Let’s conclude our critique of William Lane Craig’s essay “The Absurdity of Life without God” (the critique begins here) by examining a few more of WLC’s claims.

Morality

Craig tells us that we are morally adrift without God. How can we live without objective morality? How can we live in a world with the Auschwitz experiments of Josef Mengele? He says, “My heart was torn by these stories [from the concentration camps],” and yet how does God help? Craig imagines that we live in a world with Auschwitz and God! Throwing God into the mix does nothing to remove the Holocaust from history; instead, it brings up yet another question, What the hell was God doing while Auschwitz was in operation?

As for objective morality (moral truth that is correct independent of whether anyone believes it), this is just his fantasy. He is quick to proclaim it, but he’s done nothing to justify this bold claim.

From the “Wait—this guy is a professor?” category, consider this example in which he clarifies what objective morality is:

[The Holocaust] would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everybody in the world thought the Holocaust was right and good.

Let’s think this through. We have our world, where everyone says the Holocaust was wrong, and we have Bizarro World, where things are identical except that everyone says the Holocaust was right. Each world has a William Lane Craig, and these two philosophers are identical except for opposite views on this one issue. Where is the objective grounding for either view? WLC in our world would say that the Holocaust was still wrong, but how is this anything but his opinion? Neither version of WLC could point to anything to convince the other. Craig’s own example therefore proves my point: there is no reason to imagine objective morality.

Now return to Craig’s quote and imagine it happening: Germany won the war, Nazi thinking had swept the world, and we all believed that the Holocaust was morally right. That’s a terrible thing to imagine, and yet Craig blunders forward apparently unaware that we live in a very similar world—just replace Nazi thinking with Christian thinking, and replace the extermination of the Jews with the extermination of the Canaanites.

Craig himself wrote an impassioned defense of the Israelites’ “slaughter of the Canaanites”. Craig misses the irony of Christian parents reading their children bedtime stories about the Israelites’ heroic conquests in Canaan and then deploring comparable actions by the Nazis the next day during homeschool time. Christians say that the Canaanites deserved it, but the Nazis said that the Jews deserved it (h/t NonStampCollector).

(As an exercise to the reader, sketch out the parallels between the Holocaust and the Flood.)

Is atheism absurd?

In part 1, we saw how Craig will drop the word “ultimate” in phrases such as “ultimate purpose” or “ultimate meaning” and declare that purpose and meaning don’t exist in the life of the atheist. I agree that I see no ultimate purpose in life, but there’s plenty of purpose. Look up “purpose” in the dictionary, and you’ll find no requirement for an ultimate anything. One is left to puzzle over whether in ignoring any distinction between purpose and ultimate purpose he’s deliberately deceptive or just a sloppy writer.

Craig mocks the naturalist position when he quotes Bertrand Russell saying that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” In the first place, millions of atheists don’t see despair as having a role in their lives, let alone an obligatory one as Craig imagines. But second, he’s quoting Russell out of context. Russell wasn’t recommending despair for mankind, he was recommending reality (h/t commenter Steampunk Gentleman).

Craig plays games with “absurd,” a critical word in an essay titled, “The Absurdity of Life without God.” According to the dictionary, he’s saying that life is meaningless, ridiculously unreasonable, or incongruous without God, and that’s obviously what he means when he (mis)quotes Russell. But the word actually has another meaning:

In philosophy, “the Absurd” refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

And this definition actually works. It’s simply the observation that there is no inherent or ultimate meaning in life. So in that sense, life is absurd without God.

So Craig is using “absurd” either to make an obvious and uninteresting point (there is no reason to imagine ultimate meaning in life) or a false one (life has no meaning). Worse, he may be deliberately switching between the two as benefits his presupposition.

Insight gained . . .

We wade through paragraph after tedious paragraph as Craig marvels how atheists think Reality wasn’t cobbled together just for their benefit. But Craig is sensible when it suits him. Using the example of feminists annoyed with the conclusions of Freudian psychology, Craig says,

If Freudian psychology is really true, then it doesn’t matter if it’s degrading to women. You can’t change the truth because you don’t like what it leads to.

Yes! It doesn’t matter whether you like the truth or not! The truth is the truth, and you’re stuck with it.

Why does the essay not reflect this obvious fact, and why bury it almost at the end? If this idea had been in the first paragraph, it might have informed the essay and grounded it in reality.

And insight lost

But when thinking sensibly doesn’t suit him, Craig rejects it.

Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair.

Completely backwards. Don’t introduce an alternative until you have shown that it’s viable. This is like wrestling with the consequences of life with the winning Powerball lottery ticket versus without it. First, let’s see if you have such a ticket.

Note also that the “If God exists” phrase is an attempt to conjure up God out of nothing. This is is the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

We finally reach the end of Craig’s long essay, wanting only to make it out with our sanity intact. In the very last paragraph, he acknowledges the elephant in the room and admits:

Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true . . .

You got that right!

But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives. If God does not exist, then life is futile.

Wrong. Life is ultimately futile.

There is no reason to imagine that God exists or that you have that winning lottery ticket. Grow up and get over it.

Notice how he’s doubling down on the Hypothetical God Fallacy. Why bother pointing out that if a certain insanely unlikely thing doesn’t exist, then life is futile? That might be true, but who cares until you’ve shown that it’s a viable possibility?

It seems to me that even if the evidence for these two options were absolutely equal, a rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity. It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness.

No, what’s irrational is groping for an option that is not first well supported by evidence. Craig finds what he’d like to be true and then rearranges the facts to support that conclusion. This is not the argument of someone honestly searching for the truth (but I appreciate his illustrating this flawed thinking so clearly).

And notice the slippery debater’s trick. He feigns a concession (“even if the evidence were equal”) to make us more accepting of the ridiculous argument that “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist” are equally likely. And yet he admitted in the same paragraph that he has done nothing to defend his Christian conclusion. This entire bloated essay simply says that it would be nice if God exists. Stated less charitably: it would please Craig if God exists.

Religion imagines that it has something to add to the conversation when its answers to life’s Big Questions change based on where they’re asked! Ask “What is life’s purpose?” in a Buddhist country and you’ll be told it’s to cease suffering and reach nirvana. In a Muslim country, it’s to submit to Allah. In a Christian country, it’s to learn about and praise God.

Craig is determined to justify his childish view of reality. He’s made clear that no argument would change his mind. For anyone who finds his arguments enticing, however, I encourage them to put on their big girl panties, grow up, and demand that supernatural claims be backed with serious evidence.

Seeing life accurately can be daunting, but it’s also invigorating. Problems get solved only by seeing them as they are, not as we wish they were.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/22/15.)

Image from Håkan Dahlström, CC license

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This is the conclusion of our look at a Christian’s list of 16 supposedly bad atheist arguments (part 1). Take a look and see if your critique is the same as mine.

If you want more, here are other posts in which I’ve responded to claims of bad arguments.

• Response to “Nine Not-so-Good Reasons To Be an Atheist”
• Bad Atheist Arguments: Book Review of “The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist”
• Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments—Do They Fail?
• 10 Tough Questions for the Atheist to Answer
• Responding to “10 Myths About God”

Argument #13: Religion is toxic

“The idea here is that religious thought always motivates actions that are bad. One problem with this idea is that ‘religion’ is a broad term. It puts people who follow all kinds of religions under one umbrella, even if the differences between those religions are stark. It also downplays any potentially ‘good’ actions taken under religious motivations.”

Yes, let’s avoid sweeping statements, and let’s admit both that Christianity can make Christian do good things and that Christians can find value in church services and their church community. But yet again, we are given a caricature of a reasonable atheist argument. Was a thoughtful critique of Christianity too hard to respond to?

Christianity is a hydra. Some flavors are nurturing, but many denominations or individual congregations contain toxic elements. You don’t need to be in a Jim Jones cult or be in the thrall of a televangelist who continually demands “Your most generous love offering of at least $80.” The problem can be debilitating feelings of guilt. It can be constant anxiety over whether you’ve done enough or believed enough to avoid hell. It can be the fear in the mind of a child startled awake by a noise, wondering if the imminent End has finally started. Some denominations hold friends and family hostage—sure, you can leave, but you leave them behind.

Christianity is often a social busybody, imposing its morality on society. It can also intertwine with politics. Christianity is flexible enough that you can find biblical support for almost any political position, and this can give some Jesus pixie dust to an election campaign. I’m particularly annoyed by politicians eager to attack church/state separation in return for Christian votes when church/state separation is central to the Constitution and the friend of the Christian as much as the atheist.

No, Christianity isn’t universally toxic, but it’s still only partway between Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll.

(Click for a rebuttal to the claim that Christianity improves society’s social metrics.)

Argument #14: Jesus is just a copy of pagan gods

“This argument seems powerful on the surface as Atheists stack up to similar traits between Jesus and pagan gods—‘born of a virgin,’ ‘resurrected,’ ‘born on December 25’, etc. But when you dig deeper into the primary sources for the pagan gods, you will find that the traits don’t align with the actual stories of those gods.”

We’re starting with a point of agreement, because he seems to acknowledge the precedents—Dionysus and Tammuz died and rose again (before Jesus), Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy had supernatural births (before Jesus), and so on. Here’s a paraphrase of the argument: “Okay, Jesus did rise from the dead like other gods, but when you look at the biographies of those gods, they aren’t anything like Jesus!”

Uh, yeah. If the Jesus biography were the same as that for Dionysus, we’d call him “Dionysus.” No one claims that their stories are identical.

List the miracles of Jesus—healing the sick, raising the dead, water into wine, walking on water, virgin birth, and the resurrection, for example. Which ones are unique to Jesus? Asclepius healed the sick. Achilles was raised from the dead by his mother Thetis. The Oenotropae were three sisters who could change water into wine. Helen of Troy had a supernatural conception. Dionysus rose from the dead. How does Jesus stand apart as the only real one?

Christianity was a latecomer to the supernatural-ideas swap meet. Palestine was at the crossroads of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and other empires, and it’s not surprising (from a natural standpoint) to see borrowing of supernatural ideas from all over the ancient near east.

If the Jesus story were true, it would not look like an quilt made from ideas plucked from its environment. Sure, the details of the Jesus story are different from those of Asclepius, Achilles, Dionysus, and the rest, but that’s true for all of them. Each one is unique. The supernatural achievements of a true god would look dramatically different from the results of human imagination.

Argument #15: The Flying Spaghetti Monster

“New Atheists intended to make a point by bringing up this fictional creature—that you could assign the attributes of God to any random thing. But many Atheists who mention the creature now seem to do so in order to mock religious ideas rather than make a substantial point about them. Overall an Atheist who brings the creature up today ends up looking more ridiculous than thoughtful.”

There is indeed a ridiculous element to this, but it’s not where this author thinks. When considering the Flying Spaghetti Monster (sauce be upon him), Christians find that his properties compare poorly against those of Yahweh, who is the ground of all being, the Creator of all, and Aquinas’s necessary First Cause.

But that can be easily remedied. What’s missing? You say that the FSM isn’t omnipotent? Okay—then make him omnipotent. You say that the FSM isn’t omniscient? Okay—make him omniscient. Make him outside of time and space. Make him the Creator. Heck, give him a jet pack and a ray gun. The FSM is an idea that can be shaped as necessary.

You say that’s cheating? Nope—that’s how Yahweh got many of his properties. The Bible doesn’t say that Yahweh exists outside time and space, that he is three yet one, or that he was the cause of the Big Bang. And those properties that the Bible plausibly does give him are also refuted by the Bible. God is love, God is omniscient, God as the creator of the 200 billion galaxies in the universe? The Bible itself can be cited to argue otherwise.

The deist arguments that are apologists’ go-to arguments for God—the design argument, the moral argument, the Transcendental Argument, and so on—point to the FSM as readily as to Yahweh.

Sure, the FSM is ridiculous, but guess what other god also is.

Argument #16: Christians never agree

“The argument goes like this: Since Christians always seem to disagree about everything, it’s clear that God isn’t involved in the whole process.

“This argument is incredibly broad and immeasurable—it is uncertain how much agreement there would need to be before the objector no longer sees a problem. It also ignores that ‘mere Christianity’—the divinity, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ—is almost entirely agreed on amongst Christians.”

What part of “omniscient and omnipotent” do you not understand? I would stop seeing a problem if your god could accurately convey his message. That’s not much to ask of a god, and yet Christians’ 45,000 denominations argue that he can’t. The Bible itself is ambiguous and contradictory. The Christian can respond that maybe God doesn’t want to make a clear and unambiguous message, but then what kind of trickster god have they created?

What I’d expect from an actual god is a simple, clear message. What we get instead is the 780,000-word blog from a primitive desert tribe. The manuscripts from which we get our New Testament are a flimsy foundation that doesn’t support an unbelievable story. Few old manuscripts remain, and the time gap from original to best copies is large (more here).

The author wants to take the “mere Christianity” route, which looks at the overlap that is common to almost all denominations, but how does that help? Yes, there are a small set of shared beliefs, but lots of conflicting beliefs remain. And if he likes the “mere Christianity” route, why not the “mere theism” route as well? That is, if you say that some overlap exists among Christian denominations and so declare them all valid routes to God, why not look at the overlap among religions and declare them all valid routes to the same God? Admittedly, this overlap may only be “the supernatural exists,” but his mere Christianity isn’t much of an overlap either.

(Click for a thought experiment that highlights the weakness of the Bible record.)

A holy book that looks manmade—full of factual errors, ambiguity, and contradictions and not protected against decay—is one more reason to be satisfied with the natural explanation for Christianity. No supernatural assumptions are necessary.

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Image from Matthew T Rader, CC license
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This is part 3 of our look at a Christian’s list of 16 supposedly bad atheist arguments (part 1). Take a look and see if your critique is the same as mine. We’ll pick up with #9.

Argument #9: Science disproves God

“This is one of the most broad arguments in the list. There are many fields in science, and some concepts about God are completely unrelated to those fields. What exactly is being said here? There needs to be more detail given before any substantial discussion can take place.”

Here again, there’s a glimmer of good advice. “Proves” or “disproves” are tough claims to defend. It’s not smart to say that science disproves God since science never proves or disproves anything. Science is always provisional.

And again this is an uncharitable Christian response. It’s an easy out to declare your opponent’s argument invalid or flawed so you can dismiss it, but that’s cowardly or even dishonest. A better response would be to encourage the atheist to recast the argument to be more defensible so that any valid elements of the atheist argument could be considered.

That improved atheist argument would be something like this: we don’t need a disproof of unicorns to go through our lives believing that they probably don’t exist. Science hasn’t proven they don’t exist, but that’s where the evidence points. Absence of evidence (assuming you’re looking where you’d expect evidence to be) is most definitely evidence of absence. Christian claims for God fail by the same logic.

Argument #10: Stories of Jesus changed like the game of telephone

“You know the game of telephone? You start with a sentence and then it gets changed after being passed down from person to person? Well, that’s what happened when stories of Jesus were passed from person to person.

“This objection does not take into account the communal aspect of oral tradition—people could check their stories against one another. The objection also causes the reliability of all ancient history to be called into question.”

Yes, people could check their stories against one another, but when they differ, who’s right, if anyone? What authority do you consult? The game-of-telephone analogy applies during the period of oral tradition, when there were no written documents to be that authority. Sometimes the Jesus story was simply shared person to person—who validates it then? And when the story was told within a group, a listener might interject a correction, but without a reliable authority, this debate could settle on the erroneous version as easily as the correct one.

This objection fears that the sinking of Jesus claims would drag down all of ancient history as well, but consider the difference between conventional ancient history and the gospels. Not much rides on the accuracy of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War or Livy’s History of Rome. If historians found errors, the consensus view of that historical event would change, and life would go on as before. Few laypeople would know or care. Compare that with the discovery of a major, dogma-threatening correction to the Bible.

If you remove the supernatural from the lives of Alexander the Great or Caesar Augustus, you have their remarkable accomplishments as documented by history. But take away the supernatural from the gospel story, and you’re left with an ordinary, uninteresting man. Jesus is nothing without the supernatural.

Historians today debate what sources the gospel authors used. How old were they and how reliable did the authors think they were? Were they trying to document history, write literature, or create holy scripture? We don’t even know who the gospel authors were. We’re used to giving the gospels a pass on these points, since rigorous historical standards didn’t exist back then.

Except that they did. The Secular Web gives as an example Roman Antiquities. This book was written in Greek, just like the gospels, but it preceded the gospels by a century. The introduction to that book shows that ancient authors could indeed identify their sources and thoroughly critique their reliability. They could write biography, showing warts and all, rather than just flattering hagiography. The gospels have none of this. (So much for archaeologist Sir William Ramsey’s famous 1915 conclusion, “[Luke] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”)

Finally, the game of telephone understates the amount of change in the oral transmission of a story. The game of telephone passes a message of a few sentences from person to person in a few minutes. The gospel story is far longer and more complicated, and its period of oral history was decades long.

(Click for more on the gospels’ reliability and the game of telephone and how historians would treat the supernatural in the gospels.)

Argument #11: If you grew up somewhere else you would believe something else

“This is one of the most common objections to Christianity—if you grew up in a middle eastern country, you would be a Muslim, not a Christian! While this concept does have some truth in it, it packs a load of unsupported assumptions. It also has little effect on the question of if God actually exists or not.”

Ten countries are 99+ percent Muslim. What’s the likelihood that a baby born and raised in one of those countries will become Muslim? Religion is learned as a cultural trait, like customary attire or language. A Pakistani baby doesn’t evaluate Urdu against other languages to pick the best one; it just learns the language of its environment. The same is true for religion.

As for the question of whether God exists, this argument shows that belief in Allah doesn’t need Allah to exist. The same is true for belief in other gods. Natural explanations are sufficient to explain religious beliefs, and when people adopt a religion, it’s almost always the religion of their culture.

(Click for more on religion as a reflection of culture and how Christianity would fare if people didn’t learn it as children.)

Argument #12: Atheists can be good without believing in God

“This statement is true in the sense that people who do not believe in God can make choices that are moral choices. But the statement ignores the grounding of the good—the question of what caused the existence of objective moral duties. [What do atheists suppose] caused “good” and “bad” to exist in the first place?”

What objective moral duties? William Lane Craig defined objective morality this way: “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” I’ll grant that moral statements can be deeply or universally felt, but that doesn’t make them objective by this definition.

The dictionary makes the same point. Look up morality, good, evil, or similar words, and you won’t find an appeal to anything objective. The Christian can’t assume objective moral duties but must first show (1) that they exist and (2) that humans can reliably access them.

As for what caused good and bad to exist in the first place, evolution explains human morality. We’re all the same species, so we have a intuitive sense of morality that’s largely shared. We’re a social animal (like wolves or elephants), so we praise pro-social concepts like trust or compassion.

Concluded in part 4.

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Image from Jamison Riley, CC license
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