In part 1, we looked at a couple of arguments from popular Christian apologists with a deceptive view of the burden of proof. Let’s look at two different definitions of “burden of proof.” As with the different definitions of “faith,” Christians cloud the issue for their benefit, perhaps knowingly. It helps to see these definitions and know when they’re being used.

Burden of proof definition #1

First, it can be the concept taken from a criminal trial. Here, we begin with a presumption of innocence for the accused. The prosecution can’t present merely an argument as compelling as that from the defense; they must overcome it to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

Returning to the Christians’ argument (see part 1), this beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden is what the supernaturalist has. We start that debate with the assumption of a natural explanation because we have no good evidence of any supernatural causes of anything. Wallace would love to have parity for his God hypothesis, but it doesn’t work that way. Naturalism is the default, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Imagine someone thinking, “I have no idea for the answer to this problem. I’ll just put down . . . I dunno, 7. Well, that’s either right or wrong, so that gives me a 50/50 chance. I like those odds!” A child can be forgiven for that analysis, but we have higher standards for adults.

Take the Purple People of Pluto as an example of something that none of us have any particular interest in. Do we start with parity? Could anyone legitimately demand that you either prove that they don’t exist or adjust your reality to accept the Purple People of Pluto? Of course not. The default is no Pluto people (or unicorns or fairies or Bigfoot) and no supernatural. Any alternative argument that moves us off this default must be quite compelling.

Burden of proof definition #2

But apologists wants to ignore that definition. There is another, and that was what Koukl and Wallace were referring to. If I make a claim, I need to be prepared to defend it. This is where we enter the messy realm of rhetorical tricks and debate tactics, which was Koukl’s concern with his “Professor’s Ploy.”

Wallace is technically correct that if the atheist says, “There’s no God” (or the resurrection didn’t happen or the supernatural birth story came from other cultures or whatever), the Christian is within their rights to insist that the atheist defend that position. This is what Koukl was arguing. This puts the Christian in the role of attacker, trying to pick apart your argument, and Koukl likes that situation. You must defend a position and they don’t, assuming the Christian hasn’t yet declared a position (and Koukl is careful to advise that they avoid that).

A little debate advice

Speaking for myself, I usually don’t mind being in that position. I’m happy to argue that the evidence points to a conclusion. I never argue that I can prove anything; I simply claim that the preponderance of evidence points to the naturalist position, like claiming that the preponderance of evidence says that unicorns don’t exist.

The only debating point I want to make is for atheists to realize that they start with the high ground. They are arguing the default position. The burden of proof in any religious discussion is on the theist. If you want to give up that advantage and declare your own position that you must defend, that’s fine, but do it deliberately, not accidentally. In fact, if you inadvertently realize that you overstated your position (for example, saying “There is no God” rather than “I see no good evidence for God”) and your Christian antagonist is giving you the Koukl treatment by asking all the questions and demanding answers, you can always apologize for clumsily stating your position and restate it in a non-dogmatic fashion to return the burden of proof to the Christian.

See also: Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence

I think I’ve found the secret behind the strategy. That’s in part 3.

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Image from Rob Oo, CC license
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Remember evil Professor Radisson, the philosophy professor in the 2014 Christian persecution-porn movie God’s Not Dead? On the first day of class, he insisted that his students write “God is dead” on a piece of paper and sign it. When plucky Christian student Josh refused to play along, Radisson demanded a public debate between them, with a large fraction of Josh’s grade dependent on the outcome. (My review of that movie is here.)

What should’ve happened, of course, was that Josh, with a Jedi hand gesture, says, “That challenge didn’t happen . . . or else I go to the dean.” I’d have reported the professor to the administration myself if I’d been in that class. That was a blatant violation of any conceivable faculty code of conduct.

The Christian burden of proof is such a . . . burden

Christian apologist Greg Koukl seems not to have figured out that that was just Hollywood when he introduced a similar situation Christians encounter when evangelizing Christianity.

I call it the Professor’s Ploy because professors like to use this. You go to class, and you have a professor that is bent on destroying your own convictions, and so they’re going to go after Christianity as often as they can in the class.

Sure, that sounds plausible. Professors have nothing better to do than be mean to Christians, right? The subject they’re actually teaching—French Literature, Intro to Quantum Mechanics, or Tudor England—is subservient to Academia’s primary goal of making baby Jesus cry.

Koukl’s “Professor’s Ploy” imagines the student protesting the Christianity-bashing, and he sketches out a brief hypothetical discussion between the plucky Christian student and the wicked atheist professor and then imagines that the professor is impressed by the kid’s determination. He offers the student a few minutes in front of the class to explain whatever aspect of Christian apologetics they were discussing.

Success!

Uh, no, apparently not. You’d think that this would be the goal. It might be enough time to plant the seeds in a few souls that would eventually grow into Christian conviction. In the same way that God gave Moses the words to speak to Pharaoh, you’d think that he would guide the evangelist. But no, in the topsy-turvy world of Christian persecution, the student has been ensnared by the Professor’s Ploy, which now places the burden of proof on the student. Apparently, speaking the Good News to a captive audience (yet more of what would never actually happen in a regular, non-Christian university) isn’t a good thing. One wonders when the Christian is supposed to take a stand and defend it. But more on that later.

Another shirking of the burden of proof

Jim Wallace of the Cold-Case Christianity ministry gives a murder scene as his example. One detective thinks the coworker did it and another thinks it was the girlfriend. Wallace imagines himself as one of those detectives and says:

We both have the same burden of proof to explain why it is our proposed cause can explain the evidence in this scene. Both of us share the same burden of proof.

I agree. Given the fact that someone was murdered, it’s plausible that it was someone known to the victim. There’s symmetry here—each detective is proposing a hypothesis, each of which must be defended. There is no default hypothesis that must be overturned.

But things go off the rails when he moves on to imagine two people arguing about the origin of the universe. One says it’s natural, and the other says it was caused by a divine being. He cheerfully admits that the divine being arguer has a burden of proof. But then he says,

Do you see that both of us have an equal burden?

Nope. One person is on the side of the default explanation, and the other is making the most incredible explanation possible. The burden is not equal. We know coworkers and girlfriends exist, not so gods and the supernatural.

The symmetry we had before—two people each arguing their plausible hypothesis—is gone. Now we have one person arguing for a natural explanation for a phenomenon in nature and another making the grandest, most incredible claim possible, that a supernatural being created everything. In this case, there is a default. We know countless examples of natural explanations, many of which overturned pre-scientific supernatural explanations (no, lightning doesn’t come from heaven, God doesn’t cause famine, etc.). That’s the default. We can keep an open mind about the supernatural, but that explanation is the upstart, and it has the burden of proof.

We’ll look at two different definitions of “burden of proof” in part 2.

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Image from Gabriela Fab, CC license
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A popular tactic within the Christian apologetics community is to identify and reject self-refuting arguments that are used against them. There is some wisdom here, but dig into this advice and you’ll find that it betrays a fear to confront the actual arguments.

What is a self-refuting statement?

A self-refuting statement is one that defeats itself. You can reject it without additional evidence or argument. Here are a few examples.

• “This sentence is false.” If we assume that it’s true, the statement itself tells us it’s false.
• “I will not respond to that.” Uh . . . you just did.
• “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded” (Yogi Berra). The place can’t be both empty and crowded.

Popularity of this approach with Christian apologists 

Identifying a self-refuting argument is a quick way to parry an attack. You needn’t bother with a rebuttal if there’s no argument to rebut.

This is called the “Road Runner tactic” in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (2004) by Geisler and Turek. The atheist whose argument has self-destructed is like the coyote in the cartoon who suddenly looks down to discover he has run off a cliff.

The approach is called the “Suicide Tactic” in Tactics (2009) by Greg Koukl. He wants the Christian debater to point out that the argument has committed suicide.

Here are some examples from Koukl’s book that are more relevant to apologetics.

1. To someone who says, “There are no absolutes,” the Christian could point out that that sentence gives no exceptions and so claims to be an absolute. It defeats itself. Or to “There is no truth,” the Christian shows that the sentence claims to be true, thus defeating the claim.
2. “The Bible must be flawed because people make mistakes.” But if people make mistakes, that sentence is itself subject to error. And if the atheist wants to salvage his position by arguing that people don’t always make mistakes (and that his sentence was correct), then the Bible might also be correct by the same loophole.
3. “Only science gives reliable truth.” But why is that statement trustworthy? Where is the science behind it?

And that’s that! (Or is it?)

Koukl says, “When a view commits suicide, it cannot be revived, because there is no way to repair it. Even God cannot give life to a contradictory notion.”

Not necessarily. Only through a strict and uncharitable interpretation can we dismiss these statements as meaningless. They might be clumsily worded, but they’re not meaningless. In fact, each of these examples is easily salvageable.

1. Instead of “There are no absolutes,” say, “I see no evidence for moral absolutes” or “If you claim that there is absolute truth, provide evidence to back up that claim.”
2. Instead of “The Bible must be flawed because people make mistakes,” say, “The Bible can’t be declared flawless if it was written by flawed people” or “Bible manuscripts disagree, so we can’t be certain what the originals said.”
3. Instead of “Only science gives reliable truth,” say, “Science delivers—consider the computer you’re typing on” or “If religion gives reliable new insights about reality, like science, I want to see examples.”

If the point were that clarity matters and that we should be careful how we construct arguments, that’s valid, but Koukl is not interested in careful wording. He wants to use this as a caltrop or rhetorical trick, an excuse to avoid dealing with the argument. This is what a debater does; this is not what someone interested in exploring the evidence does.

Christian cowardice and avoiding the burden of proof

The honest Christian would want to find any truth behind a claim. Is it poorly worded? Then fix the wording. Watch out for games like this where the Christian looks for the easy out rather than actually confronting any issue that’s there.

Used this way, the Suicide Tactic is just a dishonest gimmick to avoid the issue. The larger goal of apologists like Koukl—and they’ll often admit this—is to avoid the burden of proof. Making a claim and defending it is difficult, so he looks for opportunities to dupe the other person into doing that. He wants to attack, not defend.

In the first place, the Christian is the one making the remarkable claim—“God exists” or “Jesus resurrected,” perhaps—and so is obliged to gives reasons to accept the claim. But more important, the Christian can never win the argument if they shirk their burden of proof. Sure, they sidestep being embarrassed by not being able to defend their position well, but they also sidestep the opportunity to convince someone that they’re right.

Apparently they find that shouldering the burden of proof for defending the Jesus story is actually a burden.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/30/15.)

Image from Miroslaav Vajdic, CC license

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I wade through many Christians’ comments and blog posts in which the point boils down to something like, “I sense God’s presence; therefore, God exists.” Or, “I got that job after I prayed for it; therefore, God exists.” Or, “I just know that Grandpa is in heaven; therefore, God exists.”

These Christians imagine a situation like this:

where the arrow indicates causation. That is, God exists, and this causes my sense of God’s presence.

The argument can be expressed more formally:

1. If God existed, I would sense his presence
2. I sense God’s presence
3. Therefore, God exists.

Formally, the structure of this argument is:

1. If P then Q
2. Q
3. Therefore, P

But any argument of this form is a logical fallacy. Specifically, this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

It’s easy to see that this is a fallacy. Here’s another argument using this form:

1. If it’s raining, then I have my umbrella
2. I have my umbrella
3. Therefore, it’s raining.

The conclusion in step 3 doesn’t follow because I could have lots of other reasons for having my umbrella. Maybe it completes my outfit. Maybe I want to fly like Mary Poppins. Maybe I need it to act out a Monty Python silly walk or Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain.” Maybe it’s a weapon. Maybe I always carry it, just in case.

The same is true in the original “I sense God’s presence” case. Here, too, there could be more than just the one cause. The beginning of a more complete map of causes might look something like this:

where HAAD = Hyperactive Agency Detector, a brain trait that natural selection could have favored in early humans. Those timid ones who imagined agency (intelligence) behind a rustling in the bushes would run away and live, while those who thought, “Not to worry—probably just the wind” might pay for an error with their lives. A sound might be only the wind or a squirrel . . . or it might be a leopard. Those who survived (our ancestors) would be the ones with a strong hyperactive agency detector, which occasionally saw agency where there wasn’t any. For example, this HAAD might assign agency to thunder, drought, and illness.

In this diagram, two possibilities are shown that could create the Christian’s sense of God’s presence, and there might be many more.

Learning correct logical inferences and the long list logical fallacies won’t hurt anyone eager to think more rationally, but if you only learn one, this might be a good one to understand and avoid.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/23/14.)

Image via Tim Green, CC license

I survived Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ movie, the story of a no-nonsense, legally trained journalist who tackled the Jesus story as an atheist (my review here). He was determined to knock down the Christian house of cards, but he convinced himself of the truth of Christianity and became a believer instead.

Stories like Strobel’s provide never-ending entertainment for Christian audiences. Here’s a smart guy, probably smarter than they are, who attacked Christianity with more energy and intellect than they could muster. The Christian ramparts were unscathed from the attack, and the enemy is now a brother.

Praise the Lord and buy some books.

The scam

Let me sketch out an alternate reality that wouldn’t be hard to create. Take the population of public atheists from celebrity authors and scientists all the way down to commonplace atheist bloggers. Imagine that a small fraction of these public atheists dedicated some time to a special kind of missionary work. Their project would be to loudly and publicly declare that, after deep study or perhaps personal tragedy, their atheism turned out to be a big mistake. Jesus lives! Whether their conversion was driven by emotional reasons, intellectual reasons, or both, they’d then lecture or write about their conversion, embraced and validated by prominent Christian leaders who would hog the spotlight with these fledgling Christians.

Think about the big deal evangelical Christians made when philosopher Antony Flew moved from atheism to deism in 2004. Many Christians eagerly declared him atheism’s most celebrated philosopher as they claimed him for their own, even though his conversion was built on scientific arguments he wasn’t qualified to evaluate (more here).

Consider the remaining Four Horsemen—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—and imagine what a catch any of them would be to today’s Christian establishment. Or imagine prominent atheist intellectuals like Lawrence Krauss, Steven Pinker, Dan Barker, or Richard Carrier. Or cocky and obnoxious atheist bloggers and speakers like PZ Myers, Matt Dillahunty, David Silverman, or Aron Ra—wouldn’t it be gratifying to see them with their tail between their legs coming to the Truth? As new Christians, they might write books with titles like I Was Wrong: How a Professional Atheist Found Jesus and appear on conservative and Christian shows, embracing leaders like Pat Robertson and Joel Osteen and telling their inspiring story of deliverance.

And then, maybe a year after their immersion in Christianity, the new Christian would reveal that it was all a spoof! Then they’d lecture about that—about the Christian celebrities who declared that God assured them that the ex-atheist’s heart was pure or about the publicity tour where the ex-atheist was used like a trained circus animal to raise donations. Don’t tell me that they couldn’t convincingly pull this off when many of them came from a deeply religious background—Michael Shermer, Matt Dillahunty, and Dan Barker come to mind, for example.

The point

The goal here isn’t to humiliate the Christian establishment, though that’s a satisfying side benefit. Rather, it’s to poison the well so that the next Lee Strobel conversion claim may not be so well received. The Christian marketing machine needs to be burned a few times, like it was in 2015 with “heaven tourism” books.

If Christianity’s mechanism for winnowing the true from the false is so imperfect that a fraudulent “I visited heaven!” or “I found Jesus!” story can be this easily believed, that says something about how they find truth in supernatural claims. If they refuse to learn the lesson when it’s clearly and logically presented by these atheists today, maybe they need a little public humiliation tomorrow. If the deception part bothers you, remember that they started it. They are the ones who declare that they have solid intellectual reasons behind their faith. If that makes them feel good about themselves, that’s fine, but they can’t insist that those of us in the reality-based world swallow that.

I’m half thinking about this just as a fun thought experiment . . . and half thinking that it’d be a great project to actually implement. Do you know any atheists who want an adventure?

See also:

• “I used to be an atheist, just like you”
• An Atheist Horror Story (Fiction)

Asking, “If there is no god, what is the purpose of life?”
is like asking, “If there is no master, whose slave will I be?”
— Dan Barker

Image credit: Frederick Dennstedt, flickr, CC