Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) recently responded to a post from the atheist blog A Counter Apologist. This is the conclusion of my response to his attack on the problem of divine hiddenness.

Part 1 critiqued WLC’s first response, that God has given evidence in the form of vague clues in nature and that this piddling evidence is just what you’d expect from a god who profoundly desires to let each and every one of us know he exists and loves us. Or something.

You don’t have good evidence? Blame yourself.

There’s more. WLC says:

God wants people to come to know him and build a relationship with him, and so he knows what gifts of grace, what evidences, what arguments to give to people that will be conducive to their coming to believe in him.

But what about the people in Schellenberg’s divine hiddenness argument in part 1, the nonresistant nonbelievers? These are the people who were eager, even desperate, for a relationship with God but insist that they had insufficient evidence to believe Christianity’s god claims. These are the people who, the Christians will say, are made in the image of God, using the rational brain that God gave us. When that God-given brain says there’s not enough evidence, the Christian must take that rejection seriously.

WLC gets to that:

I think that if there were someone who would come to know God personally if he were to get more evidence, God would give him that evidence because he loves him and he wants him to come to know him.

You think? I mean, sure, this is all just a silly game with rules you can bend or even make up as you go along. Tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night. But taking the Christian claims at face value, there are afterlives with bliss or torment in the balance here. Why is this just speculation on your part? Why doesn’t God’s holy book make the rules of salvation unambiguous and irrefutable?

And it’s not like God gives solid evidence to those bound for heaven and nothing to those who wouldn’t benefit from it. The evidence that everyone gets is crap. We know because Christian apologists are eager to share with all of us the best arguments they can find, but they fail. (Reasons that our world looks like a world without a god are here.)

And consider the admission in the phrase, “if there were someone who would come to know God personally.” In WLC’s view, some people will eventually develop a relationship with God and some won’t. Consider that latter cohort: God deliberately creates people he knows won’t meet the entrance requirements for heaven. Instead, their afterlife will be conscious torment.

The burden of proof is yours to show that God was on solid moral ground when he created beings for torment. And before you jump into some rationalization for why God could’ve had some valid reason, admit first that God’s Perfect Plan® looks immoral (more). If it didn’t, you wouldn’t need to handwave your rationalization.

The Lazy God hypothesis

WLC restates his position:

The fact that there are many people who don’t get more evidence would simply be indicative of the fact that God has so providentially arranged the world that anyone who would get more evidence than what he has wouldn’t come to believe even if he had it, and so God knows it wouldn’t do any good to offer such a person more evidence.

That’s seriously the best reason you could come up with? Well, y’see, God is hidden . . . because, uh, . . . because God didn’t want to bother—yeah, that’s it! It’s such a hassle to make oneself known, right? It’s not like it would be difficult for God, but it’s the principle of the thing. Or something.

Okay, sure, I can’t think of anything better, but then I’m not motivated to. Here’s a quick critique: this Lazy God hypothesis sucks. I’ve read deconversion stories of seriously devoted Christians who pleaded and cried to God for good evidence of his existence for months as their faith dribbled away. I find far more heart in stories like these than those of typical fat ’n sassy Christians with their complacent and unexamined faith.

WLC not only dismisses these ex-Christians’ claims but insists on a worldview in which they’re destined for an afterlife of torment. There’s no Christian love in this argument.

And notice God’s perfect batting average. There are plenty of vague and unverifiable stories of individuals in lots of religions who get a surprise healing or feel a strong sense of divine guidance or presence. But at every chance the Christian god gets to make his existence clearly known to everyone, he retreats. Take, say, a pandemic—y’know, like the one we’re in right now. This would be a nice time for God to step in and instantly eliminate this coronavirus. But God ignores such opportunities. Every. Single. Time. If he exists, he’s deliberately making himself indistinguishable from nonexistent.

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Having (poorly) defended God’s afterlife scheme, WLC now goes on the attack. It’s all the atheist’s problem, doncha know. He shirks his burden of proof with the same “How can anyone accurately evaluate these probabilities??” argument he used before.

So once again you see the atheist finds himself saddled with probability judgments that are way, way beyond his ken. He would have to show that it is probable (highly probable) that if God were to offer more evidence of his existence that more people would come to freely know him and find salvation than those who do in the actual world. There’s no way he can know that. It’s pure conjecture.

“Pure conjecture”?? When I consider God creating people who he knows he will eventually put in hell with my God-given brain and conclude that that’s messed up, I shouldn’t trust that conclusion? I might as well flip a coin for all the good that being created in God’s image gives? Oh, please. Give back your doctorates if you’re not going to use them.

And he seriously wants to stick with the argument that God making his existence plain will do absolutely nothing to encourage undecided people to find out more about him? That a Christian god who looks as manmade as the thousands of other gods humans have invented is a problem WLC can just ignore and not get called on?

The one who’s handwaving based on nothing is you (for example, your “I think” paragraph above). You know that creating intelligent beings destined for conscious torment is immoral, and your inert god can’t get out of the line of fire (where you put him) so you rush in to protect him. Your argument is crap, and yet you state it with bluster and a straight face. You have to. Evidence isn’t something for you to follow but something to twist to satisfy your predetermined conclusion.

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Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) recently responded to a post from the atheist blog A Counter Apologist. He responded to the problem of evil, and I critiqued that here.

The majority of WLC’s response was to the problem of divine hiddenness. In brief, this argument notes that the Christian claim that God merely exists (don’t worry about his properties yet) is very much in doubt. With no good evidence for this most basic and trivial claim, Christianity isn’t worth believing in.

The divine hiddenness argument

The version of the divine hiddenness argument up for discussion is the one from J. L. Schellenberg. Here is a summary:

1. God is perfectly loving, so he would be available for a relationship with any human who was open to one.
2. Therefore, God must have a relationship with every willing human. There can be no “nonresistant nonbelievers” (nonbelievers who are open to a relationship with God).
3. But there are people who have desperately desired relationships with God, failed to find them, and now are nonbelievers.
4. Because 2 and 3 contradict, this god can’t exist.

Since God doesn’t make himself known to nonbelievers who are open to a relationship, he either doesn’t exist or refuses a relationship with these people. Either is a problem for Christian claims.

You want evidence? WLC has evidence.

WLC responds that God isn’t hidden at all: “The evidence is there for anyone who has eyes to see.”

What is this irresistible evidence? Unsurprisingly, it’s the same tired old arguments he always trots out. As I list them, challenge yourself to anticipate my response. Or perhaps you have additional responses that are better.

• “The origin of the universe out of nothing at a point in the finite past.” I suppose this tries to map the six-day creation story in Genesis 1 onto modern cosmology’s understanding of the Big Bang. But science doesn’t say that the universe came out of nothing (it might have, but the jury’s out). Oddly, Genesis doesn’t even say that the universe was created out of nothing (I explore what it does say here). Let’s also note that the two creation stories in Genesis have taught science absolutely nothing about the origin of the universe or life on earth or indeed anything else.
• “The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life with a complexity and delicacy that defy human comprehension.” Nope. The Multiverse hypothesis is supported by evidence, and the rarity of life-supporting universes could be overwhelmed by the vast number of potential universes. WLC also skips over the fact that we don’t understand the conditions necessary for life in the universe. We don’t even understand them for Earth. Christian claims about the universe are supported by no evidence. The best a Christian apologist can do is start with known scientific facts and sift through the Bible for the occasional vague similarity and then declare the Bible to be prescient.
• “The existence of a realm of objective moral values and duties that impose themselves upon us.” Objective moral values? Show us that such things exist. I see no evidence.
• “The applicability of mathematics to the physical world enabling modern science to operate.” This is the Argument from Incredulity fallacy (“I just can’t imagine a natural cause, so therefore it must’ve been supernatural!”) plus the Argument from Mathematics (responded to here).
• “The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.” That’s a story. It’s your job to show that it’s history. (More here and here.)
• “Religious experience.” Finally! This one is real. Our Paleolithic and pre-human ancestors grew up in a dangerous world. With technology, we’re the apex predator now, but that wasn’t the case when we were naked on the African savanna. Growing up in a dangerous world made us skittish. Guessing that the rustling in the grass might be a leopard made survival sense. Unseen predators rustling the grass gradually become unseen gods making lightning and drought, so that evolution created religious experience.

WLC’s pat-on-the-head platitudes don’t stand up to cross-examination, and even he senses that this isn’t  a complete argument.

Evaluating the morality of God’s actions

WLC asks the follow-on question:

If God exists, how probable is it that he would give more evidence than what he has given?

The first problem is the “than what he has given,” which assumes God into existence. But let’s suppose that was unintentional, ignore it, and move on.

I don’t see that there’s any great probability that if God existed he would give more evidence than that. That makes the argument from divine hiddenness, I think, very, very weak indeed because [the atheist] can’t demonstrate that it is highly probable that God would give much more evidence than what he has indeed given.

Remember his Problem of Evil response in the last post. Not having much to work with, he is playing the same trick. Y’see, it’s the atheist who has the burden of proof. WLC thinks he can plop a stinker of an argument on the table and insist that the atheist clean it up. (More about the burden of proof and how WLC bears it here.)

It’s not my job to rebut this argument, but I’ll do it anyway. An all-loving, omnipotent, and omniscient god who (1) created the hellish consequences of our not knowing he exists and (2) didn’t make his existence obvious, can’t exist because he wouldn’t be all-loving. We are not only justified but logically obliged to reject this god claim.

Keep in mind that it’s simply God’s existence that we’re looking for, the proving of which for ordinary humans is effortless. What’s “very, very weak indeed” is WLC’s argument that God’s diaphanous hints about nature and mathematics are the likeliest evidence by which he’d illuminate the path to heaven for his most cherished creation.

(I’ve imagined the conditions where we would easily accept that God exists, a world I call Gaia. That thought experiment is here.)

Concluded in part 2, where WLC digs his hole deeper here.

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Image from José Fonticoba, CC license
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Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) recently responded to a post from the atheist blog A Counter Apologist. The majority of his response is to the problem of divine hiddenness (to be discussed in the next post). But as a stepping stone to that, he addressed the problem of evil—why does an all-good God allow so much evil in the world?

Appetizer: A point of agreement

This first Christian argument to respond to the problem of evil comes from apologist Michael Rea, who says that God can be hidden but still be loving and good because “loving” and “good” have been redefined. With these newly redefined words, things that wouldn’t be loving or good if a person did them could be so for God. In a pleasant turn of events, WLC rejects this argument.

He didn’t give his reasons, so let me. It’s true that definitions aren’t fixed, and words can be stretched to take on new meanings. Sometimes they have legitimate alternate definitions in certain domains. I’ve written about legitimate alternate definitions of “necessary” by Alvin Plantinga and “absurd” by WLC.

The problem is when words are redefined with the intent (or expectation) that the old definition carries over. This is deceptive.

Things run off the rails when WLC jumps in with his own argument.

Problem of evil: humans and probability

Where was God when something bad happened? God is always mute, but apologists are quick to come to the aid of their dumb deity. As usual, WLC insists that the problem is the atheists’. Why? Because we’re unable to understand the big picture.

We’re simply not in a good position to make the sort of probability judgments that the atheist wants to make: namely, it is improbable that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing my daughter to get leukemia, or it’s improbable that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing the Holocaust or any evil that you might want to pick.

[This argument highlights] our inherent cognitive limitations that prevent us from making these kinds of extravagant probability judgments with any sort of confidence.

We don’t know that it’s impossible that God is morally justified, just that it seems that way. What else can we do but make that evaluation? And what other conclusion can we come to but that childhood disease and the Holocaust is bad?

True, we can’t prove that God had no good reason, but proof was never the goal. We’re given a claim that God allowed some bad thing to happen to bring about a greater good, and we must evaluate it. Does it seem that the Holocaust or a child slowly dying of leukemia were a net positive? Of course not—who would say otherwise? If an omnipotent god wanted to take out a bad character, he would do it more surgically than with a tsunami, hurricane, or Holocaust.

This argument is astounding when we put it alongside another argument WLC makes. He often appeals to objective morality, giving examples like the Holocaust as things that are really bad (that is, objectively bad). But that appeal to strongly felt moral truth is inconvenient for this argument against the problem of evil, and he hopes you will have the good taste to avoid pointing that out. Let’s just sweep it under the bed where it will lay until we’ve moved past the problem of evil and it’s no longer embarrassing.

And even if that child with leukemia were to grow up to be another Hitler, there are far more compassionate ways to address that problem, like poofing them out of existence, fixing their badness, or never letting them be born.

With “our inherent cognitive limitations [prevent] us from making these kinds of extravagant probability judgments,” WLC is saying that we can’t be perfect, so we shouldn’t even try. But we never conclude that in other areas of life. The legal system is an example. The correct path is weighed by imperfect human judges and jurors all the time. WLC would never insist that courtrooms close because, since we can’t do justice perfectly, we shouldn’t do it at all. How then can he make the same argument against the problem of evil?

I can’t let that nutty sentence go without one more comment.

[Humans have] inherent cognitive limitations that prevent us from making these kinds of extravagant probability judgments [like declaring it improbable that God had a morally sufficient reason for allowing the Holocaust] with any sort of confidence. (Emphasis added.)

Extravagant? Huh?! There’s a tsunami of popular support for the proposition that the Holocaust was wrong, and yet it’s extravagant to conclude this? I think bravado has replaced logical thinking.

We evaluate the Holocaust, decide that it was very, very bad, determine that we would have prevented it if given the chance, and conclude that anyone who didn’t seize that opportunity made a huge moral error. That includes God, in whose (moral) image Christians insist we were made.

Next up: WLC tackles the problem of divine hiddenness here.

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We’re in the home stretch! Three-quarters of the 28 Quick Shots now have responses. I hope these condensed replies to popular Christian arguments have been useful for you.

Summary of reply: There is neither direct nor indirect evidence for the case for God’s existence; science has the track record in answering questions about reality, not Christianity; and a non-biologist’s critique of biology is irrelevant.

(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: There is no evidence for God’s existence.

Christian response #1: There is both direct evidence (testimony of those who saw Jesus’s miracles, including the Resurrection) and indirect evidence (clues from modern science that point to God).

BSR: Testimony? What we have are copies separated by centuries from the originals. And those originals contained fanciful supernatural stories unlikely to be history. And those stories had been oral history for decades before they were written down. So, no, we don’t have reliable testimony. That doesn’t prove that the Jesus stories we have today at the end of that long process are false, but it’s scant evidence that they’re true. And it’s preposterously flimsy evidence with which to support Christianity’s massive supernatural claims.

Let’s move on to the indirect evidence, science’s clues to God. The Christian argument mentions (1) the universe coming from nothing, (2) the fine tuning of the universe, and (3) the origin of life.

(1) No, science doesn’t say that the universe came from nothing. That might be true, but science has no consensus on the question. In fact, not even Genesis says that God created the universe from nothing.

(2) The multiverse is predicted by cosmic inflation, for which we have good evidence. With 10⁵⁰⁰ possible universes in the multiverse, it’s not surprising that one might appear fine tuned.

(3) Science doesn’t have a consensus theory of the origin of life. Maybe in twenty years it will. Christianity also doesn’t have a well-evidenced explanation for the origin of life. And it still won’t in twenty years. Or ever.

No, we aren’t forced to hypothesize a supernatural Creator.

There is neither direct evidence (reliable eyewitness testimony) nor indirect evidence (clues from science) that God exists. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: How can you accept naturalistic explanations for information in DNA, fine tuning, the appearance of design, and more when there isn’t sufficient evidence to support such claims?

BSR: Where’s the problem? Where science doesn’t have an answer, there is nothing to accept. Science and laypeople just say, “We don’t know.” Unanswered questions aren’t embarrassing to science. They help focus research.

Christian apologists like to raise questions, but they’re just repeating questions that they got from science. Attacking science by raising unanswered questions neither attacks science nor argues for God. A supernatural explanation wins only when it explains things better than the natural explanation, and when that natural explanation is the scientific consensus, it explains things very well. Christian apologists often imagine that pointing out an unanswered scientific question (such as, where did life come from?) advances their position, but an unevidenced “God did it!” will never replace a scientific hypothesis.

This argument distills down to, “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, Christianity.” Making this non-argument, even with bravado, only highlights the fact that Christianity has never taught us anything about reality. Let’s instead go with the discipline with the track record.

A popular but pointless Christian argument is “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, Christianity.” This is just embarrassing. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Philosopher Antony Flew was famous for his arguments against God, but when he examined DNA as evidence, he concluded that its information couldn’t be explained without an intelligent Creator.

BSR: Who cares what Antony Flew concluded about DNA? He wasn’t a biologist! His critique is worth nothing.

DNA is a sloppy mess. It (more or less) gets the job done and it’s very complex, but complexity doesn’t mean designed. A Rube Goldberg machine is deliberately complex, and the reason they’re amusing is that designers don’t actually design that way. In particular, DNA doesn’t look like how a human programmer would do it. Of course, God might have his own way of doing things that isn’t at all how human designers work, but then the Design Hypothesis, which states that DNA looks designed, fails.

You don’t seek complexity but rather elegance when looking for the clues of design.

BSR 20 looked into DNA more closely, so I’ll just summarize that argument: human DNA has 20,000 nonworking pseudogenes, it has genes that code for vestigial structures and atavisms, and eight percent is made of virus fragments. No designer would put this junk in DNA; therefore, it doesn’t look designed; therefore, the Design Argument fails.

Antony Flew was a famous atheist philosopher. He turned from atheism after misunderstanding biological arguments. Sorry, Dr. Flew, but no one cares how a non-biologist critiques biology. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue with BSR 23: Moral Truths Are a Matter of Personal Opinion

For further reading:

• New Testament Manuscript Reliability Less Than You’ve Been Told
• God Created the Universe From Nothing—Or Did He?
• Frank Turek’s Criminally Bad C.R.I.M.E.S. Argument: Fine Tuning
• Stupid argument #44: Time’s up! Now answer all the fundamental questions of science.
• The Curious Case of Atheist Philosopher Antony Flew
• Argument from Design BUSTED!
• BSR 7: If God Existed, He Wouldn’t Be so Hidden
• The Design Hypothesis, DNA, and Dysteleology
• “DNA is a Program, and Programs Demand a Programmer”: a Response

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