Ten Tips For Atheists

Christian apologist John Dickson wrote an article some time ago with the purported object of promoting productive dialog between Christians and atheists.  It contains ten pieces of advice for the atheist to follow that he feels will advance this objective.  I applaud him for his effort, but I have to take issue with him on a number of points.  I'll address them one by one.  At the same time, I think there are a number of things that he (as well as other Christians who want to engage in robust debate with atheists or skeptics) might want to think about.

Extraordinary Claims - Who Needs Evidence?

Most reasonable people understand what Carl Sagan meant by his expression: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  If someone tells me that an everyday event occurred, I have little or no reason to doubt the truth of that claim.  But if they tell me something occurred that rarely or never happens, it would be reasonable to doubt that claim unless they provide sufficient reason for me to believe it.  What is sufficient reason?  Obviously, it depends to some degree on the person who is being convinced.  Is that person credulous or skeptical?  Is there motivation to believe?  Sagan's expression assumes a person who isn't credulous or motivated by other factors to believe the claim.  Some people will believe anything.  Some are motivated to believe for reasons other than sufficient evidence.  In that case, they may try to deny the value of evidence in an effort to discredit skeptics.  Such is the case with Dean Meadows, Christian apologist at Apologia Institute.  Meadows presents three arguments against Sagan's epistemological rule of thumb.

God's Perfect Justice

In the commentary on my previous post, there was some discussion about what it means for God to be perfectly good or benevolent.  Most theists like to include some notion of justice in their definition, as a way to explain why God would mete out punishment for sin.  God is perfectly loving and merciful, but at the same time, he is just.  He must exact payment for our sins in a perfectly fair and impartial manner.  But justice seems to be in conflict with mercy.  In perusing the posts on Cross Examined, I came across an article that is relevant to this issue.  A commenter had noted

Justice is getting what you deserve. Mercy is getting LESS than what you deserve. Take your pick.

How can God be both just and merciful at the same time?  Al Serrato attempts to answer the question by explaining that God is just because he demands payment for sin, but he is also merciful because he allows someone else (Jesus) to pay the price for us.  But I have some problems with that explanation.

What Matters Is What's True

Richard Dawkins, discussing what motivates religious belief, famously said:

Who cares what you feel like?  Who cares what feels good?  Who cares what makes you feel comforted?  Who cares what helps you sleep at night?  What matters is what's true. - Richard Dawkins

Religionists don't care what motivates their belief, or perhaps it's the case that they willfully ignore it.  But they take great umbrage at the idea that a non-believer could lay any claim to caring about what is true, because their faith tells them that Truth™ belongs exclusively to themselves.  This is a dogmatic assertion.  Don't bother trying to bring facts to the table.  Facts have nothing to do with it.  Reality has nothing to do with it.  To a militant religionist like Mikey at Shadow To Light, an atheist's relationship with the truth is "slippery".  But his own relationship with the truth is taken for granted, because God.  Mikey speculates that the only reason an atheist would place any value on truth is because he comes from a culture with a religious history that values truth.  So the first lie in his article appears in the second sentence.

Being Brutally Honest

Let's face it.  The only truly honest Christians are those who lack a sophisticated philosophical understanding of their faith.  I noted in my previous post that faith, as practiced by ordinary believers, requires a resistance to any evidence that would subvert belief, and those ordinary believers who aren't philosophically-minded generally agree with that.  But it is the apologists who insist that faith is based on evidence.  The apologists are lying.  It is intellectually dishonest to say that their faith is based on evidence, and at the same time, steadfastly refuse to critically examine evidence that refutes belief.  But they have painted themselves into a philosophical corner, so to speak.  They can't honestly admit that they reject evidence and still claim the intellectual high ground.  So they take the path of intellectual dishonesty, in the hopes that most people aren't astute enough to see the truth about their philosophical stance.  And they even manage to fool themselves into believing their own lies, because, after all, faith really does trump reason.

Apologetic Vs. Actual Christian Faith

In his latest post at Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has pointed out the deluded nature of Christian apologists' definitions of religious faith, such as this one given by David Marshall:

holding firmly to and acting on what you have good reason to believe is true, in the face of difficulties - David Marshall and Tim McGrew, in True Reason

Or as apologist J. Warner Wallace says:

Conviction is the result of certainty, and certainty is the result of evidential confidence. We are called to be convinced by mastering the evidence that supports what we believe. The Christians life is not one of "wishful thinking" or "hope in the unreasonable". It is a life of certainty, grounded in the evidence. - Wallace

Loftus rightly notes that these definitions are disingenuous, because they try to make their faith sound reasonable, when in fact the objective evidence that would justify their belief is severely lacking.  It is only due to religious delusion that they could possibly think the evidence merits their beliefs.  But apologists must defend belief in the face of all critiques, and don't necessarily use honest tactics in pursuit of that goal.  You often hear them claiming that atheists just don't understand what faith means from the Christian perspective.  But if that's true, they might as well admit that most Christians don't understand faith, either.  It seems to me that apologists have their own special definitions, involving evidence, reason, and justified belief, that aren't shared by ordinary Christians.

God Is Great

As I watched news coverage of the extraordinary flooding in Houston due to Hurricane Harvey, I saw something that happens whenever a natural disaster occurs: people who have been rescued praise the glory of God.  This is hard for me to understand.  I get that they are  happy and grateful that they managed to survive, but if God is really making all this happen, then God just turned their lives upside-down.  Is this something they should be grateful for?  It seems to me that God wreaked havoc, and destroyed or ruined a lot of lives.  God didn't save them.  It was the dedicated efforts of brave people who did everything they could to mitigate God's disaster that saved their lives.  And it's those people who deserve the praise - not God.

Science Education And Reality

Victor Reppert has produced yet another stunning blog piece, called The authoritarianism of science education, that caught my attention because of its sheer ignorance.  It attempts to denigrate educational methods in science as being "authoritarian", and not "following the argument where it leads".  Here is the article in its entirety:

Science education is NOT an example of following the argument where it leads. If you do a chem lab and your results differ from those prescribed in the textbook, you are not to ask whether you  have made a new scientific discovery. No, you are asked to figure out where you made a mistake. - Reppert

I think it is worth commenting on this, not just to point out its ignorance, but because is illustrates the huge rift between scientific thinking and religious thinking, in general.  I'll get to that, but first, I need to explain why Victor is 100% wrong.

The Soteriological Drama

It is interesting to see the stories people make up about why their supposedly maximally good and loving God would allow so much evil, pain, and suffering in the world.  These stories, known as "theodicies", are an attempt to explain away our observations of the world in the face of apparently contradictory assumptions about the qualities of God.  Most of them try to make the case that it's all for our own good - that we need all these bad things in our lives in order to build or prove our character, so that God can know we are worthy of spending eternity basking in his presence.  But every theodicy I have ever heard sounds like a just-so story   It provides an unlikely explanation that might be fascinating to a child, but doesn't stand up to any serious scrutiny, either from an evidential or logical perspective.

Heads I Lose, Tails You Win

What does it take to convince an atheist that God exists?  This question has been asked and answered again and again.  But no matter what reasonable response an atheist gives, it is automatically rejected by the religionists.  If an atheist suggests that some supernatural event would be convincing to him, that suggestion will be met with one of two possible responses from the religionist: either "That's unreasonable because you're asking to see something that is never going to happen" or "You wouldn't really accept that as being convincing because your own belief system doesn't allow it as a possibility".  The religionist will never simply take the atheist's answer at face value, because that would be tantamount to admitting that the atheist is being reasonable.  That's something religionists will never admit, regardless of how reasonable the atheist's position might actually be.

Reppert On the Scientism Bandwagon

Scientism has been a topic of considerable interest to me lately, mainly because I see it as a major battleground in the war on reason.  As with other monotheistic religions, Christianity has long been hostile to anything that would encroach on its ideology.  In a recognition of the logical absurdity of belief in the Christian mythos, Tertullian proclaimed that faith was incompatible with natural reason.  That attitude is still reflected today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which places faith above reason as a matter of doctrine.  Most Christians today deny that they are opposed to reason, but when it comes down to matters of science or secular philosophy versus religion, there is no question that their sympathies lie on the side of faith.

Philosophical Elitism on the March

Alvin Plantinga is widely regarded as a leading Christian apologist and philosopher of religion.  Perhaps his most notable philosophical contribution in the field of epistemology is his so-called "Reformed Epistemology", which holds that belief in God is justified without evidence or argument.  According to RE, belief in God is said to be properly basic, or foundational - the same as the axioms of logic or mathematics are considered to be properly basic beliefs that are universally accepted and require no justification.  Thus, RE constitutes a rational basis for belief in God, despite the utter lack of any objective evidence that would provide justification for an empiricist to believe.  A major difference between this and the properly basic beliefs of an empiricist epistemology is the fact that belief in God can be rationally denied without creating a problem of functionality or coherency in one's worldview.

Would I Become a Christian?

BK puts forth this question in his latest posting at Christian Cadre: If Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?  He supposes that this is the all-time gotcha question that would force atheists to come clean and confess the truth of the faith, or expose themselves as being dishonest.  BK presents three possible responses that an atheist might offer to this question.   One is to deny Christianity without any explanation.  Another is to deny it with an explanation.  And finally the atheist might accept the truth and say yes.  But I think the question requires more depth of discussion before a simple yes or no answer can be given.

The Problem of Divine Hiddenness

I just read a strange argument from BK, over at Christian Cadre.  In praising Tom Gilson's review of John Loftus' forthcoming book How To Defend the Christian Faith, BK inadvertently undermines Gilson's argument.  But BK's thought process is thoroughly irrational.  He doesn't even recognize that he has abandoned all logical argument in favor of an emotional knee-jerk reaction against the atheist Loftus. 

Before we get to any discussion of divine hiddenness, BK starts out by expressing his dislike of Loftus.  He says:

I don’t like to give the aforementioned Mr. Loftus any recognition on this blog because he is remarkably uninformed about Christian thought even by atheist standards. - BK

Apparently, BK is completely unaware that Loftus was raised as a Christian, and was a fervent believer for more than half of his life.  He holds a Bachelor of Religious Education degree, a Masters of Divinity, and a Masters of Theology.  He was an ordained minister.  He studied under William Lane Craig, and taught apologetics.  In BK's view all this amounts to being "remarkably uninformed".  He then goes on to make the childish proclamation:

For the remainder of this post, I will treat him like Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter by referencing him as “he-who-shall-not-be-named”. - BK

And this sets the tone for the intellectual content of the remainder of his post.

The Limits of Credulity

I read an article called The Gospel Truth of Jesus by Christian apologist Tom Gilson, that attempts to debunk the idea that Jesus could have been a legendary figure.  This is in response to a common objection to the so-called "Trilemma" of CS Lewis, which says that Jesus must have been either lunatic, liar, or Lord.  The objection that readily comes to mind for anyone who isn't steeped in religious fervor is that Lewis left out another possibility: the idea that the biblical stories of Jesus could be based on legend rater than historical reality.  But Lewis didn't consider that possibility, and Gilson defends Lewis, on the basis that it is not even worthy of consideration.

The Christian Narrative

It is amusing to watch Christians disagree with atheists about the definition of common words.  We have seen many times how they spar over the definition of 'faith', with Christians insisting on a definition that is not found in any ordinary dictionary.  And we also see the same kind of battle over the definition of 'atheist'.  Both of these words are found in common usage, so they are not considered to be technical terms that are understood only by people in certain academic or professional circles.  However, Christians prefer to use these words in a non-standard way that carries different meaning - one that fits their own agenda.

On the Meaning of Faith

Metacrock (Joe Hinman) recently re-posted an old article on the meaning of faith.  The thrust of this article is that when atheists speak about religious faith, they define it as a straw man.  They define faith in such a way that it doesn't apply to what Christians actually believe.  And by that, Hinman means that we use the dictionary as our source of definition rather than something contrived and approved by theologians as a concept of faith to be used in the indoctrination of Christians.  Of course, the theological concept bears no negative connotation whatsoever.  If it did, it wouldn't be approved by theologians, whose goal is to cast it in the best possible light.  But that says little or nothing about how the term is used in actual discussion, particularly among those of us who aren't apologists for the faith.

More on Evidence vs. Faith

Victor Reppert sees the evidence as a relationship between the likelihood of a fact and some postulated state of affairs.  Given the postulated state of affairs Y is true, if a particular fact X is more likely to exist, then X is said to be evidence in favor of Y.  To put it in Victor's own words:

I understand evidence in Bayesian terms. For me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. By this definition, something can have evidence for it and be false. - Reppert 

In his view, an individual fact is regarded as evidence for or against the postulated state of affairs.  It may then be possible to judge whether that postulation is true, perhaps on the basis of a single fact in evidence, or perhaps by weighing several pieces of evidence for and against the postulation.

In my view, this way of looking at evidence is wrong, and quite likely to result in incorrect conclusions.

The Irrational Feser - Part 1: The Review

I saw that Ed Feser wrote a review of Jerry Coyne's book, Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, which is posted in First Things, and I was interested to see how Feser would address the issues raised by Coyne.  Upon reading it, I realized that this "review" was little more than a diatribe against Coyne, and does little or nothing to satisfy the questions of someone who is interested in hearing arguments against Coyne's central thesis: that science and religion are incompatible.

Since it is a brief review, consisting of 12 paragraphs, I'll take a look at the the entire article here.

Conflating Faith With Faith

Kyle Butt cautions Christians against using the standard dictionary definition of faith.  Christians, understandably, don't want to be seen as believing without sufficient evidence.  They love to tell themselves that their faith requires, and is justified by evidence that is overwhelming and irrefutable.  But the dictionary defines faith as belief without evidence, not because of some ideological motivation to subvert the true nature of faith, but because that is, after all, what we generally mean when we use the word.