“Atheism’s Empty Soul” is a recent article from Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry. Shlemon tries to slap some sense into those hard-hearted atheists by showing the inevitable, grave consequences of their worldview. Shlemon informs us that the atheist worldview, seen correctly, is nihilism, the view that life is meaningless.

Something always seems to be off when someone tells me that I haven’t assembled the components of my worldview correctly, but that they’re happy to educate me about how that would look. Let’s see how this critique goes.

A livable worldview?

The article begins:

Atheists don’t have a livable worldview. I don’t say that to gloat. Several atheists who have been candid with me have told me life is ultimately empty and devoid of meaning.

Oops—three sentences in, and we grind to a halt. Atheists, does “empty and devoid of meaning” sound like your life?

The key word here is “ultimately,” and, yes, an atheist’s life has no ultimate, cosmic, eternal, or objective meaning. But does the Christian’s? They claim their lives have ultimate meaning, of course, but they need to show their work. Otherwise, this is merely evidence-less dogma. Atheists have access to the ordinary kind of purpose and meaning for their lives as much as anyone.

If it sounds arrogant for person A to tell person B how the B worldview doesn’t hold up, we turn to an unlikely ally. Greg Koukl, also of Stand to Reason, made that very point. In a podcast, Koukl said,

It’s always a mistake to critique another worldview from inside your own. (@4:50)

He says it’s fine to criticize a worldview by showing that it’s incoherent or contradictory internally, and I would add that it’s fine to show where a worldview collides with the facts of reality. The problem is one worldview critiquing another. Koukl illustrated his point with an example from a debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Jay Richards.

Hitchens said, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” When Richards assented, Hitchens then said to the audience, “I rest my case.”

Hitchens was saying that resurrections are ridiculous, and Koukl agreed that they are, from Hitchens’ worldview, but within Richards’ they make sense. Koukl argued that Hitchens was saying, “From my worldview, your worldview is flawed,” which was both true and pointless. It assumed one worldview as correct from the outset. You can’t just assume one’s worldview; you must do the heavy lifting to show that it’s correct.

I think Hitchens was doing more by comparing the Christian worldview against the fairly universal scientific worldview, but Koukl does have a point. Going forward, look for Shlemon making the mistake of assuming his worldview.

Let’s continue and discover where atheism takes us.

Step 1: atheism leads to naturalism . . .

Shlemon claims that naturalism, the rejection of the supernatural, is a consequence of atheism. About this, he said:

A belief in naturalism is neither a neutral nor an insignificant commitment.

I don’t see the big deal. Given the two alternatives of naturalism and supernaturalism, naturalism is the default. Life around us is full of natural causes (rivers carve canyons, sunlight through suspended water droplets cause rainbows, germs can cause disease, and so on). And while people in societies worldwide see supernatural causes, we have never reached a consensus view on what these supernatural causes are or even the names of the god(s) responsible. Christians and atheists agree that some of these claimed supernatural causes are wrong, and maybe they all are.

Naturalism observes that supernaturalism has the burden of proof, and it hasn’t met it.

And step 2: naturalism leads to nihilism

He gives three reasons that naturalism leads to nihilism, which Wikipedia defines this way:

Nihilism is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, expressing some form of negation towards life or towards fundamental concepts such as knowledge, existence, and the meaning of life. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities does not exist.

Show me that a sizeable fraction of atheists feel that life is meaningless. Nihilism certainly doesn’t describe my life philosophy. As with the “life [for an atheist] is ultimately empty and devoid of meaning” claim above, atheists should consider whether nihilism describes their lives. If not, we can return to Greg Koukl’s insistence that one worldview can’t judge another.

Shlemon makes an enormous jump from atheism to nihilism. The remainder of his post is a discussion of three points that argue that nihilism is a consequence of naturalism. I’m skeptical of any argument of the form, “I’m not an atheist, but if you are, you gotta believe x, y, and z” when, for me, it simply means that I have no god belief. That’s it.

Nihilism is a depressing state, but it flows logically from naturalism for three reasons.

 Uh oh—it sounds like tough-love time. We’ll get into his three reasons in part 2.

.

Image from Izz R (free-use license)
.

The idea behind this argument is that humanity has invented thousands of gods throughout history. The atheist and the Christian both reject these many gods, so rejecting gods can’t be something the Christian would object to. Why then complain when the atheist rejects that one final god? (Part 1 here.)

Let’s wrap up by exploring the last few arguments.

13a. The Mere Christianity argument

When I first encountered C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, I found the title confusing. Was he dismissing or denigrating Christianity? No, by “mere” he meant those traits of Christianity that were common among the many denominations. One source sees this kind of commonality with religions as well.

As a Christian I do believe that most other religions have many things right. I am not a Hindu, but the Hindus and I agree that there is more to the world than the material, that humans have souls, and that there is objective right and wrong. There are many aspects of Brahmin that I recognize as aspects of my own God. I simply believe that Hindus are wrong on most of the details.

The author goes on to make a similar comparison with Norse religion, noting that both he and the Norseman agree on the supernatural, life after death, and that we will be judged based on our work on earth.

It’s true that many societies share a few core supernatural beliefs, but they may also share racism and sexism. They may share beliefs in superstitions and astrology. Does, “Yeah, but look at all the societies that shared this thinking!” still sound like a good way to discover the truth?

And you’re making too much from this observation since you and your fellow believers across the world’s religions can’t even agree on the names the god(s), the number of god(s), and how to placate them. Those are some substantial details to disagree on.

Can you be a Christian and declare that all roads lead to God? If not, then this all-encompassing Kumbaya thinking is just a smoke screen, and we’re back to the Christians and atheists agreeing on 99+% of the gods that don’t exist.

13b. God as unicorn

Here’s a variation on that argument. One source imagines that he believes in unicorns. His belief is strengthened when he learns of another person who believes in them as well, though this person calls them something else and describes them completely differently. And then there’s another believer, though he also has a different name and description.

Hearing all [these] different accounts might make me doubt my own conception of the unicorn: but the last thing it would do is make me doubt that a unicorn exists. Instead my faith would be strengthened by that fact that all these other people did see something.

But unicorns don’t exist! How can this example get off the ground when it nicely illustrates how pre-scientific people create legendary animals?

And let’s imagine duplicating this author’s experiment. If you describe a “unicorn” as a horse with a horn, and someone else describes a “Bigfoot” as a giant hairy man, and a third person describes “Nessie” as a fresh water sea monster, why would all this strengthen your unicorn belief? If anything, it shows that cultures worldwide have turned imagination into creatures that probably don’t exist.

There is a magical creature out there; it is only my own conception of it that is in doubt. In just the same way pointing out that mankind has believed in thousands of other gods and worshipped in other ways may be a decent argument against my own conception of God, but it is a terrible argument to try and make me believe that there are no gods at all. Indeed it only strengthens my faith in the supernatural.

You look around and see thousands of gods that societies have invented and that strengthens your belief in the supernatural? Why not see thousands of instances of a particular mental error and try to identify the same error in your own thinking?

Are there any gods in that pile that actually exist? Maybe, but you’ve got an uphill climb to give us good reason to believe so. The study of religion shows that mankind has a strong need to invent the supernatural, and this should only undercut your belief in it.

14. We both have gods. “God” is just the thing central to one’s life—money in your case.

Functionally-speaking, everybody has a “god”, even if they don’t have a “religion.” You have something that you’ve placed at the center of your life that gives it direction, meaning, purpose, and value. You devote your time, energy, love, and affection to this thing as if it were the most central thing in the universe. That, in the monotheistic traditions, is what is called an idol. . . . The point isn’t whether or not you will worship a god. The point is “which god will you worship?” (Source)

Uh oh—I think it’s tough-love time.

If you match Jesus up with the most common American god, Money, Jesus wins. Jesus is totally better than money.

And yet we know that money exists. Money 1, Jesus 0.

Money never satisfies.

While I agree that successful people can seek wealth beyond the point where it is helpful, money actually solves a lot of problems. One influential U.S. study said that money can buy happiness—happiness correlates with income up to $75,000 per year. Greed isn’t pretty, but neither is poverty.

[Money] never delivers what it promises.

Sounds like Jesus! Only by making him unfalsifiable can Christians put him in the ring with a competitor that actually exists.

Jesus, on the other hand, well, he’s not going anywhere. . . . I could go on [for] hours, but you kinda get the point. Jesus > Money. Name anything else, even really good things, (Jesus > relationships, Jesus > your personal freedom, Jesus > sex, Jesus > power, Jesus > fame, Jesus > stuff, Jesus > a career, Jesus > status, Jesus > being a rockstar, etc.), and Jesus wins every time.

Jesus goes where you tell him to go because he’s just pretend. If you say he’s not going anywhere, then I’m sure he’s not. He’s just a meme in your mind and you’ve made him immune to evidence.

Money, relationships, career, and so on actually exist. Look at your list and notice that Jesus is the odd man out.

15. A final critique.

There are more arguments on the internet, but let’s round it out to 15.

There are problems with this reasoning. The first is that it begs the question against Christianity by assuming that there are no good reasons to be a theist (i.e. if you examined Christianity, you’d reject it too). (Source)

That’s not the way I see the “I just believe in one less god than you do” argument. It makes no declaration that Christianity is false; it’s just trying to provoke thought. What does it say that our positions are so similar with respect to the other religions? Sure, Christianity could be, against all odds, the needle in the haystack, but understand how much evidence you’ll need to convince us (or yourself).

There have been many who have examined Christianity and found it to be epistemologically robust; so the reasoning of the atheist is question begging.

I’m not assuming Christianity false from the outset (which would beg the question). So what if some have found it robust? Others have found it not so. Or found other contradicting religions to be robust.

But it also assumes that atheism is a kind of epistemic neutral ground . . . : if one is an atheist, he/she can examine all worldviews without bias. Again, the problem is that this is false.

Again, this is not where I’m going. It’s not that atheism is neutral ground or the atheist is somehow in sole possession of the clear-seeing glasses. Rather, it’s that atheism is the null hypothesis. It’s the starting point. The Christian is making the bold claim and so has the burden of proof.

I anticipate the “Yes, but most people have been theists throughout history” argument again. To that, I simply repeat: you make the bold claim, so you have the burden of proof.

An important caveat

There’s one more point to make, and this helps explain the Christian side of the argument (h/t to long-time commenter avalon, who helped me see this point). Going from belief in n gods to n – 1 gods may not be too painful a process until you’re making that final step down to zero gods. That is a different kind of jump, because in addition to changing the number of gods, it discards the supernatural world. That can be a big deal.

We have been exploring and debunking charges that the atheist argument “I just believe in one less god than you do” is a fallacy. I think that argument can be effective when it shows that the gulf between the atheist and Christian positions is a little smaller. This final caveat helps illustrate why that gulf is not nonexistent.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/25/16.)

Image from Eirik Solheim (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
.

The idea behind this argument is that humanity has invented thousands of gods throughout history. The atheist and the Christian both reject these many gods, so rejecting gods can’t be something the Christian would object to. Why then complain when the atheist rejects that one final god? (Part 1 here.)

Sharpen your wits by seeing how you’d respond to these Christian rebuttals.

9. Courtier’s Reply

Unless one has made a serious study of philosophical theology as it has been developed within the Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic and other Scholastic traditions, one’s understanding of traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology, not to mention philosophical theism, is simply infantile. …

The [objection represents] a failure to understand even the fundamentals of the position one is attacking. (Source)

In other words: Christianity has had 2000 years to develop sophisticated theology, and by bypassing that, your “I just believe in one less god than you do” argument is beneath contempt. And don’t get me started on the uselessness of parodies like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

This is a nice example of the Courtier’s Reply, a logical fallacy in which an opponent is declared at the outset unqualified to even enter the field of combat, let alone make a thoughtful contribution to the debate. (It was developed by PZ Myers in 2006 as the imagined reply by one of the Emperor’s self-important courtiers to the charge that the Emperor wore no clothes.)

What matters in evaluating classical theism is not what your Grandpa or your Pastor Bob have to say about it, but rather what serious thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and countless others have to say.

Your mistake is imagining that “serious thinkers” speak with one voice. By starting with one Christian perspective and then selecting scholars, you can hide behind their writings. But other Christian scholars could be collected to argue a different story, and each camp finds heresy in the thinking of the others. Add in theologians from outside Christianity, and the chaos increases.

That’s the power of the “one less god” argument. It bypasses not just the “sophisticated theology” of Christianity but that of all the other religions and challenges the Christian to justify why, if dismissing religions by the hundreds is reasonable, one religion must be kept.

10. Car analogy

Here is a thought experiment. Let’s say that you and I both own cars, and we use our cars almost every day. They’re essential to our lives, but we each need just one. We don’t own hundreds of cars. And then one day, you lose your car—say you’re in an accident and you can’t afford a new one. You wouldn’t tell me, “It’s no big deal—I just have one less car than you do.”

My first response would be to ask why this is a good analogy. We understand cars and how useful they can be. Show me that your god exists and is useful in the same way. They seem very different to me.

We can map this onto a world with Christians and atheists by imagining that you (the guy who has no car) switches over to mass transit, taxis, Uber, rental cars, Zipcar, and so on as appropriate. You get where you want to go, though in a different way, just like the atheist has answers to the big questions of life, though different ones than the Christian has. So, no—getting rid of your supernatural “car” isn’t a big deal. Just ask an atheist.

11. Arithmetic analogy

There are a theoretically infinite number of possible answers to the equation “Two plus two,” but only one actually true answer. To say that “Two plus two equals four” is to automatically make me an unbeliever in all the other possible answers. It’s not rational, however, for the atheist to say, “Well I just go one step further and choose to disbelieve that four is the answer either.” (Source)

This source has deliberately chosen an example where “one” is the correct answer to “How many answers are valid?” I wonder if it’s a coincidence that “one” is also the answer the Christian wants from “How many gods are there?” While arithmetic problems always have one correct answer, the correct answer to “How many gods are there?” could be one or twenty or zero.

Note also that arithmetic has proved itself, but religion has not. The many incompatible religions look like they’re all manmade. Comparing religion to arithmetic is to illegitimately appropriate arithmetic’s success. (More in this analysis of the map of world religions.)

12. Who needs evidence? Not the Christian.

This argument cautions us to not assume that the Christian reaches his worldview as an atheist might. Don’t assume that the Christian has sifted through the evidence for the hundreds of other gods, found none, and concluded that his original Christian belief is correct. Instead, some Christians say they have had a personal revelation. They also point to “self-verification of the Holy Spirit within.”

On this, William Lane Craig adds,

It is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. (Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, p. 47)

Self-authenticating? Evidence in a subsidiary role? I hope you’re consistent and allow the other guy to have the same careless attitude toward reality.

(Craig takes this thinking much further, and I analyze that here and here.)

Concluded in part 4.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/23/16.)

Image from Tighten up! (license CC BY 2.0)

.

The idea behind this argument is that humanity has invented thousands of gods throughout history. The atheist and the Christian both reject these many gods, so rejecting gods can’t be something that Christians are uncomfortable with. Why then complain when the atheist rejects that one final god? (Part 1 here.)

Let’s continue analyzing Christian rebuttals to this argument.

5. The other gods weren’t really gods.

The gods of these pantheons were/are not really gods in the proper sense. In order to call them such is a misunderstanding of what “god” means. In other words, they were functional deities who carried a role that was expedient to the life and happiness of the people. They were the gods of rain, sun, crops, war, fertility, and the like. They were the “go-to” immanent forces who had no transcendence or ultimate creative power. They were more like superheroes from the Justice League than gods. (Source)

Sounds like Yahweh. He was the war god in the early Justice League of Israel Israelite pantheon.

6. The other religions were polytheistic, and that doesn’t count.

I understand perfectly why [atheists] reject all the other gods. It is because they reject polytheism. But I don’t understand how this parallels to the rejection of the Christian God. It is a slight of hand to make such a comparison (effective as it may be). People believe in these two completely different things for completely different reasons and, therefore, must reject the two differently. The same arguments used against these gods cannot be used effectively against the Christian God. Once polytheism as a worldview is rejected, all the millions of gods go with it. I don’t have to argue against each, one at a time. (Source)

In the first place, what’s wrong with polytheism? This author gives no justification for any prejudice against it. I’ll grant that it’s a primitive and superstitious view of the world, but then so is monotheism. (Let’s avoid the temptation to detour into the Trinity to discuss whether Christianity actually is monotheistic.)

If one wants to claim that the invention of monotheism was a bold innovation, Amun-Ra in the Egyptian pantheon was worshipped as the sole god before Yahweh was.

In the second place, the Old Testament idea of Yahweh evolved. The theology of the people who would become the Jews began as a pantheon like those of the cultures around them, and only gradually did Yahweh become the sole god.

See also: The Perplexing Monty Hall Problem and How It Undercuts Christianity

7. It doesn’t count if that god wasn’t a creator god.

This first cause is by definition God. (Source)

Look it up. You won’t find “god” defined as the first cause. We’re not talking about the upper-case version.

Simply put, whoever started it all (the time, space, matter creation) is the only true God. . . . God, while able to interact and love mankind, must transcend all that we see and know. He must be outside of our universe holding it all together, not simply the most powerful actor in our current play.

Other religions from the Ancient Near East had gods who created our world from the carcass of the defeated chaos monster. For example, Marduk, the god of the Babylonians, formed the universe from the body of Tiamat. This story was common enough to be given a name: the Combat Myth. We see hints in the Bible that Yahweh defeated Rahab (another name for Leviathan) in a way that parallels this creation story, which makes Yahweh’s creation story just one of a series of similar stories.

It’s almost as if the Old Testament god didn’t actually exist but was inspired by stories from the surrounding cultures. . . .

8. God must be infinite in greatness, and nothing less will do.

Alvin Plantinga representatively captured the concept of God as a being “having an unsurpassable degree of greatness—that is, having a degree of greatness such that it’s not possible that there exist a being having more. . . .

There is no, and cannot be, a possible world with two or more beings that possesses unsurpassable degree of greatness. (Source)

From this, we conclude that there is no possible world with three beings that possess an unsurpassable degree of greatness. (It sounds like this Christian doesn’t believe in the Trinity.)

Define God (that is, Yahweh) anyway you want, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the thousands of gods—that is, deities—that people believe in.

This author is saying, “What thousands of other gods? There is only one God by definition!” But that’s changing the subject. He’s imagines Yahweh as a privileged example of the set of gods, and we must decide if that privilege is warranted.

Another author provides insight into Plantinga’s definition of God as the greatest possible thing. “Greatest” sounds impressive until we try to define it and find that it’s more debatable than we thought.

The resurrected Osiris asked Horus a question, “What is the most glorious deed a man can perform?”

Horus answered, “To take revenge upon one who has injured his father or mother.”

Are we all on the same page with Horus? If not, then greatest, most glorious, or best may be in the eye of the beholder. (The difficulty of finding the best is made clearer in the Ontological Argument.)

To be continued.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/18/16.)

Image from M’s photography (license CC BY 2.0)

.

Christian apologists are eager to argue that the gospel story is historically accurate. They point to the large number of New Testament manuscripts. They point to the shortness of the oral history period compared to other documents of the time. They claim that our oldest copies are remarkably close to the originals. I’ve made clear why those claims do little to argue for the historicity of the Jesus story (here, here, and here, respectively), but let me try to illustrate how weak this claim is. “Our copy of the New Testament is negligibly different from the original” is not defensible.

A thought experiment

Imagine this experiment. I tell you that in the New Testament there is one specific verse that I have in mind. A few decades after the original was written, a variant tradition was created by a scribe who changed the text of the verse. It doesn’t matter how the error got in there—maybe he misread the original or omitted something or tried to correct what he honestly thought was an error or tried to “improve” the reading of the text to make it better align with what his spiritual leader had taught. All that matters is that we have a fork in the road, after which point we have two textual traditions for this verse.

Let’s further imagine that this is a significant change, not a trivial spelling mistake.

Here’s the twist: one of these traditions is lost to history. I won’t tell you which one. This is almost surely true. (Indeed, how could you possibly prove that it wasn’t true that there had been two versions of one New Testament verse, that this change wasn’t trivial, and that one version was lost?)

I hand you a Bible and tell you:

1. Find the verse.
2. Tell me if that verse is the variant or the original.
3. If it’s the incorrect version, tell me the correct reading.

You’d say that that’s an impossible challenge. Yes it is, and that’s the point. In our Bible, for how many verses is it true that there was a variant tradition, the change was significant (not just a spelling error or synonymous phrasing), and one of the traditions (maybe the original or maybe the erroneous one—you don’t know) has been lost? Zero verses? A thousand? We simply don’t know.

An example

Here’s a rare example where historians think they know about a manuscript that was changed. It’s not in the Bible but rather in Antiquities of the Jews, written in about 93 CE by Jewish historian Josephus. Its most famous passage is the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage praising Jesus and celebrating his resurrection. Historians reject this as original because Josephus, a Jew, would never make such a pro-Christian statement. Also, the early church fathers knew about Josephus’s writings but never quoted this passage in support of their position.

It’s very unusual to be able to detect the change when you don’t have a second tradition to highlight the problem.

Can scholars pull out the original document?

Apologists will point to the impressive work New Testament scholars perform in weighing several variants and judging which one is likelier the more authentic. But what do they do when there were several variants but history gives us copies of only one?

Weigh the magnitude of the the challenge by considering some of the earliest fragments of the New Testament. Papyrus P75 has some fragments of Luke from around 200 CE. Papyrus P46, from about the same date, has some of Paul’s writings. These are our earliest copies of those books, and yet they’re separated from the originals by well over a century. How do we know that they made it through that dark period—during much of which those books were considered by Christians to be merely important works, not sacred or inspired scripture—without significant change? Our best recreation of the New Testament has those books fitting together fairly well, but maybe this is because theirs is the viewpoint that survived. Maybe competing viewpoints were ignored or changed or even deliberately destroyed.

The apologists will say that there is no proof of this. True, our version of the New Testament could be identical to the original, but why imagine this? The evidence is not there, and apologists are left with just “Our version of the Bible might be accurate.” This is a meager foundation on which to build a supernatural claim.

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license
.

Summary of reply: Belief is in the eye of the believer, Christianity’s claims to textual support fail, and the argument that evidence for God is all around works for the Flying Spaghetti Monster just as well.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Believing in God is the same as believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM).

Christian response #1: No one believes in the FSM, not even its creator! The creator protested religion by equating worship of the FSM (Pastafarianism) with religions. He failed.

BSR: The FSM was invented in 2005 to protest a proposal to teach Intelligent Design in Kansas public schools alongside evolution. Since the state school board was in effect declaring biology class open to all comers, Bobby Henderson insisted they add his own variant of Intelligent Design, with the Flying Spaghetti Monster as the Creator of the universe and life as we know it. As a lampoon of Intelligent Design (see his quote at the end of this post), it worked brilliantly.

Pastafarianism claims many earnest followers and even states that the faith has splintered into sects (as you’d expect from any religion that specified precisely one correct worldview). You’re welcome to laugh at Pastafarians, but don’t deny them the government rights that you enjoy for your Christian beliefs. And don’t insist on government oversight that judges who’s an honest follower of Pastafarianism unless you want the same critique for your Christian beliefs.

You’re welcome to laugh at the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but don’t deny its followers the government rights that you enjoy for your Christian beliefs. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Textual evidence for God is far better than that for imaginary characters.

BSR: Let’s go with the assumption that the FSM was manmade. We have the foundational document, Bobby Henderson’s letter to the school board.

But things don’t look any better for Christianity. We don’t have the foundational documents for Christianity, and the origins of Christianity fade into the mists of history. For the gospels, the per-chapter average time gap between original authorship and our oldest copies is two centuries. This is flimsy support for Christianity’s incredible claims.

The best the Christian can say is that Christianity is so old that it’s untestable, but this is nothing to brag about. If Hinduism, Jainism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism, and a thousand other venerable religions are in the bin labeled Mythology and Legend, then so is Christianity, and for the same reasons.

Or let’s look at it from another angle. In less than two centuries, Mormonism went from a nutty invention to a venerable religion. Give Pastafarianism the same amount of time, and who knows?

Christianity is so old it’s untestable. Its origins fade into the mists of history. That’s nothing to brag about. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: We don’t need to compare founding documents. We find clues to God in nature—design in biology, finely tuned universe, objective morality, and more. Not so for the FSM.

BSR: The “evidence from nature” claim is the usual list of arguments—the Argument from Design, the Argument from Morality, and so on. Problem 1 is that these arguments all fail. Problem 2 is that these are deist arguments, and they support most gods equally. Support for God is support for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And if the properties of the FSM aren’t optimal to take advantage of some particular deist argument, then change the properties. Remember that God relatively recently acquired omniscience, omnipotence, timelessness, and other superpowers. In Genesis, he was just an old-fashioned, limited-power kind of god. If God can level up over time, so can the FSM.

The supernatural explains nothing satisfactorily in our world today. New scientific puzzles will likely be answered by science, and God continues to be a solution searching for a problem.

The deist arguments Christians claim support their supernatural claims will support the Flying Spaghetti Monster just as well. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 26: If Christianity Were True, There Wouldn’t Be So Many Denominations

For further reading:

• “Argument #15: The Flying Spaghetti Monster” in Bad Atheist Arguments? Let’s Investigate 16 of Them. (Part 4)
• 25,000 New Testament Manuscripts? Big Deal.
• How Long from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies?
• The Inadequate Deist Argument
• Argument from Design BUSTED!
• How Much Faith to Be an Atheist? Geisler and Turek’s Moral Argument.
• 12 Reasons Why Jesus Is a Legend
• Christianity Can’t be Deduced from Nature

.

Image from Wikimedia, public domain
.