Tolerating Hell While in Heaven: 4 Lessons

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Let’s distill out four lessons from the last two posts (here), which considered how knowing of hell would burden the souls in heaven.

Those two posts surveyed popular Christian rationalizations about hell, from the first few centuries of the church to the present day. Many concluded that the thought of loved ones in perpetual torment would be impossibly distressing to those in heaven. Therefore, those in heaven must either have their memories erased or be so overawed by heaven that they have no mental bandwidth for compassion. Either way, you must be changed into someone else to endure heaven.

Our first takeaway is a biggie:

Lesson 1: God is immoral, God doesn’t exist, and the Bible is contradictory

Let’s start by agreeing that morality is a good thing. (It may seem odd that we must back up this far, but you’ll soon see that we must in this “up is down and eternal torment is good” environment.) Our best examples within society of honesty, compassion, selflessness, or any other moral trait are examples that are often highlighted for us to emulate. It’s not that we don’t know what is morally good. We do know; our problem is our inability to consistently strive for moral goodness.

While we do our imperfect best to be moral people, Christians tell us that God perfects that. God is morally like us but better; he’s what we strive to be but perfectly so. But the view of heaven we’ve been discussing is not that. God isn’t a vastly better moral being like us. This God doesn’t have more morals but less because God’s view of hell is radically different than ours.

Take a step back to the foundational idea of Christian salvation. Count the ways it offends our moral instincts.

  1. It’s a human sacrifice
  2. needed to satisfy God’s justifiable rage
  3. at humans being imperfectly moral despite the fact that he made them that way
  4. when he could just forgive any sin, like we do (and like he has done himself).

Now add:

  1. hell as eternal torment for our finite crimes.

This justification for hell doesn’t just seem crazy, it is crazy. A savage because-I-said-so god might have worked for an Iron Age tribe, but today the flaws are too glaring. When Christians also insist that their brutal god is love, the delusion breaks. God can’t be both loving and the author of hell; therefore, he doesn’t exist.

(The Christian response will be, “But you haven’t proven that these are incompatible.” That’s true, but the burden of proof is not mine. An open-minded person, like I try to be, can evaluate Christianity’s claims, but when they don’t satisfy the burden of proof, we’re obliged to reject them.)

Salvaging the idea of God?

A popular defense of God’s good name cites Isaiah 55:9, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” If we’re talking about understanding reality, that makes sense. The author of the universe would understand physics, chemistry, and other aspects of nature vastly better than we do. That’s an understandable intellectual gulf.

But the topic is morality. We’re not talking about how God’s love for someone who is homeless, depressed, or lonely is a million times more profound than ours. The issue here is that, when it comes to hell, God’s morality is radically different than ours. It’s contradictory. It’s preposterous. It’s insane. You would think we share a moral awareness with God. Remember who we’re talking about—it’s the “God is love” guy. But as we’ve seen, the response to heaven and hell by Christians themselves show that God’s morality is different, and, since human morality is the standard, God is immoral. (More here.)

When I say that human morality is the standard, that’s simply because “moral” and “immoral” are words with definitions. If God’s actions match up with what passes for human morality, then he’s moral. If instead God’s actions would be called immoral if a human did them, then God is immoral.

Let me give a parting challenge to Christians who refuse this conclusion: tell us what moral rules you think God is bound by. In God’s calculus, it’s okay to drown the world, it’s okay to bring into existence people that his omniscience knows are destined for heaven, and it’s okay to support slavery by making rules for it. He clearly doesn’t follow conventional Western morality. He even breaks most of his own Ten Commandments. Is God’s guiding principle “might makes right”? Is it arbitrary, driven by what annoys him at any moment? Or is there some logic behind it that we can understand?

Lesson 2: You become a grotesque, unrecognizable creature in heaven

I once thought that when one gets to heaven they become acutely compassionate. Silly me! No, Christians themselves tell us that you must be less so. You must be anesthetized or lobotomized by removing any loving memories of friends and family who are in torment in hell. Because given the two important priorities, our comfort in heaven and just punishment in hell, why would God bother fixing hell?

The other bright idea is that somehow those in heaven come to understand that it’s all part of the Plan—and, despite the revulsion that any person with a functioning conscience would feel, that’s a good thing. Who cares what humans’ God-given sense of right and wrong says?

Someone who could look from heaven at their children in agony in hell and not immediately feel overwhelming horror, compassion, and sorrow has become a different person. Only by inverting society’s moral rules can heaven be made tolerable.

Lesson 3: God doesn’t support free will—he suppresses it

This was discussed in the last post.

God is hidden, which is odd because we’re told that he longs for a deep relationship with each of us. Christians rationalize this by saying that God making his existence plain would step on our free will. (No one else’s existence seems to offend our free will, but let’s ignore that.) We must freely give our love to God. But what kind of champion of free will is God if he must override your honest response to hell?

(More on the problem of God’s hiddenness here, here, here, and here.)

Lesson 4: You should reconsider Christianity if it seems like BS

What does it say about Christianity that a fundamental doctrine—God administering justice in the afterlife—falls apart with a little examination? And that the same is true for the Trinity. And the virgin birth prophecy. And lots more foundational claims of Christianity.

Many Christians who hit these speed bumps take no notice. Others notice but don’t want to. And an open-minded few keep track of these rather large problems that don’t make sense—the Bible’s contradictions, prayer that doesn’t work as promised, attributes of God that are beneath a deity, how God is pretty much like every other deity, how this looks like a world with no God, and so on. These thoughtful Christians are the ones that could find a more sensible world outside of Christianity, one held together with more than cognitive dissonance and wishful thinking.

This is what happens when you squeeze a normal, compassionate human brain into a Bible-shaped box. Repeatedly, “But it doesn’t make sense” is pounded down with “God must have his reasons.”

Stumbling over a nonsensical claim can be an opportunity to wake up and reevaluate whether Christianity makes sense or is just another manmade construct.

See also:

[Heaven is like] when you hear
someone talk about Hawaii
like they’ve been there,
but they only read about it in a brochure.
— commenter Kodie

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Image from John Verive (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure (2 of 2)

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How could you enjoy heaven knowing of the agony of loved ones in hell? Or the billions of strangers in hell? Christian defenders of God (God knows he can’t defend himself) hypothesize that heaven’s inmates lose their memories of them, or maybe they’re overawed by God so that hell doesn’t trouble them anymore. That’s right—heaven is so horrible that you must be anesthetized or changed into someone else to endure it. This is discussed in part 1.

How to deal with a hideous heaven, part 2

Let’s move on to another rationalization, that those in heaven will see hell clearly but come to accept that it’s actually a great plan. With this, we’re told God has insights we just haven’t thought of.

Preacher Jonathan Edwards, a key figure in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s, rationalized the delight of those in heaven this way:

They shall see the dreadful miseries of the damned and consider that they deserved the same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which made them so much to differ from the damned.

So you don’t deserve heaven and you know it, but you’re going to take delight seeing the damned who might’ve been just as moral as you. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out the flaw:

According to Edwards’s own theology, moreover, he was no less deserving of eternal torment himself than are those who suffer in hell. [Nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich] Schleiermacher and many others therefore find it hard to understand how those who receive special favor in this regard could be so deliriously happy in the knowledge that some of their own loved ones do not receive a similar special favor.

The clumsy rationalizations continues into our day. Let’s critique a few.

From the popular Christian site GotQuestions:

Perhaps we will have come to understand how our loved ones’ absence glorifies God.

Glorifies God? A petty tyrant might want to be glorified, but an omniscient god? (Compare God’s need for praise to Donald Trump’s here.)

You must be changed upon entering heaven

From Stand to Reason:

God is doing this as an expression of his own morally perfect nature and his judgment is just and it’s therefore good. When we are changed, we will see things the way God sees them. We will see that this action is appropriate and we will be satisfied in our hearts that goodness is done, and we will honor God for the goodness of judgment (podcast @9:35).

“When we are changed”? This is another admission that an ordinary, moral, loving human couldn’t withstand heaven’s cruelty. Apparently, it’s better to be a God-praising zombie than be forced to deal with the reality of life in heaven. And this is all given without evidence. Faith alone supports the idea that those in heaven will be comfortable with the ongoing torment of billions or even that heaven and hell exist.

And consider, “[God’s] judgment is just and it’s therefore good.” This is just an assumption with no evidence. In fact, it’s claimed in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. The last thing God’s judgment looks like is justice.

Free will is important . . . but God isn’t its champion

Let’s return to that God-praising zombie. One of Christian apologists’ many unevidenced claims is that God is the source of human free will. And why is God hidden? They tell us it’s because God respects free will so much that he wouldn’t want to impose (as if making plain his mere existence would impose, but never mind). We must give our love to God freely, not be forced out of fear or awe (as if the problem were people withholding love rather than God not deserving love, but never mind).

But why do people need to be “changed” as they get to heaven? What does it say that their natural instincts, their expressions of free will, must be overridden? So much for people in heaven freely giving their love to God.

As an aside, do Christians ever stop to think that the guy behind the idea of hell doesn’t look like the good guy anymore? I wonder if, at the end of the Christian story, there’s a plot twist at the pearly gates.

Let’s return to Christian rationalizations for hell. From Eternal Perspective Ministries:

In a sense, none of our loved ones will be in Hell—only some whom we once loved. . . . I cannot prove biblically what I’ve just stated, but I think it rings true, even if the thought is horrifying.

I know we’ve seen it many times already, but I must again highlight what this author admits. This is a Christian saying that heaven is horrifying. You can sense the strain of cognitive dissonance as they justify two opposing ideas—God is good and yet he invented hell. It’s like holding the tails of two angry bulls.

So what have we learned? Getting a ticket to heaven is unmerited, so there’s no good reason for you to be there. You must to be changed into someone else to endure heaven. Human free will is vital to God and yet he must suppress it in heaven. And the need for people to be changed—that is, for their natural instincts to be overridden so they can tolerate heaven—undercuts one of Christian apologists’ favorite arguments, that only God can ground free will.

Have you heard of better rationalizations? Or more ridiculous ones? Share them in the comments.

Wrap up these ideas: Tolerating Hell While in Heaven: 4 Lessons

If you have to explain,
“I’m doing this out of love,”
it ain’t love.
— seen on the internet

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Image from Faisal Akram (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure

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Could you enjoy heaven knowing of the agony of those in hell? What if those in hell are your loved ones?

Medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas turned the problem around by embracing that torment:

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.

Many Christians have seized this lemons-to-lemonade opportunity. Thinkers from the early church such as Tertullian and Augustine down to Jonathan Edwards in his famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry god” and beyond have not avoided but celebrated the pain of hell, imagining those in heaven looking over the ramparts and delighting in the anguish of those far below (more).

That doesn’t provide much support for C.S. Lewis’s famous claim, “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.”

(This is argument 28 in a list that begins here.)

Such thinking continues today. Popular Christian theologian R.C. Sproul told of one of his teachers saying,

In heaven, you will be so sanctified that you will be able to see your own mother in hell and rejoice in that, knowing that God’s perfect justice is being carried out (video @19:35).

Who’d want to go to heaven if you’ll turn into that?

How to deal with a hideous heaven, part 1

Christians often rationalize hell by pointing to Revelation 21:4, where “[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes . . . [and there will be] no more mourning or crying or pain.” If God will remove all sorrow in heaven, then somehow hell won’t bother us. It’s not clear how (the Bible doesn’t even admit the problem), but Christians have come up with various ideas to insulate those in heaven from hell.

Christianity StackExchange cites a popular though childish rationalization:

A common argument goes: There is no sadness in Heaven. If I knew that this person I loved was in Hell that would certainly make me very sad. Therefore it must be that I won’t remember them.

That the doctrine of hell isn’t fully explained and justified in the Bible is a clue that the Bible comes from simple people rather than God, but let’s let that pass.

The Stand to Reason podcast (here @12:11) expands on this:

So we are not going to spend eternity reflecting on the anguish of our loved ones who have not received the mercy of God through the love of Christ. That would put a damper on things. But those things are going to be forgotten. . . . [Even if there were a fleeting memory of them,] it will be a reflection from God’s perspective, that they are getting judged justly, and that’s a good thing, and we have escaped justice and received mercy instead, and that’s a good thing, too.

Yeah, thinking of billions in torment in hell—or even just a handful of loved ones who didn’t make the cut—would put a damper on your pleasure in heaven, wouldn’t it? We certainly can’t have a loved one’s anguish ruining our picnic. But don’t imagine God would actually solve the problem and eliminate the injustice of perpetual conscious torment in hell. Instead, we either lose memories of those loved ones or smother any tender memory with the thought that, but for the grace of God, that could be us.

This is the “Sucks to be you” approach to justice. I got mine, and you’re burning in hell. God approved both placements, even though no human merits heaven. But of course if the tables were turned (you in heaven and me in hell), the justification would be equally valid—one of us is where justice demands they go, while the other subverted justice and lives in heaven.

Heavenly justice?

What about the importance of absolute, celestial justice? I’ve read many Christians who are incredulous that anyone could be an atheist because then Hitler got away with it. For example, here is Bobby Conway, the One-Minute Apologist:

Suppose we were to step into atheism—I’d have a harder time living with the [lack of] ultimate justice than I would with . . . the Problem of Evil (STR podcast @10:20).

I think he’s saying that the problem of no ultimate justice would be a greater burden to him as an atheist than the Problem of Evil is to him now as a Christian.

He claims ultimate justice for his worldview but now has a new problem, how to make sense of God violating that fundamental principle by letting unworthy Christians into heaven. Is justice in the afterlife essential or not? If it is, why give some subset of Christians a pass? And if mercy is being given to some people, why not all?

I guess Christians set it aside when they can exploit a loophole to get to the Good Place. (More on the Christian claim of ultimate justice here.)

William Lane Craig (WLC) has something to offer on this topic. He is quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[Craig hypothesizes] that God could simply “obliterate” from the minds of the redeemed “any knowledge of lost persons so that they experience no pangs of remorse for them.”

The Encyclopedia ticks off a couple of puzzles this brings up and then rests on this one:

The main issue to be resolved here is whether blissful ignorance qualifies as a worthwhile form of happiness at all.

“Welcome to heaven! It won’t be so bad once we erase your memory.”

WLC tosses out another possibility.

The experience of being in Christ’s immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell (Source).

So where does that leave us? Christians themselves tell us that heaven is so hellish that to endure it, one’s memory of loved ones must be erased. Alternatively, one must be distracted, forever.

I think this is the point where someone with a heart says, “If that’s heaven, I want nothing of it.”

Concluded in part 2, where we explore another way to make heaven less hellish.

 He’s your god;
they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— Unknown

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Image from note thanun (free-use license)
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An Understandable Universe May Point to God, but How Understandable Is the Universe?

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We can understand the universe, but why? Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner said in 1960, “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural science is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” Albert Einstein expressed a similar thought: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”

What some Christian apologists claim

Many Christians have seized on this, claiming that an understandable universe points to God, both because God would want us to understand it and because only a theistic approach can explain such a universe. Christian apologist William Lane Craig gave this religious interpretation:

It was very evident to me that [naturalists are not] able to provide any sort of an explanation of mathematics’ applicability to the physical world, and this was self-confessed. . . . Theism [enjoys] a considerable advantage in [being able to answer this question].

Philosopher Nicholas Maxwell added:

Why should the physical universe, utterly foreign to the human mind, nevertheless be comprehensible to the human mind? We have here, it seems, an utterly inexplicable link between the physical universe and the human world. . . . Of course if God exists, the comprehensibility of the universe is entirely understandable.

This needs some pushback. These interpretations make a huge, unstated assumption that a godless universe could not look like our universe, but what supports this? Do they think that the dependability of physics is only due to God? Do they think that a godless universe would be unstable, with constants, exponents, and relationships continuously changing? Perhaps in this universe, e = mc2 would be valid one moment but then e = mc2.1 the next and e = 17mc3.5 the next?

And why imagine that the physical facts of the universe must baffle us? Some aspects are counter-intuitive, of course, but evolution adapted us to be in tune with physics—at least the physics of our not-too-big and not-too-small world. For example, the inverse-square law says that radiation intensity falls off as the inverse of the square of the distance. Stand in front of a campfire and you soon get an intuitive understanding of this law.

That our physics wouldn’t look like it does without God is a very bold claim, for which I see no evidence. Furthermore, “God did it” is unfalsifiable, which is a fatal trait for any theory, let alone one that claims to explain all of science’s most perplexing problems.  (I give a more thorough analysis here.)

But hold on—is the universe understandable?

Let’s reconsider the initial claim, that the universe is understandable. Sure, we can find simple relationships between aspects of reality with scientific laws such as the Ideal Gas Law, Ohm’s Law, and Newton’s Law of Gravity, and so on, but things become more complicated. Corrections for relativity must be added to Newton’s Law of Gravity (F = Gm1m2/r2). Ohm’s Law (V = IR) ignores capacitance and inductance, which make calculations of time-varying voltage or current much more complicated. And the Ideal Gas Law (PV = nRT) makes assumptions about gases that limit its applicability.

Nature often isn’t particularly reliable, at least at first glance. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, but that speed varies depending on what medium it’s going through. The boiling point of water varies around the world (only at one precise pressure does it boil at 100 °C). Weather and natural disasters are hard to forecast. Chaotic systems are deterministic but not predictable. And so on.

It might make sense after we get used to it, but beforehand, it can seem to be a random jumble. For example, what’s the simple law that tells us which isotopes are radioactive and what their half-lives are? Things outside our familiar middle world may never be intuitive. As Richard Feynman noted, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

If the comprehensibility of the universe points to God, what does its incomprehensibility point to?

It’s not that the universe is understandable. Rather, what we understand about the universe is understandable, which isn’t much help in anticipating how science will continue to progress as we push the frontiers. How much about the universe will we eventually understand?

What we know vs. what we don’t

Knowledge about the universe can be divided into four categories, as illustrated by the Venn diagram above.

  1. What we know. This has expanded dramatically since the modern period of scientific discovery beginning around 1800, which includes scientists such as Maxwell, Mendeleev, and Tesla, and even more so since the Enlightenment period, which might include Galileo, Newton, and Pascal. Imagine how small the “What we know” ellipse was 500 years ago.
  2. What we will know. No one knows if we’ll continue learning about the universe at the current rate, but it seems a safe bet that we’ll know much more a thousand years in the future (assuming human society stays safe).
  3. What we’re capable of knowing. What more could we understand if we only asked the right questions or if super-smart aliens taught it to us? Theoretical physics, like science fiction, can only take us to places that its practitioners can dream up.
    Another limit is our finite ability to create technology. Scientists and engineers have built the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometry Gravity Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope, and they’re planning next generation versions. But what if we eventually need versions that were a thousand times bigger or more expensive? Or a billion times? Human society, even far into the future, might have limits. Without these monster machines, unimaginable truths might remain unimagined.
  4. All foundational knowledge of reality. The final ellipse is everything—not trivial specifics like the atmospheric composition of Alpha Centauri’s fourth planet but every concept, law, and theory needed to describe life, the universe, and everything.
    Our imperfect brains have limits. Imagine an alien species that is smarter than we are to the same extent that we are smarter than chimpanzees. While we share a common ancestor with chimps from just six million years ago, we can find in chimps only the rudiments of higher-order intelligence such as humor, problem solving, and morality. Chimpanzees are our closest living animal relative, but human children surpass their intelligence at perhaps four years of age. These aliens would intellectually be to us what we are to chimps. If chimps can never understand algebra or geometry, let alone calculus or quantum physics, what would these aliens be able to understand that we could never hope to learn? And if chimps will never understand all the science behind reality, why do we think we will?
    Now take it a step further and make the aliens’ cognitive gap the same as between us and lizards. Our understanding the new science these aliens could teach us might be as unlikely as a lizard understanding a joke.

A pessimistic look at our understanding of reality

The figure above gives one version of what we know (and will know) compared to what we won’t, but that’s just an optimistic guess. Imagine if the four ellipses actually look like this:

With this interpretation, we will still make a lot of progress from what we now know to what we will eventually know, but this more pessimistic version imagines the overwhelming majority of science out of our reach, either because imagination or lack of data let us down (third ellipse) or because it is beyond our cognitive reach (fourth ellipse). Will humans eventually understand 99 percent of the science behind reality? Or 0.1 percent?

Most frustrating, we can never know how big the third and fourth ellipses are! We can never understand the size of our ignorance. We will always perceive only ellipse #1, never sure if we’ve learned most of the science or a tiny fraction, never sure if we will learn much more or if we’re near our inherent limit.

Let’s return to our marvelously understandable universe. The universe is indeed understandable . . . but only to the extent that we can understand it. And how far is that? No one will ever know. “The universe is understandable” is an empty statement.

Here’s an interesting connection between Nature’s counter-intuitive laws and the growth of religion.

The cause of religious belief in human beings is intimately related to the desire on the part of individuals to have an explanation for various phenomena, and in fact, if nature possessed easy, simply-discoverable laws, it is doubtful that religion would have ever developed. As it happens, however, natural law is by no means simple, and thus it undoubtedly appeared to the primitive mind that the forces of nature were chaotic and unpredictable. From this point of view, however, it was but a short step to attributing an anthropomorphic character to nature: Unpredictability became whimsicalness; the raging storm became the work of an angry god who, like an angry man, will become calm again in time; the personal calamity became the punishment of evil-doers; the occurrence of an unusual event became a sign that the deity was engaged in something special that would affect his minions; and so on.

If Christians want to find proof of God in there somewhere, they must imagine a God who tantalizes us with some bits that are understandable, makes us work very hard to understand more, and refuses to tell us just how much of this mess we will ever understand. Doesn’t sound like a proof of anything to me.

See also:

The classic theist dodge
is to declare that God answers all prayers,
but the answer can be “Yes,” “No,” or “Wait.”
This means God has fewer options available to him
than my Magic 8 Ball.
— commenter Kevin K

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/19/16.)

Image from Olga Reznik (license CC BY 2.0)

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Defending 10 Atheist Arguments (5 of 5)

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We’ve been responding to “Atheist Offers 10 FALLACIES to Disprove God” from Tim Barnett of the Stand to Reason ministry. Here are the final two arguments (part 1 here).

9. This inhospitable universe doesn’t look like it was created for mankind

Atheist argument: “This isn’t a finely tuned world created with us in mind. The sun gives you cancer, most of the water is undrinkable and diseases run rampant. If there was an intelligent designer, there wouldn’t be any mistakes.”

Christian response: “Just because you can’t drink the ocean or antifreeze doesn’t mean they’re not designed. They’re just designed for another purpose.”

My response: The point in the atheist argument, if it were hard to understand, is that this doesn’t look like a world designed for humans to live in. The fraction of the earth’s surface that a naked Adam and Eve could survive on is pretty small. Zoom out to include the universe, and the fraction is negligible.

We’re not going for a proof that the world wasn’t designed (at least I’m not). Rather, this argument attempts to make a convincing case that the world wasn’t designed. We don’t have proof that God didn’t design an undrinkable ocean, just the fact that it looks that way.

I’ve written more about how this vast universe with more than 200 billion galaxies doesn’t look like what God would create if he wanted a home for humans here and here.

“Something doesn’t have to be perfectly designed in order to be intelligently designed.”

If God the perfect designer made it, then yes, it does have to be perfectly designed.

Natural beats supernatural

“Imperfect design is perfectly consistent with intelligent design in a broken world.”

Explain how a broken world would be part of the omnipotent Maker’s perfect plan. “Broken” is just evidence-free handwaving to dismiss the embarrassing lack of perfection we see in God’s supposed handiwork on earth. Apologists credit the excellent parts of our reality to God the designer, and poor parts are blamed on humans. That doesn’t make sense even assuming that Christianity is correct.

Sure, the world could be supernaturally broken, but why go there? The natural explanation, always the default, is sufficient to explain the good and the bad in the world. The God hypothesis isn’t necessary, so let’s discard it as an unfounded and useless assumption.

“God could have made every mistake that we could possibly think of when creating everything, but that still does not affect the chances of Him existing or not.”

Is God omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good? Then he wouldn’t have made mistakes.

And if the reference to a “finely tuned world” in the atheist argument was an attack on the Fine Tuning Argument, I’ve made that attack myself here and here.

Evaluation: 9/10. This argument seems to be (1) a response to the Fine Tuning Argument and (2) the question, “Why would God make the universe 93 billion light-years across (and that’s just the visible part) to make a home for one species?” The argument would’ve worked better if it were just one or the other.

10. Evolution explains life. The God hypothesis is unnecessary.

Atheist argument: “Evolution is obviously proven and true. This means that we weren’t created by magic and are somehow superior to the animal kingdom. No creator, no God.”

Christian response: “Biological evolution, even if true, has nothing to do with the existence of God. It has to do with God’s alleged role in biology.”

Evolution, “even if true”?? Well, thanks for laying your cards on the table, I guess.

This quote is from Tim Barnett, of the Stand to Reason (STR) ministry. Greg Koukl of STR is a flaming evolution denier, so this isn’t a surprise. Evolution deniers grant themselves the privilege to pick and choose what science to accept, unconcerned with the scientific consensus (my response to that approach here). I continue to be amazed that someone more interested in the convenient argument rather than truthful argument still has an audience.

Let’s get back to Barnett’s point. He says that evolution tells us nothing about God’s existence. I agree that it doesn’t prove no God—God could’ve allow evolution to modify life. We have plenty of compelling arguments against God without evolution, but as Richard Dawkins pointed out, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Before Darwin, not having a naturalistic explanation of life was an uncomfortable omission, but now that hole has been reliably filled.

Christians: drop the evolution denial!

“If Darwin was right, atheists can still be wrong, as shown by a large number of theistic evolutionists. So, this is another non-sequitur.”

If you accept theistic evolutionists so gracefully, why cling to your embarrassing rejection of the scientific consensus? If you so readily point to them as compatriots, you should join them. Evolution denial may be more of an Achilles’ heel than you realize. Realizing that flaw in Evangelical dogma was an important step on the road to atheism by commenter Greg G.:

When I heard preachers making false statements about evolution, I could no longer trust what they said about religion. If they didn’t know what they were talking about regarding things they could look up, why think they know about things they couldn’t possibly know?

The other prong of this argument is that the Bible explains life on earth but is obviously ignorant of evolution. Somehow you’ve got to explain how God got it wrong. But Christians have rationalized away plenty of awkward facts (such as God’s support for slavery, human sacrifice, and genocide), at least in ways that satisfy them, so I have every confidence that moving to a Christianity compatible with evolution wouldn’t be hard.

The importance of evolution is that God is (yet again) not necessary to explain an important aspect of reality. That’s no proof against God, just like having gaps in our scientific knowledge has never been proof for God, but it’s one more area of the Christian façade that has crumbled. It’s one more place where the God hypothesis is unnecessary.

And what about the idea of Original Sin, the doctrine that humans inherit the sin from our common ur-parents, Adam and Eve? Evolution makes clear that there were no primordial first parents of all humans (h/t Ben York).

Evaluation: 8/10. A stronger argument would be go beyond evolution and point to other scientific explanations that don’t need God, from lightning to the Big Bang.

Concluding thoughts

I’ve probably been too generous with these evaluations. Only by changing these from proof that God doesn’t exist to convincing evidence that God doesn’t exist have they been salvaged at all. Nevertheless, with a charitable interpretation (noticeably not forthcoming from the Christian antagonists), these arguments can work. My total grade is 85/100—not bad. Tim Barnett gave each argument a zero, but I suspect that he would give that score to any atheist argument, whether he’s seen it or not. Since he’s fascinated by logical fallacies, he’s lucky I didn’t tally his.

Let’s throw the judging open to get more objective input. Readers, share your grades for these arguments and offer improvements on either side.

The Christian responses were all deliberately brief. Did my higher word count give me an advantage? I encourage Tim Barnett and Mike Winger, who I quoted in these posts, or any other Christian with a platform to respond.

Want more? I’ve critiqued other lists of atheist arguments that were attacked by Christians:

It is not everyday that you see a circular argument
with a radius that short.
— commenter Greg G.

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Image from Intricate Explorer (free-use license)
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Defending 10 Atheist Arguments (4 of 5)

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We’ve been responding to several Christian sources, including “Atheist Offers 10 FALLACIES to Disprove God” from Tim Barnett of the Stand to Reason ministry. Six have been dealt with (part 1 here).

What do you think—will the next four be of higher quality?

7. What is God made of?

Atheist argument: “There is no evidence that spiritual energy exists, so we can conclude that psychics, ghosts, and gods are non-existent. Otherwise, God has nothing to be made of.”

Christian response: “Not this again. An immaterial being, by definition, is not made of material.”

My response: Not this again. You can’t just magic something into existence with a definition. Do you think “God is an immaterial being” is a spell that will create such a being?

Don’t waste our time with, “Well, God might exist” or “You haven’t proven he doesn’t exist.” God’s existence is the topic here, and you need to show it. Yes, I realize that the atheist is making the argument and you’re responding, but responses need evidence, too. Your response is no more compelling than “Because I said so.”

“I’m not going too quickly here, am I? God is not made of anything. God is spirit. God is spirit, but he’s not made of spiritual energy. He’s immaterial, so this is a straw man.”

God is not made of anything, least of all spiritual energy, but he’s made of spirit? Or he is spirit? Or something?

“Not made of anything”—that sounds like your rhetorical weapons. And it sounds like they’re loaded with not-evidence. This is the problem with just handwaving stuff into existence. Your embarrassing ad hoc arguments will mean you’ll no longer be able to sit at the adult table.

So God is not made of matter or (heaven forbid!) spiritual energy . . . but he’s made of something, right? You’re the expert—if not “spiritual energy,” then what? Don’t play Simon Says, just tell us. And whatever you say God is made of, show us that it exists. One atheist responded, “Can someone tell me what the word ‘spirit’ means without saying what it is not?”

God is simple

This reminds me of the “God is simple” argument made by Christian apologists Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, and others. Here is Craig’s contribution to that argument:

As a mind without a body, God is amazingly simple. Being immaterial, He has no physical parts. Therefore to postulate a pure Mind as the explanation of fine-tuning is the height of simplicity!

Craig marvels that, having no physical parts, God is the height of simplicity, but this is more evidence-free handwaving. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes, the height of light and airy material because it has no material at all. The obvious next step is for Craig to build this God for us. How hard can that be if God’s composition is the height of simplicity? And if Craig doesn’t have the materials to make a God—maybe he’s out of phlogiston, æther, élan vital, or bodily humours—he can just give us the plans with a parts list. Until he can offer that, grounded with evidence, his speculations are worthless.

“A spaceless, timeless, and immaterial God would not be able to be measured or discovered by purely materialistic means.”

Unless he entered our material world, and then science could in principle detect him.

The physics of God

Since we’re talking about a real god, a real soul, and a real afterlife, think about how those must manifest in our reality. Physicist Sean Carroll highlights the problem:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

. . . Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.

Evaluation: 9/10. The Christian response is poor, but the atheist argument could be worded better, perhaps something like: we agree that scary things from beyond the grave like ghosts don’t exist, in part because there is no good evidence for what they’re made of or what powers them. Now substitute “gods” for “ghosts.”

8. God couldn’t have created the universe from nothing

Atheist argument: “There is no such thing as nothing. For nothing to exist would cause it to be ‘something.’ Creationists believe that God created the universe out of literal nothing.”

Christian response: “The universe appearing from nothing is powerful evidence for a transcendent creator god.”

My response: I assuming he’s saying that the creation ex nihilo (“from nothing”) in the Genesis story recapitulates science’s Big Bang theory, meaning that science is validating the Bible’s creation story.

Nope—not even the Bible claims God created out of nothing. Let’s unravel the problem by examining the relevant verses in Genesis 1.

  • Verse 1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This simply introduces the topic. It doesn’t identify the materials God used or state that God used none.
  • Verse 2: “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” (“the deep” is the ocean). Surprise! There was water already.
  • Verse 9: God said, “Let [the ocean water] be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And apparently land was there all along, too.

God now has water and land to work with, and he begins to create material things—plants, stars and the sun, animals and birds, and finally man and woman.

Look at other creation myths from the region, and you find something similar. Those creator gods also reshaped the available material to create our earth. This common story is called the combat myth. (More on God’s nonexistent ex nihilo creation here.)

What does “nothing” mean?

“God didn’t create the world out of nothing, He created the world from nothing. Big difference. The reason I am making the distinction here is to avoid confusion. We are really playing a semantic game here.”

Yes, the atheist argument seems to have gone off on an uninteresting tangent—nothing as a kind of building material vs. nothing as no thing. But since neither science nor Genesis say that nothing preceded the Big Bang, we can ignore it.

This raises questions like what caused God, how we know God has been here forever, how God could ever exist timelessly, and so on. The apologist’s plate is getting full of claims that need to be justified.

Evaluation: 2/10. I think this one fails. The Christian response fails, too, so this has been a useful exercise, but I don’t see much of an atheist argument here.

Concluded in part 5 with the arguments: the universe doesn’t look designed as humanity’s home + evolution.

For my money, the classic example
of a guy who died for his beliefs was Adolf Hitler.
In any event, martyrdom may be evidence of sincerity, but—
given the emotional trauma of the occasion—
it’s the last place you’d look for accuracy.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from Buzz Andersen (free-use license)
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