BSR 28: There Is No Such Thing as Sin (28 of 28)

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This is the last Bite-Size Reply to the 28 “Quick Shot” arguments from Jim Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity blog (this series starts here).  If you have any general reactions to this series of posts, to atheists responding to lists of Christian arguments, to the state of Christian apologetics in general, or any other meta comment, please (as always) share them in the comments.

At the end, I have some final thoughts on this exercise plus links to the entire list of 28 posts. This epilogue includes the outline of possible future post series, and I’d appreciate your feedback on that idea.

♦

Summary of reply: Don’t claim sin exists without first showing that the supernatural exists; the burden of proof is the Christian’s, not the atheist’s; and science provides answers where Christianity could never even find the right questions.

Challenge to the Christian: “I don’t need an imaginary God to forgive me of my ‘sins.’ There is no such thing as sin.”

Christian response #1: Sin is analogous to missing a target, and getting rid of sin means getting rid of bull’s-eyes. Do you really want to do that, to declare that there is no such thing as a bull’s-eye in laws or moral codes?

BSR: Whoa—slow down, big fella. No one is trying to discard the idea of right and wrong. Sin is a concept only in the domain of religion. It’s “an offense against religious or moral law” or a “transgression of the law of God” (Merriam-Webster dictionary). If there’s no supernatural and no gods, then there is no sin.

The ball is in your court to show that the supernatural exists. Then we can worry about staying on the right side of the god(s).

Don’t tell me about sin without first showing that the supernatural exists. Sin is a transgression against gods, so without gods, there can be no sin. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Sin is analogous to crime, just with the violation of a different kind of law. To say there is no sin is the equivalent of saying there is no God. Justify your charge that there is no God.

BSR: Nice try, but nope—the burden of proof is yours, and it would be rude of me to take that from you. You’re the one making the remarkable claim—you are saying that there is a God so therefore sin exists. It’s not my job to show God doesn’t exist; it’s yours to show he does.

Yes, sin is analogous to crime, but we know that people and society exist, as do violations against people and society. Legal systems worldwide are similar because we know crimes (against people) exist. Murder and theft, for example, are understood worldwide, but sins vary by religious culture.

Murder and theft are understood worldwide, but sins vary by religious culture. Morality is largely universal because it’s grounded in human psychology, but religion is just a cultural trait. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Nature gives us lots of reasons to believe in God: “a fine-tuned universe that came into existence from nothing, the naturally inexplicable origin of life, and the improbable existence of information in DNA.” With good reason to believe God exists, there is good reason to believe sin exists.

BSR: Coupla problems here. First, you’re simply regurgitating scientific questions that science uncovered. These are important questions, but not only does science find the questions, it tends to find the answers as well. Your worldview couldn’t even come up with the questions, and you claim you had an all-knowing god to help!

Problem two is that none of these questions have caused the scientists who best understand them to switch to Christianity. There are Christian scientists, of course, but intellectual arguments never convert well-informed atheists into Christians.

And finally, claiming that the supernatural explains these puzzles is a deist argument. It supports Islam and Bahai just as well as Christianity.

Let’s briefly turn to these tired deist arguments.

  • Fine-tuned universe: We don’t even fully understand life on the one planet in the universe we know has life. Once we understand the conditions for all kinds of life, we can evaluate how fine tuned the universe is. Until then, the main thing we can say now with some confidence is that the universe is abysmally hostile to life as we know it. (Oh, and the Multiverse.)
  • Came into existence from nothing: Nope, that’s not what science says.
  • Naturally inexplicable origin of life: You can prove that abiogenesis is impossible naturally?! Publish that paper and collect the adulation of all biologists. Until then, don’t say stupid stuff.
  • Improbable existence of information in DNA: Genetics is amazingly complicated, and yet we still have a natural explanation for it.
Not only does science find the questions, it tends to find the answers as well. The Christian’s worldview couldn’t even come up with the questions, and they claim to have had an omniscient god to help! [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Epilogue

The goal of Jim Wallace’s original list was to take 28 popular atheist arguments and give Christians quick responses that they could look up on the fly, while in the middle of an argument, and use immediately. I see how debating someone on the opposite side of a hot topic, especially in public, can be difficult. I don’t mind his attempt to put training wheels on Christian arguments to help out. I structured my responses to deliberately mimic his minimalistic approach, and perhaps they can be used in the same way.

Nevertheless, there’s no alternative to knowing the issues well. Giving as a rebuttal an argument that you’re reading from your phone, live, for the first time, isn’t the best use. Better would be to admit that you have no answer, thank your antagonist for the new information, and promise to get back to them when you do have a response.

These Bite-Size Replies probably won’t provide you with an effective response in a real-time debate (unless it’s simply to refresh your memory of an argument you already understand). Instead, use them as training before you engage with someone and as study afterwards to improve weaknesses in your argument.

As I went through these Christian responses over the last five months, I noticed that some were arguments that I might make (Christianity supports slavery and genocide) and some that I wouldn’t (“Christian Hypocrisy Proves Christianity False” or “All God Expects of Us Is Sincerity”). Nevertheless, for completeness, I replied to them all. Many seemed clumsily worded so I steel-manned (which is the opposite of straw-manning) those arguments as well as I could to have something to respond to.

The original Christian posts were all replies to atheist arguments, not arguments for Christianity, so this isn’t a survey of the entire field of Christian apologetics. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that if this is the best Christianity has to offer, it’s in sad shape. None of these posts were difficult to respond to. The biggest challenge was making my argument terse and clear, not in finding a response to the Christian position. Feel free to add your own thoughts about the quality of the Christian arguments.

My challenge for Christian apologists

Let me return the favor. Christian apologists, I have a list of 27 arguments (and growing) that I’m now calling silver-bullet arguments. (Early in the list, I called them “Reasons we don’t live in a world with a god.” Same idea with a different name—sorry for the confusion.) The list begins here. In my mind, every one of these arguments single-handedly defeats Christianity. If you disagree, I invite your response. Write Quick Shots against these.

What about atheist Quick Shots?

Jim Wallace’s original list was Christian responses to atheist arguments. With this list of Bite-Size Replies, I’ve responded, but what I haven’t done is create the atheist equivalent.

In other posts at this blog, I’ve responded to most of the Christian arguments, but some of those are 3000 words long or longer. Is there any value in short posts (again, fairly close to what Jim Wallace did) responding to the most popular dozen or so Christian arguments or claims? Let me know what you think.

For further reading:

Praying is like a rocking chair:
It’ll give you something to do,
but it won’t get you anywhere.
— Gypsy Rose Lee

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Image from Eli Christman, (license: CC BY 2.0)

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Complete list of Bite-Size Replies with links

BSR 27: There Are No Good Reasons to Believe in Miracles

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Summary of reply: redefining “miracle” is not helpful, “consciousness” is no more miraculous than a thousand other abstract nouns, and David Hume’s recommendation for critiquing miracles is still valid.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: There are no good reasons to believe in miracles.

Christian response #1: Don’t be hasty—maybe you already believe in them! Let’s define a miracle as an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws. Big Bang cosmology says the universe came into existence from nothing. Since space, time, and matter didn’t exist, the cause couldn’t have been spatial, temporal, or material. Therefore, that cause is “not explicable by natural or scientific laws,” and the universe was a miracle.

BSR: No, let’s not define a miracle that way, since “inexplicable by (known) scientific laws” describes many unanswered questions within science. Surely “miracle” must mean more than “a thing we can’t yet explain with science.” And shouldn’t the supernatural appear somewhere in the definition?

Let’s also discard a couple of false claims. No, Big Bang theory doesn’t say that the universe came from nothing. That’s possible, but the jury’s out. Genesis doesn’t even say that God created the universe from nothing.

Second, the universe may have had no cause. Some quantum events, like the decay of a radioactive nucleus, are thought to have no cause. The Big Bang might have likewise come from a causeless quantum event.

Christians, you’ll look less ridiculous if you get your science from scientists, not apologists.

Christians, you’ll look less ridiculous if you get your science from scientists, not apologists. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: We already know about non-physical, non-material things like consciousness or mind. These can’t be explained physically or materially. Why then reject the existence of other realities not governed by laws of nature?

BSR: We need to start with a quick English lesson. There are two kinds of nouns, concrete and abstract. Concrete nouns are physical things, like glass, Boston, dog, or grimace. All the rest are abstract nouns, like permission, happiness, charity, or courage. Abstract nouns don’t have physical properties like color, height, or weight. This Christian response highlights certain nouns—in particular, consciousness and mind—which aren’t particularly special. They’re just abstract nouns like thousands of others, like permission and courage.

What’s difficult about a word like courage? While it doesn’t have the properties a concrete noun has, it is brought into existence through matter. We can understand it at different levels such as brain chemistry, neurophysiology, psychology, or sociology. There’s more to learn, but we have no reason to expect that we will need to invoke the supernatural to explain it.

The same is true for mind. Mind is what the brain does. We can also understand the mind at different levels. We continue to learn about the brain, but why imagine that we’ll need to rely on the supernatural to explain the mind any more than we need it to explain happiness, frustration, or courage? The supernatural explains nothing because we have no useful evidence of the supernatural.

As an aside, note that we know of no minds without brains. What does that tell us about where God’s mind must reside?

Why are “mind” or “consciousness” so special? They’re just abstract nouns like thousands of others. We don’t need to invoke the supernatural to explain “courage” or “hunger,” so why expect that for the mind? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: When categorizing phenomena, Philosopher David Hume said that we should give priority to things that occur repeatedly or regularly over those that occur rarely. While rarely is part of the definition of a miracle, remember that it’s also part of the definition of the Big Bang. If Big Bangs are rare or even unique, and we’re very familiar with the non-physical (such as consciousness and free will), what’s surprising about a rare miracle with a non-physical cause?

BSR: What’s surprising would be anything with a supernatural cause. Science has shown us countless instances of phenomena (lightning, plagues, floods, etc.) incorrectly thought to have supernatural causes. We’ve seen zero instances of the reverse—something with a supposed natural cause that was actually caused by the supernatural. As for non-physical things such as consciousness and free will, these are just our old friends, abstract nouns.

David Hume’s observation has been called the Law of Least Astonishment: don’t put forward a body of evidence to argue for a miracle unless that evidence being false would be even more miraculous than the miracle. So we should reject the crazier: either Jesus raised people from the dead or that ancient story was just the result of history and legend. Either a miracle healing happened at Lourdes or that miracle claim was incorrect somehow.

Drop the God presupposition, and the choice is easy.

Did Jesus raise someone from the dead or was that ancient story the result of oral history and legend? We should reject the crazier. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

This post series is concluded at: BSR 28: There Is No Such Thing as Sin (28 of 28) 

For further reading:

A theory is the more impressive
the greater the simplicity of its premises,
the more different kinds of things it relates,
and the more extended its area of applicability.
— Albert Einstein

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Image from Eduardo Mallmann, (free-use license)
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BSR 26: If Christianity Were True, There Wouldn’t Be So Many Denominations

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Summary of reply: A perfect creator should be able to accurately convey his perfect message to the people he created. And yet, somehow, he can’t. It’s not looking good for God.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here. I’m hoping to wrap up the final three this week.)

Challenge to the Christian: If Christianity were true, there wouldn’t be so many denominations.

Christian response #1: Sure, Christians disagree, but so do atheists. Christians agree that God exists, and atheists agree that he doesn’t, but there are disagreements within both camps on lots of issues.

BSR: It’s true that some atheists are Democrats and some Republicans, some reject the supernatural entirely and some don’t, some reject vaccines and GMOs and some accept the scientific consensus on these. Atheism is a simple, narrow claim: “There are no gods” or “I have no god belief” or something similar, and that’s it. Christianity is vastly larger and contains the Bible and all its claims, angels, the Trinity, the history of doctrinal changes, 2000 years of church tradition, the decisions of 2000 years of church councils, rules of conduct, and so on.

When you compare the two, of course Christianity looks like the aftermath of the Tower of Babel, so where’s the problem? The problem is that Christianity claims to have come from an omniscient, perfect author. Surely this perfect author was able to convey his Most Important Message clearly so that his Most Cherished Creation could understand it.

The Bible makes clear that this was the idea. Jesus said, “I pray [that all believers] may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” Paul said, “I appeal . . . that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

A perfect author could surely convey his Most Important Message so that his Most Cherished Creation could clearly understand it. Why then 45,000 denominations? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Sure, Christians disagree, but so do scientists. “Cosmologists disagree, therefore the universe doesn’t exist” is just as wrong as “Christians disagree, therefore God doesn’t exist.”

BSR: We should expect an omniscient god to be able to communicate his message clearly to everyone, but no one expects scientists to instantly answer every new question. There is disagreement at the frontier of science, but consensus typically emerges after a few decades. For example, quantum tunneling was first noticed in 1927, it was understood in more general cases by mid-century, and it has long since become a commonplace part of the physics that underlies today’s electronics. But in Christianity, many issues are never resolved but instead cause a permanent split in the church. Even when a theological issue is agreed to within Christianity, most outsiders reject it.

Even for scientific questions that take decades to resolve—plate tectonics, quasicrystals, string theory, or cold fusion, say—more evidence tends to resolve the conflict. Christianity, by contrast, has little use for evidence. Scientists tend to converge, and Christians tend to diverge. Christianity is forming new denominations at a rate of two per day.

Ask yourself why there is a map of world religions but no map of world science. Then ask whether that map of world religions looks like God’s Perfect Plan or human culture and superstition.

Ask yourself why there is a map of world religions but no map of world science. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Sure, Christians disagree. People disagree. People disagree on pretty much everything—there’s the problem.

BSR: So God made people and God has a perfect message for all people, but God couldn’t make his people so that they could understand this single, universal message? Or is omnipotent God unable to create that universal, understandable message?

This is no proof against a god of some sort, but it’s sure not looking good for God.

The “perfect” God can’t create people who can understand his message (or a message understandable by his people). Either way, it’s not looking good for God. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 27: There Are No Good Reasons to Believe in Miracles

For further reading:

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends,
of most of the people you see every day,
is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
— Theodore H. White

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Image from AJC1, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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5 Ways the Design Argument Fails

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Does life on earth look designed by an intelligence? Science says no, and evolution explains why.

We’ve been recently looking at Creationist pushback against evolution, an attempted end-run around science to encourage Joe Citizen to put on a lab coat and decide the matter for himself. I summarize the problems with that approach here.

But there’s another way to respond to this version of the Design Argument, which states that nature appears designed by a cosmic Designer. While the bacterial flagellum is a favorite bit of nature that Creationists love to marvel at, DNA itself is even more so. This version of the argument is often expressed like this:

  1. DNA is information
  2. Information only comes from designers
  3. Therefore DNA was designed
  4. Therefore evolution is inadequate to explain life
  5. Therefore God.

I’ve summarized this argument before, but I’d like to do it again. In my recent blog post series, I responded by attacking Jim Wallace’s approach. Now I want to set that aside and attack this version of the Design Argument. I will show that DNA is not evolution’s Achilles’ heel but rather a powerful rejection of this argument.

What is the Design Argument?

The Design Argument says that nature looks like it was the product of a Designer. We’ll take humans as our example designers. We know what their designs look like—artwork, airplanes, computers, skyscrapers, and so on. So the claim has become: nature looks like it was the result of human designers who had superhuman capabilities.

Now consider the kinds of constraints these designers work under. By understanding these, we can get an idea of the telltale signs of design and try to find it (or its lack) in DNA. One constraint might be cost: this wristwatch should cost as little as possible. Another might be strength: this bridge should be as strong as possible. Others could be light weight, durability, low maintenance or operating costs, safety, quick completion, long life, beauty, and so on.

Not every design will be burdened by every constraint. For example, cost wasn’t a constraint on the Apollo program, and beauty isn’t a constraint for a circuit board.

How do we attack the Design Argument?

But note one very important omission from the list: junk. No finished design will ever deliberately have unwanted, useless junk in it. A critic might label one element as junk—maybe they didn’t like some architectural ornament—but “junk” would have never been a deliberate part of the design. That makes junk the vulnerable point in the Design Argument. If we can find junk in DNA, we will defeat this argument. In fact, DNA has plenty of junk, in at least five categories.

1. DNA has junk

Human DNA is made up of 3 billion base pairs. Some mammals have less and some more. For example, cows, mice, and bats have more. The axolotl salamander has 32 billion base pairs, and other salamanders have much more. There are grasshoppers, beetles, ticks, worms, and snails with more DNA than humans. There are plants with more. The record holder is an amoeba, with 670 billion base pairs.

There are two explanations. One is that these lifeforms need all their DNA—and the axolotl salamander really needs ten times the DNA that humans have, and the Amoeba dubia really needs 200 times more—but this seems unlikely. The other option is that much of the DNA in earth life is junk.

Just because a stretch of DNA isn’t used for anything now doesn’t mean that it can’t be fodder for evolution to create some future improvement, but this isn’t what we’d expect if life is the way it is because of a designer. However, DNA full of junk is exactly what evolution would predict.

2. DNA has pseudogenes (broken genes)

Human DNA has 20 thousand protein-coding genes, but it also has nearly that many pseudogenes. My favorite example of a pseudogene is that for vitamin C. All but a handful of mammals synthesize their own vitamin C with this gene and don’t need vitamin C in their diets. About 61 million years ago, the ancestors of some primates, including humans, lost this ability when the working gene became a pseudogene. Every cell in your body contains this useless, nonworking pseudogene.

Another example is humans’ 390 genes for smell. There are also 480 pseudogenes for smell. These pseudogenes look similar enough and are in roughly the same place compared to other animals’ working genes that the evolution from gene to pseudogene is clear.

DNA full of pseudogenes is what evolution would predict, not what a Designer would create.

3. DNA has endogenous retroviruses

Viruses can’t reproduce on their own and must force a cell to do it. Sometimes a virus will infect the DNA in a germ cell (an egg or sperm). If that viral DNA is inactivated by mutation, the genome is passed down to future generations with a record of this viral invasion. Human DNA has roughly 100,000 nonworking fragments of these viruses, a record of millions of years of viral attacks, composing 5 to 8 percent of the total number of base pairs.

4. DNA has atavisms

The novel and movie Jurassic Park imagine finding dinosaur blood fossilized in ancient mosquitoes preserved in amber. In the blood is fragmentary DNA, intact enough to reconstruct dinosaurs. It doesn’t work like that back here in the real world, but biologists might be able to do it the other way around by (for example) reactivating genes for tooth formation in dinosaurs’ modern descendants, birds. Birds don’t have teeth, but their theropod dinosaur ancestors did.

When archaic genes are switched on in nature, those are called atavisms. Snakes can have legs, dolphins can have a hind pair of limbs, and humans can have tails.

5. DNA has vestigial structures

Vestigial structures are structures like the human appendix or tailbone that have lost most or all of their ancestral function. That doesn’t mean that they’re useless, just that they aren’t used for what they were originally used for. For example, ostrich wings are vestigial because they can’t be used to fly (that’s what wings do), but they’re still useful.

Other examples are eyes in blind mole rats or cave fish, the pelvis (for nonexistent legs) in the baleen whale, and goose bumps (to raise nonexistent fur) in humans.

What this shows (and doesn’t show)

The success of this argument doesn’t prove that God didn’t create DNA. He might have his own ways of design that are beyond our capabilities to appreciate. It also doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. God could still exist while letting evolution shape life.

But this does defeat the popular DNA version of the Design Argument, which says that DNA looks like it was designed. If God’s handiwork is so bizarre that it doesn’t look like anything that any conceivable designer would likely create, then Christians should rethink the Design Argument.

Related posts:

If you read the bible in reverse,
it’s about the world’s population killing each other
until there’s only 2 people left,
and then the woman pukes an apple
and they both get naked.
— Macaulay Culkin

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Image from Colin and Sarah Northway, (CC BY 2.0)
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Guest Post: Elvis, Jesus and the Natural Law Tradition

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A few years ago, I contributed a chapter to Not Seeing God (2017), edited by fellow Patheos Nonreligious blogger Jonathan M.S. Pearce (at A Tippling Philosopher). Pearce’s Onus Books has a new book out, The Unnecessary Science by Gunther Laird. The following is an excerpt from that book, which is a response to the work of some of the most popular Catholic apologists in professional philosophy working today. Here, he critiques an argument for the historical veracity of the Bible based on philosophical grounds made by one such philosopher, Edward Feser. This approach (as well as the humorous but still academically rigorous writing style) can be found throughout the rest of The Unnecessary Science.

The philosopher Edward Feser, in most of his published books and articles (such as The Last Superstition, Five Proofs for the Existence of God, and Scholastic Metaphysics, among many others) has done more than any contemporary writer to popularize and defend the Catholic religion. I have endeavored to contest his efforts directly in the new book I have recently published, The Unnecessary Science: A Critical Analysis of Natural Law Theory. In this entry for Cross Examined, I will summarize one of the arguments (out of many) I make in Chapter 2: Even if we assume the existence of a single God, and even if we assume that God is capable of miraculous intervention in the material world throughout history, we would still be unable to prove with certainty that Christianity was true through the “miracle” of the Resurrection; indeed, no apparent miracle could prove any religion true with such a high degree of philosophical certainty.

By “philosophical certainty” I refer to deductive arguments versus inductive ones. Deductive arguments are necessarily true due to the logical relationships between their premises (if the conclusion of a deductive argument follows necessarily from its premises, it is called a valid argument, and if those premises are also true, it is a sound argument). Inductive arguments are probabilistic—they rely on empirical evidence, so their conclusions can be very likely true, but not absolutely certain as is the case for deductive arguments. Feser thinks he has made a sound deductive argument for an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God (one who would never lie to His creations). That syllogism, sketched out in his book The Last Superstition and given in a more formal manner in Five Proofs for the Existence of God, is based on the Aristotelian metaphysical argument for change, the premises of which, though admittedly empirical, cannot be contested. For the moment, I would be happy to concede this point to Feser, and argue against him on his own terms. This is one of the appeals of my book: I make an effort to engage with my opponents on their strongest grounds, accepting many of their assumptions and premises at first in order to display how their conclusions do not follow even given those assumptions, and only then attacking those assumptions directly. I do not expect every Catholic or Christian to agree with me on every point they make, but I expect that they will be unable to claim I have been unfair.

So, how does Feser go from the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent (and also entirely honest) single God, to believing that the Christian religion specifically gets it right about that God? Miracles. To quote from his The Last Superstition,

Given that God exists and that He sustains the world and the causal laws governing it in being, we know that there is a power capable of producing a miracle, that is, a suspension of those causal laws…. [Therefore, if] a monotheistic religion’s claim to be founded on a divine revelation is going to be at all credible, that claim is going to have to rest on a very dramatic miracle.… The Resurrection surely counts as such a miracle, for there are no plausible natural [as opposed to divine] means by which a dead man could come back to life. What does Islam have to match this? Muhammad’s “miracle”…is the Qu’ran itself. This is…rather anticlimactic, especially given that the contents of the Qu’ran can easily be accounted for in terms of borrowings from Jewish and Christian sources. Jewish miracle claims are going to be the ones familiar from the Old Testament…but Christians accept those too, so even if their historicity were verified, they could not make the case for Judaism over Christianity specifically. Moreover, the direct eyewitness evidence for these miracle stories is more controversial than the evidence surrounding the Resurrection. All things considered, then, the one purportedly revealed monotheistic religion which can appeal to a single decisive miracle in its favor is Christianity.[1]

This, therefore, is Feser’s argument for the truth of Christianity above all others: We know, through deductive reasoning and therefore with one-hundred-percent deductive certainty, that a single God exists, and that God is capable of performing miracles. We have a great deal of eyewitness historical evidence for a certain miracle (the Resurrection). Thus, we can conclude the Resurrection really did occur, and since the only being capable of performing a miracle is the one God, God must have been responsible for it. And since God is omnibenevolent and could not lie, the miracle of the Resurrection proves that Christianity has His imprimatur, which makes Christianity true, and the world is logically (not just probablistically) obligated to accept it.

I can highlight the problems in Feser’s argument with an analogy—one which I hope most readers here might get a chuckle out of.

Let us imagine that one day, mysteriously, the body of Elvis Presley disappears from his grave in Graceland, Tennessee. The media flocks to the area, the King’s fans are in an uproar, the FBI is dispatched to figure out what happened to it, and the nation descends into general chaos. Just before the nuclear bombs start flying, Elvis suddenly reappears! Dressed in his finest sparkly threads, his black hair waxed and mussed into a perfect pompadour, his skin as healthy and radiant as it was when he first came on stage, he casually strolls into a local Denny’s at 5 AM in the morning and orders a milkshake. It’s not a busy night, and there are only thirteen people there, including the staff. But none of them can deny it—the King has returned! They crowd around him, begging for his wisdom, and he tells them that he was resurrected by God to return peace, love, and rock-and-roll to this benighted world. He must return to heaven very soon, he says, but once he does, they must start a new religion called “Elvisism.” He’s a bit vague about its tenets, but it mostly revolves around listening to his songs at least once a week. With those words of wisdom dispensed, he stands up and casually saunters away as if nothing had happened, and when his audience desperately runs outside to follow him, they find out he’s gone! There’s no proof he was ever even there…except for a recording the cashier had made on her smartphone, which is irrefutable evidence of what he did and said. She uploads it on YouTube, gaining over one billion views in less than six hours, and soon everyone in the world is convinced of the inescapable truth of the new religion. The nuclear strikes are called off, all the world’s great religions are swiftly abandoned, and Planet Earth is soon united in peace and harmony under the soothing tunes of the greatest musician who ever lived, now proven to be divine as well.

If such an event were to take place—if the corpse of Elvis were to disappear, and someone who looked just like him appeared soon after—would Dr. Feser abandon Catholicism and embrace the hip-grinding ways of his new savior? I rather suspect not. Like any good skeptic, Dr. Feser would point out that a multitude of explanations besides divine activity could explain these shenanigans. Some mischief-makers stealing Elvis’s corpse and hiring a look-alike to fool the dupes at Denny’s, for instance.

But wait! Don’t we know for sure it would be an act of God? After all—to once again review Feser’s reasoning—we know that change exists, which means that a single unchangeable Being exists, which also must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Since that Being can control the laws of physics (this is a slight simplification—Feser believes in “laws of natures,” emphasis on the plural, rather than physical laws, but that’s too complex to get into here). He could have brought Elvis’s corpse back to life, thus allowing the King to get his shake at Denny’s. That means, as Feser might say, “His miraculous resurrection puts a divine seal of approval on what He said,” which of course would mean that Elvisism would be true.[2]

Given that line of reasoning, would Feser relent and join the Church of Elvis? I still suspect not. Feser would probably say, “Well, simply because the existence of Pure Act makes miracles possible, it doesn’t follow that any strange happening or bizarre event is necessarily a miracle. Perhaps they’re elaborate hoaxes which will be revealed given enough time and investigation. Or perhaps there are scientific explanations, like will-o-the-wisps being proven to be marsh gas, that we haven’t discovered yet. But simply believing in Pure Act doesn’t mean I have to believe every trick someone might pull over me.”

Reasonable enough, but couldn’t you say the same for Christianity? After all, there are “natural” explanations for the miracles attributed to Christ, simply due to the nature of historical (or exegetical, in the case of the Bible specifically) inquiry. There is no way to prove with deductive certainty that some historical event happened—it is always possible that the historian has incorrectly interpreted the evidence, or even that the evidence itself is not reliable. It is true that the existence of God (if we concede this to Feser, again, I contest this in chapter 6 of my full book) makes Christ’s miracles possibly true, but that does not make the evidence “overwhelming.” Otherwise, any random person could claim to be a dead celebrity, or have risen from the dead, and point to “overwhelming” evidence on their side.[3]

Feser might try and refute this by saying that given their different historical contexts, it is far more likely Christ’s Resurrection would be divine than Elvis’s. After all, Christ was known for many miracles in addition to coming back to life, and in any case it would have been harder to pull off such a hoax back in the days of Roman Judea, since any grave robber would not have had the aid of machinery to break in or any technology which could help hide his presence. But two problems remain with this solution. First, even if it is unlikely that anyone could break into the tomb and steal Christ’s body in ancient times, it is not impossible. Perhaps someone bribed some guards or soldiers near the tomb to assist them with the scheme, for instance, and the subsequent reappearance of Christ was, if not a mass hallucination, a look-alike that fooled the audience. It may be unlikely that anyone could disguise themselves as Christ, but given the number of people who can pass for Elvis today, it is hardly impossible that there was at least one person in ancient Judea who resembled Jesus enough to trick a grieving, emotionally-distraught audience. The same applies to Christ’s other miracles—perhaps they were tricks or made-up. Of course, this is assuming the testimony of the Gospels is entirely accurate—very many scholars have looked at the Biblical account and found more than a few reasons to be skeptical.[4] But either way, it is far from certain that the Resurrection happened exactly the way Scripture tells it, which means that it is far from certain Catholicism (or any other branch of Christianity) is true. In other words, one might—might—be able to make a strong inductive case for Catholicism or Christianity generally based on the available historical evidence, but it is impossible to make a deductive case that what evidence we have (the testimony of the Gospels, archaeological traces, etc.) proves that a miracle truly occurred and that a certain religion is true.

This is just one example of what you can expect to find in chapter 2 of The Unnecessary Science—I expand on these points, and many others, in the text itself! If you find this compelling—or perhaps even amusing—whether you agree with it or not, I hope you’ll consider giving the book itself a look.

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[1] Edward Feser, The Last Superstition (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), 155, 160.

[2] The Last Superstition, 156.

[3] For more problems with the Resurrection, see the paragraph on Ockham and miracles at Arensb, “The Last Superstition: Hedonism Killed Aquinas,” Epsilon Clue, November 21, 2016, last accessed on August 14, 2020,

https://epsilonclue.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/the-last-superstition-hedonism-killed-aquinas

[4] My editor has done an excellent job rounding up a selection of these theories on his personal blog. See Jonathan Pearce, “Easter Round-Up: Everything You Need To Know About The Resurrection (Skeptically Speaking),” A Tippling Philosopher, April 20, 2019, last accessed August 14, 2020, https://onlysky.media/jpearce/2019/04/20/easter-round-up-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-resurrection-skeptically-speaking

Final Thoughts on the Problem of Sifting Natural from Designed

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Imagine a simple algorithm that would reliably tell us whether something is natural or designed. Christian apologist Jim Wallace claims to have a checklist that can be used as such an algorithm.

But no, he doesn’t.

Let’s revisit that list one final time to summarize the problems with it. The overall idea is good (yes, it would be nice to have such an algorithm), but the execution was poor. Here’s a list of necessary corrections.

Problem 1: it’s a biased list

The jury has returned a verdict: evolution is correct, and the flagellar motor is natural. Wallace’s checklist of rules is an end run to save a game that Creationists lost a century ago. No biologist would reject evolution after reading this argument. Its value is only in giving wavering Christians an unfounded sense that the science is on their side.

Where they can, I’m happy to let the experts decide. National Geographic says that a weird undersea design was caused by a fish? That’s good enough for me. EarthSky.org explains lunar and solar eclipses as natural? Sure, I’ll accept that. But that’s not allowed by the unwritten rules behind Wallace’s original list! If he were to let the experts decide, they’d immediately put the bacterial flagellum in the Natural category—it’s there because of evolution, and evolution is natural. I’m happy to accept the consensus of science experts, but he isn’t.

The obvious expert witness for Wallace to call would be a biologist who could explain the scientific consensus, not Michael Behe and his irreducible complexity argument. That’s what you do when the consensus view is inconvenient, and you’re groping for something else. The whole purpose of the list was to reopen a closed case, ignore the experts, and encourage ordinary people to decide instead.

Why is evolution even a thing? A perfect Designer would design a perfect creature for each biological niche. And yet to look at his handiwork, he is apparently constrained by designs in other environments. The tree of life (cladistics), with species connected by their relatedness, is exactly what we wouldn’t expect from such a Designer and exactly what we’d need to see if life were shaped by evolution. Only evolution would need to repurpose things (a tail in human embryos that later gets reabsorbed; jaw bones to make the inner ear; front limbs that are fins, then legs, then wings; etc.). God’s perfect design would be elegant, but in life around us, complexity is the closest we come.

The theory of evolution is a house of cards—not in that it’s rickety or likely to fall but because a thousand different counterexamples could have overturned it. One of these is the famous hypothetical discovery of “fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian.” God could do anything, but evolution has constraints. That evolution is at all plausible given the evidence we find argues that God isn’t responsible for life being the way it is.

Problem 2: this list hasn’t been tested

A serious list would first be tested against hundreds of things that are known to be designed or natural. Next, it would be tested against things in the gray area—for example, an elaborate crystal that’s natural but looks designed or a simple stone mortar and pestle that’s designed but looks natural. Only if the list were very reliable on all these cases (say, 99% accurate or better) would we trust its evaluation on a case we honestly didn’t understand. Previous posts have highlighted this problem by listing some important examples that should be tried (more).

I give a sample of tests that could be added to this list here.

Problem 3: the list isn’t objective, repeatable, or quantitative

The list must provide a quantitative result for each test case—say a 10-point scale between “certainly natural” and “certainly designed.”

The prerequisites for users must be clear. Must the user have been raised in the West, or could someone from a culture without modern technology and formal education use it? At a minimum, it must allow young-earth Creationist Christians, scientists, atheists, and anyone in between to reliably reach about the same score for any test case.

Problem 4: the list doesn’t acknowledge how radical “supernatural designer” would be as a conclusion

Creationists want to conclude, “See there? This thing is likely not natural, but we know it’s not manmade. Therefore it was made supernaturally (and I can give you some suggestions of Who in particular, if you need any help).” But even if we know of no natural precedents, that doesn’t mean something must have been designed. This list doesn’t allow us to bypass the Sagan standard, the aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Concluding a supernatural designer would take a mountain of evidence, which we don’t have.

Anyway, advanced aliens would be a far likelier cause of something mysterious than the supernatural. Aliens are intelligent lifeforms with technology, which we already know exist. No new major category must be created to accept aliens, but the very existence of the supernatural is doubtful.

Remember also that an attack on evolution is no support for Intelligent Design/Creationism. For Creationism to beat evolution, it must explain why life is the way it is better than evolution. Creationists haven’t even accepted that challenge, let alone answered it.

God’s hiddenness

All this gets back to the problem of God’s hiddenness. Why must we track down these tenuous clues instead of having God’s existence be obvious? Shouldn’t Christian apologists be embarrassed that they must sink to arguments like this that broadcast how weak their case for God is?

(More on the problem of divine hiddenness here, here, and here.)

There’s one more post in this series: 5 Ways the Design Argument Fails

The universe we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

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Image from Ankur Gautam (copyright free)
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