A few years ago, the Pew Research Center published a thorough and intriguing international study of religion, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050.” Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic blogger here at Patheos, gloated about the conclusions in “The Facts: Atheism is Dying Out.”

Atheist “intellectuals” speak disparagingly about religion and predict that mankind is on the cusp of a new age in which religion will simply disappear as science, technology and reason are in the ascendant.

The facts indicate exactly the opposite. It is religion which continues to grow around the world while the statistics indicate that agnosticism and atheism are dying out.

In journalism, that’s called “burying the lede.” No, that’s not really the story. Let’s explore in more detail how religion will change by 2050.

Christianity has been the 800-pound gorilla on the world stage, but Christianity is losing its edge. In 30 years, Christianity is expected to be only negligibly larger than Islam, with 31.4% of world population vs. 29.7% for Islam, and Islam is projected to be the number one religion by 2070.

Changes in Christianity

Christianity will increasingly become an African religion. Africa is already the largest Christian continent, with slightly more Christians than North America. But by 2050, Africa will have more than twice North America’s Christian population (1.12 billion vs. 516 million).

By 2050, North and South America will increase their Christian populations slightly—about the same as population growth for South America and substantially less than population growth for North America. And Christians in Europe will drop from 75% to 60%.

This global spread of Christianity can be seen visually on a map showing the changes in Christianity’s center of gravity over time. In 33 CE, the center of gravity began in Palestine. Over the centuries, it moved through Asia Minor and Greece, then gradually westward as Christianity spread through Western Europe. By 1700, it was in northeast Italy, by 1800 in northwest Italy, and by 1900 (with the rise in the Christian population of the Americas) in Spain. By 1970, it had moved dramatically south and was in northwest Africa. Today, it’s roughly centered on Timbuktu, Mali, and it’s expected to continue moving southeast into Africa.

The ancient city of Timbuktu is often used to suggest an impossibly remote place. Western Christians may find this metaphor relevant as world Christianity becomes increasingly foreign.

We’ve gotten a taste of this new global, not-necessarily-Western Christianity with the recent changes within the United Methodist Church. The conservative faction, aided by the disproportionately conservative congregations in Africa, imposed an anti-gay agenda that threatens to split the church. Yes, global Christianity is increasing, but will American Christians like how that affects their church?

Changes in Islam

The Muslim fraction of Europe will almost double by 2050 to 8.7%. Islam in North America will continue to be tiny, with 2% of the population.

In Africa, however, Islam will more than double to 960 million. The big winner will be Asia, with 1.74 billion Muslims in 2050. The top four Muslim states will be India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Changes in Unaffiliated

The number of people unaffiliated with any religion (the “Nones,” which includes atheists) will increase, but as a percentage of the global population, this group will decrease, from 16% to 13%.  This is the statistic that Longenecker was gleeful about.

But there’s more to the story. For most religious groups, the difference between those switching in (adopting the religion) roughly matches those switching out. Christianity, however, is the big loser here, with a net loss of 66 million by 2050. The Unaffiliated will see a net increase of about the same amount. Christianity may not be that sticky a meme after all.

Changes in the United States

Christians sometimes scold me for focusing almost exclusively on Christianity. If I’m going to attack anything, these Christians want me to attack Islam. But the focus of this blog is on Christianity in the U.S. That’s why, for me, the story is the percentage increase of Nones in the U.S., not the percentage decrease in the world. (In the same way that the U.S. lagged Europe’s shaking off of Christianity, the world as a whole may, in its turn, follow this trend.)

Consider projected changes in Christianity vs. Unaffiliated (Nones) in the United States.

Graphic copyright 2015, Pew Research Center. Permission to reprint graphic provided by Pew Research Center.

Unlike changes in worldwide statistics, Christianity in the U.S. is the big loser (78% to 66%) and Unaffiliated the big winner (16% to 26%). That is, the Unaffiliated category is now winning the only race that one can be proud of winning, the intellectual debate in the marketplace of ideas.

While Christianity can win a demographic race as long as Christians make more babies, movement by intellectual migration does not favor Christianity.

Concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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I recently wrote about an atheist who gushed about the irresistibly incisive philosophical arguments of Christian apologist William Lane Craig (WLC). He signed his letter to Craig, “Your biggest atheist fan.” This atheist said that Craig’s essay “The Absurdity of Life without God” kept him awake at night because it “completely shattered my worldview.” We’d better take a look at this life-changing essay.

(The full essay is in Craig’s Reasonable Faith (2008), and I’m guessing this isn’t much changed from the 1984 first edition. The version I’m responding to is online and a little shorter.)

The foundation of the problem

Craig begins by recounting how he first learned as a child that life is finite. He said, “I was filled with fear and unbearable sadness.” That his own death was far in the future did nothing to allay the problem. Whether his death was hours or decades away didn’t matter—it was eternity or nothing.

Here Craig tips his hand. His life’s work has been dedicated to resolving that little boy’s fear of death. He might’ve confronted the problem of death by being a doctor or cancer researcher. He might’ve explored religion and spirituality as a skeptic to see if any discipline offered tangible truth about the afterlife. But he has made clear that following the evidence where it leads isn’t his goal.

And following the evidence is certainly not what he’s doing in this essay. He finds no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in atheism (I agree—atheists just find regular meaning, value, and purpose) and then flails about as if we can do something about that. It’s like wishing that 2 + 2 = 9 and then spending your entire life concocting a justification for your new view of arithmetic.

How does reality work?

WLC whispers truths about reality as if his dreadful realizations may not be expressed in polite company.

“My life is just a momentary transition out of oblivion into oblivion. . . . This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call ‘myself’ will cease to exist, that I will be no more!” (Well, yeah. Your life and death are not really that big a deal. Welcome to reality. Neil DeGrasse Tyson observed, “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”)

“And the universe, too, faces death.… As it [expands], it grows colder and colder, and its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes.” (You’re seriously anxious about the fact that there will be no more stars in 100 trillion years? No one but you loses sleep over this.)

“Mankind is thus no more [ultimately] significant than a swarm of mosquitos or a barnyard of pigs. . . . Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.” (Yeah. Get over it.)

And again we have the perspective of the young boy shocked by these realizations for the first time. This is a boy growing up in America, smart enough to do well in school and build a career. This is a boy granted the luxury to fret about existential issues like eternity, the eventual death of the universe, and Mankind’s lack of ultimate significance. Sounds like someone has #FirstWorldProblems. Sounds like someone needs a hug.

Contrast these concerns at the top of Maslow’s pyramid with Third World issues. Consider a child with real problems—orphaned by a tsunami in Haiti, forced to serve as a soldier in the Congo or a sex slave in India, or dying of malaria in Niger. WLC’s handwringing about the eventual death of the universe doesn’t amount to much by comparison.

Let’s return to his central point, “This thought is staggering and threatening: to think that the person I call ‘myself’ will cease to exist, that I will be no more!” He’s fretting about how a billion years from now, without Christianity’s promise of an afterlife, no one would care whether he had existed or not (which, apparently, is enough evidence of the afterlife for him).

But what does this approach imply? He could save his own relatives from such an oblivion by learning about and celebrating their lives. He could share anecdotes from his genealogical research with family members so that great-great-great-grandma would live on. But unless he’s forgotten to share the importance of this crucial hobby with his readers, he doesn’t care. Apparently, the goal isn’t to help mankind live on but to help him live on. (h/t commenter MR)

An elementary error

Another category of concern is with the meaning of life. Read these quotes and see if you have the same objection I do.

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose.

Life is utterly without reason.

If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life.

In a universe without God, good and evil do not exist.

No, what you mean to say is that there is no ultimate hope, purpose, reason, good, or evil. People find plenty of the ordinary kind. Look up those words in the dictionary—they don’t need any transcendental or absolute grounding.

It’s not that Craig doesn’t understand the issue. For example, he asks, “[A person’s life] may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events?” Here, he contrasts importance from the standpoint of that person with ultimate importance—not a difficult distinction to make. But in dozens of other instances, as in the quotes above, he conflates the two ideas. You’d think someone with two doctorates would write more carefully.

Here’s an example where he conflates the two in the very same sentence: “If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless” (emphasis added). It’s hard to imagine how this confusion has survived in this essay since he wrote it three decades ago. He’s either a sloppy writer, or he intends to deliberately mislead the reader.

In part 2: WLC’s essay has a number of points that need responses.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/16/15.)

Image from Elijah O’Donnell, CC license

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In 2010, John Steinrucken wrote an article, “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity.” Like philosopher Antony Flew’s ghost-written appeal to deism a few years earlier, Steinrucken became a short-lived darling within the Christian apologetics community. Finally, they had found an atheist with a little common sense who could appreciate Christianity as the foundation that Western civilization rested on.

The most ludicrous line in Steinrucken’s scattered argument was this:

Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Grab a barf bag and compare your reaction to mine.

Déjà vu all over again

I’d only seen one other instance of an atheist praising the Christian worldview.

But then I came across yet one more example. In a rambling 2015 email titled, “You’ve Ruined My Life, Professor Craig!!” a gushing fanboy named Adam tells William Lane Craig how fabulous he is. Craig ruined Adam’s atheist worldview by presenting such danged good arguments for Christianity.

Kevin Harris, Craig’s podcast sidekick, said,

Many are, in fact, saying (including myself) this is the greatest letter in the question and answer forum on Reasonable Faith.

The greatest letter? That’s something we must investigate.

Problem the first: nihilism

Adam said that he was a happy atheist who loved philosophy until he read Craig’s article, “The Absurdity of Life without God,” after which everything changed. (I have responded to this article of Craig’s.)

Craig declared that the atheist worldview “was worthless in every possible way.” Adam’s reaction:

[That article] completely shattered my worldview. . . .

What you say the atheistic worldview entails is true. There is no escaping the nihilism as an atheist.

Everything has died for me.

You have ruined my life.

It doesn’t sound like Adam was much of an atheist but more on this later. Adam is saying here that life has no ultimate meaning. Well, yeah. So what?

Adam apparently gets anxious at the thought that God, a billion years from now, won’t leaf through his little notebook, see Adam’s name, and think fondly of the good times they had together during Adam’s brief life on earth. Sorry Adam, but out of the billions of people on the earth right now, you’re not that big a deal. You’re even less important when seen with all of history as a backdrop.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a helpful observation: “If you are depressed after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.”

Life has plenty of meaning, just not transcendentally grounded meaning. It has the meaning that we assign to it and that we find for it, not that someone else like a religious leader assigns for us. Most of us find that not debilitating but empowering.

Problem the second: moral grounding

Adam had another concern:

There is no foundation for morality outside of God.

Wrong. He begs the question by assuming that morality means a God-grounded morality. It doesn’t—look it up. Morality is simply the set of beliefs about good and bad, right and wrong. I’ve never seen evidence for objective morality (morality that would be true whether humans were here to appreciate it or not). Examples inevitably offered such as the wrongness of torture for fun are instead examples of shared or strongly felt morality. We don’t need God to explain human morality; evolution does the job.

(I discuss morality here and here. I respond to Christian apologists’ weak arguments about morality here, here, and here.)

Who is this guy?

Kevin Harris assures us that Adam’s letter is what it claims to be rather than a hoax. I believe him, even though that’s hard to believe given ingratiating flattery like this aimed at Craig:

You are and always have been my favorite living philosopher. I have seen every debate you have ever recorded and put up on the internet. I watch all your lectures and talks. . . . I think you are the epitome of what a philosopher should be. You’re uber logical, fantastically clear, and “computeresk” with the speed and precision of your responses to objections against your position, particularly the criticisms you respond to in your debates.

(I’m imagining William Lane Craig concert posters taped up on the walls in Adam’s room.)

I must disagree with Adam’s assessment. Craig is a good debater and puts on a good show on stage, but that’s about all I can find positive to say. I’ve responded to his unscientific approach to reality here and here. Some of what he writes sounds like what would get a failing grade in a college freshman paper.

So why isn’t Adam a Christian?

Adam says that he’s bowled over by the fabulousness of Craig’s deist arguments but can’t take that last step to become a Christian. Still, it sounds like he’s tempted:

The deeper I dive into philosophy, the more the theistic worldview seems more plausible. The concepts or “language” of mathematics seems to “cry out” as you put it for an explanation, objective moral values seem to be real (but they can’t be “real”, if atheism is true), the idea of “existence” nauseates me to no end (just the thought of anything, at all, existing, and especially existing without any reason, frightens me), and I could go on and on.

I’ve responded to Craig’s Argument from Mathematics, and we’ve talked about objective moral values above. As for Adam’s fear of stuff existing without a reason, I have no idea what he’s concerned about. Doesn’t science explain why things exist? And where it doesn’t (yet), can he be saying that God is hiding in those gaps of science’s ignorance?

This admission of fear tips his hand. He’s not much interested in the truth but in finding a respected scholar who can pat him on the head and reassure him that he is indeed living in Fluffy Bunny Land, just like he’d hoped.

Adam’s concern

Adam hates his “nihilistic-atheistic world” and sees Christian belief as his salvation. If he simply swapped in a new set of beliefs, these unpleasant thoughts would be gone.

Theism is a dream come true. The world would make sense, the existential mysteries that haunt me would be solved, life would be livable. It is atheism, however, which seems to be true, yet I do not want to live like this. I have become depressed to no end. I have been in a nihilistic rut for years now. I have become utterly recluse. Yet, even with all this, I cannot come to believe in God. . . . You may be my last hope. . . . I know the “answer” is Christianity, but as I said, I cannot get myself to believe its truth. I am an atheist who hates atheism. I want there to be a God more than anything, yet I cannot get myself to believe in one.

If Adam is this depressed, he needs therapy. But if he desperately wants Christianity to be true and knows that Christianity is the answer, then he’s a Christian.

That was easy. Adam, be sure to contact me if this becomes a problem again. Please pay on the way out.

Craig’s response

Craig does little besides bask in the adoration, though a couple of his points need a response.

You need to escape the cloying bonds of naturalism by catching glimpses of a transcendent reality beyond the material world.

If anything binds us, it’s religion. Look at a map of world religions to see how the Big Questions get different religious answers based on where they’re asked.

Genesis 1 tells us that God shaped the earth like Play-Doh, while science tells us that a typical galaxy holds 100 billion stars and that your little fingernail held at arm’s length covers a million of them. Oh—and it backs up its claims with evidence.

If any explanation is cloying (or condescending), it’s Christianity’s childish Bronze Age view of reality.

Craig riffed on Adam’s concern about nihilism:

[Atheists who reject nihilism are] inconsistent with [their] worldview. In fact, I argue it is really impossible to live consistently and happily within the framework of an atheistic worldview. So if you want to be happy you are going to do what your friends do, and that is to live inconsistently.

Thanks for the condescension, but I can have happiness and consistency. There is no ultimate meaning or purpose to the universe, humanity, or my own life. Ordinary meaning and purpose—discovered and invented by humans—works just fine, thanks.

Craig assured Adam that God is chasing him (in a way that made me wonder if Adam might need a restraining order):

He is after you and will continue His pursuit until you recognize in Him all that you are longing for.

Tell that to the ex-Christians whose faith waned and who begged God to reveal himself. Didn’t happen. Read more at Rational Doubt, the blog of the Clergy Project, a safe place for clergy who doubt.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/8/15.)

Image from David Blackwell, CC license

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These are arguments that every Christian should avoid but are too often paraded around as if they’re effective. This is a continuation of a list that begins here.

Stupid Argument #26: Deconstruct the atheist worldview.

If you atheists were consistent, you’d say: “Follow any morality that pleases you. Those pangs of conscience in your brain are just chemicals.” And what are wonder, love, courage, and other positive traits if they’re also nothing but chemicals?

Sure, we can explain much of how the brain works, but how does that dismiss morality, wonder, and so on? This is the genetic fallacy—discounting something because of where it came from.

It’s like seeing an answer of 849 on a calculator and thinking, “Oh, just ignore that value. Those digits are simply an illusion of numbers caused by electrons turning bits of liquid crystal dark or light.” It’s true that at a low level it’s all physics and semiconductors, but that’s just one way to explain it. At a higher level, it’s a math problem.

Another example: when you meet someone new and they say, “Tell me about yourself,” you don’t list your body parts.

Similarly, at a low level, the brain is just chemicals, synapses, and neurons, but at the high level, it’s morality or wonder or consciousness or emotions or whatever. Neither level denies the truth of the other, and we can explore the issue at whatever level makes sense.

Consider the wonder we get from Christianity. Its cramped and flawed view of reality is nothing compared to what science gives us. Science tells us of atoms and quarks, living cells and DNA, and black holes and the Big Bang, and it backs up its claims with evidence!

About the universe, the Bible tells us, “[God] also made the stars” (Genesis 1:16). In the original Hebrew, it’s a single word.

Richard Dawkins said this about the world that we see through science:

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living.

Stupid Argument #27: Flawed claim to Argument from Authority fallacy.

Wait—did you just base your claim that evolution is correct on the scientific consensus? Gotcha—Argument from Authority fallacy! Just because smart people say it’s true doesn’t make it so.

Let’s first understand how to apply the Argument from Authority fallacy. Statements such as the following may fail because of this fallacy: “Dr. Jones says I’m right” or “PZ Myers, a biology professor, says I’m right” or even “many biologists say I’m right.” The Argument from Authority fallacy rejects an argument based on the statement of someone who is either not an expert in the relevant field or who should be ignored in favor of the consensus view of that discipline.

To avoid the fallacy, replace “PZ Myers says that evolution is correct, so therefore it is” with “The consensus within biology is that evolution is correct, so that’s the best explanation we have at the moment.” (More on the irresistibility of the scientific consensus here.)

Stupid Argument #28: Don’t be a hypocrite! You take stuff on faith, too!

Here is the view stated by a Christian commenter (slightly tweaked): “Until you can tell me that you were there from the beginning until now, you don’t really have facts of your own, do you? Neither do I; I just don’t proclaim it like you do.

“Faith boys, we all have faith; faith in what is up to you. I think I will stick with the gospel on this one.”

The Christian goal here is to insist that the positions of the atheist and Christian are symmetric—say what you will about faith; we’re all in the same boat. This fails for several reasons.

• The Christian antagonist denigrates faith with this argument. A crude paraphrase might be, “You say I’m stupid for having faith? Well, you have faith too, so who’s stupid now??” Faith is no longer an honorable and valid route to truth but a crutch that atheists as well as Christians lean on. Ask yourself why the Christian response is never, “Good for you—now you’re getting it! You’re taking things on faith, just like you should.”
• The definition of “faith” is curiously slippery, but in this context it’s used to mean belief based on insufficient or poor evidence. The Christian here charges the atheist with faith in science, but I have no use for that kind of faith. Instead, I trust science. That is, my belief is well supported by evidence and (here is the bit too often overlooked) if the evidence changes, my belief will change accordingly.
• To go beyond a layman’s trust in science, science can explain the reasons why any particular claim is made. And explain the reasons behind those reasons, and so on. At some point, we get down to facts (results of experiments, say) or axioms (1 + 1 = 2, say). Even with axioms, there is no faith. Axioms are tested continually.

Continued in part 9.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/23/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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Doesn’t time fly? It seems like forever since we checked in with our favorite sitcom, “Christians say the silliest things,” our list of stupid arguments Christians would do well to avoid.

We’ve blown past our initial goal of 25 arguments and are now at argument #46. If you want to start at the beginning, that’s here.

Stupid Argument #46: “God is like a father” and similar comparisons

We don’t see supernatural beings in daily life, so Christian apologists try to compare God to things we do see. In this blog, we’ve seen claims that God is like a father who gets angry when we make mistakes (here and here). God is like a child or an artist who deserves praise (here). Or maybe God is like a romantic partner (here).

Whenever I read such a comparison, I feel like a cat chasing paper tied to a string. As soon as I grab for the analogy to make sense of it, the apologist jerks it away and tells me that it’s not a perfect analogy.

No, it’s not a perfect analogy. It’s not even a good analogy. These comparisons fail because the most boring thing about the person God is compared to (he’s like a spouse, like a father, like a judge) is that that person exists.

A “God is like” analogy is a deepity: to the extent that it’s true, it’s trivial and unhelpful, and to the extent that it’s useful and insightful, it’s false.

More here.

Stupid Argument #47: Appeal to ego

This argument sounds like this: “Don’t be a wimp! You’re smart enough to weigh the evidence for evolution [or climate change or vaccinations or the Big Bang or some other scientific issue]. You don’t need scientists—figure this out yourself.”

An example of this is a long, fruitless discussion I had with Dr. Jay Wile about evolution here. He’s a scientist (nuclear chemistry), but he’s not a biologist. He can speak with authority in his field, but that’s no warrant to correct errors in other scientific fields. Nevertheless, he dumped on me his version of the Appeal to Ego:

If you are a lazy layperson who doesn’t want to think for him/herself, then you have no choice but to accept the scientific consensus. However, if you are a layperson who actually enjoys learning and thinking for him/herself, you can examine the evidence and come to your own conclusion.

Golly—my options apparently are to be an indolent puppet in the hands of my betters, or to stand like a man and decide for myself.

Or maybe there’s a third option: that sciences like biology are very specialized fields that I will always be an outsider to, and, as a result, I am obliged to accept science’s consensus view (where it exists) as the best approximation to the truth. That doesn’t mean that the consensus is necessarily right, just that it’s the layperson’s best bet.

That this is simply a desire for a more pleasing reality rather than a quest for the truth becomes clear when these tough-minded skeptics only challenge the science they don’t like—evolution, Big Bang, climate change, and so on. Their agenda shows when they let stand the science that is truly counterintuitive like Relativity or quantum mechanics.

Sometimes this is an attempt to bypass science. Science isn’t saying what they want to hear, so these armchair scientists bypass science and appeal directly to other laypeople. The Disco Institute is an Intelligent Design thinktank that does this. They don’t spend their money on unbiased research that might change the scientific consensus. They’ve already lost that war, so they write popular-level books and newsletters to appeal to individuals.

The most popular example that I come across is the typical fundamentalist attitude toward evolution. No ivory-tower geeks are going to shove nutty atheist science down the throats of these red-blooded Americans. And yet they accept Christianity! It would be nice if a little of that tough skepticism were applied to Christianity.

Or, we can look at it from the other side. Christians often tell atheists to drop their arrogance and have some humility, to admit they don’t know everything, and to open their minds to the possibility of the supernatural. The irony is when some of these Christians go on to push the Appeal to Ego, which is 190-proof arrogance.

More about the scientific consensus here and here.

Stupid Argument #48: Wishful thinking

The idea here is to adopt a worldview simply because it’s more pleasing than the one with the evidence. The SMBC comic above neatly illustrates this view with this syllogism:

If P is false, I will be sad;

I do not wish to be sad;

Therefore, P is true.

(h/t Greg G.)

Here’s a specific example. Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell illustrated the Problem of Evil with the example of a dying child and asked how a good god could allow such a thing. Christian apologist Greg Koukl answered this way:

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig offered this response: “What is the atheist Bertrand Russell going to say when kneeling at the bed of a dying child? ‘Too bad’? ‘Tough luck’? ‘That’s the way it goes’?” No happy ending? No silver lining? Nothing but devastating, senseless evil?

What??? “No happy ending?” The child is dying! No, there’s no goddamn happy ending. (And notice that the original problem remains: they’ve offered no defense for why this would be part of an all-good god’s plan.)

An atheist comforting the dying child would do what a Christian would: read books or tell stories or remember happy events or in some way help the child feel comfortable and loved. The difference would be that the atheist wouldn’t handwave comfort, either for themselves or the child, through stories from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Greek myth of Hades, the Hindu idea of reincarnation, Christian heaven and hell, or whatever afterlife story happens to be popular in the local culture.

Koukl responds with claims about the Christian worldview—God is patient and merciful, God has a plan, and so on—without evidence, as if that counts for something. He skips over that messy supporting-evidence step and just takes his worldview as a given, claiming the win because he thinks his worldview is happier.

This is the Pragmatic Fallacy—some custom or practice is worthwhile because it makes me feel better, not because its claims are true. More here and here.

Continue with #49, Science is Built on Christianity.

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Image from SMBC, used with permission
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I recently responded to the Argument from Mathematics. Apologist William Lane Craig marvels at how mathematics explains much of the physical world.

But if that is surprising, we must ask Craig what world we should expect to see instead. He offers nothing, so then what is there to be surprised at? (See my post for the complete response.)

William Lane Craig’s bravado

At best, Christian apologists can point to some philosophical ambiguity that they hope to resolve with God, but this ignores the fact that science and math have been the only disciplines from which we’ve ever learned about reality, and the Christians’ discipline of theology has delivered no testable results despite millennia of trying.

At the end of the interview, Craig says:

Honestly, I think [God] is the only explanation on the table. I don’t see what the competing naturalistic hypotheses are.

The very existence of WLC’s proposed answer is in doubt. I don’t know whether to marvel more at his audacity to push a hypothesis with no evidence or his gall to think we’re too stupid to notice. Once again WLC sits at the children’s table. “God did it” doesn’t rise to the level of an actual useful explanation that, y’know, explains things. It’s as useful as “Fairies did it.”

If you have no standards, sure, you can label any string of words an “explanation,” but for the rest of us, an explanation needs to pass some minimum test of credibility. Does it answer more questions than it raises? Does it make new predictions? Is it testable? Falsifiable? Does it seem to be agenda-driven wishful thinking? Has this kind of explanation ever been accepted by science before?

Remember that this is the scholar called “one of Christianity’s leading defenders” and “arguably the world’s foremost defender of historic Christianity,” which say much for the standards within Christian apologetics.

If there are unanswered questions, science goes with, “We don’t know . . . yet.” Let’s stick with that.

This illustrates two problems with how apologists deal with arguments. I’d like to highlight them so you can more quickly spot them in the future.

1. These caltrop arguments mean surprisingly little to apologists

Caltrop arguments are arguments used as a rearguard action. They don’t make much of a positive argument for Christianity and are only used defensively to deflect atheist arguments.

The Argument from Mathematics isn’t a hill that any apologist will defend to the death. They won’t bother since none use it as an argument to support their own faith. They didn’t come to faith after being convinced by this argument (or the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument or the Design Argument or the Moral Argument), and their faith doesn’t rest on them.

They have nothing of consequence at stake. They may enthusiastically defend the Fine Tuning Argument, say, but once science has an explanation, they’ll discard that argument like a used tissue and grope for another. “Well, how about this one?” they’ll ask with the next argument du jour. “Do I get any points this time?” Apologists would trot out the Argument from Flavors or Colors of the Rainbow if they thought this would help, but since these aren’t arguments that they use themselves to ground their own faith, why should any of us find them compelling?

Their argument is simply, “Science has unanswered questions; therefore, God.” That’s not much of an argument, especially since it bets against science, the only horse that ever wins.

Not only do these arguments form no part of Craig’s evidential foundation, not only does he have no direct evidence supporting his position, but he doesn’t care. He’s content to pretend that an internal conviction of his own correctness trumps any arguments that I could possibly present (more here and here).

2. The failure of the cumulative case

Jim Wallace of the Cold Case Christianity podcast argues that Christianity is historically accurate. He claims that this is a cumulative case, like that built by the prosecution in a murder trial.

I disagree with just about every facet of the argument for the historicity of Christianity, but let’s put that aside. I want to introduce the idea of a Christian cumulative case because that’s what William Lane Craig seems to think he’s building.

A cumulative case for a murder trial might show that the accused had motive, that he is connected to the murder weapon (through fingerprints, say), that he had opportunity (no alibi), that other suspects are poor candidates, and so on. Each successful claim strengthens a single overall case.

Contrast that with the case often made for pseudoscience. Consider how the argument for Bigfoot is often made, for example. Here is a large plaster cast that claims to be the impression of a Bigfoot footprint. Here’s the photo of pressed-down vegetation, claimed to be a sleeping area. Here’s a tuft of fur. Here’s a story from a hunter who heard something scary. They’re from different places and times, there is no connection between them, and they invite other explanations besides a Bigfoot. The Bigfoot proponent admits that any one factoid is weak but hopes that the sheer volume will be compelling.

Not really. This isn’t a collection of mutually supporting facts that fit, jigsaw-puzzle-like, into a consistent whole as a cumulative case would. It’s just a big pile of unrelated facts. This kind of argument wasn’t convincing in centuries past for alchemy or homeopathy, and it isn’t convincing today for astrology or Bigfoot.

Let’s return to the William Lane Craig throw-spaghetti-against-the-wall-to-see-if-it-sticks approach to apologetics. If you dismissed one of his arguments, he’d reach into his top hat and pull out another one. He apparently imagines a cumulative case, with a big pile of so-so arguments adding up to a great big hug with Jesus.

But this is a sign of weakness, not strength. These are the unrelated, big-pile-of-crap arguments of those who claim that Bigfoot exists or that space aliens perform experiments on people. I’m not saying that claims for God, Bigfoot, or space aliens are necessarily false; I’m just distinguishing this kind of argument from an actual cumulative case.

WLC puts his reputation on the line when he backs an apologetic argument. He gets the credit when the argument is strong, but he also takes the hit when the argument does nothing more than introduce us to a curious question (into which he’s determined to shoehorn God). We already know that science has unanswered questions. If his argument devolves into merely this observation, he gives no argument for God, he wastes our time, and his reputation must be blemished as a result. Don’t let him wriggle away from a stinker of an argument without consequences.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/25/15.)

Image from Michał Parzuchowski, CC license

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