How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

I recently wrote about the contradictory definitions of faith here. For this post, I’ll use this definition: faith is belief held not primarily because of evidence and little shaken in the face of contrary evidence; that is, belief neither supported nor undercut by evidence.

See that earlier post to explore the two definitions and see why I think this one is widely accepted within Christianity. To give one example of this usage, the popular Christian apologetics book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist uses that evidence-less definition in its very title.

Faith as a belief that doesn’t demand evidence is getting close to the philosophy of Lewis Carroll’s White Queen: “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Can even religion ennoble this approach? Let’s critique this popular definition of faith.

Why have faith?

Faith is permission to believe something without a good reason. Believing because it is reasonable and rational requires no faith at all. Trying to believe is like trying to fall asleep—it’s not something that benefits from intellectual effort. As an exercise, try to believe in unicorns or leprechauns. You can’t will yourself to believe.

Here’s the value in faith. Suppose you face a Chasm of Unknown. Maybe the question is, Is there an afterlife? Or, What explains the suffering in the world? If you could cross that chasm, you could hold the belief that there is an afterlife or that suffering is all part of a perfect plan. Or maybe it’s a Chasm of Longing—the loss of a loved one has taken all the joy from life. Or perhaps agonizing problems make one feel helpless. There may be no science or reason that can cross such a chasm, but no chasm is so broad that faith can’t teleport you across.

If someone’s life has taken a desperate turn, I won’t criticize whatever they need to believe to get through a difficult period. But for the rest of us, why would you want to cross such a chasm this way? Why ignore the tools you use in every other part of life for separating sense from nonsense?

What upholds our belief?

Part of the answer is Shermer’s Law, which states that we use our intellect to justify beliefs arrived at for non-intellectual reasons. If you believe something important (like the tenets of a religion) for no better reason than that you were raised that way, you likely won’t admit that, even to yourself. You’re going to use your intellect to assemble rationalizations for the belief even though those reasons weren’t what led you to that belief in the first place. You’ll point to apologetic arguments you’ve come across, not because they had any role in creating your faith but because they make you look rational.

Martin Luther King said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” But why? Why take any steps in faith except to get you across a chasm that reason and evidence are unable to? And once across that chasm, is there anything substantial upholding your new belief, anything that you’d happily admit to an observer?

If there’s no good evidence to cross the chasm, just don’t cross. Admit the truth and say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t have enough evidence.”

Do you “take a step of faith” in any other discipline? Certainly not in science. There are guesses, of course, but the goal in science is always to replace guesses with facts and follow the evidence where it leads. Trust (belief based on evidence) is used in science, and there are no “leaps of trust.”

Faith often doesn’t mean answers but merely an end to questions.

A critique of faith

Faith is the worst decision-making technique available. Crossing a busy street, evaluating a dangerous mistake your child made, getting treatment after you’ve broken a bone—faith is never the tool to use. Faith is usually kept on a leash and used only when (1) you want to believe something that’s contradicted by (or unsupported by) the facts and (2) there are no big consequences for doing so. The few exceptions where there are consequences become either causes of alarm (children who died because their parents insisted on prayer rather than medicine) or public ridicule (people who sold their possessions to make themselves right with God before the end of the world or the woman who closed her eyes to pray while driving). “Jesus, take the wheel” might make a good country music song title but certainly isn’t something you’d really do.

Even a guess is better than a decision by faith because, with a guess, you’re willing to consider evidence that you made a mistake.

Faith is celebrated only when there’s nothing else, and Christian apologists prefer evidence. Want to know how I know? Because when they have evidence, they always emphasize it! No apologist says, “Well, we do have evidence for Jesus outside the Bible, but frankly I never put that forward as an argument. I find belief by faith to be much more compelling.”

And that’s a clue. Backers of a claim well supported by evidence wouldn’t bother appealing to faith, but faith would be the fallback if the claims were false. Faith doesn’t prove that the Christian claims are false, but that’s where the evidence points.

Faith in the New Testament

Let’s consider again: what good is faith? Paul the apostle didn’t have faith. He didn’t need it, if he indeed received the gospel from a vision of Jesus. The same is true for the disciples. According to the gospels, they heard Jesus’s message in person. I don’t have faith that my car is blue since that’s a fact that I’ve experienced. Why can’t we also have direct evidence of Jesus rather than relying on faith? Faith is required now because that’s part of God’s plan . . . or maybe because the whole thing is legendary, and Christian leaders today are just passing along a tradition.

If faith were a useful tool, there would have a method for distinguishing between true and false faith claims, but there is no way to judge if any particular proposition held by faith is true or not. Indeed, there may be nothing that’s impossible to believe on faith, and many of those propositions must be false, at least in the real world. Christianity itself shows the problem since Christians have disagreed on important propositions since the earliest days (the losing propositions are called “heresies” by the winners). The church has permanently split over such issues. Christian factions have fought wars over such issues.

This contrast between how religion decides questions and how science does is illustrated in the map of world religions. It’s inconceivable that a map of science would show one view of the solar system dominant in this part of the world and another in that part, one model of the atom here and another there, and yet that’s how it works with religion. In science, ideas are evaluated in the same objective way, and a new successful idea peacefully sweeps the relevant part of the scientific world within months or years. In religion, ideas aren’t evaluated based on evidence, and division remains static for centuries.

Scientists don’t gather periodically to sing, and no one writes articles telling them how to prop up their faith in science. There is no equivalent within science of doctrinal statements, a mental straitjacket dictating correct and incorrect thinking. Doctrinal statements create in Christian institutions a dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four environment, where certain subjects become thoughtcrime. Consider what happened to Mike Licona when he crossed the line.

Christian rebuttal

One popular Christian response is something like, “But you believe in science on faith!” I don’t—I trust in science, and that trust is nicely supported by evidence—but let’s go there. They seem to be saying, “Well, you’re just as much an idiot as I am, since you believe stuff on faith, too!” But isn’t faith a good thing from a Christian viewpoint? Wouldn’t “You believe by faith, too” be a compliment? And if science and religion both use the same approach (“faith,” or whatever you want to call it), then why is it only science with the track record of curing disease, increasing crop yields, and landing people on the moon?

Let’s consider the trust I have in science. I’m an outsider to science, but it’s easy to evaluate science’s track record. I use cell phones, computers, and cars, and science delivers. But in principle I could become an insider. I could get a doctorate in evolutionary biology or cosmology or quantum physics and I would be able to test the claims for myself. Is there any equivalent within Christianity? Scholars with doctorates in theology are still burdened with the map-of-world-religions problem. In science, my doctorate would let me thoroughly understand the consensus view, but within religion there is no consensus!

That reminds me of a story. It’s said that Winston Churchill would sometimes drink too much. On one of these occasions, a woman said to him, “Winston, you are drunk!”

Churchill replied, “Indeed, Madam, and you are ugly—but tomorrow I’ll be sober.”

The analogous interaction for our purposes would be a believer who says, “You take science on faith.”

The atheist replies, “Let’s suppose I do, and you take God’s existence on faith—but I could get a doctorate in any science and lose that need for faith. Could you do the equivalent?”

Conclusion

Christians say that truth is their goal, and they even capitalize Truth to assure us (or maybe themselves) that they’ve really found it, but methinks they doth protest too much. They’re not welcome at the adult table until they use tools that actually work at finding the truth.

Faith recoils from reason because reason unravels the happy lies that faith wants to believe.

Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said;
“One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the [White] Queen.
“When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/15/16.)

Image from Perry Kibler (free-use license)

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Atheists’ Terrible, Unbearable Worldview (and Some Pushback)

It’s our lucky day! Someone else wants to lecture atheists on how best to live as an atheist. Let’s see how the attack holds up this time.

Transhumanism and worldview

Transhumanism is technology to augment human frailties, and Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC) dismissed any hope that it would give atheists what the Christian worldview has.

It’s difficult to live with the conclusions of an atheistic worldview. The kind of nihilism that atheism implies, I think, is existentially unbearable. And therefore one will either be profoundly unhappy if one tries to live consistently, or, more probably, in order to be happy one will simply choose to live inconsistently, and one will grasp for these substitutes, these surrogates [that is, technologically-driven approaches to human life extension], for God and immortality.

I am continually amazed at WLC’s arguments. It’s difficult for him to live with the conclusions of an atheistic worldview . . . and so what? That says absolutely nothing about the correctness of atheism! He has two doctorates. He knows this. But by example, he’s encouraging his followers to pick their conclusions first and ignore any evidence.

Think of what they imagine WLC giving them license for.

  • Atheism says that you won’t be playing canasta with Jesus in heaven a million years from now? No problem—just reject it. Evidence is for losers. Just follow your heart.
  • Evolution makes baby Jesus cry? No problem—declare that the Bible (or tradition or your pastor) trumps science.
  • Policies to reduce climate change might be expensive or inconvenient? No problem—just find a PhD who says whatever you’d rather hear. All you need is one.

Wishful thinking like this instead of an evidence-based argument would be rejected in middle school. Is this an approach to knowledge what WLC would teach his philosophy students? This childish thinking does not help produce a durable society able to adapt and improve.

I thought (wrongly, obviously) that being on their best intellectual behavior was what Christian philosophers did to polish the reputation of their philosophical arguments. Most of us abandoned this kind of thinking when we stopped being six years old.

I realize this isn’t news—it’s just what conservative Christians do. But I’m amazed at the lack of a fig leaf, the lack of even a pretense of applying those two doctorates.

Rant over; back to the argument

(Sigh.) So where were we? WLC says that atheism is existentially unbearable, but I follow the evidence, and the evidence says that we live and die and that’s it. There’s no evidence of a heaven, so we shouldn’t believe in one. A finite life isn’t perfect, but dealing with unpleasant realities is what adults do. Wishing for a happier reality doesn’t get us anywhere.

He then ponders the distant future (the very distant future):

These futile gestures toward the prolongation of human existence [such as putting human consciousness into computers] are all ultimately futile because the universe itself is doomed to destruction in the thermodynamic heat death of the cosmos. . . .

It’s so sobering it’s almost unbearable to face.

He ought to hang around atheists more to marvel at their superhuman abilities of acting like grownups and realizing that sometimes you don’t get what you want.

Let’s try to grasp his concern. Suppose scientists and engineers eventually extend human lifetimes to a thousand years. No—suppose they could extend lifetimes to a billion years. WLC wonders, why would they bother? The universe will still end eventually. For him, it’s all or nothing, infinite life or finite life. A longer life still has an end, and that’s unbearable.

Now return to the “heat death of the cosmos.” WLC uses that as a marker for the effective end of the universe. The heat death of the universe is hypothesized in 10100 years, and he’s saying that no matter how effective scientists are in extending life, they can’t beat this ultimate limit. Whether your life lasts ninety years or a thousand years or a billion years or (incredibly) 10100 years, he says it’s all futile.

This crazy thinking is so outside ordinary concerns that I must return to it one final time. WLC says, “It’s so sobering it’s almost unbearable to face” that the universe will be dead in a googol years. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. “Unbearable to face”? WLC needs a new therapist. No one else is kept awake by this thought.

Finite human lifespan bothers me, too, but this is crazy. Would life this long be a gift or a burden?

I’m sure our more sensitive readers have picked up on WLC’s disquiet, but don’t worry. He has an escape hatch to heaven. The end of life is “unbearable to face” for him personally, and yet he’s comfortable with the idea of billions of souls in hell. Fellow atheists: when you’re in torment in hell, you can take a bit of comfort knowing that WLC won’t care. Scream all you want—you won’t rain on his parade.

(More on heaven being hellish here.)

The role of evidence

This critique of the atheist worldview is backwards. Whether you like the atheist worldview or not doesn’t matter. The focus should be on whether it’s correct or not. Figure that out, and then we can talk about the implications.

WLC was paraphrased by his cohost on where the evidence points:

Even if the evidence [for atheism vs. Christianity] were 50/50, who in the world would want to lean toward such a negative, depressing, dark view [that is, toward atheism]?

That is so not the topic. How did we get to the evidence for atheism and Christianity being equal? This is like saying, “Even if the evidence for my buying the winning Powerball lottery ticket were 50/50, who would want to lean toward the possibility that I might not win?” Your focus shouldn’t be on what to do when the evidence is a tossup (since it isn’t); it should be on understanding the actual probability and accepting the consequences.

Your chance of buying one ticket that wins the Powerball jackpot are about one in 300 million. Is Christianity any likelier to be true? Christians must provide the evidence.

The role of truth

Apparently we see the role of truth differently. Christians, is truth important to you? Do you really want to see reality, or would you ransom truth for the hope of a more pleasing worldview?

“Worldview X is unpleasant; therefore it’s untrue” isn’t how I could ever think. I’d rather see an ugly truth clearly than have it covered by a pretty lie.

And no, atheism is not discouraging

Is WLC spotting the inevitable consequences from the atheist worldview that others can’t see, or do atheists not see these consequences because they’re not there?

An atheist is simply someone who has no god belief, and very little follows from that. Has WLC ever discussed worldviews with an atheist? Very few would say that life is meaningless because of their lack of god belief. It’s not a dismal view, and the atheist shares with the theist the ordinary sources of happiness. If there is no afterlife, then life is short and precious. We don’t have time for make-believe.

Actually, it’s WLC who sees life as meaningless. He says that life on earth is “the cramped and narrow foyer leading to the great hall of God’s eternity.” What a dismal view of the only life we’re sure we get! To WLC, life on earth seems to be an ordeal to be gotten through, the overcooked vegetables that must be endured to earn dessert.

Let’s revisit those worldviews

Like Job, who was an uncomprehending pawn in a bet between Satan and God, Christians can find themselves experiencing hardships that aren’t explained in the Bible. Christians, you’re stuck defending a god who won’t meet you halfway by making his mere existence plain. Prayer doesn’t work as promised, the imminent second coming is 2000 years overdue, Jesus’s comfort during hard times is just Christian self-talk, and God isn’t necessary to explain anything we see around us.

The Christian world is like Alice’s Wonderland—weird and mysterious and run by an inscrutable god. We’re told this god wants a relationship, but somehow he always has a reason to remain hidden. He unfailingly ignores opportunities to step forward and do something useful, like preventing earthquakes or ending the current pandemic. He is indistinguishable from nothing at all. “God did it” is always a solution looking for a problem, and Christians are often forced to pick between science and the Bible.

Compare that with the atheist’s worldview. Atheists have no baggage preventing them from following the evidence. They won’t lose friends, family, or social standing. They can align themselves with reality, not make excuses for superstition. Christians, having a worldview with no cognitive dissonance is refreshing.

No, Dr. Craig, it’s not the atheist worldview that’s difficult to live with.

Another recent Christian worldview attack: About Atheists’ Empty Worldview . . .

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it,
however helpful it might be;
if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it,
even if it gives him no help at all.
— C.S. Lewis

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Image from Brock DuPont (free-use license)
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About Atheists’ Empty Worldview . . . (3 of 3)

Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry has written “Atheism’s Empty Soul,” an article that corrects atheists’ confusion about the consequences of their own worldview. Last time we looked at the first two arguments, that atheists (that is, naturalists) can’t claim to have free will and that they can’t claim knowledge. In this last post, we consider the final argument. (Part 1 here.)

Third, naturalism leads to nihilism because morality doesn’t exist

“The world, according to naturalism, is just there. Students cheat in school, lions eat zebras, and men rape women. Life just happens. There’s no way the world is supposed to be because there’s no ‘supposer.’ ”

So you think that God is the celestial Supposer, but by your own admission conditions for his creation are terrible?? As you say, “Students cheat in school, lions eat zebras, and men rape women”—and God allows that to happen? There are good things here on earth, but there are plenty of bad things as well; puppies and sunsets but also plague and drought. This is the best that God can do? This is his Perfect Plan? I must have higher standards for an omnipotent God than you do, since the mediocre role you imagine for God offends me a lot more than you.

(I can anticipate the Christian response. Pesky humans screwed up God’s plan, but he knew that would happen because he’s omnipotent, and he has some convoluted only-a-sacrifice-will-do fix, but let’s not go there now.)

Shlemon says:

[According to the naturalist,] God doesn’t exist as our objective moral standard, so there’s no fixed set of morals that exists outside of ourselves. Each person acts however they like.

If objective moral standards exist, show me. Plenty of apologists gesture toward them, but they always omit good evidence. I can think of no such evidence (more here and here).

And, yes, each person acts how they like. We take inputs from our conscience, personal experience, and society, and we respond. What’s left for the God hypothesis to explain?

Maybe you’d prefer this: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. That’s not for me. I’d rather find my own life goal, however clumsily, than have it imposed by seventeenth-century theologians.

Shlemon expands on his thesis, lamenting that atheists can’t do good or noble things. Without an ideal, there’s no way to better ourselves. He says about atheists, “Life is a trek with no moral compass and no destination.”

Which is how pretty much zero atheists would describe their lives. Here’s a tip: when you tell someone how their worldview should play out in their lives and they reject that, acknowledge that they’re experts in their worldview and reconsider your statement.

Objective morality

Shlemon’s claim can be salvaged if we imagine him going for objectively correct good and noble actions or an objective meaning to life. But this is unnecessary—the ordinary, non-objective kinds of “good” and “meaning” as defined in a dictionary are the definitions everyone uses.

More tough love:

But it’s worse. Despite the absence of morality, there’s no shortage of guilt. People have an intuitive sense that they do wrong. But in a world without God, there’s no forgiveness.

Suppose I steal something, and I’m found out by the victim a week later. I admit that I stole the item but assure them that everything has been made right. “I’ve confessed to God,” I tell them, “and I feel an assurance that he’s accepted my apology. I feel so much better!” Problem solved?

Of course not. If I steal something, I don’t need God’s forgiveness since I didn’t steal from God. Back to Shlemon, in a world without God, there can indeed be forgiveness from where it counts, the victim.

Our conscience, which sometimes punishes us with a feeling of guilt, comes from evolution. Guilt is yet another thing we don’t need the God hypothesis for.

Christianity to the rescue!

Shlemon wraps up by pointing to the Christian alternative.

The Christian worldview, by contrast, can justify free will, explain knowledge, and define right and wrong.

Oh, but I’m certain that it can’t—at least not with evidence that would satisfy an objective third party. Show us with evidence that God is more than wishful thinking. Or, don’t bother, since God solves no problem: even without God, atheists have a sense of free will, access to knowledge, and a working moral framework identical to Christians’.

Here’s an experiment: imagine there’s no God. Can you explain everything you experience with this godless worldview? In our world, prayers are sometimes answered and sometimes not. Sometimes good things happen and sometimes bad things—natural disasters and disease on one hand but also newborn babies and job success. Natural explanations easily explain all this and more. Is the God hypothesis necessary for anything?

The difference between faith and reason
is like the difference between theft and honest toil.
— Bertrand Russell (paraphrased)

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Image from Caleb edens (free-use license)
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About Atheists’ Empty Worldview . . . (2 of 3)

atheists empty worldview

Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry has written “Atheism’s Empty Soul,” an article that offers to correct atheists’ confusion about the consequences of their own worldview. In part 1, we looked at his argument in summary, and now we’ll consider the reasons.

First, naturalism leads to nihilism because humans don’t have free will

“We do what we are determined to do. We are cogs in a cosmic machine.”

I don’t have the interest to dig into the complicated question of free will. I have the impression of free will, and that’s good enough for me. Since you’re talking about worldviews, my worldview includes that.

The Christian position might be, “You’ve got free will, don’t you? Well, there you go—there must be a god to support that.” My response: (1) I see no reason why we need a god to create the impression of free will that I have, and (2) I see many traits of our reality that are incompatible with the Christian god existing (these are my silver-bullet arguments). Resolve those showstoppers first, and then we can consider if the facts of reality point to a god.

The Christian argument in this article is all attack and no defense. What I want to see instead is as much time justifying the unbelievable Christian worldview as is spent attacking the atheist worldview.

Second, naturalism leads to nihilism because knowledge is unattainable

Next, Shlemon defines knowledge as “justified true belief.” Break that apart and focus on the underlined words: you know that proposition A is true if (1) A is indeed true, (2) you believe A is true, and (3) you are justified in believing A is true (that is, you used a reliable method in coming to your belief, rather than flipping a coin).

He argues that the naturalist can never attain this kind of knowledge.

The problem for the atheist arises from the fact that their worldview of naturalism views the brain as a wholly material object, subject to the environmental forces of physics and chemistry. Such forces, however, have no interest in producing reliable cognitive faculties. Physical forces on a physical object like the brain won’t necessarily produce a trustworthy system of independent thought, reason, and logical deduction. Since we can’t be confident in our ability to attain justified true beliefs, we can’t have knowledge.

This is Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN): natural forces are, at root, just mindless physics and chemistry. Natural selection doesn’t favor truth but rather genes being passed on to the next generation. How can knowledge—justified true belief—be the result of a process that focuses on survival rather than truth?

Evolution answers the question

To see how a foundation of skills shaped by evolution can support higher-level traits, imagine learning to hit a ball with a bat. At first, you’re terrible at it, but you have reliable feedback. A pitch and a swing takes just a few seconds, and you immediately know how well you did. If your swing was poor, you have clues about what you did wrong. You can test your improvements when the process repeats seconds later. After weeks of practice, you’ll be pretty good. Your ability to hit a ball was built on accurate vision, kinesthetics (our sense of motion and body position), and muscles that adapt, all traits that evolution could select for because they benefit survival.

Another illustration: the modern human brain is no better than the one used by Paleolithic humans 12,000 years ago. How can this Stone Age brain understand calculus? How can it invent calculus?

Let’s first consider a similar question with living skin. The first nuclear radiation burns on skin happened in the twentieth century. Evolution had no chance to improve skin to better withstand gamma rays, but evolution honed skin to be general purpose. It’s durable and self-repairing, both to ancient injuries (such as scrapes, bites, and sunburn) and new ones (knives, bullets, and gamma rays).

In the same way, the human brain is general purpose. The brain selected by evolution to be good at communicating, animal tracking, and general problem solving is also good at wondering about the planets, finding natural laws, and inventing calculus. (Which leads to the tangential but fascinating question: what if the mental toolkit we inherited through evolution had been radically different? What ideas and knowledge would that have fostered that we can’t even imagine because we would have had to have inherited that toolkit to imagine them?)

Mindless evolution

To see what brainless evolution can do, look at the field of genetic programming. Here’s a project that tries to recreate the Mona Lisa with 50 semi-transparent polygons. Starting with random polygons, it evolves them by randomly changing them slightly with each generation and comparing the result with the actual painting, keeping the best approximation. That’s random mutation and selection—just like in evolution in nature. After a thousand iterations of the polygons, the image is nonsense; after ten thousand you’d say “Oh, yeah” if someone told you it was a rough Mona Lisa; and after a million, anyone would immediately identify it.

Knowledge finding is an emergent property. (I respond in more depth to Plantinga’s EAAN argument here.)

And what is the Christian alternative? That God is the homunculus at the wheel, justifying your knowledge? A little man sitting inside your head pushing the levers and pedals, driving you like construction equipment? Or maybe that the soul connects us with some sort of intelligence in the supernatural realm?

With the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, the Christian has solved one (invented) problem by creating another: where’s the evidence for God or the soul or even anything supernatural? Even if science had no idea how consciousness, thinking, or knowledge finding arose, that does nothing to argue that God did it.

Concluded in part 3.

America, the country that has the most Nobel Prizes in science,
also has the most willfully ignorant people per capita
when it comes to understanding science.
Mrs. Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian

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Image from Chris Karidis (free-use license)
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About Atheists’ Empty Worldview . . .

Atheism’s Empty Soul” is a recent article from Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry. Shlemon tries to slap some sense into those hard-hearted atheists by showing the inevitable, grave consequences of their worldview. Shlemon informs us that the atheist worldview, seen correctly, is nihilism, the view that life is meaningless.

Something always seems to be off when someone tells me that I haven’t assembled the components of my worldview correctly, but that they’re happy to educate me about how that would look. Let’s see how this critique goes.

A livable worldview?

The article begins:

Atheists don’t have a livable worldview. I don’t say that to gloat. Several atheists who have been candid with me have told me life is ultimately empty and devoid of meaning.

Oops—three sentences in, and we grind to a halt. Atheists, does “empty and devoid of meaning” sound like your life?

The key word here is “ultimately,” and, yes, an atheist’s life has no ultimate, cosmic, eternal, or objective meaning. But does the Christian’s? They claim their lives have ultimate meaning, of course, but they need to show their work. Otherwise, this is merely evidence-less dogma. Atheists have access to the ordinary kind of purpose and meaning for their lives as much as anyone.

If it sounds arrogant for person A to tell person B how the B worldview doesn’t hold up, we turn to an unlikely ally. Greg Koukl, also of Stand to Reason, made that very point. In a podcast, Koukl said,

It’s always a mistake to critique another worldview from inside your own. (@4:50)

He says it’s fine to criticize a worldview by showing that it’s incoherent or contradictory internally, and I would add that it’s fine to show where a worldview collides with the facts of reality. The problem is one worldview critiquing another. Koukl illustrated his point with an example from a debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Jay Richards.

Hitchens said, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” When Richards assented, Hitchens then said to the audience, “I rest my case.”

Hitchens was saying that resurrections are ridiculous, and Koukl agreed that they are, from Hitchens’ worldview, but within Richards’ they make sense. Koukl argued that Hitchens was saying, “From my worldview, your worldview is flawed,” which was both true and pointless. It assumed one worldview as correct from the outset. You can’t just assume one’s worldview; you must do the heavy lifting to show that it’s correct.

I think Hitchens was doing more by comparing the Christian worldview against the fairly universal scientific worldview, but Koukl does have a point. Going forward, look for Shlemon making the mistake of assuming his worldview.

Let’s continue and discover where atheism takes us.

Step 1: atheism leads to naturalism . . .

Shlemon claims that naturalism, the rejection of the supernatural, is a consequence of atheism. About this, he said:

A belief in naturalism is neither a neutral nor an insignificant commitment.

I don’t see the big deal. Given the two alternatives of naturalism and supernaturalism, naturalism is the default. Life around us is full of natural causes (rivers carve canyons, sunlight through suspended water droplets cause rainbows, germs can cause disease, and so on). And while people in societies worldwide see supernatural causes, we have never reached a consensus view on what these supernatural causes are or even the names of the god(s) responsible. Christians and atheists agree that some of these claimed supernatural causes are wrong, and maybe they all are.

Naturalism observes that supernaturalism has the burden of proof, and it hasn’t met it.

And step 2: naturalism leads to nihilism

He gives three reasons that naturalism leads to nihilism, which Wikipedia defines this way:

Nihilism is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, expressing some form of negation towards life or towards fundamental concepts such as knowledge, existence, and the meaning of life. Different nihilist positions hold variously that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities does not exist.

Show me that a sizeable fraction of atheists feel that life is meaningless. Nihilism certainly doesn’t describe my life philosophy. As with the “life [for an atheist] is ultimately empty and devoid of meaning” claim above, atheists should consider whether nihilism describes their lives. If not, we can return to Greg Koukl’s insistence that one worldview can’t judge another.

Shlemon makes an enormous jump from atheism to nihilism. The remainder of his post is a discussion of three points that argue that nihilism is a consequence of naturalism. I’m skeptical of any argument of the form, “I’m not an atheist, but if you are, you gotta believe x, y, and z” when, for me, it simply means that I have no god belief. That’s it.

Nihilism is a depressing state, but it flows logically from naturalism for three reasons.

 Uh oh—it sounds like tough-love time. We’ll get into his three reasons in part 2.

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

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Image from Izz R (free-use license)
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Faith, the Other F-Word? (2 of 2)

What does faith mean? Does it mean belief firmly grounded in evidence? That’s the definition in vogue among many conservative apologists (and discussed in part 1). But there’s another definition that is also popular.

Faith definition 2

If you have any familiarity with Christianity, you know that this definition doesn’t cover the spectrum. “Faith” is sometimes defined to have a very different relationship with evidence.

Faith definition 2: belief held not primarily because of evidence and little shaken in the face of contrary evidence; that is, belief neither supported nor undercut by evidence. This would be a belief that can’t be shaken by a change in evidence (such as, “I won’t give up my faith in Jesus for any reason”). Evidence for one’s belief can be nonexistent, or it can actually oppose one’s belief (as in blind faith), or evidence can simply be insufficient to firmly ground the belief.

Again, let’s start with the Bible to find support for this evidence-less faith:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. . . . And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:1–6).

Then Jesus told [Doubting Thomas], “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.” (John 20:29)

The Hebrews passage has no need of evidence, and the statement of Jesus celebrates those who believe despite a lack of evidence.

Let’s check in with some early church fathers.

If you chance upon anything [in Scripture] that does not seem to be true, you must not conclude that the sacred writer made a mistake; rather your attitude should be: the manuscript is faulty, or the version is not accurate, or you yourself do not understand the matter. (Augustine)

[I don’t understand to believe but rather] I believe to understand. (Anselm of Canterbury)

Now consider some modern sources. Kurt Wise has a PhD in geology from Harvard, and yet he’s a young-earth Creationist. In high school he used scissors to cut from a Bible everything that science concluded couldn’t be interpreted literally. He said about the resulting corrected Bible, “I found it impossible to pick up the Bible without it being rent in two.”

But his definition of faith doesn’t follow the evidence:

If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.

William Lane Craig’s gullible acceptance of magic rather than evidence as the ultimate authority is equally disturbing:

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa. (Reasonable Faith [Crossway, 1994] p. 36)

We can see both definitions of “faith” in Geisler and Turek’s I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. In part 1, we saw how they celebrate evidence when they think they have it. But the very title of their book denigrates “faith” as a leap unsupported by evidence. They say:

The less evidence you have for your position, the more faith you need to believe it (and vice versa). Faith covers a gap in knowledge. (p. 26)

Richard Dawkins once challenged Kenneth Miller’s justification for holding some religious belief (both men are biologists, but Miller is Catholic). Miller replied, “There’s a reason it’s called faith!” (rather than “certainty”).

Finally, consider a faith that has real-world consequences. Though religion wasn’t involved, it seems faith rather than physics guided a hot-coal-walking exercise put on by motivational speaker Tony Robbins in 2012. Twenty-one people were treated for burns.

Snake handlers believe that Jesus said about them, “In my name . . . they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all” (Mark 16:17–18) despite the very clear evidence to the contrary. Pastor Mark Wolford died from a snakebite in 2012, and he had watched his father die from the same thing. Pastor Jamie Coots refused medical treatment for a snakebite in 2014 and also died. If anyone knew that God doesn’t protect believers from snakebite it was him, since that was his ninth snakebite.

Christian commentary

Christian scholars grope around as they try to justify belief without evidence.

John Warwick Montgomery suggests crossing a busy street as a parallel. You never have absolute certainty of your safety when you cross a street. Instead, you wait until you have sufficient confidence, then you cross. And then, you don’t just take 99 percent of yourself across (to match your degree of confidence in the safety of the trip); you take all of yourself. Faith jumps the gap, both for busy streets and for Jesus.

Another example is marriage. You don’t have certainty that the Bible is true, but you don’t have certainty that you’ve picked the right marriage partner, either.

Nope. Neither example makes the Christian case. Crossing a street is always based on evidence. You look for good evidence that it’s safe, and you reconsider your conclusion if new evidence comes in. You also weigh evidence in the search for a compatible mate. In the same way, we follow the evidence for the reliability of the Bible as well—and find very little, not enough to support its enormous claims.

Theologian Alvin Plantinga has an interesting angle:

No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Is there a reason to believe that there’s an even number of stars? No. An odd number? No. What about God—is there reason to think that he exists? No. That he doesn’t? Yes! You can throw up your hands in the case of the number of stars because it’s impossible to answer—agnosticism (or, more likely, apathy) is an appropriate response. But the data is in for God, and that hypothesis fails for lack of evidence, just like the leprechaun and Zeus hypotheses. (More on Plantinga’s number-of-stars puzzle here.)

Anselm said, “I believe to understand,” but that won’t work for me. If God exists, he gave me this big brain to use. It would be impolite to ignore its objections or be a Stepford wife. If God exists, he’d be happy to see me challenging empty Christian claims.

Pick a definition and stick with it

Lots of words in English have multiple definitions, even opposite definitions. Dust means to clean up dust (wiping with a cloth) or to add in a dust-like manner (dusting a cake with powdered sugar). Screen means to broadcast for everyone to see (a TV station screens a program) or to conceal (screening the baby from the sun). Cleave can mean to cling to or to split.

And as we’ve seen, faith also has two opposite definitions: belief well grounded in evidence (“I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow”) or belief uninterested in evidence (believing as your heart speaks to you). Using the latter definition, Christians might speak with unjustified confidence about what heaven is like and who’s going there, what message God sent with a recent disaster, who’s on God’s naughty list, and so on.

Christians, to help you make your own arguments more clearly and honestly, let me suggest some word hygiene. Use trust to mean evidence-based belief, belief in accord with the evidence and which will change as the evidence changes. Use faith to mean belief not primarily supported by evidence and which is not shaken by contrary evidence.

Each word has its place. Be consistent. Sloppy usage only confuses your message and yourself.

Continue: How Reliable Is a Bridge Built on Faith?

Faith and science are two methods humans use
to learn about the world around them.
One works, one doesn’t.
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/13/16.)

Image from Paolo Crosetto (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

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