.” WLC uses that as a marker for the effective end of the universe. The heat death of the universe is hypothesized in 10¹⁰⁰ years, and he’s saying that no matter how effective scientists are in extending life, they can’t beat this ultimate limit. Whether your life lasts ninety years or a thousand years or a billion years or (incredibly) 10¹⁰⁰ years, he says it’s all futile.

This crazy thinking is so outside ordinary concerns that I must return to it one final time. WLC says, “It’s so sobering it’s almost unbearable to face” that the universe will be dead in a googol years. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. “Unbearable to face”? WLC needs a new therapist. No one else is kept awake by this thought.

Finite human lifespan bothers me, too, but this is crazy. Would life this long be a gift or a burden?

I’m sure our more sensitive readers have picked up on WLC’s disquiet, but don’t worry. He has an escape hatch to heaven. The end of life is “unbearable to face” for him personally, and yet he’s comfortable with the idea of billions of souls in hell. Fellow atheists: when you’re in torment in hell, you can take a bit of comfort knowing that WLC won’t care. Scream all you want—you won’t rain on his parade.

(More on heaven being hellish here.)

The role of evidence

This critique of the atheist worldview is backwards. Whether you like the atheist worldview or not doesn’t matter. The focus should be on whether it’s correct or not. Figure that out, and then we can talk about the implications.

WLC was paraphrased by his cohost on where the evidence points:

Even if the evidence [for atheism vs. Christianity] were 50/50, who in the world would want to lean toward such a negative, depressing, dark view [that is, toward atheism]?

That is so not the topic. How did we get to the evidence for atheism and Christianity being equal? This is like saying, “Even if the evidence for my buying the winning Powerball lottery ticket were 50/50, who would want to lean toward the possibility that I might not win?” Your focus shouldn’t be on what to do when the evidence is a tossup (since it isn’t); it should be on understanding the actual probability and accepting the consequences.

Your chance of buying one ticket that wins the Powerball jackpot are about one in 300 million. Is Christianity any likelier to be true? Christians must provide the evidence.

The role of truth

Apparently we see the role of truth differently. Christians, is truth important to you? Do you really want to see reality, or would you ransom truth for the hope of a more pleasing worldview?

“Worldview X is unpleasant; therefore it’s untrue” isn’t how I could ever think. I’d rather see an ugly truth clearly than have it covered by a pretty lie.

And no, atheism is not discouraging

Is WLC spotting the inevitable consequences from the atheist worldview that others can’t see, or do atheists not see these consequences because they’re not there?

An atheist is simply someone who has no god belief, and very little follows from that. Has WLC ever discussed worldviews with an atheist? Very few would say that life is meaningless because of their lack of god belief. It’s not a dismal view, and the atheist shares with the theist the ordinary sources of happiness. If there is no afterlife, then life is short and precious. We don’t have time for make-believe.

Actually, it’s WLC who sees life as meaningless. He says that life on earth is “the cramped and narrow foyer leading to the great hall of God’s eternity.” What a dismal view of the only life we’re sure we get! To WLC, life on earth seems to be an ordeal to be gotten through, the overcooked vegetables that must be endured to earn dessert.

Let’s revisit those worldviews

Like Job, who was an uncomprehending pawn in a bet between Satan and God, Christians can find themselves experiencing hardships that aren’t explained in the Bible. Christians, you’re stuck defending a god who won’t meet you halfway by making his mere existence plain. Prayer doesn’t work as promised, the imminent second coming is 2000 years overdue, Jesus’s comfort during hard times is just Christian self-talk, and God isn’t necessary to explain anything we see around us.

The Christian world is like Alice’s Wonderland—weird and mysterious and run by an inscrutable god. We’re told this god wants a relationship, but somehow he always has a reason to remain hidden. He unfailingly ignores opportunities to step forward and do something useful, like preventing earthquakes or ending the current pandemic. He is indistinguishable from nothing at all. “God did it” is always a solution looking for a problem, and Christians are often forced to pick between science and the Bible.

Compare that with the atheist’s worldview. Atheists have no baggage preventing them from following the evidence. They won’t lose friends, family, or social standing. They can align themselves with reality, not make excuses for superstition. Christians, having a worldview with no cognitive dissonance is refreshing.

No, Dr. Craig, it’s not the atheist worldview that’s difficult to live with.

Another recent Christian worldview attack: About Atheists’ Empty Worldview . . .

.

Image from Brock DuPont (free-use license)
.

Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry has written “Atheism’s Empty Soul,” an article that corrects atheists’ confusion about the consequences of their own worldview. Last time we looked at the first two arguments, that atheists (that is, naturalists) can’t claim to have free will and that they can’t claim knowledge. In this last post, we consider the final argument. (Part 1 here.)

Third, naturalism leads to nihilism because morality doesn’t exist

“The world, according to naturalism, is just there. Students cheat in school, lions eat zebras, and men rape women. Life just happens. There’s no way the world is supposed to be because there’s no ‘supposer.’ ”

So you think that God is the celestial Supposer, but by your own admission conditions for his creation are terrible?? As you say, “Students cheat in school, lions eat zebras, and men rape women”—and God allows that to happen? There are good things here on earth, but there are plenty of bad things as well; puppies and sunsets but also plague and drought. This is the best that God can do? This is his Perfect Plan? I must have higher standards for an omnipotent God than you do, since the mediocre role you imagine for God offends me a lot more than you.

(I can anticipate the Christian response. Pesky humans screwed up God’s plan, but he knew that would happen because he’s omnipotent, and he has some convoluted only-a-sacrifice-will-do fix, but let’s not go there now.)

Shlemon says:

[According to the naturalist,] God doesn’t exist as our objective moral standard, so there’s no fixed set of morals that exists outside of ourselves. Each person acts however they like.

If objective moral standards exist, show me. Plenty of apologists gesture toward them, but they always omit good evidence. I can think of no such evidence (more here and here).

And, yes, each person acts how they like. We take inputs from our conscience, personal experience, and society, and we respond. What’s left for the God hypothesis to explain?

Maybe you’d prefer this: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. That’s not for me. I’d rather find my own life goal, however clumsily, than have it imposed by seventeenth-century theologians.

Shlemon expands on his thesis, lamenting that atheists can’t do good or noble things. Without an ideal, there’s no way to better ourselves. He says about atheists, “Life is a trek with no moral compass and no destination.”

Which is how pretty much zero atheists would describe their lives. Here’s a tip: when you tell someone how their worldview should play out in their lives and they reject that, acknowledge that they’re experts in their worldview and reconsider your statement.

Objective morality

Shlemon’s claim can be salvaged if we imagine him going for objectively correct good and noble actions or an objective meaning to life. But this is unnecessary—the ordinary, non-objective kinds of “good” and “meaning” as defined in a dictionary are the definitions everyone uses.

More tough love:

But it’s worse. Despite the absence of morality, there’s no shortage of guilt. People have an intuitive sense that they do wrong. But in a world without God, there’s no forgiveness.

Suppose I steal something, and I’m found out by the victim a week later. I admit that I stole the item but assure them that everything has been made right. “I’ve confessed to God,” I tell them, “and I feel an assurance that he’s accepted my apology. I feel so much better!” Problem solved?

Of course not. If I steal something, I don’t need God’s forgiveness since I didn’t steal from God. Back to Shlemon, in a world without God, there can indeed be forgiveness from where it counts, the victim.

Our conscience, which sometimes punishes us with a feeling of guilt, comes from evolution. Guilt is yet another thing we don’t need the God hypothesis for.

Christianity to the rescue!

Shlemon wraps up by pointing to the Christian alternative.

The Christian worldview, by contrast, can justify free will, explain knowledge, and define right and wrong.

Oh, but I’m certain that it can’t—at least not with evidence that would satisfy an objective third party. Show us with evidence that God is more than wishful thinking. Or, don’t bother, since God solves no problem: even without God, atheists have a sense of free will, access to knowledge, and a working moral framework identical to Christians’.

Here’s an experiment: imagine there’s no God. Can you explain everything you experience with this godless worldview? In our world, prayers are sometimes answered and sometimes not. Sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things—natural disasters and disease on one hand but also newborn babies and job success. Natural explanations easily explain all this and more. Is the God hypothesis necessary for anything?

.

Image from Caleb edens (free-use license)
.

Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry has written “Atheism’s Empty Soul,” an article that offers to correct atheists’ confusion about the consequences of their own worldview. In part 1, we looked at his argument in summary, and now we’ll consider the reasons.

First, naturalism leads to nihilism because humans don’t have free will

“We do what we are determined to do. We are cogs in a cosmic machine.”

I don’t have the interest to dig into the complicated question of free will. I have the impression of free will, and that’s good enough for me. Since you’re talking about worldviews, my worldview includes that.

The Christian position might be, “You’ve got free will, don’t you? Well, there you go—there must be a god to support that.” My response: (1) I see no reason why we need a god to create the impression of free will that I have, and (2) I see many traits of our reality that are incompatible with the Christian god existing (these are my silver-bullet arguments). Resolve those showstoppers first, and then we can consider if the facts of reality point to a god.

The Christian argument in this article is all attack and no defense. What I want to see instead is as much time justifying the unbelievable Christian worldview as is spent attacking the atheist worldview.

Second, naturalism leads to nihilism because knowledge is unattainable

Next, Shlemon defines knowledge as “justified true belief.” Break that apart and focus on the underlined words: you know that proposition A is true if (1) A is indeed true, (2) you believe A is true, and (3) you are justified in believing A is true (that is, you used a reliable method in coming to your belief, rather than flipping a coin).

He argues that the naturalist can never attain this kind of knowledge.

The problem for the atheist arises from the fact that their worldview of naturalism views the brain as a wholly material object, subject to the environmental forces of physics and chemistry. Such forces, however, have no interest in producing reliable cognitive faculties. Physical forces on a physical object like the brain won’t necessarily produce a trustworthy system of independent thought, reason, and logical deduction. Since we can’t be confident in our ability to attain justified true beliefs, we can’t have knowledge.

This is Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN): natural forces are, at root, just mindless physics and chemistry. Natural selection doesn’t favor truth but rather genes being passed on to the next generation. How can knowledge—justified true belief—be the result of a process that focuses on survival rather than truth?

Evolution answers the question

To see how a foundation of skills shaped by evolution can support higher-level traits, imagine learning to hit a ball with a bat. At first, you’re terrible at it, but you have reliable feedback. A pitch and a swing takes just a few seconds, and you immediately know how well you did. If your swing was poor, you have clues about what you did wrong. You can test your improvements when the process repeats seconds later. After weeks of practice, you’ll be pretty good. Your ability to hit a ball was built on accurate vision, kinesthetics (our sense of motion and body position), and muscles that adapt, all traits that evolution could select for because they benefit survival.

Another illustration: the modern human brain is no better than the one used by Paleolithic humans 12,000 years ago. How can this Stone Age brain understand calculus? How can it invent calculus?

Let’s first consider a similar question with living skin. The first nuclear radiation burns on skin happened in the twentieth century. Evolution had no chance to improve skin to better withstand gamma rays, but evolution honed skin to be general purpose. It’s durable and self-repairing, both to ancient injuries (such as scrapes, bites, and sunburn) and new ones (knives, bullets, and gamma rays).

In the same way, the human brain is general purpose. The brain selected by evolution to be good at communicating, animal tracking, and general problem solving is also good at wondering about the planets, finding natural laws, and inventing calculus. (Which leads to the tangential but fascinating question: what if the mental toolkit we inherited through evolution had been radically different? What ideas and knowledge would that have fostered that we can’t even imagine because we would have had to have inherited that toolkit to imagine them?)

Mindless evolution

To see what brainless evolution can do, look at the field of genetic programming. Here’s a project that tries to recreate the Mona Lisa with 50 semi-transparent polygons. Starting with random polygons, it evolves them by randomly changing them slightly with each generation and comparing the result with the actual painting, keeping the best approximation. That’s random mutation and selection—just like in evolution in nature. After a thousand iterations of the polygons, the image is nonsense; after ten thousand you’d say “Oh, yeah” if someone told you it was a rough Mona Lisa; and after a million, anyone would immediately identify it.

Knowledge finding is an emergent property. (I respond in more depth to Plantinga’s EAAN argument here.)

And what is the Christian alternative? That God is the homunculus at the wheel, justifying your knowledge? A little man sitting inside your head pushing the levers and pedals, driving you like construction equipment? Or maybe that the soul connects us with some sort of intelligence in the supernatural realm?

With the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, the Christian has solved one (invented) problem by creating another: where’s the evidence for God or the soul or even anything supernatural? Even if science had no idea how consciousness, thinking, or knowledge finding arose, that does nothing to argue that God did it.

Concluded in part 3.

.

Image from Chris Karidis (free-use license)
.