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Who Has the Burden of Proof? Apparently Not the Christian.

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Remember evil Professor Radisson, the philosophy professor in the 2014 Christian persecution-porn movie God’s Not Dead? On the first day of class, he insisted that his students write “God is dead” on a piece of paper and sign it. When plucky Christian student Josh refused to play along, Radisson demanded a public debate between them, with a large fraction of Josh’s grade dependent on the outcome. (My review of that movie is here.)

What should’ve happened, of course, was that Josh, with a Jedi hand gesture, says, “That challenge didn’t happen . . . or else I go to the dean.” I’d have reported the professor to the administration myself if I’d been in that class. That was a blatant violation of any conceivable faculty code of conduct.

The Christian burden of proof is such a . . . burden

Christian apologist Greg Koukl seems not to have figured out that that was just Hollywood when he introduced a similar situation Christians encounter when evangelizing Christianity.

I call it the Professor’s Ploy because professors like to use this. You go to class, and you have a professor that is bent on destroying your own convictions, and so they’re going to go after Christianity as often as they can in the class.

Sure, that sounds plausible. Professors have nothing better to do than be mean to Christians, right? The subject they’re actually teaching—French Literature, Intro to Quantum Mechanics, or Tudor England—is subservient to Academia’s primary goal of making baby Jesus cry.

Koukl’s “Professor’s Ploy” imagines the student protesting the Christianity-bashing, and he sketches out a brief hypothetical discussion between the plucky Christian student and the wicked atheist professor and then imagines that the professor is impressed by the kid’s determination. He offers the student a few minutes in front of the class to explain whatever aspect of Christian apologetics they were discussing.

Success!

Uh, no, apparently not. You’d think that this would be the goal. It might be enough time to plant the seeds in a few souls that would eventually grow into Christian conviction. In the same way that God gave Moses the words to speak to Pharaoh, you’d think that he would guide the evangelist. But no, in the topsy-turvy world of Christian persecution, the student has been ensnared by the Professor’s Ploy, which now places the burden of proof on the student. Apparently, speaking the Good News to a captive audience (yet more of what would never actually happen in a regular, non-Christian university) isn’t a good thing. One wonders when the Christian is supposed to take a stand and defend it. But more on that later.

Another shirking of the burden of proof

Jim Wallace of the Cold-Case Christianity ministry gives a murder scene as his example. One detective thinks the coworker did it and another thinks it was the girlfriend. Wallace imagines himself as one of those detectives and says:

We both have the same burden of proof to explain why it is our proposed cause can explain the evidence in this scene. Both of us share the same burden of proof.

I agree. Given the fact that someone was murdered, it’s plausible that it was someone known to the victim. There’s symmetry here—each detective is proposing a hypothesis, each of which must be defended. There is no default hypothesis that must be overturned.

But things go off the rails when he moves on to imagine two people arguing about the origin of the universe. One says it’s natural, and the other says it was caused by a divine being. He cheerfully admits that the divine being arguer has a burden of proof. But then he says,

Do you see that both of us have an equal burden?

Nope. One person is on the side of the default explanation, and the other is making the most incredible explanation possible. The burden is not equal. We know coworkers and girlfriends exist, not so gods and the supernatural.

The symmetry we had before—two people each arguing their plausible hypothesis—is gone. Now we have one person arguing for a natural explanation for a phenomenon in nature and another making the grandest, most incredible claim possible, that a supernatural being created everything. In this case, there is a default. We know countless examples of natural explanations, many of which overturned pre-scientific supernatural explanations (no, lightning doesn’t come from heaven, God doesn’t cause famine, etc.). That’s the default. We can keep an open mind about the supernatural, but that explanation is the upstart, and it has the burden of proof.

We’ll look at two different definitions of “burden of proof” in part 2.

If God made man in his own image,
why aren’t we all, like . . . invisible?
— Father Guido Sarducci

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Image from Gabriela Fab, CC license
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Christianity a Hospital, with Sinners the Patients? 8 Reasons This Fails.

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If Christianity is the correct moral and spiritual path, why doesn’t it look like it?

Some Christians are good and some not so much, just like in any large population, but if morality is a central part of religion and Christianity is the one true religion, shouldn’t this be obvious somehow? Why can you not tell a person following the truth path from one following a false religion by their actions? And why are prisons full of Christians?

Christians have a response. Look in a church, and you’ll find that it’s full of sinners. But what did you expect? Christianity says that we’re all fallen people. Jesus said, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-2). The church is a hospital, with the sinners as the patients.

Let’s take this metaphor for a drive and see the many ways it fails.

1. A hospital stay is temporary

When you’re sick, you go to the hospital if you must, but your stay should be as brief as possible. The hospital is the option of last recourse. Financial pressure encourages the patient to leave quickly.

By contrast, church isn’t to be avoided, it’s celebrated. It’s a lifestyle and a worldview. Once you’re in, there are often penalties for leaving such as loss of friendships and even family. Church isn’t free, and you are encouraged to dig deep and contribute. Your tithes aren’t a fee but a privilege.

If a vaccination can last for ten years, why isn’t a good dose of Jesus enough to last you for a lifetime?

2. Hospitals improve society

If we can expand the metaphor to include modern medicine and health-focused social policy, this expansive view of “hospitals” has found many ways to keep you out of a hospital bed: a healthy lifestyle with proper diet and exercise, vaccines, improved environmental conditions, nutrition labels on packaged food, laws to safeguard working conditions and food, and preventative medicine like periodic checkups.

By contrast, churches have no interest in seeing you leave. They sometimes encourage their members to fiddle with social policy, standing in the way of same-sex marriage and abortion, for example. Church leaders often dabbles in politics. Christians might push for religious views of reality (like Creationism) to be taught in schools. Evidence drives medicine, but dogma drives religious meddling.

Christianity looks like a protection racket. Its leadership benefits from the status quo and strives to protect the system. Commenter RichardSRussell asked, “Of the two great, evil, criminal gangs to emerge out of Italy, why is the Mafia the one that gets most of the bad press?”

3. A hospital can cure you, completely

Modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it cures many illnesses and repairs many injuries. While medical treatment and research is expensive, we have a lot to show for it.

By contrast, churches have no concept of a cure for a spiritual ailment. Baptism or saying the sinner’s prayer are sometimes portrayed as cures, and yet (depending on the denomination), the Christian is continually on edge, wondering if they’re still on God’s good side. To follow the metaphor, churches provide palliative care only. Christianity says that we’re born spiritually sick, there is no cure in this lifetime, and God himself made us so. As Christopher Hitchens noted, “We are created sick and commanded to be well.”

Religion takes in over $100 billion in the U.S. every year. Tell me that church is a country club and I’ll buy it, not that it’s a hospital.

4. Hospitals treat actual illness

Hospitals treat illnesses like pneumonia, hepatitis, and AIDS.

By contrast, churches invent a new problem of sin plus a god to get offended by it, as if there weren’t enough real problems in the world. Jesus said demons can cause disease. This is theology, not science.

Here’s an idea: if God is offended by sin, let’s assume that he’s a big boy and can take care of it. He can tell us himself how we should conduct our lives, not through a religion that looks no different from all the other manmade religions. That God needs human agents here on earth and never speaks for himself is powerful evidence that he doesn’t exist.

5. Hospitals follow science

Hospitals use medicine, and medicine follows evidence. The bill at the end of a hospital stay might not be as transparent as you might like (that’s a policy issue), but it could theoretically itemize every test given or medicine taken. And each of those could be linked to the studies that document their efficacy.

We can complain about the medical system, but we can agree that objective measures of success should be the final arbiter of what works and what doesn’t.

Churches use dogma and faith, not evidence. There’s not even an objective measure of the correctness of various religions’ dogma. That extends down to contradicting Christian denominations as well. Religion gets a pass and isn’t required to provide evidence for their claims.

There’s a reason that faith healers don’t spend time in hospitals healing the sick. And there’s a reason why U.S. churches hide behind a loophole that allows them to benefit from tax deductible donations and yet keep their financial records secret.

6. Hospitals work

Antibiotics and other medicine as well as other treatments work. Some are 100% reliable, while others are less so, and doctors can reliably predict how a course of treatment will go.

Churches use prayer whose only effectiveness is as a placebo. Christians often say that prayer works, but it certainly doesn’t in the sense that medicine, electricity, or cars work. Prayer may reliably work only in that it provides meditative benefits, but that is certainly not the meaning behind the claim “prayer works.”

They also claim that miracles happen. I issue a challenge to provide that evidence here.

7. Hospitals use professionals

Doctors and nurses are trained. Evidence is used to improve their training.

Jesus is the Great Physician (as in a spiritual healer) in name only. He never shows up. It’s said that he does his work by magic, but there’s no evidence of this. People marvel at his work like people marveled at the diaphanous fabric made by the tailors weaving the Emperor’s new clothes. Any example of an actual healing through the church—maybe someone who kicked an addiction or got out of homelessness or got control of their anger—has people behind it.

In this “hospital,” the patients treat each other. Some are lay members and some are clergy, but they’re all ordinary people, with the Doctor in the Sky conspicuously absent.

The treatments (that is, the right path of spiritual living) are sometimes contradictory across Christian denominations. Extend that out to all religious people, and the incompatibilities underscore the partisan nature of religion’s answers (more here).

8. Bad things happen if you need to go to the hospital but don’t

Centuries ago, doctors might’ve caused more illness than they cured, but we’re long past that. Faith healing or wishful thinking are no help. A medical cure, if one is available, is the reliable route.

By contrast, people outside the church look about the same as those who are members. In fact, those who had been in the church but quit say they’re happier. (Of course, Christians will say that the opposite is also true—those who had been outside the church and are now inside are happier. There are plenty of miserable Christians, but let’s accept that point. That simply makes this a worldview issue. Atheism and Christianity are worldviews, and those in each one prefer it to the other. But is this the best that the One True Religion can claim? It’s just another worldview? Shouldn’t it be obviously better somehow?)

But there is one parallel that works. Hospital-acquired infections cause or contribute to 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Similarly, churches can give you new spiritual infections such as new biases or hatreds.

h/t commenter InDogITrust.

You say you’re supposed to be nice
to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists
and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense! I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
— Pat Robertson

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/12/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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When Christians Themselves Don’t Know Why They Believe

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Why do Christians believe? Not because Christianity is true but pretty much for the same reason every other theist believes—because they were raised that way.

I’d like to use a puzzle to illustrate the thought process of the believer—or indeed any of us who feel backed into a corner, needing to defend a position. Seeing this flawed thinking in a more familiar, non-Christian context (and realizing that we all do this to varying degrees) may help us better understand how Christians believe.

Lateral thinking puzzle

Imagine two strings hanging from the ceiling in an ordinary room—an office, say, or a living room. Your challenge is to tie the strings together, but if you hold one, your arms aren’t long enough for you to reach the other. Using items typically in such a room (pencils, tacks, light bulbs, etc.), how many different ways can you find to connect them?

This puzzle dates to 1931 when psychologist Norman Maier first did the experiment. His subjects fairly reliably came up with solutions in three categories. (Pause here if you want to think up your own answer to the puzzle. How many categories can you find?)

Here are the categories.

  1. Make one string closer. There isn’t a second person to hand you string 1 while you hold string 2, but an easy alternative is to pull string 1 as close to string 2 as possible and hold it in place by tying it to a chair. Then grab string 1 and return to pick up string 2, and tie them together. There are lots of variations (replace the chair with a table, hold the string in place with a heavy weight, tack it to a wall, and so on), but these are unimportant. They all fit into this one category.
  2. Lengthen the string. Tie string 1 to something long like an extension cord. Grab the other string and then reach for the extension cord to pull in the first string.
  3. Lengthen your arm. Hold one string with one hand and use a broom or yardstick to reach the second string.

Did you get those? How about the fourth option? (Pause for a few minutes, if you want, to see if you can find it.)

In Maier’s 1931 experiment, only forty percent of the subjects found the fourth solution within ten minutes. Here’s that solution: tie a weight like a stapler or coffee mug to one string and make it swing like a pendulum. Hold the other string and wait for the pendulum to swing toward you, and then grab it.

Punch line

Now we’ll connect this puzzle to the problem of how the human mind justifies itself. The climax of the experiment was when the psychologist gave a clue for the fourth solution. To the sixty percent who didn’t come up with it themselves, he hinted at it by walking past one of the strings and knocking it “accidentally” so that it swung. That prodded an additional forty percent of the subjects to come up with the solution.

The interesting part was the final step when he asked the subjects with the new insight why they came up with the solution. The answer, of course, was “You brushed the string, and it moved like a pendulum. That helped me realize that I could make one string swing to me while I held the other.” But only one person answered with that. The rest gave answers ranging from “It just came to me” to some elaborate explanation or other. One supposed insight involved the mental image of monkeys swinging from trees.

Connection to Christianity

Why do Christians believe? Mostly because they were raised that way. Christian apologist Jim Wallace agrees and has said that, in his experience, this is a popular (but insufficient) Christian explanation for belief.

Nevertheless, Christians will often rationalize an intellectual foundation. They might point to the apparent design in nature or wonder where morality would come from in a world without God. This parallels the result of Maier’s connect-the-strings experiment. Those subjects wouldn’t state the actual reason for their belief and gave rationalizations when asked.

Or, perhaps those Christians couldn’t admit the actual reason because they honestly thought their belief was well grounded in evidence. Here, the intellectual part of the brain is simply rationalizing what the emotional part told it to rationalize—“I reject that argument; go make up a reason why” or “we’re doing it this way; go justify that.”

Malcolm Gladwell in Blink analyzes Maier’s subjects this way:

Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It’s just that Maier’s hint was so subtle that it was picked up only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier’s subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one.

Beyond simply being a fascinating look into the human mind, I see two lessons from Maier’s experiment. First, Christians’ explanations for their beliefs are unreliable, even if delivered earnestly. This experiment shows how Christians may think they’re believing for rational reasons when in fact they believe for emotional reasons (or, at least, non-intellectual reasons). To see that, find out when a Christian adopted their rationalizations. They likely learned those arguments after becoming a Christian.

Second, we all have (more or less) the same brain, and atheists aren’t immune from bad thinking. A little humility helps.

See also: Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.
Tell him you disagree and he turns away.
Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources.
Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
— Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger

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Image from nahid hatamiz, CC license
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How Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument Fail? Let Me Count the Ways (part 2 of 2).

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Let’s conclude our examination of William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (part 1 here). His version of the argument has two premises and a conclusion:

1 Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2 The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise 1 sounds like common sense until you realize that William Lane Craig (I’ll call him WLC) imagines a loophole for his god. Reinterpret premise 1 with this agenda, and you see he is talking about:

  • a supernatural creation (he provides no examples of a supernatural anything),
  • out of nothing (he provides no examples of creation out of nothing),
  • before time (which didn’t yet exist before the universe came to be)
  • with “begins to exist” as a special-pleading caveat to carve out a God-shaped exception
  • to the “everything has a cause” rule, which is false.

Seen this way, premise 1 loses all common-sense appeal and the Kalam argument fails, but let’s flog this dead horse and continue.

Second premise: The universe began to exist

WLC defends the second premise this way:

Let’s consider the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us the universe is slowly running out of usable energy… and that’s the point.

If the universe had been here forever, it would have run out of usable energy by now. The second law points us to a universe that has a definite beginning.

 6. The second law of thermodynamics is no ally to the apologist.

Unlike his frequent metaphysical handwavings, WLC makes a plausible argument here. If the universe is like a clock that’s running down, it can’t have been running forever.

But does WLC really want to argue that things always run down, so therefore everything must have a beginning? If so, then this must apply to God as well. (Yes, of course I know that WLC will say that God is an exception. But then I will demand evidence that such a god exists.)

It turns out that a clock is a poor analogy to the universe. The zero-energy universe theory says that if you convert everything to energy, matter and light are positive energy but gravity is negative energy. Add it all together, and the sum is zero—the universe has zero net matter and energy. Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist who WLC often cites, explains it this way: “The gravitational energy, which is always negative, exactly compensates the positive energy of matter, so the energy of a closed universe is always zero” (source: video @24:00). Though it seems like cheating, it takes no matter or energy to create a universe.

WLC might say that the zero-energy universe theory might be overturned with new evidence. True, but then his argument has become “The second law of thermodynamics might argue for a beginning,” which isn’t much of an argument.

7. The universe began . . . in its present form.

We don’t know what preceded or caused the Big Bang. The universe might’ve come from nothing, or it might be a rearrangement of material from another universe. (This point and point 6 may not coexist as objections.)

8. Response to Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin.

WLC frequently cites the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (BGV) to argue for a beginning to the universe and, if you want to posit a multiverse, a beginning for that, too.

He’s such a fan that he has the following quote by Vilenkin on several pages at his web site:

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. (Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One [2007], p.176)

That’s powerful evidence for WLC, but if he’s such a fan, I wonder why he ignores this from Vilenkin on the very next page:

Theologians have often welcomed any evidence for the beginning of the universe, regarding it as evidence for the existence of God. . . . So what do we make of a proof that the beginning is unavoidable? Is it a proof of the existence of God? This view would be far too simplistic. Anyone who attempts to understand the origin of the universe should be prepared to address its logical paradoxes. In this regard, the theorem that I proved with my colleagues does not give much of an advantage to the theologian over the scientist.

Oops—it looks like WLC wants to pick and choose his evidence and hope that we don’t notice. (We’ll soon see that the cosmologists he cites aren’t the allies he imagines.)

Cosmologist Vic Stenger saw limitations to BGV:

I asked Vilenkin personally if his theorem required a beginning. His e-mail reply: “No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time.” This is exactly what a number of existing models for the uncreated origin of our universe do.

In Sean Carroll’s debate with WLC (my summary here), he made clear that BGV starts with assumptions. Discard those assumptions, and the rules are different and eternality is possible. Carroll said:

BGV . . . is certainly interesting and important, because it helps us understand where classical General Relativity breaks down, but it doesn’t help us decide what to do when it breaks down. Surely there’s no need to throw up our hands and declare that this puzzle can’t be resolved within a materialist framework. (Quoted in Vic Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning, p. 130.)

In the debate, Carroll mentioned that there are over a dozen plausible models for the universe, including eternal ones.

WLC says he’s BFFs with B, G, and V, but then these guys go off and say things that WLC can’t possibly agree with. He should rethink who his allies are.

  • Vilenkin says that the universe can have no cause.
  • Vilenkin argues for the multiverse, which defeats WLC’s fine-tuning argument.
  • Alan Guth says, “It looks to me that probably the universe had a beginning, but I would not want to place a large bet on the issue.”
  • WLC likes to channel The Sound of Music and declare, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” But Guth says, “Conceivably, everything can be created from nothing. And ‘everything’ might include a lot more than what we can see. In the context of inflationary cosmology, it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
  • And if WLC’s interpretation is compelling, I await the conversion to Christianity of his allies Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin.

Though I’m open to disconfirming evidence, it seems that WLC simply cherry-picks his evidence to cobble together a science-y argument, then stamps it with his two doctorates. He has no interest in honestly following the evidence.

He also enjoys mocking the pathetic plebes from his ivory tower. Take this defense of Kalam’s first premise:

I think the first premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause is virtually undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth. . . . It’s silly then when popularizers say things like, “Nothingness is unstable to quantum fluctuations” or “the universe tunneled into being out of nothing.” (Source: video @22:55)

WLC has no argument here, just derision. He’s not a quantum physicist, and yet he cheerfully trash-talks those who are. Note also that WLC dismisses the “popularizers,” who include the very cosmologists he cites as allies.

9. The Big Bang isn’t a beginning

Yes, the Big Bang happened, but no, that wasn’t a beginning. This is a subtle point, but it’s worth making: the Big Bang takes us back 13.8 billion years in time, but that’s not the same thing as a beginning. The Big Bang is the point before which cosmologists can’t see.

WLC might ask, “But if God didn’t create the universe, then how did it come to be?” Science is the discipline that answers questions, not religion, and science may need to say that it doesn’t know. WLC offers an argument without evidence and imagines that this forces an answer.

WLC has an answer that he’s bursting to offer, but insisting that God did it is no answer at all because it comes without evidence. Science saying that the origin of the universe is one of its unanswered questions isn’t embarrassing when there’s insufficient evidence to make a conclusion.

It’s like the world created by Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Show us that toves and borogoves exist, and then we can figure out what their properties are. WLC needs to show us first that God exists. Only then can we puzzle over his properties (outside of time, omniscient, supernatural, whatever). Until then, he’s just imagining a Jabberwocky universe without evidence.

10. God has an odd relationship with time

To bypass other problems, Christian apologists tell us that God has existed forever and that he is outside of time. But what does this even mean? The physics of their argument, God as a Time Lord like Doctor Who, is metaphysical bullshit. The ball’s in their court to support their fanciful claims.

I’ll close with an apt summary by blogger Uncredible HallQ:

This is just an example of Craig’s annoying tendency to make unsupported claims and then demand his critics disprove them, and it’s an absurd way to argue. If Craig is going that way, why not just announce God exists, demand atheists prove otherwise, and be done with it?

 

People are so unsophisticated in their thinking.
I am just appalled, honestly,
when I read the stuff that’s out there on the internet,
how inept and sophomoric people are.
— William Lane Craig

 

It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge
— Christopher Hitchens

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/28/15.)

Image from NASA, CC license

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How Does the Kalam Cosmological Argument Fail? Let Me Count the Ways.

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World-famous philosopher William Lane Craig (WLC) is perhaps best known for his popularization of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Let’s examine it to see if it is as compelling as WLC thinks.

The argument is a Muslim variant on Aristotle’s First Cause argument (something had to be the first cause; otherwise, you have causes going back forever). WLC states the Kalam argument this way:

1 Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2 The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause.

First premise: Whatever begins to exist has a cause

There is so much wrong in this brief argument that it will take two posts to explain it. Let’s begin with that first premise. WLC defends it:

Believing that something can pop into existence without a cause is more of a stretch than believing in magic. At least with magic you’ve got a hat and a magician.

And if something can come into being from nothing, then why don’t we see this happening all the time?

No . . . everyday experience and scientific evidence confirm our first premise—if something begins to exist, it must have a cause.

That’s the argument? Just an appeal to common sense? (It’s actually an effective argument against miracles—if miracles happened, why don’t we see them today? There are zero universally accepted miracles; therefore, we have no justification for believing in them. Since WLC must reject this argument against miracles, one wonders why he accepts his argument against cause-less things.)

WLC’s support for his philosophical claims often devolve into something like, “Aw, c’mon. You’ll give me that one, right? It’s obvious!” One wonders: if he’s not going to use his doctorates, maybe he should give them back.

Understand the limitations of common sense. It’s not the tool to rely on at the frontier of science. To take one example, we all know that a thing can’t be in two places at once, and yet quantum physics shows that it can. WLC handwaves a simple argument that works with people desperate for justification for their supernatural beliefs, but it doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

1. Things don’t need a cause.

Contrary to WLC’s intuition, things may indeed pop into existence without cause. That’s the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. For example, the electron or neutrino that comes out of a decaying nucleus qualify as things that “began to exist,” and they didn’t have a cause. Just to clarify, this isn’t to say that there is a cause but we just don’t know it. Rather, it’s saying that there is no cause.

WLC will say that this interpretation might be overturned, and that’s true. But then his premise becomes, “Whatever begins to exist might have a cause,” which doesn’t make for much of an argument.

He wonders, “Why don’t we see this happening all the time?” and the obvious answer is that it applies only at the quantum level. Indeed, the universe itself was once the size of a quantum particle, so it’s reasonable to think that causelessness could apply to the universe as well.

That’s the conclusion of cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin:

If there was nothing before the universe popped out, then what could have caused the tunneling? Remarkably, the answer is that no cause is required. In classical physics, causality dictates what happens from one moment to the next, but in quantum mechanics the behavior of physical objects is inherently unpredictable and some quantum processes have no cause at all.

To see this another way, replace “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” with “Everything has a cause” and ask WLC to find a counterexample. Unless he can, he has no reason (besides supporting his agenda) to prefer his clumsier version. He can point to the Copenhagen interpretation, but that defeats his version as well.

2. We know nothing about supernatural creation.

“Whatever begins to exist has a cause” has a common-sense appeal, but the only “whatevers” that we know that began to exist (stars, oak trees, a dent in a fender, tsunamis) are natural. Why imagine that this common sense rule of thumb would apply to supernatural causes? And why even imagine that the supernatural exists? WLC doesn’t bother even acknowledging the problem, let alone resolve it.

3. We know nothing about creation ex nihilo.

The only “begins to exist” we know of is rearrangement of existing matter and energy. For example, an oak tree begins with an acorn and builds itself from water, carbon dioxide, and other nutrients. If WLC is talking about creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), his premise has become “Whatever begins to exist from nothing has a cause.” He wants us to accept this remarkable claim though he can’t give a single example of something coming from nothing. The common sense appeal of the premise is gone.

WLC said above, “If something can come into being from nothing, then why don’t we see this happening all the time?” If this is supposed to be an argument against creation ex nihilo, does he then not believe God created ex nihilo? He might want to pause to get his argument straight.

(As an aside, the Bible doesn’t even argue that the universe was created ex nihilo.)

4. “Began to exist” makes little sense at the beginning.

WLC wants to stretch the common sense “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” from the natural to the supernatural, from rearrangement of existing matter to creation from nothing, and from creation within time to creation before time. He’s referencing a cause before the universe has even come into existence. If WLC wants to argue for magical creation of this sort, he must provide the evidence to support this claim.

First we have the earthquake, then the tsunami. First the moving car, then the dented fender. First the collection of gas moving inward by gravity, then the star. If the instant of the Big Bang is at t = 0, where is the prior cause? There can be no cause at t = –1 if time started at t = 0. How can there be a cause that works in time before there is time?

Every example WLC can point to (like tsunamis and dented fenders) is a different kind of “begins to exist” than the one he imagines, a (1) supernatural creation (2) from nothing (3) before time began, none of which have examples.

5. We have no reason for the “began to exist” caveat.

Why is the premise not simply “Everything has a cause”? It’s just a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to bias the argument so that it will deliver the divine answer WLC wants. We don’t have myriad examples of things with beginnings, plus myriad examples of things that are without beginnings. That he wants to carve out a spot for his beginningless god reveals his agenda.

Since God is the only exception he imagines, WLC’s “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” is simply a disguised version of “Everything has a cause, except for God,” which makes it a circular argument (because it assumes its conclusion). It’s not like he gives evidence to support this remarkable claim; he just asserts it. But if that’s the game we’re playing, I suggest a new first premise: “Everything has a cause, except for the universe.” This is certainly the simpler claim, since WLC must invent a supernatural realm to support his, so Occam’s Razor is against him as well.

WLC will demand that I support my claim with evidence. My response: you first.

Concluded in part 2.

Another good source is The Scathing Atheist podcast episode “Kalam Down” @ 45:00.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run
by smart people who are putting us on
or by imbeciles who really mean it.
— The Peter Principle
by Laurence F. Peter and Raymond Hull

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/26/15.)

Image from NASA
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A Skeptical Christmas

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If you’re looking for holiday gift ideas, let me suggest my two novels. The apologetic argument becomes an additional character in Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey. It’s the story of a young man torn between two mentors, his pastor and an atheist, as he struggles to make the Christian case in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

A Modern Christmas Carol is a reworking of Dickens’ classic, in which a shrewdly successful televangelist receives unexpected Christmas visitors: first, his long-dead partner, and then three ghostly guides. Finally able to acknowledge the shallowness of his Christian message and doubts he has long suppressed, he makes amends with far-reaching consequences.

Here are my Christmas-themed posts:

  • The virgin birth story for Jesus is a popular one in the list of supposed fulfilled biblical prophecies. When you actually read it, however, it’s surprising how many ways this claim falls apart.
  • Popular Christian apologist William Lane Craig tackled the virgin birth question and more, and I responded.
  • I summarized the argument behind Rick Larson’s popular Christian attempt to find a scientific explanation for the story of the Star of Bethlehem here (and critiqued that argument here).
  • A very different interpretation of the Star of Bethlehem story comes from an atheist source in the Zeitgeist movie (here). I didn’t think much of that argument, either (critique here).
  • In my long and growing list of Bible contradictions, I contrasted the many statements in the nativity stories that Jesus was divine with his family’s startling conclusion that he was insane.
  • My favorite Christmas movie makes an important rebuttal to empty Christian claims. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life finds powerful meaning in his life, destroying the apologists’ claims that only God can provide meaning (discussion here).
  • The War on Christmas™ seems to come sooner every year, doesn’t it? Some Christians seem to enjoy being offended, and the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is a professional at it. Literally—that’s his job. In one end-of-the-year survey, he thought he found a juicy factoid with which to attack the atheists, but it blew up in his face.
  • Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt demolished a pop song and taught an important lesson about how God doesn’t work at Christmas: “How Christianity Infantilizes Adults.”
  • A parable about two kids arguing about evidence for Santa has interesting parallels with evidence for Jesus. Be careful about dismissing the existence of Santa, because that reasoning may demand that you dismiss Jesus as well.
  • A few years ago, in what was must have been a War-on-Christmas miracle, I was given a copy of Sarah Palin’s newly released Good Tidings and Great Joy to review. I had a few thoughts. Here’s the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in that book.

Until it’s legal to once again say “Merry Christmas,” I’ll have to be content with “Happy Holidays”!

We cannot know that Santa definitely doesn’t exist.
This is technically true.
But what’s your best guess?
Go on. Be bold.
— Ricky Gervais

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Image from freestocks.org, CC license

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