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Defending 10 Atheist Arguments

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“This is gonna be a good one.”

That’s how a recent Red Pen Logic video from Tim Barnett begins. His confidence was in response to Brien Doyle’s brief list of atheist arguments, “10 Ways to ‘Prove’ God Doesn’t Exist.” Barnett gives the entire list a grade of 0/10, he found a fallacy in each one, and he encouraged fellow apologist Mike Winger to respond as well. I’ve also added a rebuttal from Who Is Like You Ministries to the Christian side of the argument.

Sounds like this should be a tough challenge. Let’s take a closer look.

(Brien Doyle’s atheist arguments are in blue. I’ve put the Christian responses in green and, to avoid clutter, have avoided labeling most sources.)

1. We must be taught that God exists

Atheist argument: “The fact that a human being has to tell you about the existence of your God proves there’s no God. We would be born with knowledge of its existence.”

Christian response: “Here’s the first fallacy, a non-sequitur, where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.”

My response: Most of the Christian responses come from Tim Barnett. He was eager to find logical fallacies in each atheist argument, but we’ll see that he’s living in a glass house.

“Research has shown that humans are predisposed to believe in supernatural agency behind the world. God belief will crop up in humans unless indoctrination pushes it out, so by your own standard, this is actually evidence for God.”

That’s evidence for evolution, not God. A rustling in the bushes could be the wind . . . or it could be a jaguar. Seeing agency, even if there is none, and running away would’ve been a protective instinct. It’s a small jump to go from seeing agency behind a sound in the bushes to agency behind drought, illness, and lightning. The plausible naturalistic explanation trumps the supernatural explanation.

And the Christian thinks that indoctrination is a point in their favor?! Remember the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.” Christianity continues only because it indoctrinates impressionable children. Reverse this by making Christianity an adults-only activity like voting, driving, or military service and see how long Christianity lasts (more).

Does it not exist, or do we just not know about it?

“Let’s say that no one knew of the existence of God because no one was told about it. That means nothing when it comes the actual existence of a divine being. Ignorance of something does not equal non-existence.”

And if the supernatural existed but left us alone, its existence would be irrelevant to anyone’s life here on earth. Christianity’s problem is its claim that God exists and is eager for a relationship. Surely such a god could make his existence obvious.

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world where all evidence of science and Christianity were destroyed. The societies that emerged from the rubble would eventually recreate the same science we have today. They would likely recreate religions of some sort, but they wouldn’t recreate Christianity. Christianity can’t be deduced from nature.

“We all have knowledge of God, but some suppress it.” Romans 1:18–20.

Yes, the Bible says that God’s attributes “have been clearly perceived,” but the Bible is no authority. The world is full of people of different faiths saying that their god(s) are the real ones. Don’t quote the Bible; quote evidence.

But we teach children about lots of things

The atheist argument is that knowledge of God must be taught. “Human beings have to tell us about the existence of all kinds of things, but that doesn’t prove that those things don’t exist. For example, teachers tell terrified students about fractions, but that doesn’t prove there’s no fractions. Bad start.”

The atheist argument says that, if God existed, we’d be born with that knowledge. Sure, that’s one way that God might’ve done it, but that’s not the only way. A better argument would say that God would be obvious from the environment, since that’s how we learn of the existence of everyone and everything else.

The Christian response compares knowledge of God with knowledge of fractions. Every educated adult understands that fractions exist and we all understand them the same way. Unlike math, religion is a cultural trait, varying across the world. There is a map of world religions, but there is no equivalent for math (or science). Also, fractions aren’t all-knowing and eager for a relationship, but we’d expect an omnipotent god to make his mere existence obvious.

Since Barnett likes to point out fallacies, this one is a false analogy.

“Bad start.”

Bad indeed. Be careful with those charges of fallacious thinking.

Evaluation: The atheist argument is the Argument from God’s Hiddenness, which I think is the most powerful argument against Christianity.

I’ll give an evaluation of the strength of the argument at the end of each, adding in any improvements from the critique. I give this one 10/10.

Let me make a meta comment about these ten atheist arguments. They’re flawed because they claim to each be a proof that God doesn’t exist when they should simply remind us that atheism is the default, that Christians have the burden of proof, and that each argument against God has the preponderance of evidence on its side. That’s a more reliable way to win the argument. I’m surprised that the Christian respondents didn’t take a charitable interpretation of the argument and respond to the strongest version they could make.

Well, no, I guess I’m not surprised. They do that all the time.

2. God belief is geography

Atheist argument: “A God belief is simple geography. Being raised in a Christian home decides which God you believe in.”

Christian response: “This is a textbook example of the genetic fallacy. You cannot invalidate a belief by showing how someone came to hold that belief.”

My response: No, it’s not a textbook example of the genetic fallacy, but your response is a textbook example of misunderstanding the fallacy. “Genetic” comes from “genesis,” referring to the origin of the claim, and an example of the fallacy is “X is a bad person, and he says Y, so therefore Y must be false.” Or “X is a good person, and she says Y, so therefore Y must be true.”

Now suppose I ask the question, “Is there a God?” and decide the answer with a coin flip, crystal ball, Tarot deck, or Ouija board. Is the belief that I come to reliably correct? What if I adopted my religious belief saying, “If it was good enough for Mom and Dad, it’s good enough for me”?

Or (dare I say it?), can we invalidate a belief by showing that it came from a flawed process?

Time for a quiz!

Let’s return to the original argument. Barnett plays a teacher in his Red Pen Logic videos, and we can illustrate the atheist argument as a multiple-choice word problem.

The population of Somalia is almost entirely Muslim. What is the likelihood of a Somali baby growing up to be a Muslim? Is it closer to:

〈  〉   24.1 percent, the fraction of the world’s population that is Muslim, or

〈  〉   99.8 percent, the fraction of the Somali population that is Muslim?

Religion is a social trait. Children pick it up like language. More.

But flip your argument around: if you’re programmed based on where you come from, the same must apply to your atheist belief.

The symmetry you imagine doesn’t exist. Children raised in a religion-free environment usually aren’t atheists because they were taught to be atheists but because they were not taught to be religious. By contrast, Christians are Christian because they were taught to be. Christianity must be taught, and atheism need not be taught. Atheism is the default. Remove tradition and religious books, and Christianity would vanish. There is no objective knowledge from which to rebuilt it.

“Where you are born and what you believe has no bearing on the actual existence of God.”

Right, but that’s not the issue. The question is: given that religious belief of children maps reliably to the religiosity of their society, what is left unexplained by the explanation, “There is no God, and religion is a social construction”? The correlation is very strong; who doubts what causes what?

If Christians want to dismiss this argument, they’ve lost an important tool. If almost all Somalis grow up to be Muslim but it’s not because they mirror their environment, then what explains it? Do Christians want to say it’s because Islam is correct?

Evaluation: 10/10. People adopt the traits of their environment—language, customs, and religion.

Continue to part 2: God and time + copycat argument.

The idea of having apologists
defend the existence of a deity
seems comical if this god truly exists.
How many apologists do we need
to defend your existence?
— PineCreek

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Image from Kyle Brinker (free-use license)
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Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement

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The Christian atonement is the reconciliation of humans to God through the death of Jesus. While it’s pitched as an incredible gift from a loving god, it doesn’t make sense when you stop to think about it.

The role of today’s Christian apologist is played by Greg Koukl, who responded to a skeptic’s question on the Unbelievable? podcast (audio here @30:10).

And our skeptic questioner is Frances. She had three concerns. Each is an illustration of how our sense of justice works, and each is a tenet that the atonement rejects. (I’ll try to clearly identify input from both Frances and Greg Koukl, and anything else is my own reaction.)

  1. If we’ve done something worthy of punishment, then we should get that punishment. Anything else is unjust.
  2. Whenever someone takes a punishment that should’ve been applied to someone else (like Jesus taking our punishment), that’s a miscarriage of justice.
  3. If you give one guilty person a break, you must give the same break to everyone in the same situation, otherwise that’s an injustice as well.

(And there are more issues. For example, why must we be reconciled in the first place? If we’re flawed, that’s because our Maker made us so. And why make a big deal about the sacrifice when Jesus popped back to life a couple of days later? I talk about that more here. But the answers to the three answers are such a train wreck that we’ll limit this discussion to just them.)

Worldviews: let the tap dancing commence!

Koukl responded by saying that we must first identify the worldview from which a statement is made. Sometimes people critique Worldview 1 from the standpoint of their worldview, Worldview 2. An atheist doesn’t accept miracles and so may scoff at a Christian talking about miracles. “It’s absurd from within their story because their story doesn’t allow for that kind of thing,” but within the Christian story, miracles are quite normal.

He wants to pigeonhole Frances’s comments as coming from an atheist worldview, but they’re not. Her observations about justice come from a Western worldview and perhaps even a worldwide worldview. They are pretty much universally held within the modern world.

Koukl imagines a symmetry that’s not there. He’s saying in effect, “We each have a worldview—I have my Christian worldview, and you have your atheist worldview, so let’s admit up front that we’re both biased.” Here again he’s wrong because there is a default position. We have a common idea of justice, and Frances is speaking from that standpoint rather than an atheist standpoint. Koukl is welcome to have a different point of view, but we will always see it in terms of its differences from the default.

He wants to respond to Frances from within the Christian worldview, but is that available to anyone? Can I answer from within a Scientology worldview and expect that to be respected? Or Raelian? Or Pastafarian? Can I say that polygamy is okay from a Mormon standpoint? Can I say that ritual murder is okay as Kali worship? Or is Christianity privileged for some reason—and if so, why?

Koukl says that God is the primary one offended by any sin or crime. “Even if I sinned against Frances, I am sinning first and foremost against Frances’s maker.” So if God is indeed the primary offended party and he’s satisfied with Jesus as a substitute (and the substitute is satisfied, and the guilty party is satisfied), then where’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t justice. Instead, it’s mythology and legend that over time became codified into religious dogma. Koukl starts with an assumption of God and then weaves a story showing how it all makes sense from within a Christian worldview. It may make sense to him, but that’s not the point. We start, not with an assumption of the supernatural (the Hypothetical God fallacy), but with the idea of justice held pretty much universally in the West and compare the Christian version against that. It doesn’t compare well.

He says, “I don’t see the conflict within the context of the Christian worldview. Certainly I can see from a perspective of justice outside of the Christian worldview that there could be a conflict.” Exactly! Critiquing his position from outside the Christian worldview reveals a conflict. That’s all Frances has been saying. More importantly, this external, more universal view is the default. Koukl can’t dismiss it by saying that he simply has a different worldview.

(Oddly, Koukl’s position sounds like the postmodern “We each have our own truths” attitude that conservatives claim to hate. Maybe they only hate it until it’s convenient.)

Mercy and debt and punishment, oh my!

Koukl addressed the unfairness issue: “Mercy is an overflow of goodness that is not required of God.” God can grant mercy . . . or not. For example, Frances is within her rights to forgive one debt but not another. And if she is owed a debt but a third party wants to pay it, and everyone is happy with that, problem solved.

Yes, Frances can be arbitrary, but doesn’t God follow a higher standard? A judge certainly does. Fairness is the standard that society tries to achieve with our justice system. True, we don’t always meet that standard, because we are imperfect. A perfect, omnibenevolent being would be perfectly fair.

As for a third party paying a debt, that’s an option only for monetary payment, not for punishment for a crime. Frances suggested that we imagine someone unfairly imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit. Once the error is discovered, no one says that the debt has been paid and there’s no need to find the actual perpetrator since someone has already served the time.

That’s what we see in the Innocence Project, which has used DNA evidence to overturn more than 300 criminal cases in the U.S., one quarter of which were for murder. Had justice nevertheless been satisfied in these cases because punishment was at least given to someone? Of course not—these were miscarriages of justice just like the Christian story of God’s righteous wrath being satisfied by the death of Jesus.

Koukl has a few more misfires on justice and morality, and that critique is concluded in part 2.

Justice is the only worship.
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
the place to be happy is here,
the way to be happy is to make others so.
— Robert Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/3/16.)

Image from Justin Leonard (license CC BY 2.0)
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How Does Prayer Work? And What Does that Say About God?

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What’s the point of prayer? Why bother praying if God already knows?

Christian apologist Greg Koukl took skeptics’ questions on the Unbelievable? podcast (audio here @13:02). Let’s evaluate his response to a question about prayer.

The question could be interpreted several different ways.

  • What I think the caller was asking: What difference could asking make when the future is fixed? It doesn’t seem fixed to us, but there are no forks in the path ahead of us since God knows every future event. To God, events unfold as if he’s watching a play that he wrote. He knows every line. So what’s the point?
  • What I want to ask: Why bother praying since God already knows what you need? You’re obviously not informing him of anything. Shouldn’t he just do the right thing for you, regardless of whether you pray or not?
  • And then the question Koukl wanted to answer: Is there a constraint on human free will if God knows everything in advance?

Christian response to the puzzle of prayer

Koukl began by imagining a boss who has already decided that if a particular person asks for a raise, he’ll grant it. But if a raise makes business sense, why not just grant it without being asked? Koukl says that the asking requirement comes from the Bible: “You do not have because you do not ask God” (James 4:2). In response to pushback from the caller, Koukl called the asking-for-a-raise example “a perfectly human illustration that matched every item exactly” and which makes perfect sense to us.

No, this is actually a poor parallel. In the first place, can Koukl possibly be saying that you don’t get things from God if you don’t ask, but you will get them if you do ask? I’d like to see a demonstration of that.

The Bible has a handful of claims about prayer’s efficacy. Some have no caveats—for example, “Ask and you will receive” from John 16:24—but this one cited by Koukl does. The next verse says, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” But surely someone has asked with good motives. How many millions have prayed for world peace or a dramatic healing in someone?

How about this for a good motive: I will ask for a something mundane to appear (a candy bar or a glass of water) and do this demonstration repeatedly, in public, simply because this will shock millions of non-Christians to consider afresh the Christian claims.

But everyone knows that this won’t work. What does this tell us about the Bible’s claims about prayer?

Ordinary people have constraints, but God has none

A second reason this isn’t a good example is because a good boss should provide the raise if it’s the right thing to do and not put capricious obstacles (like asking) in the way of any employee getting what they deserve.

Third, money is in short supply in the typical company. It must be spent wisely. Not so with God—he can grant anything at no cost or effort.

Let’s fix these problems. Map God into the employer’s role, but now the employer adjusts everyone’s pay from his unlimited supply of money and perks to maximize productivity. If the janitor would be maximally productive with a salary of a million dollars per year, that just happens. There’s no haggling or negotiation, just happy, motivated, and hard-working employees.

Humans in a Skinner box?

Back in the real world, prayer is reinforced intermittently. Once in a great while it seems to deliver, which is that little push to convince the believer that it works (though it certainly doesn’t work in any way like “works” is normally used, like with a typical home appliance or car—y’know, reliably). We find this in pigeons who had behaviors reinforced intermittently in B. F. Skinner’s famous experiment. Prayer becomes nothing more than a slot machine.

What have we turned God into?

This is a tangent, but I think it’s an interesting one. Consider what Koukl’s god has become. God knows the future perfectly, including every request or need that he will respond to and what each response will be. If we look at God’s actions, we could reduce each one to a conditional cause-and-effect statement like this: “If person P requests R then grant it (or not), but if he doesn’t request it then grant it (or not).”

But the conditional part is unnecessary since God already knows whether P will make the request or not. So it becomes: “When person P requests R (or doesn’t), then give it (or not).” That is, God knows whether or not P will make the request, and he knows whether or not he will grant it.

But even this can be simplified to a simple timeline: “At time T1, do action A1; at time T2, do A2,” and so on. Give these instructions to a universal wish-granting machine, and that’s God. This God doesn’t react in real time to anything. Is this mindless and soulless God what Christians want? What does it say that God could be replaced with a machine? What have God’s love or worry or anger or any emotion become without the time component?

Like the poor parallel between God and the boss, God has become a poor parallel to a loving creator, father, or caregiver. And prayer becomes pointless.

More on how prayer works (or not):

Tweeted after a devastating 2013 tornado:
Beyoncé, Rihanna & Katy Perry
send prayers to #Oklahoma #PrayForOklahoma,
Tweeted in response by Ricky Gervais:
I feel like an idiot now . . .
I only sent money.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/1/16.)

Image from University of Washington Neurobotics Lab (license CC BY 2.0)

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Stupid Christian Argument #41: Polls to Resolve Scientific Issues

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Polls of the population can be interesting and informative:

  • the percent of prison population that are atheists vs. Christian,
  • the fraction of Republicans vs. Democrats who are Christian,
  • the gender mix of Christians or atheists,
  • the biggest issues troubling voters,
  • the most/least religious parts of the country or world,
  • how many Americans think the end times have arrived (41 percent, by the way),

and so on.

But public opinion polls may not be a good foundation on which to build government policy. In particular, public opinion should not dilute the scientific facts used to guide policy. Of course, elected officials must answer to their constituents, but the opinions of non-scientist constituents still count for nothing on any question of science. Politicians make policy, and scientists give us science’s best approximation to the truths of nature. “We should do nothing because acknowledging climate change is scary” is a policy option (a cowardly option, but one nonetheless), but “Climate change is a hoax that can be ignored” isn’t.

Creationism in public schools is another area where science steps on toes. Americans are embarrassingly clueless (perhaps willfully so) about evolution. 42 percent accept strict Creationism (God created humanity in the last 10,000 years), and an additional 31 percent accept guided evolution (evolution was tweaked by God). (Acceptance of evolution rises with education, which highlights the nonscientific agenda behind Creationism, but that’s an aside.)

Answers in Genesis said about this wide public acceptance of Creationism, “Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.” No, the disparity is between a population that to a large extent accepts the agenda of conservative and religious leaders on one hand and science on the other. Nonscientists don’t get to invent science.

The Discovery Institute tried to give a veneer of scholarship to the debate with its “Teach the controversy” campaign. They ask: if we’re talking about science, why can’t we present claims of both sides and let the students decide?

I wonder if they’ve thought this through. How would such a science class be graded? Would pastors be brought in to grade the tests of students who don’t like evolution? Would an answer, “I have a powerful feeling that the answer is . . .” automatically be correct? What about “I’d like the answer to be . . .”? And how many “controversies” do we teach—does only the biblical idea of Creation get to come in, or are we throwing the door open to humanity’s hundreds of origin myths?

In 2011, Texas governor Rick Perry put it this way, “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”

Oh? And which one is right? How do you know? If you already know, why don’t we just teach that one instead of wasting class time teaching both? Or is “figure out which one is right” a personal thing so that any answer is correct?

“Teaching the controversy” isn’t what we do in science. We teach science in science class, not discarded theories like astrology, alchemy, or Creationism. And, of course, within biology, there is no controversy! This is a manufactured issue, and polls of citizens do not make science.

See also: Games Creationists Play: 7 Tricks to Watch Out For

“Who is the right god?” is like asking,
“What is the last decimal digit of pi?”
There are ten possible answers and none of them are right.
— commenter Greg G.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Aaron Vowels (license CC BY 2.0)
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Stupid Christian Argument #40: Interpret Difficult Passages in Light of Clear Ones

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How can Christians maintain their belief when the Bible is full of contradictions and instances of God’s barbarity? Let’s look at their secret weapon.

(This list of stupid arguments begins here.)

This argument is an attempt to wriggle away from Bible verses that make God or Christianity look bad or that contradict each other. “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones” is advice from Josh McDowell’s New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (page 48).

McDowell makes clear that difficult isn’t actually the issue—it’s contradictions that are the problem. They’re not difficult to understand, only to reconcile. For example, the epistle of James says that salvation is by works but Romans says that it’s by grace. The trick, McDowell tells us, is to find the interpretation that you like within the constellation of competing verses, bring that one forward, and either ignore the others or reinterpret them to be somehow subordinate to or supportive of your preferred interpretation. He doesn’t put it quite so bluntly, but that’s what he means.

The quest for the “clearer” passage has become a quest for the most pleasing (or least embarrassing) one.

The mere existence of what McDowell euphemistically calls “difficult” passages is a problem that few apologists admit to. How could verses conflict in a book inspired by a perfect god, even if some argument could be found to harmonize them? If conflicting verses exist, doesn’t that make the Bible look like nothing more than a manmade book? How could God give humanity a book that was at all unclear or ambiguous? What does it say that 45,000 Christian denominations have sprung up over varying interpretations of a single holy book?

And no, “I’ll just have to ask that of God when I see him in heaven” won’t do because the Bible must be self-contained. It has no purpose except to be clear and convincing to people here on earth.

See also:

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.
When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.
— Robert M. Pirsig

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Toa Heftiba (free-use license)
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Stupid Christian Argument #39: Were You There?

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The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re well past our original goal of 25 arguments and still going.

“Were you there?” may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line with which to infect students’ minds. In the Old Testament book of Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to anyone who summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Were you there?” In other words, shut up about events at which you weren’t present. The implied evidence-free corollary is, “Because if you weren’t there, God was!”

(Which demands the response: then why does God get pretty much every detail wrong? Biology, cosmology, archaeology, morality—on all of these, God looks less like the omniscient Creator of All and more like an Iron Age desert nomad. [h/t FB commenter Luci Walker])

Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”

Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers pointed out that Ham’s “Were you there?” is intended to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. Myers recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.

“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science uses instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.

Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly.

Atheist: “This rock is 3.56 billion years old.”

Ken Ham: “How do you know? Were you there?”

Atheist: “I wasn’t, but the rock was, and that’s what it tells us when we use radiometric dating” (h/t commenter Jim Baerg).

And if Ham wants to play games, here’s an exchange he might enjoy:

Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”

Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”

Ham: “No you weren’t!”

Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”

To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.

And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?

(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)

Continue: Stupid Christian Argument #40: Interpret Difficult Passages in Light of Clear Ones

Religion is just superstition
that has been around long enough
to have become respectable.
— JBR Yant

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/27/16.)

Image from Mark Timberlake (free-use license)
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