Christian apologists are in a difficult spot. Their “God did it!” explanation is a solution looking for a problem because naturalistic explanations are largely sufficient. What’s left that’s provably unexplainable through natural mechanisms? God might have been the best explanation for lightning, drought, disease, and other riddles within nature, but science now gives us far more reliable answers. What role is left for God?

God World vs. natural world

Imagine that everything in the universe is natural, and there is no supernatural. What traits of this world are now unexplained for which there had been satisfying answers from Christianity? That is, what have we lost by dropping the God hypothesis?

Of course, no one can disprove “God did it” as an explanation for anything, but, without evidence, that explanation is unfalsifiable and therefore useless. By explaining anything, it explains nothing. If the claim is that God did something, we need evidence.

We can probably all agree that God doesn’t create lightning, but then what does God do? Any Christian apologist bold enough to pretend to read the tea leaves only identifies God’s actions after the fact. For example, an earthquake hits Haiti, and Pat Robertson sees God’s hand in the disaster and interprets its meaning, but it never happens the other way around. These Christian pundits never accurately predict anything interesting. They never accurately say, “Now that the Gay Tolerance bill is law, expect a devastating hurricane to hit Washington DC within 24 hours.”

Christians must clearly describe what a God World and a Non-God World would look like. Otherwise, how do we know which one we’re in? Apologists admit through their actions that these two worlds would be identical. They claim that we live in God World, but at every opportunity for God to make his existence clear—regrowing amputations, reliably answering prayer, or having a religion with a unified and unambiguous message (rather than tens of thousands of denominations)—they must step in to explain away the fact that God is a no-show. They’re left pointing to surprising events, disasters, or powerful emotional experiences, imagining the hand of God despite the fact that, here too, natural explanations are sufficient.

Look at what keeps apologists busy. They’re coaching the flock through seasons of doubt, explaining why “Ask and you shall receive” doesn’t really mean that, or rationalizing away the Problem of Evil. This is exactly what they’d do if we lived in Non-God World. God is functionally nonexistent—even if he exists, he might as well not, given his impact on our reality. The God that apologists have created is insulated from attack by being indistinguishable from nothing.

Christianity vs. science

Christianity offers answers to life’s Big Questions: Why are we here? What’s our purpose? What happens after we die? And so on.

The first problem is that Christianity’s supernatural claims are based on no good evidence. Second, Christianity’s answers sometimes conflict with answers from other religions (which are also based on no good evidence). Why believe Christianity’s answers over those of any other religion or indeed believe them at all? Go to another part of the world with another predominant religion, and the answers to the Big Questions change. Supernatural answers are as impermanent as local customs like fashion or manners. This problem is illustrated by the Map of World Religions.

Another problem is that science can also answer life’s Big Questions. It’s just that Christians don’t like those answers.

Christian apologists may strike back by demanding the answer to some current scientific puzzle—what preceded the Big Bang or a complete theory of abiogenesis, for example. They might say, “Science can’t explain where life came from, but Christianity can!”

Anyone can answer a scientific puzzle, but only science provides answers that are worth listening to. Unanswered questions don’t embarrass science, they focus future research. Christianity imagines it’s adding to the conversation when it gives science the questions that science discovered, just like when Christianity gives humanity the morality that came from humanity.

Worldviews

Christian apologist Frank Turek in Stealing from God (2015) argues that the default worldview is Christianity.

Atheists are using aspects of reality to argue against God that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true. In other words, when atheists give arguments for their atheistic worldview, they are stealing from a theistic worldview to make their case.

No, actually Christians steal from the naturalistic worldview. When they cross the street or phone the police or use their computer, they’re relying on evidence and science. The naturalistic worldview—that the only factors affecting our lives are natural ones, not magic or the supernatural—is the default view. Christianity is an extra, optional layer. Very few Christians pray for their children to get well rather than taking them to a hospital, ignore traffic as they cross the street with the confidence that God will protect them, or learn French using prayer. Christians have to admit that evidence is pretty useful.

I’ve responded to an earlier online version of Turek’s argument.

Final thoughts

Oxford-math-professor-turned-Christian-apologist John Lennox recently published a book that asks, Can Science Explain Everything? (2019). The more relevant question is: can Christianity explain anything? As a social construct, Christianity might have value, but as an explanation of reality, it is useless. Science has replaced it. Its supernatural claims are groundless.

Some arguments are mic-drop arguments. You deliver the argument, and you can just drop the microphone and walk away. This is one such argument—the God hypothesis answers no questions and so is superfluous.

See this from another angle with this recipe for boiling water: put a pot of water on a hot stove, then take a magic spoon and give the water a single stir, clockwise. Wait for the water to boil.

Christianity is the magic spoon. It reliably explains nothing, and a naturalistic worldview is sufficient.

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Image from Donald Giannatti, CC license
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A few years ago, the Pew Research Center published a thorough and intriguing international study of religion, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050.” Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic blogger here at Patheos, gloated about the conclusions in “The Facts: Atheism is Dying Out.”

Atheist “intellectuals” speak disparagingly about religion and predict that mankind is on the cusp of a new age in which religion will simply disappear as science, technology and reason are in the ascendant.

The facts indicate exactly the opposite. It is religion which continues to grow around the world while the statistics indicate that agnosticism and atheism are dying out.

In journalism, that’s called “burying the lede.” No, that’s not really the story. Let’s explore in more detail how religion will change by 2050.

Christianity has been the 800-pound gorilla on the world stage, but Christianity is losing its edge. In 30 years, Christianity is expected to be only negligibly larger than Islam, with 31.4% of world population vs. 29.7% for Islam, and Islam is projected to be the number one religion by 2070.

Changes in Christianity

Christianity will increasingly become an African religion. Africa is already the largest Christian continent, with slightly more Christians than North America. But by 2050, Africa will have more than twice North America’s Christian population (1.12 billion vs. 516 million).

By 2050, North and South America will increase their Christian populations slightly—about the same as population growth for South America and substantially less than population growth for North America. And Christians in Europe will drop from 75% to 60%.

This global spread of Christianity can be seen visually on a map showing the changes in Christianity’s center of gravity over time. In 33 CE, the center of gravity began in Palestine. Over the centuries, it moved through Asia Minor and Greece, then gradually westward as Christianity spread through Western Europe. By 1700, it was in northeast Italy, by 1800 in northwest Italy, and by 1900 (with the rise in the Christian population of the Americas) in Spain. By 1970, it had moved dramatically south and was in northwest Africa. Today, it’s roughly centered on Timbuktu, Mali, and it’s expected to continue moving southeast into Africa.

The ancient city of Timbuktu is often used to suggest an impossibly remote place. Western Christians may find this metaphor relevant as world Christianity becomes increasingly foreign.

We’ve gotten a taste of this new global, not-necessarily-Western Christianity with the recent changes within the United Methodist Church. The conservative faction, aided by the disproportionately conservative congregations in Africa, imposed an anti-gay agenda that threatens to split the church. Yes, global Christianity is increasing, but will American Christians like how that affects their church?

Changes in Islam

The Muslim fraction of Europe will almost double by 2050 to 8.7%. Islam in North America will continue to be tiny, with 2% of the population.

In Africa, however, Islam will more than double to 960 million. The big winner will be Asia, with 1.74 billion Muslims in 2050. The top four Muslim states will be India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Changes in Unaffiliated

The number of people unaffiliated with any religion (the “Nones,” which includes atheists) will increase, but as a percentage of the global population, this group will decrease, from 16% to 13%.  This is the statistic that Longenecker was gleeful about.

But there’s more to the story. For most religious groups, the difference between those switching in (adopting the religion) roughly matches those switching out. Christianity, however, is the big loser here, with a net loss of 66 million by 2050. The Unaffiliated will see a net increase of about the same amount. Christianity may not be that sticky a meme after all.

Changes in the United States

Christians sometimes scold me for focusing almost exclusively on Christianity. If I’m going to attack anything, these Christians want me to attack Islam. But the focus of this blog is on Christianity in the U.S. That’s why, for me, the story is the percentage increase of Nones in the U.S., not the percentage decrease in the world. (In the same way that the U.S. lagged Europe’s shaking off of Christianity, the world as a whole may, in its turn, follow this trend.)

Consider projected changes in Christianity vs. Unaffiliated (Nones) in the United States.

Graphic copyright 2015, Pew Research Center. Permission to reprint graphic provided by Pew Research Center.

Unlike changes in worldwide statistics, Christianity in the U.S. is the big loser (78% to 66%) and Unaffiliated the big winner (16% to 26%). That is, the Unaffiliated category is now winning the only race that one can be proud of winning, the intellectual debate in the marketplace of ideas.

While Christianity can win a demographic race as long as Christians make more babies, movement by intellectual migration does not favor Christianity.

Concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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I recently wrote about an atheist who gushed about the irresistibly incisive philosophical arguments of Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC). He signed his letter to Craig, “Your biggest atheist fan.” This atheist said that Craig’s essay “The Absurdity of Life without God” kept him awake at night because it “completely shattered my worldview.” We’d better take a look at this life-changing essay.

(The full essay is in Craig’s Reasonable Faith (2008), and I’m guessing this isn’t much changed from the 1984 first edition. The version I’m responding to is online and a little shorter.)

The foundation of the problem

Craig begins by recounting how he first learned as a child that life is finite. He said, “I was filled with fear and unbearable sadness.” That his own death was far in the future did nothing to allay the problem. Whether his death was hours or decades away didn’t matter—it was eternity or nothing.

Here Craig tips his hand. His life’s work has been dedicated to resolving that little boy’s fear of death. He might’ve confronted the problem of death by being a doctor or cancer researcher. He might’ve explored religion and spirituality as a skeptic to see if any discipline offered tangible truth about the afterlife. But he has made clear that following the evidence where it leads isn’t his goal.

And following the evidence is certainly not what he’s doing in this essay. He finds no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in atheism (I agree—atheists just find regular meaning, value, and purpose) and then flails about as if we can do something about that. It’s like wishing that 2 + 2 = 9 and then spending your entire life concocting a justification for your new view of arithmetic.

How does reality work?

WLC whispers truths about reality as if his dreadful realizations may not be expressed in polite company.

“My life is just a momentary transition out of oblivion into oblivion. . . . This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call ‘myself’ will cease to exist, that I will be no more!” (Well, yeah. Your life and death are not really that big a deal. Welcome to reality. Neil DeGrasse Tyson observed, “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”)

“And the universe, too, faces death.… As it [expands], it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes.” (You’re seriously anxious about the fact that there will be no more stars in 100 trillion years? No one but you loses sleep over this.)

“Mankind is thus no more [ultimately] significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs. . . . Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.” (Yeah. Get over it.)

And again we have the perspective of the young boy shocked by these realizations for the first time. This is a boy growing up in America, smart enough to do well in school and build a career. This is a boy granted the luxury to fret about existential issues like eternity, the eventual death of the universe, and Mankind’s lack of ultimate significance. Sounds like someone has #FirstWorldProblems. Sounds like someone needs a hug.

Contrast these concerns at the top of Maslow’s pyramid with Third World issues. Consider a child with real problems—orphaned by a tsunami in Haiti, forced to serve as a soldier in the Congo or a sex slave in India, or dying of malaria in Niger. WLC’s handwringing about the eventual death of the universe doesn’t amount to much by comparison.

Let’s return to his central point, “This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call ‘myself’ will cease to exist, that I will be no more!” He’s fretting about how a billion years from now, without Christianity’s promise of an afterlife, no one would care whether he had existed or not (which, apparently, is enough evidence of the afterlife for him).

But what does this approach imply? He could save his own relatives from such an oblivion by learning about and celebrating their lives. He could share anecdotes from his genealogical research with family members so that great-great-great-grandma would live on. But unless he’s forgotten to share the importance of this crucial hobby with his readers, he doesn’t care. Apparently, the goal isn’t to help mankind live on but to help him live on. (h/t commenter MR)

An elementary error

Another category of concern is with the meaning of life. Read these quotes and see if you have the same objection I do.

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose.

Life is utterly without reason.

If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life.

In a universe without God, good and evil do not exist.

No, what you mean to say is that there is no ultimate hope, purpose, reason, good, or evil. People find plenty of the ordinary kind. Look up those words in the dictionary—they don’t need any transcendental or absolute grounding.

It’s not that Craig doesn’t understand the issue. For example, he asks, “[A person’s life] may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events?” Here, he contrasts importance from the standpoint of that person with ultimate importance—not a difficult distinction to make. But in dozens of other instances, as in the quotes above, he conflates the two ideas. You’d think someone with two doctorates would write more carefully.

Here’s an example where he conflates the two in the very same sentence: “If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless” (emphasis added). It’s hard to imagine how this confusion has survived in this essay since he wrote it three decades ago. He’s either a sloppy writer, or he intends to deliberately mislead the reader.

In part 2: WLC’s essay has a number of points that need responses.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/16/15.)

Image from Elijah O’Donnell, CC license

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In 2010, John Steinrucken wrote an article, “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity.” Like philosopher Antony Flew’s ghost-written appeal to deism a few years earlier, Steinrucken became a short-lived darling within the Christian apologetics community. Finally, they had found an atheist with a little common sense who could appreciate Christianity as the foundation that Western civilization rested on.

The most ludicrous line in Steinrucken’s scattered argument was this:

Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Grab a barf bag and compare your reaction to mine.

Déjà vu all over again

I’d only seen one other instance of an atheist praising the Christian worldview.

But then I came across yet one more example. In a rambling 2015 email titled, “You’ve Ruined My Life, Professor Craig!!” a gushing fanboy named Adam tells William Lane Craig how fabulous he is. Craig ruined Adam’s atheist worldview by presenting such danged good arguments for Christianity.

Kevin Harris, Craig’s podcast sidekick, said,

Many are, in fact, saying (including myself) this is the greatest letter in the question and answer forum on Reasonable Faith.

The greatest letter? That’s something we must investigate.

Problem the first: nihilism

Adam said that he was a happy atheist who loved philosophy until he read Craig’s article, “The Absurdity of Life without God,” after which everything changed. (I have responded to this article of Craig’s.)

Craig declared that the atheist worldview “was worthless in every possible way.” Adam’s reaction:

[That article] completely shattered my worldview. . . .

What you say the atheistic worldview entails is true. There is no escaping the nihilism as an atheist.

Everything has died for me.

You have ruined my life.

It doesn’t sound like Adam was much of an atheist but more on this later. Adam is saying here that life has no ultimate meaning. Well, yeah. So what?

Adam apparently gets anxious at the thought that God, a billion years from now, won’t leaf through his little notebook, see Adam’s name, and think fondly of the good times they had together during Adam’s brief life on earth. Sorry Adam, but out of the billions of people on the earth right now, you’re not that big a deal. You’re even less important when seen with all of history as a backdrop.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a helpful observation: “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”

Life has plenty of meaning, just not transcendentally grounded meaning. It has the meaning that we assign to it and that we find for it, not that someone else like a religious leader assigns for us. Most of us find that not debilitating but empowering.

Problem the second: moral grounding

Adam had another concern:

There is no foundation for morality outside of God.

Wrong. He begs the question by assuming that morality means a God-grounded morality. It doesn’t—look it up. Morality is simply the set of beliefs about good and bad, right and wrong. I’ve never seen evidence for objective morality (morality that would be true whether humans were here to appreciate it or not). Examples inevitably offered such as the wrongness of torture for fun are instead examples of shared or strongly felt morality. We don’t need God to explain human morality; evolution does the job.

(I discuss morality here and here. I respond to Christian apologists’ weak arguments about morality here, here, and here.)

Who is this guy?

Kevin Harris assures us that Adam’s letter is what it claims to be rather than a hoax. I believe him, even though that’s hard to believe given ingratiating flattery like this aimed at Craig:

You are and always have been my favorite living philosopher. I have seen every debate you have ever recorded and put up on the internet. I watch all your lectures and talks. . . . I think you are the epitome of what a philosopher should be. You’re uber logical, fantastically clear, and “computeresk” with the speed and precision of your responses to objections against your position, particularly the criticisms you respond to in your debates.

(I’m imagining William Lane Craig concert posters taped up on the walls in Adam’s room.)

I must disagree with Adam’s assessment. Craig is a good debater and puts on a good show on stage, but that’s about all I can find positive to say. I’ve responded to his unscientific approach to reality here and here. Some of what he writes sounds like what would get a failing grade in a college freshman paper.

So why isn’t Adam a Christian?

Adam says that he’s bowled over by the fabulousness of Craig’s deist arguments but can’t take that last step to become a Christian. Still, it sounds like he’s tempted:

The deeper I dive into philosophy, the more the theistic worldview seems more plausible. The concepts or “language” of mathematics seems to “cry out” as you put it for an explanation, objective moral values seem to be real (but they can’t be “real”, if atheism is true), the idea of “existence” nauseates me to no end (just the thought of anything, at all, existing, and especially existing without any reason, frightens me), and I could go on and on.

I’ve responded to Craig’s Argument from Mathematics, and we’ve talked about objective moral values above. As for Adam’s fear of stuff existing without a reason, I have no idea what he’s concerned about. Doesn’t science explain why things exist? And where it doesn’t (yet), can he be saying that God is hiding in those gaps of science’s ignorance?

This admission of fear tips his hand. He’s not much interested in the truth but in finding a respected scholar who can pat him on the head and reassure him that he is indeed living in Fluffy Bunny Land, just like he’d hoped.

Adam’s concern

Adam hates his “nihilistic-atheistic world” and sees Christian belief as his salvation. If he simply swapped in a new set of beliefs, these unpleasant thoughts would be gone.

Theism is a dream come true. The world would make sense, the existential mysteries that haunt me would be solved, life would be livable. It is atheism, however, which seems to be true, yet I do not want to live like this. I have become depressed to no end. I have been in a nihilistic rut for years now. I have become utterly recluse. Yet, even with all this, I cannot come to believe in God. . . . You may be my last hope. . . . I know the “answer” is Christianity, but as I said, I cannot get myself to believe its truth. I am an atheist who hates atheism. I want there to be a God more than anything, yet I cannot get myself to believe in one.

If Adam is this depressed, he needs therapy. But if he desperately wants Christianity to be true and knows that Christianity is the answer, then he’s a Christian.

That was easy. Adam, be sure to contact me if this becomes a problem again. Please pay on the way out.

Craig’s response

Craig does little besides bask in the adoration, though a couple of his points need a response.

You need to escape the cloying bonds of naturalism by catching glimpses of a transcendent reality beyond the material world.

If anything binds us, it’s religion. Look at a map of world religions to see how the Big Questions get different religious answers based on where they’re asked.

Genesis 1 tells us that God shaped the earth like Play-Doh, while science tells us that a typical galaxy holds 100 billion stars and that your little fingernail held at arm’s length covers a million of them. Oh—and it backs up its claims with evidence.

If any explanation is cloying (or condescending), it’s Christianity’s childish Bronze Age view of reality.

Craig riffed on Adam’s concern about nihilism:

[Atheists who reject nihilism are] inconsistent with [their] worldview. In fact, I argue it is really impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of an atheistic worldview. So if you want to be happy you are going to do what your friends do, and that is to live inconsistently.

Thanks for the condescension, but I can have happiness and consistency. There is no ultimate meaning or purpose to the universe, humanity, or my own life. Ordinary meaning and purpose—discovered and invented by humans—works just fine, thanks.

Craig assured Adam that God is chasing him (in a way that made me wonder if Adam might need a restraining order):

He is after you and will continue His pursuit until you recognize in Him all that you are longing for.

Tell that to the ex-Christians whose faith waned and who begged God to reveal himself. Didn’t happen. Read more at Rational Doubt, the blog of the Clergy Project, a safe place for clergy who doubt.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/8/15.)

Image from David Blackwell, CC license

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