In part 1, we looked at the odd interpretation of atheism by “John” the atheist. Several commenters have already suggested that it’s such a bizarre interpretation that it must be a Christian parody.

In part 2, we looked at the even odder embrace by Christian apologists of John’s conclusions. I suppose John’s ideas fit their agenda to make atheism look ridiculous, but do they not stop to consider whether John’s views are shared by other atheists? Or if the views are at all defensible?

Let’s look at one final Christian reaction to John, this time from the Wintery Knight blog. Its enthusiastic embrace of John’s message is clear in the title: “An atheist explains the real consequences of adopting an atheistic worldview.”

Atheist Richard Dawkins cited

First, this post tries to establish that John is not some maverick, either a nut who has no clue which end is up within atheism or a prescient pioneer who plainly sees what no one else can see. Rather, he says that this is already admitted by other atheists and should be a standard part of the discussion. He quotes Richard Dawkins:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. . . . DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

This is supposed to mirror John’s position? Nope. Dawkins is simply observing that there is no evidence for a benevolent supernatural that looks out for us or a wise supernatural that created us. Unfortunately, this Christian blogger doesn’t offer any reason to believe otherwise.

Nature just exists without emotion or mind. Mt. Everest doesn’t care who climbs it or dies trying. It doesn’t celebrate if you get to the top, and it doesn’t lament if you fall to your death. When a fox chases a rabbit, “good” is relative, and what’s good for the fox is bad for the rabbit and vice versa. Germs don’t want to replicate or hurt you—it’s just biology. The tea in my cup doesn’t want to stay hot or cool down—it’s just physics. Why imagine the universe as a whole acts any differently?

Dawkins points out that there is no human justice in nature, but that doesn’t mean that there is no justice. Merriam-Webster gives several definitions of justice (none of which appeal to objective anything) including “the assignment of merited rewards or punishments,” “the administration of law,” and “the quality of being just, impartial, or fair.” It’s clear that humans can strive for this kind of justice, even though we don’t have the objective or transcendent kind.

Atheist Michael Ruse cited

Next, the Christian blog quotes philosopher of science and atheist Michael Ruse.

Morality is an [evolutionary] adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” [but] such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory.

And again, this is quite different from what John said—John imagined that only objective morality exists. That the blogger doesn’t understand this simple distinction between objective morality and the regular kind as defined in the dictionary threatens my lofty evaluation of Christian apologetics.

Wintry Knight’s conclusion

The blog draws its conclusions:

I see a lot of atheists these days thinking that they can help themselves to a robust notion of consciousness, to real libertarian free will, to objective moral values and duties, to objective human rights, and to objective meaning in life, without giving credit to theism. . . . [As Cornelius Van Til observed,] atheists have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face. We should be calling them out on it.

Wait—who should be calling out whom? You’ve got no argument. You’re simply presupposing God, but you don’t get to just presuppose God into existence. With no sense of irony, a sentence later in the same paragraph begins, “This is not to say that we should go all presuppositional on them,” but I’m afraid that ship has sailed.

You can point to issues that science still has unanswered questions about, like consciousness, but let’s not imagine Christianity gives us reliable answers (that is, answers backed up by evidence). And as for objective morality and meaning, the ball’s in your court to show that these exist apart from the ordinary kind that we experience in our own lives.

The image shouldn’t be sitting in God’s lap to slap his face. Instead, imagine unwrapping a present from God on Christmas morning to find a book. The book is one of your favorites. At first you marvel at how well God knows you to give such an appropriate gift, but then you notice your name on the inside cover. And all the margin notes that you added. And the gap on the bookshelf where you remember that book being.

Morality isn’t something we get from God. Morality is already part of humanity, but “God” wants to pretend to give back to us.

I think it’s particularly important not to let atheists utter a word of moral judgment on any topic, since they cannot ground an objective standard that allows them to make statements of morality.

Why complain about atheists’ lack of an objective standard when you don’t have one yourself? All you have are empty claims.

Further, I think that they should have every immorality ever committed presented to them, and then they should be told “your worldview does not allow you to condemn this as wrong.” They can’t praise anything as right, either.

I will with pleasure judge things as right and wrong. You’ll say that those would be subjective judgments. Yes, that’s true—just like yours.

The problem for most Christians is that they can’t fairly judge God’s actions. I’m happy to label his crimes as bad, from maximizing Pharaoh’s downfall by hardening his heart in Exodus 9:12 to the global flood. Those Christians can’t call God wrong if they declare whatever God does as right by definition (more here).

It can be hard making an honest characterization of your opponent’s position. This, I’m afraid, isn’t an example.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma,
a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt
to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
— Umberto Eco

Image credit: Erich Ferdinand, flickr, CC

In part 1, we looked at the odd views of “John” the atheist.

• John denies that morality exists (apparently he means that objective morality doesn’t exist).
• John dismisses aspirations and loves as imaginary by equating them with the chemistry that makes them (just because we can understand how love works doesn’t mean it no longer exists).
• John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife” (that’s not an atheist, that’s a sociopath).

Read that post if you want more. Let’s now move on to what is the more interesting aspect of this story, Christian bloggers’ eager and gullible embrace of John’s views.

John’s essay first appeared in “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” at Jim Wallace’s Cold-Case Christianity blog. Wallace says, “John bluntly captured the true nature of morality when it is untethered to a transcendent source.”

I wonder why he accepts John’s nutty view of morality rather than those of many other atheists whose views contradict that—me, for instance.

Wallace makes clear the atheist’s problem: “[As an atheist,] I embraced a particular set of moral laws even though I couldn’t account for these laws in a world without a transcendent moral law giver.”

If you’re looking for a sensible worldview, you’ve backed the wrong horse. Naturalism explains morality with evolution, while Christianity posits God as a law giver without evidence. That’s how you tell the difference between science and religion—science is the one backing up its claims with evidence.

And Wallace is confused about how society works. “Without a true transcendent source for morality (and purpose), skeptics are left trying to invent their own, justifying their subjective moral rules as best they may.”

Societies around the world and throughout history have developed moral rules. Christians have a special book, and yet they have the same moral programming as anyone else. It’s not just Christianity that has the Golden Rule.

Wallace wraps up the lessons this way:

In my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent. As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

Hold on—who is pretending to have definite answers to the great questions of life?

By “great questions,” I assume you mean questions like, (1) Why are we here? (2) Where did we come from? (3) What is my purpose? (4) What will happen to me after I die? Yes, Christianity has answers, but are those answers backed up with evidence? And other religions have different answers. Why imagine that yours are better? If theirs are made up, why not yours?

Remember science, the discipline that backs things up with evidence? It answers your Great Questions. It’s just that you don’t like the answers. (1) We’re here for no more cosmically significant reason than a goat or oak tree is here, (2) the Big Bang and evolution are parts of the explanation of where we came from, (3) your life’s purpose is yours to define, and (4) what happens to you after you die is the same as what happens when the goat or oak tree dies (more). Might there actually be supernatural explanations behind these questions? Sure, but no good evidence points that way.

As for John demanding that atheists be consistent and accept the consequences of their worldview, I am an atheist who doesn’t share his worldview. I’m not going to accept his “consequences” when they’re ridiculous.

Wallace concludes, “As it turns out, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.”

Consistent? First, you’ve given no evidence that Christianity is not just pretend, which is what it looks like. Second, Christian morality is wildly inconsistent when Christians in the West must juggle modern morality (racial equality, gender equality, and slavery and genocide as abominations) with God’s actions in the Old Testament (an us vs. them tribal focus and God’s “chosen people,” subservient roles for women, and support for slavery, genocide, and even human sacrifice). Christianity’s “moral foundation” sucks.

Concluded with one final look at a Christian response to John the atheist in part 3.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around
a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal
is obviously some indication
of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Image credit: ollie harridge, flickr, CC

Christians who attack atheists need to know their opponent. Sometimes, though, it’s clear they haven’t been paying attention.

I’ve written several posts (here and here) about supposed atheists who want the atheist community to acknowledge the benefits Christianity has provided to society and the powerful arguments in favor of Christianity. I won’t revisit those arguments (read the posts if you want my response), but this category of atheist argument is interesting. Let’s look at another example, this time from an atheist attacking the consequences of the atheist worldview.

There are dozens of Christian articles gushing about this atheist attacking atheism, but the first was “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” (2014) at the Cold-Case Christianity blog. I’ll first respond to the atheist’s points and then consider Christian apologists’ reactions.

The atheist speaks

I’ll use a masculine pronoun for this anonymous atheist because he was dubbed “John” in the original article. He begins by stating the atheist’s position, with a goal of showing that we’re all alone.

We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself.

Not exactly. It’s an accident in that there’s no evidence for it being intentional, but there are scientific laws which govern the formation of universes and the creation and evolution of life. That’s a lot more than “random chance.”

While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, [and] civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Someone needs a dictionary. These words are clearly defined, and, as defined, they exist. What I think he means is that there are no objective or transcendental forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.

This error is widespread among Christians, but et tu, Brute? Sure, atheists aren’t necessarily any wiser or smarter than Christians, but it’s hard to imagine an experienced atheist not seeing this error from the Christian side.

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a corner of a café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck sweater, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche, and smoking cigarettes as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.

One could wonder if this is a parody (and it gets worse), but since the Christian community has taken it as an honest statement, I’ll interpret it that way, too.

See also: Does This Atheist Have a Point? Or Is This a Sycophantic Poe?

John describes those “dreams, loves, opinions, and desires” as “fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses . . . that’s it.” Humans nurture children, create, and build only because out genes tell us to. We’re just bags of DNA. “Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.”

He says this as if it’s a dark, embarrassing truth, but he’s simply approaching the effect at the wrong level. Let me illustrate with another example. You could talk about love at the chemical level or worse, at the quantum level, but why would you? Not much poetry about love is written at this low level—you should focus instead at the personal level. We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.

Are you marveling about the importance of love, or are you interested in neurobiology? Pick one.

Or another example: you can talk about how evolution works with the different species as game pieces that mindless Evolution pushes around like pebbles pushed by mindless waves, but there is no human emotion or meaning at that level. Return to the level of the individual if you want to talk about laws, civility, and morals.

And back to John’s approach: yes, you can look under the hood to see how synapses, genes, and DNA work, but why then add dreams, love, creativity, and family to the same sentence? It’s like a magic show: you can enjoy the show in the audience, or you can peek behind the curtain to see how it all works, but these two approaches don’t mix.

This reminds me of Christian apologist William Lane Craig in anguish when, as a child, he learned that we all die. Yes, Dr. Craig, we all die, but that provides no evidence for Christianity. And yes, John, we can focus on synapses and DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also focus on love, meaning, and morality.

John really jumps the shark when he moves on to morality.

Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Nothing in your world stops you from raping and murdering? There is in mine. Penn Jillette has already slapped this one down:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

Humans are social animals, and evolution has favored pro-social behavior—trust, empathy, compassion, and so on. According to John, however, atheists like me who don’t ’fess up as sociopaths are “inferior” and “just a little bit less evolved.”

He’s so out of touch that I do wonder if this guy’s for real, but let’s set that aside. What’s more interesting is how he’s been received within the Christian community.

Continued in part 2.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

Image credit: Paul Harbath, flickr, CC