This is part 7 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

Chapter 7. The Lunatic in the Louvre

In today’s opening episode, Fred takes our hero to the Louvre but then drugs him in the cafeteria. When he awakes that night, he first thinks that Fred plans to steal the Mona Lisa, but no, he just wants a paint sample to test. Why can’t Fred just find what he wants on Wikipedia? Because he’s a scientist and insists on doing his own research.

To attempt to tie this to reality, Bannister quotes Nobel Prize winner Harry Kroto, “Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.” But just two sentences later, Bannister bungles that into, “Science can answer any and all questions.” Yes, that is quoted accurately. And no, that’s not even close to what the scientist said.

In previous chapter critiques, I’ve defended the atheist argument against Bannister’s attacks. But I don’t defend this argument because no one makes it. No one makes it, that is, except theists who seem to be drawn to strawman arguments like flies to garbage.

Can science answer ethical questions?

Back to Bannister. “If the scientist in question is opining . . . that Science Can Explain Everything, well we need to point a few things out.”

Oh, good. We’re about to get schooled by a guy who can’t correctly paraphrase a simple idea.

Bannister challenges us: “What is the value of a human life?” How would atheists answer this with science alone? A chemist might tally the value of the salvageable chemicals inside a human body. An economist could look at the net contribution to the economy of each person. But surely humans have an intrinsic value that science can’t tell you.

How do we compute the value a human life?

We all know how a human life can be given a financial value when you look at how life insurance works. Or we can weigh the cost of an improvement in food or road safety, for example, against the number of lives it will save. This computation isn’t horrifying; it’s something we’re familiar with.

But Bannister probably wants a more intangible or intuitive approach. He’d probably say that we all feel that one human life is worth more than one animal life. Or do we? When Harambe, a lowland gorilla (which, as a species, is critically endangered), was killed in 2016 to protect a four-year-old boy who had fallen into his zoo enclosure, many criticized the zoo for its actions, and the boy’s mother received torrents of online outrage for her supposed negligence.

Your life is more valuable than the life of a slug or a rat, but would it be more valuable than the last breeding pair of bald eagles? What’s more valuable—the life of a random stranger you will never meet or your beloved pet? Is a human life so precious that capital punishment is immoral?

Another example is Peter Singer’s drowning child experiment: you pass a pond with a child drowning. There are no difficulties stopping you from wading out and rescuing the child except that you would ruin your $500 shoes. Would that stop you? Of course not—anyone would sacrifice an expensive pair of shoes to save a child’s life. But that means that saving a life is worth $500 to you. Now suppose a nonprofit organization that provides bed nets to protect children from malaria-carrying mosquitoes (or some similar project) shows you how a $500 donation would save one life or more. Most people would discard this appeal after a few seconds’ consideration, including those who would have sacrificed their shoes.

Using science to uncover and explain moral conclusions

That was a detour, but I think it was relevant to Bannister’s challenge that we find the value of human life without appealing to something outside science. My point is first that we can indeed put a crass monetary value on human life. We do it all the time. And second, Bannister’s unstated supernatural valuation of human life is probably a cheery declaration that God made Man the pinnacle of his creation, QED, and yet it’s more complicated than that.

Let me now directly respond to his challenge. Our moral programming tells us (in general) to value human life over other kinds of life. Why is this? It’s a product of our evolutionary path, which is explained by science. When legislators evaluate a proposed improvement to a dangerous intersection, they uncover and follow evidence and test hypotheses to make their decisions—and that’s the scientific method. What’s unexplained?

Bannister reminds me of the child who mindlessly asks “Why?” in response to every statement. He asks, “Why is the pursuit of knowledge a good thing?” and “Why is it wrong [for a scientist] to lie about [experimental] results?”

Well, little Andy, lying slows down knowledge finding, and knowledge is good because sometimes we can use it to improve life—eliminate a disease or improve food production, for example. Why is that good, you ask? Because we seek happier, healthier lives—that’s just how we’re programmed. “Good” in this case is defined by our programming, put there by evolution. There’s no need to appeal to the supernatural to explain this.

Continue to part 7b.

If science can’t detect your God,
your priests can’t either.
— commenter Pofarmer

Image credit: Wikimedia

I recently summarized the conflagration caused by a 2013 atheist monument on public property in Starke, Florida, installed in response to a six-ton Ten Commandments monument on the same property. Only after a legal fight did the county on whose land it sat allow monuments with other viewpoints.

Benjamin Wiker in “Atheists Flood the Public Square” (no longer available online) critiques the text written on its four sides. On the front side of the monument is this:

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church.
An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of prayer said.
An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.

This is by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of American Atheists. It is part of her opening statement before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that concluded in 1963 that Bible reading in public school was unconstitutional.

It’s pretty powerful stuff, though Benjamin Wiker, the author of the article, isn’t impressed: “The problem with this well-known quote is—to be blunt—that it displays to everyone . . . the total ignorance of O’Hair. Ignorance embedded in granite for all to see.”

Hospitals vs. churches

Take that first line about hospitals. Wiker says, “The truth is that if there had not been churches, there would never have been hospitals.”

Never? Nonsense. The claim that Christianity gave us the modern hospital is at best only slightly true.

To the extent that Christianity built churches for altruistic (rather than marketing) reasons, that’s terrific. Good works by the church says nothing about the truth of the supernatural beliefs on which it is built or problems caused by the church, of course, but I’m happy to acknowledge any social good that happened due to those beliefs. My only complaint is that churches in the U.S. are laughably inefficient as good-works organizations, passing on perhaps as little as two percent of their income.

The history of Christianity and science is, at best, checkered (more on the Bible’s confused relationship with science here). Modern understanding and treatment of disease is in spite of, not because of, the work of the church. For example, a president of Yale University rejected smallpox vaccination because it interfered with God’s design. The same could be said of any medical treatment—if God didn’t want that person to have a broken leg or yellow fever or an infection, he wouldn’t have caused it to happen. Even today, various Christian denominations stand in the way of in vitro fertilization and some kinds of stem cell research.

Let’s get back to Wiker celebrating how Christians want to do good for other people. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick—that’s terrific stuff. I imagine then that he’d be delighted if society at large realized this and took care of its least fortunate.

(Oops—no, it looks like his organization hates federally funded health care.)

Deeds vs. prayers

On to the second line, “An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of prayer said.” Wiker says that the Christian wants the prayer said and the deed done. He points to the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46), in which Jesus makes clear that only those who do good works will enter the Kingdom of God.

Yes, let’s look at this parable. Nothing is said about faith—you get into heaven by caring for others. That’s it. I like that attitude, though doesn’t this undercut the Protestant position?

This reminds me of an insight from Julia Sweeney. She said that as a serious Christian, she took disasters in distant countries seriously. And she did something about it: she prayed.

Only after she became an atheist did she realize that this notion of “doing something” was, at best, mental masturbation. It only weakened any desire to actually do something to help those people (educate her neighbors about the problem, write a check, and so on). If homes are to be rebuilt or people vaccinated, people must actually get off the couch and do something real, something in this world. By giving yourself a pat on the head for a job well done, prayer is actually harmful.

Life vs. death

The third line says, “An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.” Wiker went off on a tangent about euthanasia, which I think is a misunderstanding. My interpretation of the line is that we know we have one life, the one here on earth. Let’s participate energetically and enthusiastically in this life rather than yearn without evidence for an eternity in an imaginary paradise.

Social evils

And the final line: “[The atheist] wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.” Wiker bristles at the idea that a Christian wouldn’t have the same goals.

Where Christianity has been an asset, again I celebrate that, but it hasn’t always been an altruistic force for good.

Before an atheist can point to religious wars, he’s quick to point to 20th-century atheists who were behind the deaths of millions. The problem is, of course, that the atheism wasn’t behind any of the deaths (more here).

Wiker said that this brief quote “displays to everyone … the total ignorance of [Madalyn Murray] O’Hair.” In fact, O’Hair’s words have much of the permanence of the stone in which they were carved. Wiker’s whining is as effective as a rainstorm at erasing them.

Continue with part 3.

If this is going to be a Christian nation
that doesn’t help the poor,
either we have to pretend that Jesus
was just as selfish as we are,
or we’ve got to acknowledge
that he commanded us to love the poor
and serve the needy without condition
and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
— Stephen Colbert

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/9/13.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

This is part 5 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.

Chapter 5. Aim for That Haystack!

In today’s opening episode, our hero is tandem jumping out of an airplane. Things are exhilarating at first but then become terrifying when it’s clear that his partner, the experienced jumper, isn’t wearing a parachute and is planning on breaking their fall by landing in a haystack. He says that parachutes might make you feel good because you’re afraid of death or you remember them fondly from your childhood, but “just because something makes you feel good, it doesn’t make it true, does it?”

Bannister connects this to Freud’s theory that God is simply a heavenly version of their earthly father who’ll make sure that we safely get through this scary world, and he admits his own frequent reflections on mortality. (Which reminds me of apologist William Lane Craig, whose own childhood anxiety about death seems to have set him on his path as an apologist.)

Let me quickly agree with Bannister’s point: just because you want something to be true is no evidence that it is. What’s strange though is hearing this from him. He imagines that it’s the atheists who have the problem with wishful thinking? He has this issue backwards for the entire chapter. It’s so backwards, in fact, that I use a quote from him to close this post.

He touches on C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire: thirst and hunger exist, so we know that there’s water and food, and a desire for God exists, so we know that there’s a God. (I respond to that argument here.) This isn’t quite as fanciful as the Ontological Argument, but it does argue that desire points to God, which undercuts the point of the chapter.

He anticipates one obvious rebuttal. We all agree that water and food exist, but we don’t agree that God exists. He responds by handwaving that we don’t sense anything directly. The mind can be deceived or wrong. In an extreme case, you could be a brain in a jar.

After trying to cast doubt on our knowledge of mundane things, he tries to boost God belief. “There is a wealth of evidence that you can engage with to explore that question, ranging from philosophical and scientific arguments, to moral and ethical arguments, to arguments from literature and history, as well as those from personal experience.” And (again) he gives us none of it, saying that this isn’t that book.

Sorry—you get no points for an empty declaration.

Could Christianity be invented?

He next considers the idea that Christianity was invented. “If Christianity were mere wish-fulfilment, just a psychological projection, then those who dreamt it up had pretty impoverished imaginations.” He sketches out the more comfortable religion he would invent: a distant god who didn’t interfere, relaxed moral standards, freedom, and easy entry requirements to a great heaven. But being a good Christian is really hard. Conclusion: Christianity wasn’t invented.

I know of no one who says that it was. There’s a big difference between a religion deliberately invented (Bannister’s proposal here) and a religion that was manmade instead of having real god(s) behind it. Only Christians use this straw man. Note also that ordinary morality constrains hedonism, too, so Christianity is just one more path that puts constraints on our lives.

And let me push back on his characterization of Christianity as a burdensome religion. I never read about a Christian who says, “Y’know, same-sex marriage doesn’t affect me a bit. In fact, I’m delighted by the idea that homosexuals can get married and that society supports that. But my hands are tied—my understanding of the Bible makes clear that this is wrong.” On the contrary, God always seems to conveniently agree with their moral position that the other guy is wrong. There are exceptions, but the God that Christians believe in is often a projection of themselves. Because the Bible is so ambiguous, the Christian hydra has morphed into tens of thousands of denominations, and Christians get to choose the God that fits best.

Bannister agrees: “If you are religious, a sure sign that you’ve [created your own God] is that the God you claim to believe in spends most of his time benevolently blessing all of your own prejudices, desires, and ambitions.” It sounds like atheists aren’t the group he should worry about.

I can’t resist adding the wisdom of third-century church father Tertullian: “The Son of God died: it is wholly believable because it is absurd; he was buried and rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.”

They couldn’t have made up this stuff, so therefore it’s true? Sorry—I need evidence.

Tough love time!

Bannister quotes atheist Aldus Huxley to illustrate the problem with a flexible approach to reality: “We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” Bannister expands on this: “Other atheists who have reflected carefully on their motives have similarly admitted that their atheism is not so much rational as emotional.”

Huxley doesn’t speak for me. My rejection of Christianity is (to the best of my ability) entirely rational, and I’ve never heard anyone say that they pick and choose facts to cobble together a worldview they want.

No, let me correct that: I see Christians doing that a lot. It’s just that I never hear that from atheists.

See also: “I Used to be an Atheist, Just Like You”

Bannister next brings up atheists who say that they’re open minded enough that a compelling miracle would make them believe. “Really? Forgive me, but I think I need to call your bluff. . . . You see, belief isn’t really what God is looking for. As the New Testament itself memorably puts it: ‘Even the demons believe—and shudder!’” He wants to know if these atheists then just say, “Huh—so God exists. Who knew?” and proceed with life, or would they surrender to God and commit their lives to following him?

But where’s the bluff? Bannister is correct that belief in and commitment to God are two very different things. Why should servitude to God automatically follow from belief? The Old Testament makes clear that God is a nasty piece of work (more here and here)—why serve him?

We leave this argument with Bannister’s taunts following us: “But don’t walk away because you are rebelling at a deeper level and merely hiding behind the fig leaf of bad arguments.”

You flatter yourself. Don’t tell me that the atheists have bad arguments when you’ve got no arguments! Give me some plausible frikkin’ arguments and then we can decide if I’m rebelling.

Continue with part 6.

What you feel about God doesn’t
answer the question of whether there is a God.
— Andy Bannister,
The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist

Image credit: Greg Palmer, flickr, CC

This is part 3b of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1 here). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.
This post wraps up my critique of Chapter 3, “The Aardvark in the Artichokes.” In the first half, I responded to Bannister’s critique of the atheist argument that the Christian rejects hundreds or thousands of gods, while the atheist just goes one god further. He’s now moved on to argue that Christianity is special, and lumping it in with the unwashed masses of religions is wrong.
Why Christianity is unique
Christianity’s big difference compared to Zeus, Thor, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the other gods is:

Every single one of those other entities is an object inside the universe. God, on the other hand, according to Christianity is the creator and sustainer of the universe, the author of the story.

So then make up a new character and call him the Creator. Make him outside. Now Yahweh has a competitor.
You don’t like that he was just invented? All right, then revisit this character after 2000 years has passed so that the origins of this tale are clouded and it has become legend and mythology. That’s Christianity’s advantage—not that it’s correct but that it’s venerable and uncheckable.
Bannister simply declares that God is the creator. That’s not good enough: he must prove it. Without evidence, this is just theology, not an argument.
I’d also recommend that he read up on the Combat Myth and then tell me that Yahweh is in a completely different category. Today’s timeless, outside-the-universe god isn’t what Yahweh was initially. He’s evolved. (Y’know how Superman at first was just pretty strong and could “leap tall buildings in a single bound” but then became insanely strong and could fly? Like that.)
And let me take issue with this claim of uniqueness—that the Christian god’s relationship with the universe is somehow unique. The Greek creation myth (to take just one) has Chaos creating Gaia (Earth). She created Uranus (heavens), and their offspring were the Titans. Cronus (the youngest Titan) was the father of Zeus, the ruler of the pantheon that’s now in power.
That sounds about as sensible (or ridiculous) as the two creation stories that Genesis opens with. Bannister wants you to ignore the man behind the curtain and look instead at the modern Christian view where God walks hand-in-hand with modern cosmology. God is now said to have triggered the Big Bang, sustain the laws of physics, exist outside of time and space, and so on, ideas that would mystify the original audience for Genesis.
No, that won’t do—you’re saddled with the pre-scientific thinking in your holy book that makes your origin myth no more compelling than the Greek one.
How can you dismiss religions without understanding them?
Bannister next complains:

The atheist making [the claim that the world’s religions are essentially the same] has not investigated all of them—probably not any of them—and is instead assuming that they must all be more or less similar to the characterless Catholicism or pedestrian Protestantism they half-remember from their youth.

Bannister has a PhD in Quranic Studies, so he has studied at least one additional religion in great depth. I wonder though if he and I are much different with respect to the other religions. He’s right that I’m no expert in the other thousand (to pick a number) of religions in history, but how can he criticize me for rejecting those thousand religions without cause? Didn’t he do the same thing?
Sure, let’s acknowledge that Christianity is different from all the other religions, but why is that a bold claim? Each religion is different from all the other religions. And as far as I’ve been able to determine, they all have the same unmet burden of proof. You’re right that I haven’t thoroughly investigated Santeria, Baha’i, Raelianism, and the hundreds of others. If you’ve compared them all against Christianity, show us.
Christianity vs. Islam
Returning to Bannister’s expertise in Islam, he tells us, “On almost every major point of Christian doctrine, I think it is safe to say that Islam teaches the opposite.”
But they’ve got the same god! Islam accepts the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy), so whatever properties you pull out for Yahweh you must assign to Allah as well. You can say that Mohammed took things in a very different direction to give Allah a unique character, but Christianity did the same with its New Testament.
You can focus on their common origin or their divergence, but let’s go where Bannister is pointing. He says Christianity and Islam are very different—okay, they’re very different. So what? This example only emphasizes the made-up nature of both religions. How does this support his thesis that Christianity is not just different from all the other religions but the only one that’s true?
Atheists aren’t allowed to play with God’s toys
Bannister wants to banish atheists from the field of intellectual discourse, though not for any good reason.

Truth, the pursuit of knowledge, the existence of ultimate values such as justice—those are grounded, ultimately, in God. And so to pick these things up and wield them as weapons against God is to play by his rules.

Give me a break. These things come from humans. Don’t flatter yourself that your God gives truth, justice, and so on to humans when they were humans’ to begin with. But if you have evidence of your remarkable claim, provide it.
And if this turns on the word “ultimate” (as in objective or absolute or God-grounded), I await the evidence for that as well. Ordinary justice is defined in the dictionary without the word “ultimate.”
Continue with chapter 4.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,
whose purposes are modeled after our own—
a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
— Albert Einstein

Image credit: Ketzirah Lesser & Art Drauglis, flickr, CC

This is part 3 of a critique of The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (2015) by Andy Bannister (part 1 here). The book promises to critique a number of atheist arguments.
Chapter 3: The Aardvark in the Artichokes
In today’s episode, Fred is furious because something destroyed his garden. He’s considering and dismissing possible culprits—from aardvarks to zebras—while our hero points out the clues for rabbits. Fred says that it’s not rabbits, either. You’ve dismissed all those other animals? Well, he just goes one animal further.
This is obviously supposed to mimic the atheist argument used by Richard Dawkins and others that the Christian rejects hundreds or thousands of gods; why not just one god further like the atheist?
Bannister’s harsh critique: “To describe this as a bad argument is to flirt somewhat casually with understatement.”
Game on!
(I’ve responded to this argument in another post, but this chapter has some new ideas that I’d like to respond to.)
Examples to illustrate the error
Bannister lists several examples to illustrate the problem.

• The atheist says, “You’re an atheist with respect to every other religions’ god(s)” and then goes on to disbelieve that final one. Similarly, a married man can be a bachelor with respect every other woman in the world. Would it make sense to disbelieve that final one, his wife? This isn’t analogous. This is exists vs. married to—hardly the same thing. The existence of women isn’t the question when we’re talking about bachelorhood.
• He imagines Col. Mustard in the game Clue saying, “All the other characters are innocent! You should go one character more and let me go as well.” The rules say there is exactly one murderer. And we understand murders in real life—there must be one or more murderers. Zero is not an option. Contrast that with the number of gods that exist, which could be zero.
• He imagines a biologist saying that he rejects evolution because he’s rejected all the other explanations and has just gone “one theorem further.” If the scientist has reasons to reject evolution, no problem. It’s possible for science to have zero theories to explain a phenomenon, though science is looking for one theory. Again, this is different from religion, where zero gods is plausible.

Bannister’s critique to summarize his examples: “The argument leaks like a rusty colander” and “The argument is, to use a technical term from academic philosophy, bonkers.”
No, what’s bonkers is the idea that his examples are analogous to the subject at hand. All I see them doing is raising dust to cloud the issue. (But then that might be the goal.)
The general problem
Bannister generalizes the argument: never pick something out of a collection because it leaves you open to the challenge, “Hold on! You rejected all these other ones, so why not just go one further and reject them all?” He phrases it this way:

You see, the underlying problem with the “One God Less” argument is that it goes too far. If the argument were valid, it would have a devastating consequence, namely that it would behave like a universal acid and erode all exclusive truth claims, be they in theology, law, or science.

It goes too far only when you force it there. Sometimes “None of the above” is an option and sometimes not. You can suggest that a Christian believe in zero gods, but you can’t tell a vegan to adopt zero dietary regimes (they have to eat something).
Let’s return to Fred’s poor garden, ravaged the previous night by some kind of animal. The constant fight of gardeners against animals that eat their crops is well understood. You know that something trashed Fred’s garden, so “this had zero causes” isn’t an option.
And we’re supposed to see this as analogous to the religion case? Compare many animals with the many religions. We know that all these animals exist. In sharp contrast, most religions must be false and they might all be. There are one or more causes of Fred’s damaged garden, while there could be zero or more gods that actually exist. “Zero” is absolutely not an answer in the garden case, while it is a very live option in the religion case.
Not all religions are the same, y’know!
Bannister now wants to argue that when you compare religions, Christianity comes out decisively on top. He begins by scolding his favorite atheist, Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins has made a fairly basic mistake, namely failing to notice that when multiple explanations are offered for something—be that a murder, a scientific theory, or a religious claim—we don’t immediately assume that all are equally likely.

All religions have the same Achilles Heel—supernatural belief. If that single foundational assumption is wrong, then they’re all wrong—all equally wrong and all in the same way. Only if the supernatural does indeed exist are the differences interesting and worth comparing. Without the supernatural, those differences are trivia, and Bannister does nothing to argue for the existence of the supernatural.
And then, in a startling addition to the conversation, Bannister states: “It often comes as a shock to many atheists to know that there is surprisingly good evidence for God.”
Wow—are we to get some argument to support his just-trust-me handwaving for Christianity’s remarkable claims? Nope, just a link to Alvin Plantinga’s “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments.” (I’ve skimmed it in the past without finding anything interesting. Point out anything you find noteworthy.)
Conclude this argument in part 3b.

I’m a friendly enough sort of chap . . .
I’m not a hostile person to meet.
But I think it’s important to realise
that when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity,
the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them.
It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
— Richard Dawkins

Image credit: David Whelan, flickr, CC