Where Are the Good Christian Arguments? + The Problem of Evil

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problem of evilLet me begin by admitting that, like most people, my sense of the best arguments in any field is limited. There is only so much time to listen to podcasts and read books and blogs. I try to stay up to date on what passes for compelling arguments in Christian apologetics, but I’m sure I’m missing some good stuff.

Two kinds of apologetics

Nevertheless, the Christian arguments that I come across are of two sorts. One category is the earnest statement of a weak argument. I’ll provide an example shortly. The second is the deep and convoluted “No, I can’t make this any simpler” philosophical argument.

I’ve tackled a few of the philosophical arguments (see the list at the end). I haven’t found any compelling, but one of the fallbacks for the apologist with this kind of argument is to say that I’ve only responded to some of the variants of that argument. They’ll point to a stack of books and demand that I respond to all the new ’n improved versions, despite the fact that even within the philosophical community these arguments aren’t widely accepted. Only the most popular interest me, because a boring, esoteric argument doesn’t make for an interesting blog post.

The bigger obstacle for me is the idea that a loving god who desires a relationship with humanity would make his presence known only with these vague and esoteric arguments.

Christian slapdown of the Problem of Evil

What prompted this post was a recent article by Mikel Del Rosario, the “Apologetics Guy.” He says that he’s a Christian apologetics professor, speaker, and trainer. He has an MA in Christian Apologetics from Biola and is working on a Master of Theology at Dallas Theological Seminary, so you’d expect a substantial argument.

You’d expect wrong.

I come across articles like this frequently. I’m eager to respond, but there’s just not that much to say. Either the points that come to mind are already out there in a few of my posts or I can deal with it in just a paragraph. My response becomes nothing more than a comment, not a blog post. Take a look at the argument, and you may see what I mean.

Del Rosario raises three points.

1. The Problem of Evil Isn’t An Argument for Atheism

Del Rosario says, “[The Problem of Evil] really isn’t an argument for atheism. It’s not even a challenge to the existence of God.”

He supports this claim by quoting atheist Sam Harris: “If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or he does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.”

If I may paraphrase Del Rosario’s response, he says, “Aha! You said, ‘If God exists’! If God exists, then you lose, Mr. Atheist.”

No, Harris doesn’t think that the Christian god exists; he’s simply arguing that evidence shows that any god in charge is impotent or evil, which conflicts with the Christian claims of omnipotence and omni-benevolence. Conclusion: the Christian god doesn’t exist.

If Del Rosario wants to accept Harris’s hypothetical, I don’t think it takes him where he wants to go, so this word game fails.

Del Rosario continues:

But some still insist that all the evil and suffering in the world, especially the stuff that seems totally pointless to us, must mean there’s no God.

No, what the evidence leads us to is no god.

2. The Problem of Evil Doesn’t Mean There’s No God

Del Rosario gives the example of pain and fear in a child during a medical procedure. The adults understand the importance of the procedure, but they can do nothing beyond supporting the child through it. The problem with this popular analogy, of course, is that the adults are limited while God isn’t. If God wanted to help a child with a medical issue, it could be done immediately and painlessly. If God wanted to terraform Indonesia, he could find a dozen ways to do it without the 2004 tsunami and without inconveniencing a single person. And yet he doesn’t.

Dr. Glenn Kreider said, “If God is good and evil exists, then God will one day do something about evil and … we have an eschatological [end times] hope that evil and all of its effects will one day be removed. So there is a redemptive work of God and he is acting redemptively in a fallen world.”

So there are problems in the world, and God will address them in his own sweet time? I await the evidence for this incredible claim.

The atheist view sounds far more responsible: some problems in this world we can fix, and some we can’t. Let’s not wait for some supernatural something-or-other without any obvious existence to pick up the pieces. Rather, let’s join together to make the most progress we can.

Next time: “The Hypothetical God Fallacy + The Problem of Evil.”

Appendix

Here are a few of the posts I’ve written that respond to philosophical apologetics.

Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people.
Otherwise there would be no religious people.
— Dr. House in House (season 4, episode 2)

Photo credit: Demarquet Geoffroy

Ray Comfort’s Anti-Abortion Video “180”

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“A shocking, award-winning documentary!” “Changing the heart of a nation.” “33 minutes that will rock your world.” Ray Comfort lavishes his work with superlatives, but does it hold up?

I watched “180” so that you won’t have to. Spoiler: didn’t rock my world.

It’s always fun to compare the other guy to Hitler

Motives are immediately suspect when the video opens with Hitler and Nazi rallies. Right out of the gate, Godwin’s Law is in force, and Comfort makes clear that you’re either on his side or you have an autographed photo of Hitler on your night table.

With that dichotomy clear, Comfort interviews people hanging out on a sunny day at some Los Angeles beach. He begins by asking, “Who was Hitler?” The snippets introducing us to the (typically) 20-somethings who we’ll see throughout the video all show them clueless in response. If it was unclear before, it’s now obvious that he cherry picked only those interviews that gave him what he wanted. This is a poor foundation on which to show us a half-dozen people at the end who are convinced by his message. One wonders how many candidates he had to discard to get these.

We connect the present with Hitler through a long interview with a young American neo-Nazi with a tall blue Mohawk and a dashed “Cut here” tattoo across his throat. And then, videos of concentration camp aftermath.

Comfort primes his interviewees with moral puzzles such as “Would you shoot Hitler if you could go back in time and do so?” or “Would you kill Jews if told that, if you didn’t, you would be killed and someone else would do the job?”

Abortion

About a third of the way in, the conversation finally turns to abortion. The use of Hitler and the Holocaust is justified when Comfort declares abortion to be the American holocaust, with killing fetuses equivalent to killing Jews. His arguments are nothing new to many of us, but they were to this crowd:

  • Finish this sentence: “It’s okay to kill a baby in the womb when …”
  • What if a construction worker was about to blow up a building but wasn’t sure if there was a person in there or not. If we’re not sure, we should always err on the side of life, right?
  • What if someone had aborted you?

I’ve already discussed these and other arguments.

Next, he brings up the sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In the first place, he’s done nothing to show that there is a god behind these commandments and that it has any more supernatural warrant than “Use the Force, Luke!” Additionally, the commandment is usually translated as “thou shalt notmurder.” If the correct word is “kill,” I need to see Comfort walking the walk by campaigning against capital punishment and war. And if it’s an undefined “murder,” what is murder? The commandment becomes a tautology: Thou shalt not do what is forbidden. Granted, but how is this helpful?

Our interviewees seem a little off balance with a camera in their faces and are apparently not that sharp to begin with given their widespread ignorance of Hitler. Ray picks snippets that give him what he wants to hear, that killing fetuses is equivalent to killing Jews.

The lesson is that you can make an effective emotional pro-life argument to people who haven’t thought much about the issue. But people who change their minds so easily (Comfort brags about how quickly they changed) aren’t well established in their new position. How many of these, after thinking about these ideas at leisure and discussing it with friends, are still in Comfort’s camp today?

There’s a fundamental confusion in his interviewees, and Comfort is not motivated to correct it. There’s a big difference between “Abortion is wrong for me” and “Abortion is wrong for everyone, and we must impose that on society.” People give him the former, but he hopes we’ll take away the latter.

The Famous 10 Commandments Challenge

We’re two thirds through the video now and are just hoping to get out with our sanity intact, but Comfort has saved the best for last. The anti-abortion argument is dropped, and he falls back to his old favorite, the Ten Commandments challenge. (One reviewer suggested that Comfort’s compulsive use of this argument is his personal form of Tourette’s.) This is where Comfort ticks off the commandments: Have you ever lied? Stolen? Looked on someone with lust?

His conclusion typically runs like this: “By your own admission, you’re a lying, thieving, blaspheming fornicator and must face God on Judgment Day™. How do you think God should judge you?” Again, of course, he ignores that we haven’t established the existence of God or the afterlife.

I did applaud one aspect of the movie, the text at the end that read, “We strongly condemn the use of any violence in connection with protesting abortion.” At least, I applauded this until I realized that this was probably a legal demand since Comfort had pushed his interviewees to consider shooting Hitler early in the documentary.

Turnabout is fair play

Given Ray Comfort’s easy success with emotional appeals, what if someone did a rebuttal video? It could open with stories of illegal and dangerous back-alley abortion clinics when abortion was illegal. Then talk about Americans rejecting oppressive government—“the land of the free,” “no taxation without representation,” and all that. Paint a picture of medieval Europe with the heavy hand of the church on every aspect of life for the poor peasant. Overlay some stirring patriotic music over eagles and waving flags.

The interviews would focus on intuitive arguments like those I’ve discussed in Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments. For example:

  • Suppose a building were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos. Which would you pick? If you picked the child, what does that say about the argument that equates embryos with babies?
  • If you’ve seen anti-abortion videos or posters, you may have seen the bloody results of late-term abortions. Why do you suppose they show that rather than a woman taking an emergency contraceptive (“morning after”) pill? What does that say about their claim that it’s a “baby” all the way back to that single cell?
  • Given that half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous natural abortion, do you suppose that God has much of a concern about abortion?
  • A week-old human blastocyst has fewer cells than the brain of a fly. Does it make sense to equate that with a one trillion-cell newborn? The newborn has eyes, ears, legs, arms, a brain and a nervous system, a heart and a circulatory system—in fact, all the components of the human body that you do—while the blastocyst has just 100 undifferentiated cells. Can these be equal in every meaningful way?
  • Who better to weigh the impact of a baby than the mother herself?

Do you think we’d get similar results with this video?

They believe life begins at conception
and ends at birth.
— Rep. Barney Frank, about pro-life legislators

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

5 Recommendations to the Pro-Life Movement

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abortionIt’s easy to assume that pro-life proponents are decent people who honestly want to see good done in the world. The problem is that their arguments are out of touch with reality, so let me make some suggestions that I think will make the discussion more effective for everyone.

It may be odd for a pro-choice advocate to offer suggestions to the pro-life movement, but I want them to be more in line with reality, and I can critique from a very different perspective than an insider can.

1. Don’t Deny the Spectrum; Embrace It.

When trying to shock someone with the downsides of abortion, would a pro-life advocate discuss the horrors of the “morning after” pill rather than talk about a late-term abortion procedure? Of course not. There is a spectrum of personhood from a single cell to a newborn baby, and pro-life advocates know it. Their “it’s a baby” claim for the fetus at every stage of development ignores the glaring fact of the spectrum.

If a pregnant woman sees her fetus as a baby or a gift from God, that’s fine. The problem is when that view is imposed on women who may have very different circumstances and good reason to see their pregnancy differently.

Today, the pro-life movement minimizes information and discourages all abortions. The result is that the abortions that happen are often delayed, resulting in the death of an older fetus. If the pro-life movement acknowledged the spectrum and worked with it, they would instead encourage early detection of pregnancy and a prompt discussion of next steps so that any abortion is done as early as possible. An early abortion is better than a later one from every angle. Of course, pro-lifers could put forward their argument against abortion, but making abortion a taboo subject delays addressing the problem and makes any abortion later than it needs to be. Instead of a naive zero-tolerance approach to abortion they would focus instead on minimizing the harm. (Let’s not pretend that overturning Roe v. Wade would end abortion. It would only allow states to regulate it themselves. Some would make it illegal, but even that would only end legal abortions in those states.)

Recognizing the spectrum would also free stem cell research from nonsensical constraints. (You’re delaying research into treatments that could improve public health because of a worry over the rights of cells?! Get serious.)

2. Embrace Allies.

While I’m pro-choice, I don’t like abortion. The pro-life advocate doesn’t like abortion. In fact, the scared teenage girl going to the clinic doesn’t even like abortion. No one ever said, “Gee, I’m feeling kinda gloomy today. I think an abortion would perk me up.” Some people see abortion as the greater of two evils and others see it as the lesser of two evils, but everyone sees it as a bad thing.

Why focus on the disagreement when both sides of the debate are actually in agreement? And here’s the really important agreement: no one likes the primary cause of abortion, unwanted pregnancy. Instead of the current conflict, all sides should be marching arm in arm toward a better way to minimize unwanted pregnancy.

3. Focus on Education.

Whatever we’re doing to discourage unwanted pregnancies in the U.S. isn’t working. Half of all pregnancies are unintended, and evangelical young adults are about as likely to have had sex as any other group. A no-sex-before-marriage attitude leads to early and less-viable marriages.

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the U.S., the annual birth rate was 56 per 1000 women aged 15–19. Compare this to 8 in the Netherlands. The U.S. abortion rate for that group of women was 30 per 1000, while it was 4 in the Netherlands. Clearly, there’s tremendous room for improvement.

The goal of the pro-life movement has been to stop abortion. Instead of swimming against the current with this approach, they should work with the current by stopping the need for abortion.

Teen sex is a bit like teen drinking. When a kid gets to be 15 or 16, the parent warns their child against underage drinking. But the wise parent gives a part 2: “If you do drink, or the driver of your car has been drinking, call me. I’ll pick you up anytime, anywhere, with no questions asked. Your safety is the most important thing.” The lesson: underage drinking is bad, but getting hurt while drunk is really bad (and avoidable).

Likewise, if a parent wants to tell the kid that sex is bad before marriage, that’s fine. Just give the part 2: “If you do have sex, you need to know how to have sex safely and use a condom.”

The results show that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work:

A 2007 Congressionally mandated report found that, on average, students who participated in abstinence-only education had sex at the same age as students who had comprehensive sex education. They also had similar rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and used birth control at similar rates as students who had comprehensive sex education.

As children grow into adulthood, they get adult bodies. Wishing it weren’t so doesn’t help. Why wouldn’t we want to give them the owner’s manual that goes along with those new bodies? It’s like kids having access to the car keys without being given driver’s education.

Don’t our children deserve the best training for minimizing unwanted pregnancy? Abstinence-only training has been given a shot, and it doesn’t work. If you oppose the frank teaching of how to not get pregnant in Health class, avoiding abortion must not be the critical issue you say it is.

4. A “Pro-Life” Movement Should Treat Threats to Life in Priority Order.

There are roughly one million necessary abortions per year in the U.S. But around the world there are ten million deaths per year of young children that are not necessary.You want to protect life? Then do so by focusing on this much larger number of children in the developing world who die of mostly preventable causes. Jesus said nothing about abortion, but he did talk about helping the poor and sick.

5. Tell Politicians to Leave You Alone.

Politicians buzz like flies around the pro-life cause, eager to solve the problem. At least they say they want to solve the problem, but they have little motivation to do so. A solved problem doesn’t get votes, and as long as it’s unsolved, the problem remains a vote getter. Politicians benefit from the controversy, not a resolution, and they would stand in the way of the pro-life movement working in harmony with pro-choice advocates.

The Christian can become a marionette to the politician who can say “If you’re truly a moral person, you must vote for me.” Christians should just say no.

There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot,
to suffer it like Christ’s Passion.
The world gains much from their suffering.
— Mother Teresa

Photo credit: macropoulos

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/4/12.)

God Creates Evil

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unfalsifiableWe’ve recently seen that God has a hard time following his own Ten Commandments, but he has other moral lapses that aren’t covered by that list.

Slavery

Slavery is first on the bonus list of God’s immorality. I’ve written a lot on this issue already, so let’s keep this brief. I’ll summarize by saying that Old Testament slavery of foreigners was just like American slavery of Africans (more here and here).

Rape

God also has no problem with rape (Deut. 22:28–9), sexual slavery (Numbers 31:18), or forced marriage (Judges 21:11–12). The Bible has a long list of odd ideas about marriage and sex.

Homosexuality

God is on the wrong side of this issue, too.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads. (Leviticus 20:13)

(More here, here, and here.)

A better source of morals than the Bible

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948. Consider some highlights to see if mere humans can do a better job than God’s holy book.

  • Article 2: These rights apply to everyone
  • Article 3: No genocide
  • Article 4. No slavery
  • Article 5. No torture
  • Article 16. Marriage allowed regardless of race, nationality, or religion. Both spouses must consent. Divorce is allowed.
  • Article 18. Freedom to reject one’s religion

We can thank Western society for these principles, not the Bible.

Not only is the Bible on the wrong side of these moral issues, it also shows its early Iron Age origin on political issues. Again, some highlights from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

  • Article 10. Fair trial
  • Article 11. The accused is innocent until proven guilty
  • Article 19. Freedom of speech
  • Article 20. Freedom of assembly
  • Article 21. Universal suffrage
  • Article 26. Right to education
  • Article 29: Democracy.

None of these come from the Bible. (I’ve written more on the Bible vs. the U.S. Constitution here.)

God creates evil

When bad things happen, where was God? Was he not paying attention? Was he powerless against the intrigues of Satan? No—the Bible makes clear that God creates the evil himself.

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, Jehovah, do all these things (Isaiah 45:7).

Is it not from the mouth of El Elyon that both calamities and good things come? (Lamentations 3:38)

When disaster comes to a city, has not Jehovah caused it? (Amos 3:6)

Of course, there’s always a Christian apologist eager to show how this is actually a good thing. Megachurch pastor John Piper says:

God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. … Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?1

With a god like this, who needs Satan?! And in times of trouble, you’re supposed to turn to the guy who brought you the calamity in the first place? Talk about an abusive relationship!

God is like the guy who sets a fire in the basement of an apartment building and then plays the hero as he sounds the alarm and rescues people.

The ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis?

What could God do and not be moral? Not killing, lying, and causing evil—he’s already done all these things. Not genocide, slavery, stealing, and rape—he’s already advocated these.

It’s an odd dictionary that has an exception to allow anyone to do these things and still be called “moral.”

God is like a petulant and pampered heir who’s always gotten his way and careens through life, oblivious to the harm he causes, with a train of Daddy’s minions to clean up the damage. In God’s case, it’s Christians who clean up after him, assuring everyone that whatever happens—from suicide for anti-gay bullying, to slavery and genocide in the Bible, to natural disasters—God gets only credit and never blame.

God is good; evil exists; God is all-powerful—
pick any two.
— Anon.

1 quoted by Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God (2011), 65.

Hoare’s Dictum

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simplicitySir Charles Hoare was a pioneer in computer science. He observed:

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.

This applies to intellectual arguments as well: you can make the argument so simple that there are obviously no errors. Or you can make it so complicated that there are no obvious errors.

You ask if radium exists? Pierre and Marie Curie gave a procedure for producing it. Refining radium from pitchblende is a lot of work, but there are no difficult philosophical impediments.

You ask how old the universe is? The scientific literature documents the experiments and data by which cosmologists conclude that there was a Big Bang. Again: lots of work, but we laypeople can easily access the conclusion.

You ask if God exists? I suggest: “Of course God exists. He’s sitting right over there!” or something equally straightforward. But no—we get convoluted, complicated arguments that fall on the wrong side of Hoare’s Dictum. There’s the Transcendental Argument, a long philosophical dissertation puzzling over what grounds logic and whether a mind must exist to hold it. If you break free by showing how it fails, there are seemingly endless variations that the skilful apologist will throw out, like Donkey Kong throwing barrels.

The Ontological Argument is another convoluted argument. First we define “God” as the greatest possible being that we can imagine. Two: consider existence only in someone’s mind versus existence in reality—the latter is obviously greater. Three: since “God” must be the greatest possible being, he must exist in reality. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t meet his definition as the greatest possible being. Here again, there are myriad variations that the apologists expects the atheist to rebut, ignoring the fact that they have the burden of proof.

Many arguments for God’s existence claim to be simple and straightforward—“the Bible is obviously correct” or “nature proves God exists” for example—but are mere assertions rather than arguments backed with evidence. Or, we’re told that the Bible says so: “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20).

To the rest of us, this sounds like, “Of course the Emperor has new clothes!”

When hit with convoluted argument like these for the first time, you’re left scratching your head, unsure what to conclude. These arguments are effective not because they’re correct (in fact, they fall apart under examination) but because they’re confusing.

The colloquial version of the argument is: If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, then baffle ’em with bullshit.

I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God,
“for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.
— Douglas Adams

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/22/11.)

Infinity—Nothing to Trifle With (2 of 2)

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Infinity(See Part 1 for the beginning of this discussion.)

Puzzling aspects of infinity

We can compare the sizes of two sets of numbers by finding a one-to-one correspondence between them, but in the case of infinitely large sets, strange things can happen. For example, compare the set of positive integers I = {1, 2, 3, 4, …} with the set of squares S = {1, 4, 9, 16, …}. Every element n in I has a corresponding n2 in S, and every n2 in S has a corresponding n in I. Here we find that a subset of the set of integers (a subset which has omitted an infinite number of integers) has the same size as the set of all integers.

Playing with the same paradox, Hilbert’s Hotel imagines a hotel that can hold an infinite number of guests. Suppose you ask for a room but the hotel is full. No problem—every guest moves one room higher (room n moves to room n + 1), and room 1 is now free.

But now suppose the hotel is full, and you’ve brought an infinite number of friends. Again, no problem—every guest moves to the room number twice the old room number (room n moves to room 2n), and the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms become free.

Infinity is best seen as a concept, not a number. To understand this, we should realize that zero can also be seen as a concept and not a number. Consider a situation in which I have three liters of water. I give you a third so that I have two liters and you have one. I now have twice what you have. I will always have twice what you have, regardless of the number of liters of water I start with except for zero. If I start with zero liters, I can’t really give you anything, and if I “gave” you a third of my zero liters, I would no longer have twice as much as you.

Craig has argued there is no actual infinite (to avoid an infinitely old universe), but he needs one for himself. His god is supposedly infinitely good, infinitely powerful, and so on. And since the universe has a finite age, for God to be either infinitely old or timeless, he must’ve crossed an infinite number of moments of time before he created the universe. Perhaps Craig is hoist by his own petard.

Not all infinities are the same. Let’s move from integers to real numbers (real numbers are all numbers that we’re familiar with: the integers as well as 3.7, 1/7, π, √2, and so on).

The number of numbers between 0 and 1 is obviously the same as that between 1 and 2. But it gets interesting when we realize that there are the same number of numbers in the range 0–1 as 1–∞.

The proof is quite simple: for every number x in the range 0–1, the value 1/x is in the range 1–∞. (If x = 0.1, 1/x = 10; if x = 0.25, 1/x = 4; and so on) And now we go in the other direction: for every number y in the range 1–∞, 1/y is in the range 0–1. There’s a one-to-one correspondence, so the sets must be of equal sizes. QED.

(Note that this isn’t a trick or fallacy. You might have seen the proof that 1 = 2, but that “proof” only works because it contains an error. Not so in this case.)

The resolution of this paradox is fairly straightforward, but resolving the paradox isn’t the point here. The point is that this isn’t intuitive. Use caution when using infinity-based apologetic arguments.

More from William Lane Craig

Let’s conclude by revisiting Craig’s example from last time.

Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting from eternity and is now finishing: . . ., –3, –2, –1, 0. We could ask, why did he not finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished by then.… In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will have already finished.

The problem is that he confuses counting infinitely many negative integers with counting all the negative integers. As we’ve seen, there are the same number of negative integers as just the number of negative squares –12, –22, –32, …. Our mysterious Counting Man could have counted an infinite number of negative integers but still have infinitely many yet to count.

Or, imagine catching the Counting Man at any point in his project. He’d tell you that he’d already counted an infinite number of numbers. So where’s the problem?

For a more thorough analysis, read the critique from Prof. Wes Morriston.

And isn’t the apologist who casts infinity-based arguments living in a glass house? The atheist might raise the infinite regress problem—Who created God, and who created God’s creator, and who created that creator, and so on? The apologist will sidestep the problem by saying (without evidence) that God has always existed. Okay, if God can have existed forever, why not the universe? And if the forever universe succumbs to the problem that we wouldn’t be able to get to now, how does the forever God avoid it?

This post is not meant as proof that all of Craig’s infinity based arguments are invalid or even that any of them are. I simply want to ask apologists who aren’t mathematicians to appreciate their limits and tread lightly in topics infinite.

Of course, if the apologist’s goal is simply to baffle people and win points by intimidation, this may be just the ticket.

When the answer is known, science knows it.
When science doesn’t know it, neither does religion.
— Paraphrase of AronRa

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/12.)