Imagine squeezing your eyes real tight and wishing hard. What do you wish for?

No, not that Santa Claus will bring you all the stuff on your list or for Tinker Bell’s health after she drank the poison. This time, we’re wishing that all those stories from the Old Testament were really, honest-to-goodness true—from the six-day creation and Adam and Eve to the global Flood, the Tower of Babel, and all the rest. And—it’s a miracle!—our wish has been granted. Or, at least we can imagine so for 101 minutes by watching Is Genesis History?, a “documentary” released as a DVD in 2017.

The movie is unapologetically young-earth Creationist (“young earth” means that they think that the earth and the rest of the universe is roughly 6000 years old, and “Creationist” means that they reject evolution).

The production quality is high, with some beautiful natural locations, and they interview a dozen relevant scientists. Breaking ranks with typical Creationist “scholarship,” these scientists’ doctorates are often actually in the field that they’re critiquing—geology, paleontology, biology, astronomy, and archaeology. They only tangentially addressed the elephant in the room, that conventional science has overwhelmingly concluded that the Big Bang and evolution are real, and a 6000-year-old earth and global flood and the rest of the Bible’s “history” are not.

As an outsider to these scientific fields, I’m sometimes in a difficult spot. Some of the movie’s arguments are clearly nonsense. Some are legitimate open questions within conventional science. And some require more expertise (or research time) than I now have. I’ve written about a couple of times Creationists were able to shut me up with arguments I couldn’t immediately answer here. That is, they shut me up until I had a chance to investigate the claims more thoroughly and found out how I’d been lied to, which is not the best way to win me to your side.

If you can expand on my responses below, share your insights in the comments.

Canyons

The movie opens at a stream in a small canyon. The walls of the canyon look to be made of sand and gravel. We’re asked: How long would it take for a small stream like this to carve this canyon? Thousands of years, you might think? Surprise—we’re near Mt. St. Helens! It’s been just four decades since the famous eruption of 1980, and it already has new canyons. We’re told that streams “cut through deep [bedrock], all in a couple of days.”

Don’t be ridiculous—streams didn’t cut through bedrock in days. I’ve been to Mt. St. Helens many times, including two visits to the Mount St. Helens Creation Center, a tiny museum with a Creationist presupposition that may have been the source of the observation, “Gosh, but don’t these recent canyons look just like a mini Grand Canyon?!”

Who would be surprised that water quickly cut canyons at Mt. St. Helens? They’re made of sand and gravel!

The Grand Canyon

The movie introduces Steve Austin (geologist) who argued for a global flood, using the Grand Canyon as evidence. He said that the many layers show evidence of rapid sedimentation—that is, within hours or even minutes.

How? The upper Grand Canyon layers include sedimentary rock including sandstone, limestone, and shale. These rocks form under different conditions. Are they imagining that the advancing or retreating Flood changed its conditions so that different things would settle out? Limestone is mostly made from tiny fragments of marine organisms like coral. Shale is made from clay and other minerals, and unlike limestone and sandstone, it is composed of thin sheets. It would be complicated enough if all the sandstone were at the bottom, then the shale, and then the limestone (for example), but it’s actually a complex interleaving of various kinds of each stone—sandstone, then shale, then limestone, then more sandstone, and so on.

It gets worse when you remember that these layers contain fossils that are distinct to that layer. It’s not something simple like the animals were graded by size—the biggest falling out of the turbulent flood first and becoming part of the lowest layer, and so on. Why are there trilobite fossils in the Tapeats sandstone layer but none in the Hermit shale above, and why are there fossils of dragonflies with an eight-inch wingspan in the Hermit shale but none in the Tapeats sandstone? How would a chaotic flood create thousands of feet of distinctly interleaved layers? And if the flood was global, why aren’t canyons like this commonplace around the world? The questions aren’t even acknowledged.

The movie points to the Bible, handwaving a geological explanation for water bursting out of the ground (“the fountains of the deep”) to create the Flood.

No, geology doesn’t help you much here, but a mythology borrowed from the nearby Sumerians explains things nicely. They imagined a dome of salt water above the earth (that’s why the sky is blue!) and fresh water underneath. (More analysis here and here.)

Next, we’re assured that the flood was global, not local. Where did all that water come from? Don’t worry—the mountains weren’t as high back then, so covering the earth didn’t take that much. But that means extreme mountain building in the few thousand years since the Ark landed. Again, we’re given assertion but no evidence for this.

Cutting of the Grand Canyon

Finally, he rejects the idea that the Canyon took tens of millions of years to be cut by the Colorado River. He said, “Most geologists have jettisoned that idea” (untrue as far as I can tell). What did carve the Canyon, he says, is catastrophic erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes, which might’ve carved the Grand Canyon in weeks.

Actually, I can imagine erosion from the rapid draining of huge lakes. Dry Falls in eastern Washington state was formed that way. The one small problem is that Dry Falls and Grand Canyon look completely different (pictures of each here), which makes clear that they were formed in very different ways.

He can sidestep this problem by imagining that the erosion happened to sand or silt, before it was turned to stone. In that case, of course, he must explain the magic that made it turn to stone in a few thousand years.

So many unanswered questions.

To be continued.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God
who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect
has intended us to forgo their use.
— Galileo Galilei

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/18/17.)

Image from Daniel Mayer (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This is yet one more stupid argument Christians should avoid (with a bonus argument). The list begins here.

Stupid argument #43: For the benefit of the Little People, don’t take away their God

This isn’t an argument that Christians make but I think it’s worth highlighting. The Little People Argument is made by atheists and agnostics against fellow atheists. These more generous atheists scold the cranky atheists for taking God away from ordinary people. They don’t need God themselves, they assure us, but we mustn’t ruin things for the people who aren’t as smart or stable as we are.

They say that there’s more to a religious claim than just its truth. If believers get benefits from their belief, and their belief is grounded on the (false) claim that it’s true, why rock their boat?

Christianity’s reckless activity within society is why. Remember the problems listed in argument #42—Christians pushing for Creationism in schools and prayer in public meetings, Christianity softening one’s inherent skepticism for nutty ideas so that QAnon and other conspiracy theories can come aboard, and so on.

Politicians sometimes abduct Christian thinking for their own purposes, demanding that good Christians must vote for them to end the godless scourge of abortion, vaccines, girls kissing girls, or whatever is causing the sky to fall today. For giving these “Baby Jesus will cry” arguments power, Christianity takes the blame.

One variant on the argument is to demand that you not undercut Christianity without something to replace it. Sure, if a philosophy group or lecture series satisfies an intellectual hunger that before had to put up with the thin soup of a sermon, that’s great. But such a replacement isn’t mandatory. Jerry Coyne, whose article was my inspiration for this argument, gives a counterexample: did the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s offer something to replace the idea that whites were superior to blacks? Nope. If the realization that they weren’t inherently superior to someone else caused someone existential heartburn, they had to get over it. Nothing replaced the false belief. Northern Europe is far ahead of us in sidelining Christianity, and they seem to have muddled through just fine.

Another example: when you’re cured of cancer or malaria, doctors don’t replace that disease with something else; they make you well and send you on your way.

I’ll end with a caveat. I have little enthusiasm for debunking the supernatural beliefs of someone whose awful life is made a little easier with those beliefs. Perhaps they’re abused, starving, or dying, and (false) beliefs help them get through the day. The good might outweigh the bad in these cases. For the rest of humanity, let’s believe as many true things and reject as many false things as possible.

And now, it’s time for a bonus argument! Let’s call the previous argument #43a so that this related argument can be called:

Stupid argument #43b: Religion is useful

Yes, religion can be useful. In placebo fashion, it might help people kick bad habits like addiction. It might encourage people to act better because they imagine God is taking notes. It might push people to donate time or money to good works.

And of course I’m happy to see Christianity’s benefits extracted from its many false claims. Community, charity, and an interest in morality are great, and they needn’t be encumbered with Christianity’s baggage.

Note, though, that this does nothing to show that religions’ fundamental supernatural claims are true. Truth is the bottom line at this blog, and failing at that is what makes this a stupid argument.

Returning to “religion is useful,” here’s a thought experiment: suppose religion were so useful that it was a net positive. That is, the upsides (hope for heaven, the belief that God’s plan is all for the best, and related beliefs) outweighed the downsides (the harm caused by those beliefs being false plus other negatives, discussed in argument #42). Should we reject religion then?

I’ll let you answer that one for yourself. As for me, the downsides of religion far outweigh the upsides, so the question is academic.

Is there any way to get to a harmless Christianity? Consider that there are secular Jews who self-identify as Jews. There are atheist Jews who attend synagogue. They see themselves as cultural Jews. Imagine the Christian equivalent—a community of cultural Christians who might have supernatural beliefs (or might not) and are brought together for community and doing good within their society. I think of this as Christianity 2.0, and it might be Christianity’s soft landing option.

I don’t agree with C. S. Lewis on much, but he had a good point when he said,

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

If religion is useful, let’s acknowledge that and try to understand why. But that shouldn’t hamper efforts to get everyone to agree on what’s true.

Don’t touch the fruit of the tree of historical knowledge
lest it open your eyes to the hooey that the Church professes.
— commenter Sophia Sadek

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from Edwin Andrade (free-use license)

It’s time once again to put on our neoprene waders and gas mask and step in, looking for the stupidest arguments by which Christians embarrass themselves.

The list begins here. We’re well past the original target of 25 and still going.

Stupid argument #42: Why do atheists worry about someone they don’t think exists?

One Christian source expressed it this way:

How can you hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility? If God does not exist, shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant food? Why should it matter if people believe in God?

We don’t care about gods; we care about their followers. Gods don’t cause problems within society, but people who think they’re carrying out the will of gods do.

This argument seems to presume that Christianity is about nothing more than good works, community, mutual support, and other worthy aspects that no one would object to. It presumes that nothing bad comes from believing false things. They imagine that Christianity has no more destructive impact on society than knitting, but Christianity in America does quite a bit more than just good works. Christians (not all, of course, but many) love to meddle. They:

• push for Creationism in public schools,
• demand prayers at government meetings,
• stand in the way of same-sex marriage and find other ways to make life miserable for queer people,
• block the use of fetal stem cells used for research,
• vote for politicians that they admit are terrible people simply because they’re against abortion,
• make other attacks on the separation of church and state,

and more. And that’s just their attacks on society—within their own communities, people can be ostracized for thinking the wrong things or traumatized as children with talk of hell and demons.

Stepping back from this, we see a larger problem in that religion encourages people to accept things as true without sufficient evidence. They convince themselves that Jesus walks with them in adversity and that God advises them when at a crossroads, but this is just comforting self-talk.

When the mind’s drawbridge of skepticism is let down for Jesus, other ideas can come through with minimal scrutiny like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, evolution and climate change denial, vaccine phobia, and so on. Christianity is more than just a sweet old lady walking down the block to church on a warm Sunday in June or people donating to good works. It can be the gateway drug to sloppy thinking that’s much more dangerous.

Atheism makes sense as an organized movement

A variant of this argument wonders why we don’t see a parallel to atheism (an organized movement against something) with, say, stamp collecting. If it makes sense for atheists to get together under the shared belief in no gods, why aren’t there organizations, blogs, and lectures for non-stamp-collecting?

That sounds like a good question until you think about it. The comparison doesn’t work, so let’s fix it.

• Make stamp collecting in the U. S. an industry with revenue of $100 billion per year, all of which is tax deductible, but make that revenue secret. That is, require all nonprofits in the country to open their financial records to show that they are worthy of nonprofit status, except for stamp-collecting organizations (more here).
• Have the leadership of the stamp collecting industry meddle in public affairs (or get in bed with politicians who will do it) and have them complain when stamp collectors’ perks are attacked.
• Have politicians allied with the industry play Chicken Little, pointing at teh Gayz or abortion or vaccines and insisting that the sky is falling. Only by electing them can society be put right.
• Have the stamp-collecting leaders declare their organization to be supernaturally moral despite being riddled with financial and sexual scandals.
• Amend Article VI of the U.S. Constitution to forbid any public stamp-collecting test of political candidates but make it a de facto test anyway.

Now that’s an organization that could easily have organized opposition. Perhaps now it’s clear why atheism exists as a movement.

This is related to Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God, where we discover that atheists must believe in God because we talk about him so much.

Dear God,
Protect me from your followers.
— seen on a bumper sticker

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from h gruber (license CC BY 2.0)

The story of award-winning, legally trained journalist Lee Strobel as told in the book The Case for Christ has become a series of books, which have together sold millions of copies. It also became a movie (2017), about which Lee Strobel said, “It’s been an incredible journey, not only to go from atheism to faith, but to see the raw reality of our lives played out on film. In the end, it’s our hope that everyone who sees it will take their own faith journey.”

If you’re a Christian who wants a pat on the head, and you don’t need to think too hard about the arguments given, that might work. For everyone else, it’s an unsurprising journey from lack of God belief to Christian faith with a greatest hits collection of weak apologetics. It would’ve been a lot more engaging if they’d handed out Bingo cards of ridiculous Christian arguments.

Lee Strobel, award-winning journalist

The movie opens at the Chicago Tribune with Strobel getting an award for investigative journalism into questions about the safety of the Ford Pinto. We learn the kind of guy he is when he says, “The only way to truth is through facts.”

His family life is blissful, but then at a restaurant, his little daughter chokes on a gumball. A nurse at the restaurant saves her. Afterwards, the nurse tells the wife that Jesus told her to be there that night. At home in bed, the daughter asks about Jesus, and we learn that the parents are atheists.

This event plants a seed in the wife’s mind. She later visits the nurse, and they talk about God. They go to a church service together, and the pastor says that we must listen for God’s whisper. He says, “Open your heart and take a chance.”

Which is what you’d say if there were no good evidence for your supernatural claims. I wonder if the pastor has this leap-before-looking approach with Scientology or Mormonism. Clearly, not all the arguments are of the “just the facts” type.

After more church and a bit of praying, the wife admits to Strobel that she’s now drawn to the Jesus thing. He gets offended and goes out for a drinking binge. Is his marriage at a crossroads?

The quest

Strobel has two older mentors at the newspaper, an atheist and a Christian, and he discusses his concerns with each. The Christian mentor challenges Strobel to investigate the Jesus story and points to a banner on the newsroom wall: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” He visits Christian scholar Gary Habermas, and we get the first of more than a dozen weak Christian apologetic arguments. I’ll summarize each argument that I noticed for completeness and for your amusement, but I won’t spend much time rebutting them. (I’ll put brief comments in italics after each one.)

☢ Atheist Gerd Lüdemann says that Paul’s 1 Corinthians 15 passage was written just three years after the event. (That’s debatable, but even so, it doesn’t mean much. It could be three days and you would dismiss a miraculous account if it came from a religion not your own. More here.)

☢ Paul claims that 500 eyewitnesses saw the risen Christ. (Is that compelling evidence? Then why didn’t the gospels include it, too? More here.)

☢ There are nine sources for the crucifixion, some of them outside the Bible. (I haven’t studied this one enough to comment.)

Strobel gave people drinking poison Kool-Aid at Jonestown in 1978 as an example of people laying down their lives for stupid reasons. ☢ Habermas responded that those people didn’t drink poison for something they knew was a lie or hoax (That’s true, but very few atheists argue that the resurrection was a lie or a hoax! They argue that it was a legend. More here and here.)

Strobel sets up an unused storeroom in the newspaper’s basement to organize his research into Jesus, like in a murder case. As he revisits it in subsequent scenes, we see the white board filling with claims and photos.

The plot thickens

And now, a subplot: a Chicago cop is shot, and a man named Hicks is charged with the crime. Strobel investigates, and all the evidence points to Hicks . . . though it’s clear to us in the audience that there’s more to this story.

Strobel interviews another Jesus expert, a priest this time, and we get more arguments.

☢ Historians have 5800 copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts, three times more than second-place Homer. The priest shows an illuminated page from Homer that was written 800 years after the original. (I wonder why the priest doesn’t make clear that 800 years is better than 90 percent of those Greek New Testament manuscripts. More here.)

☢ The priest also has a facsimile of P52, a papyrus scrap of John, which may have been copied just 30 years after the original. (Be consistent: if you actually care about textual criticism, you’ll find that Mormonism has far better evidence than Christianity. More here.)

☢ Finally, there’s the photo negative of the Shroud of Turin hung on the wall of the church. (You like old evidence? Then you’ll be interested to hear that the oldest well-documented reference to this shroud—which is just one of dozens from a time when relics were valuable properties—states that it is a forgery. More here.)

Strobel is back in his underground lair to organize all this data. We increasingly see Strobel’s quest in parallel with his wife studying the Bible. Back at home, he gets drunk. Tensions flare, and she asks Jesus for help.

Time to speak to a world-famous apologist

And now, a phone call with William Lane Craig and more evidence.

☢ Maybe the disciples went to the wrong tomb? (Not an argument that I make.)

☢ Strobel notes that women weren’t reliable witnesses in Jewish culture. Craig responds with the Criterion of Embarrassment: why would you put in something awkward like that unless it were true? This is evidence that they weren’t making up the story. (Here again, the only one proposing that the story was made up is you. Anyway, women at the tomb makes perfect sense. More here.)

☢ What about the contradictions in the accounts? Craig says that if there weren’t some contradictions, you’d suspect collusion and challenges him: “When is enough evidence enough evidence?” (Does nothing count as poor evidence? Are you this generous with evidence for other religions?! I discuss contradictions in the resurrection accounts here.)

Strobel’s questions are those of an amateur. We all have to start somewhere, and he comes up with some good ones, but the Church has had 2000 years to paper over its embarrassing problems, so their riposte is often compelling. Where’s the atheist expert to interview? That expert would give Strobel good responses to the Christian arguments and give him more questions to ask. The average atheist blogger would make quick work of the Christian position given in this movie.

Strobel finds new data in the cop shooter case and writes a front page story that puts Hicks away for a long time. Clearly he’s a great investigator! It’s good we have him on our team to check out the Jesus story.

He placates his wife by going to church once, ☢ where the pastor talks about people turning away from the church simply because of bad experiences with the church, not because it’s not true. (Not an argument I make.)

Trouble at home

Strobel’s parents show up to see their new baby, and we discover that Strobel has issues with his distant father.

Things are also going poorly on the marriage front. He confronts his wife: wouldn’t you want to know if Christianity isn’t true? She throws it back at him: Wouldn’t you want to know if it is?

Her nurse friend later references a verse from Ezekiel: “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” Dear Jesus, when are you going to make that conversion on Strobel??

Back on the hunt, Strobel visits a famous nonbelieving psychologist. He asks if the disciples could’ve been deluded by a group hallucination. ☢ Nope—she declares that group hallucinations don’t happen. (Not an argument that I make. And anyway, wouldn’t something like the dancing sun at Fatima count? It was seen by 30,000 people. [h/t commenter Pofarmer])

She asks about Strobel’s father, and we learn more about that bad relationship. ☢ She ticks off famous atheists, all of whom had distant or abusive fathers. (This is Paul Vitz’s flabby argument, which simply cherry picks the data to come to a predetermined conclusion. For example, I wonder why she didn’t list C. S. Lewis, a famous Christian who had a bad relationship with his father. More here.)

We again see Strobel’s quest paralleled with the wife’s journey through the Bible and pray that this movie is stumbling to a close.

Tying up the loose ends

Stop the presses! Strobel uncovers new evidence in Hicks case: the cop actually shot himself by accident with an illegal pen gun. It wasn’t Hicks! Shortly after, Hicks gets beaten up in prison (guards don’t do much to protect cop shooters), and Strobel visits him in the hospital. Strobel tells him that he didn’t see the truth. Hicks replies, “You didn’t want to see the truth.” Take that, atheists!

In what mercifully turns out to be his last interview, Strobel asks a doctor about the swoon theory—that Jesus didn’t actually die but that he just fainted on the cross and revived in the tomb. ☢ Wrong again, the doctor tells him. The Roman executioners were very good at making sure the convicts were dead, and we get the obligatory journey through the agony of Jesus’s last day. (I never argue the swoon theory. I try to slap some sense into the resurrection story here and here.)

Remember that atheists-are-atheists-because-of-bad-father-figures hypothesis? We get closure on that one after Strobel’s father dies. Strobel discovers that the old man wasn’t so bad after all—he just had a hard time expressing his affection. Could Strobel’s stoney heart be softening?

Strobel’s at the end of his investigation, but what to do with it all? His atheist friend tells him that ☢ it’s a leap of faith either way. (Uh, no—it’s a leap of faith if you’re making a conclusion without evidence; more here. You should believe things only if there’s good evidence to do so. You don’t believe in unicorns, leprechauns, and fairies because there’s insufficient evidence, so why not follow the same approach for something far more important like God?)

Inexplicably, ☢ Pascal’s Wager pops up in this conversation; that is, a bet on God is a huge win if you’re right and not a big deal if you’re wrong. (I rebut that here.)

And Strobel is left to decide. Back in his man cave, he remembers what the priest had said: Jesus is love. This is the last straw, and he concludes, “All right, God—you win.”

He reconciles with his wife and says, “The evidence for your faith is more overwhelming than I could ever imagine.” They kneel, and he says the sinner’s prayer.

Three months later, justice has been done for Hicks. Strobel pitches his conversion story to his editor: one man’s journey from skepticism to faith. The editor turns it down, but then his wife suggests that he write a book. In the final scene, Strobel rolls paper into his typewriter and pecks out the words, “The Case for Christ.”

The End. Thank God.

See also: Response to Lee Strobel’s “Five E’s of Evidence”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/8/17.)
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The Problem of God’s Hiddenness is the most powerful argument against Christianity. In part 1, we considered a defense of God’s hiddenness by Christian apologist Jim Wallace. Let’s conclude by poking holes in a second argument by Wallace, “God’s Hiddenness Is Intended to Provoke Us,” which has a fresh approach to the problem.

God’s hiddenness? It’s a test.

I believe the answer [to this problem of God’s hiddenness] lies in God’s desire to provoke us; His desire to elicit a true, loving response from His children. This goal of producing something beautiful (a genuine, well-intentioned, loving response), requires Him to hide from us.

But now you’ve created a trickster god. God appears nonexistent, but you can’t tolerate that so you invent outlandish reasons why he must be hiding instead.

Is this an improvement? Just admit that your god doesn’t exist!

Wallace wants us to believe that God must be hidden even though that is a feature of no healthy relationship we have with other people.

Poor God—he just wants to be loved for who he is

Wallace introduces an analogy: consider a gold digger, a beautiful young woman who marries a much older rich man, not for love but for greed. Suppose a rich man wants to avoid this possibility. He wants an old-fashioned relationship based on love. How can he find a partner who wants him for love rather than money? Deception! He could conceal his wealth (and maybe his identity) so that no gold digger would consider him.

That is how Wallace sees God. God is the rich guy who’s hiding his wealth to get our honest, authentic reaction instead of one distorted by his majesty. He gives several Old Testament examples, but he forgets that sometimes God isn’t at all overpowering. For example, “The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). In the Old Testament, people apparently had evidence to believe God existed, so they believed.

The analogy fails

And it fails for many reasons:

• What is the equivalent of the big reveal (“I have a confession to make, my dear—I’m not an appliance salesman but am actually Byron Rachmaninov, billionaire industrialist”)? It’s not like believers don’t already know of God’s attributes. Wallace seems to imagine that we’ll develop a relationship with God, only to get a happy upgrade once we’ve settled into a comfortable, loving relationship. God will say, “I’m not just a Class C phantasm, as I’ve pretended, but I’m actually the Creator of the universe.”
• Unlike the rich guy, God could see your honest intentions to root out the gold diggers and wouldn’t need the charade. (This is also the failure of Pascal’s Wager. God isn’t so stupid that he couldn’t see through someone simply going through the motions to get into heaven.)
• A Christian evangelizing an atheist may play up the bliss of a loving relationship with God, but if you’re unpersuaded, you may get the “But if you don’t worship God, you go to hell. Just sayin’.” With that focus on carrot and stick, now who’s the gold digger? And the atheist becomes the woman who doesn’t even notice God because he’s so busy being inconspicuous.
• This analogy explains why prayers don’t work—God must be unresponsive and can’t tip his hand that he exists. Do Christians really want to admit there’s no evidence for answered prayer? And the rich old man in the story is being deceptive when he disguises who he is. This doesn’t sound like the Yahweh of the Old Testament who appeared to everyone as smoke and fire during the Exodus and who demanded genocide of the Canaanites.
• A better analogy to learning to love the rich man for his personality and keeping the wealth a secret would be for God to get to know everyone as Creator only and make the carrot-and-stick afterlife the secret. Given how big a deal Christians make about heaven and hell, it might be the atheists who would be most curious about this Creator. The Christians may be uninterested if there’s no reward.

Wallace confuses evidence for God’s existence with secondary matters such as specifics of God’s nature, how or whether we will worship him, God’s desire to have a relationship based on love, and so on. I suspect that he actually understands this, and his confusion is a deliberate sleight of hand on his part.

Atheists are just asking for God to be apparent, which is not an unreasonable request. To support God’s existence, apologists can only give vague clues for which naturalistic explanations are much better explanations. We are not justified in holding the God belief.

No one would bring out this argument except to justify belief in a god that didn’t exist.

(h/t commenters sandy, eric, and Anthrotheist)

See also: The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/7/17.)

Image from Peter (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

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