Note to the New Atheists: What we need isn't less religion, but better theology.

Our Smear Campaign. By one of the new atheists.

Brian's note: My Uncle Brad, a religious skeptic, recently asked me to debate issues related to the Christian faith. We decided to have an ongoing public debate here at my blog. This is my latest response to some of his comments on my previous post. You may want to read that post and the comments for more context. My series of posts on Richard Dawkins also comes into play. Here I've put his comments in purple; mine are in black. Feel free to interact in the comments section.

Brian, I looked up the Dawkins’ quote you cited and he clearly directed it to people who, “feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing. . .” In this specific context I’m even more convinced he’s making a very valid point. Here are my responses to your last blog.

I really don't think it makes any difference that he is addressing people who feel "trapped in the religion of your upbringing," whatever that means. I doubt Dawkins would say that his quote doesn't apply to people who don't feel trapped. Likewise, my objections would apply equally to people who do feel trapped in their religion as to people who don't.

Just what sociological questions do you think I’m confusing with what epistemological questions?

I think I've made that clear already, but I'll go over it again. A sociological question is one like, "Why is there a higher percentage of people in Colorado Springs who believe in the divinity of Christ than in Mecca?" To this question we can give sociological answers. "Christianity is the dominant religion practiced in Colorado Springs." "There's an evangelical church on every corner in Colorado Springs and a mosque on every corner in Mecca," etc. An epistemological question is, "Are there good reasons for believing in the divinity of Christ?" To this we can give epistemological answers. "There is good manuscript evidence that Christ claimed to be equal with God, and there is good historical evidence for the Resurrection," etc. If your subject matter is the origin of people's beliefs about Christ's divinity, you can move between sociology and epistemology. But if your subject matter is the truth status of their belief about Christ's divinity, you can't move between sociology and epistemology. That's bad logic. No doubt there are many beliefs that are culturally conditioned and culturally transmitted but that are also true, and that can be known to be true independent of the role they play in the culture.

In the comments section of my last post on a typical silly argument by Richard Dawkins against religious belief, Uncle Skeptic said:

Allowing for some literary license with regard to generality and geography, the Dawkins quote is right on. If we can’t, in general, “judge an individual’s justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise”, then how do you explain the overwhelming correlation between religion and geography? If you look at the geographical distribution of religions, it’s obvious that the vast majority of religious people do, in fact, acquire their religion based on the prevailing cultural soup.

A few points here. First, you are confusing sociological questions with epistemological questions. There are simple sociological reasons why we find high levels of religious uniformity among entire cultures, nations, and races: such uniformity allows for social cohesion, national identity, and a shared set of values. That people often adopt the beliefs of those around them is not new or surprising. Suppose 99% of the people of a culture believe the same thing on a particular religious subject - say, that humans are made in the image of God - and they believe simply because that's what their parents or their culture told them. This fact has exactly zero bearing on whether people actually are made in the image of God or not. As for me, if I'm trying to determine for myself what my view on human nature is, sociological facts about how and why this belief is widely held in my culture are entirely irrelevant. What only matters is whether I have good reasons for accepting it or not, and that is an epistemological question that is independent of sociological ones. If I have a suspicion that I have been duped or "indoctrinated" either for or against this belief, I need only to investigate the matter for myself. Just because a belief is held widely in one particular culture does not automatically make it wrong.

Here is Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam is false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Before we take this quote too seriously, we should consider the fact that this is the same Richard Dawkins who claimed that raising a child Catholic is worse than sexually abusing him. Credibility issues aside, what can we make of statements like the one above? This sort of reasoning is very prevalent in the writings of the new atheism of Dawkins, Harris, et al. But this is a typical Dawkinsian non-argument. There is no there there. What is the point of such statements other than to offer intellectual kudos to those who already disbelieve in any particular religion? Consider the following variation on the above quote:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think representative democracy is the best form of government and that Islamic theocracy is the worst, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Or how about this one:

If you were born in 1980 and you think the world is round instead of flat, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in 1089, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

If you can understand the silliness of the two latter statements, you should be able to understand the silliness of the first. You don't necessarily judge an individual's justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise. Consider the following three facts:

(1) I live in a culture where a majority of the people believe Christianity is true.
(2) My parents taught me to believe that Christianity is true.
(3) I believe that Christianity is true.

And these:

(4) Aziz lives in a culture where a majority of the people believe that Islam is true.
(5) Aziz' parents taught him to believe that Islam is true.
(6) Aziz believes that Islam is true.

Now, it's obvious that facts (1)-(3) have no bearing on whether Christianity is true or not, just as (4)-(6) have no bearing on whether Islam is true or not. Let's add one more fact to our list:

(7) If I had been born in Aziz' family, I would have believed that Islam was true instead of Christianity.

Dawkins' contention is that if I am aware that facts (1)-(7) are true, then I should conclude that I am a victim of "childhood indoctrination."

But why? The circumstances under which I form a belief are different animals from the reasons I have for holding that belief. I suppose that by Dawkins using this sort of reasoning he means to hold up a simple truism: we shouldn't believe something just because it is widely believed in our own culture. This is obvious, but trivial. Dawkins is attempting to twist this simple truism into some sort of cudgel against religious belief. But just because it is true that some religious people hold their beliefs because they were raised in a religious culture, and because they themselves have not done enough reflection to have good reasons for their beliefs, does not mean that all of them do. And just because some parents indoctrinate and propagandize their children into religious belief does not mean that all of them do. I think most religious parents attempt, to the best of their ability, to give their children good reasons for why they think their religious views are right and others are wrong. That some parents fail miserably at this task is probably a contributor to the apostasy rate of children of religious believers, but that too is a different discussion altogether.

Consider again my above variations on Dawkins' statement. Suppose someone were to use my first hypothetical statement to mock Dawkins for believing that representative democracy is superior to Islamic theocracy. What would his response be? I think he would simply point out that representative democracy is the best form of government for Reason A, Reason B, Reason C, and so forth. If he is justified in doing this, why is the religious believer not justified in doing the same thing? Facts about what someone would believe in a possible world in which they were raised in a different culture are irrelevant to the justification for the beliefs they hold in this, the real world. If we were to adopt this sort of skepticism, then it wouldn't just be religious beliefs that we would have to be skeptical about, but our moral beliefs, our political beliefs, and any other beliefs that fall short of being justified by naked logic or direct experience. Once again, for all his blustering and cuteness, the darling of the new atheists poses no convincing argument against the justification of religious belief. Dawkins always disappoints.

Here is a must-read post by Bill Vallicella: Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?. I have no time to comment now. Perhaps later. Perhaps not.

My posts on Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument' against the existence of God are finished. Below you will find links to all the posts in this series as well as a few others that deal with Dawkins' claims. Or you could always just peruse the Contra Dawkins sub-category. I now wash my hands of the man.

Theism Defeated? A Response to Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate 747 Argument' Against the Existence of God

• Formulating the Argument


• Formulating the Argument (part 2)


• Counterargument 1


• Counterargument 2


• Counterargument 3

Special Dawkins Bonus Posts!

• Richard Dawkins' non-argument against arguments from religious experience


• Tech savvy atheists and head-in-the-sand theists


• Dawkins jumps the shark


• Richard Dawkins = Cosmo Kramer

[This is the final part of my series critiquing Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate 747 Argument' against the existence of God. Previous entries can be found here, here, here, and here.]

Counterargument 3: A Complex God Can Exist Necessarily

To see how this final counterargument runs, recall some of the premises of the various formulations of the 747 argument I outlined in previous posts. The first three premises of 747m are:

(i) All entities (potential or actual) possess organized complexity (C) in degrees.

(ii) For any degree of C possessed by any entity E, however, E’s possessing C entails E’s possessing improbability of existence (I) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of C possessed by E.

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

The move from (i) to (ii) and from (ii) to (iii) is questionable. It seems that Dawkins’ boldness allows him to muster the confidence to posit necessary connections between organized complexity, improbability, and explanatory requirement in a striking way. Is this move legitimate? It's hard to see how it is. Discussion of metaphysical issues of this sort is almost impossible without referring to the concepts of necessity and contingency. Thus Dawkins’ argument is incomplete; it doesn’t deal with issues it needs to deal with if it wants to arrive at its conclusion in a convincing manner. Traditionally theists have viewed God as a necessary being. Every created thing, however, is contingent. This just means that of quarks and Quakers, pandas and people, and molecules and mollusks, none of them have the power to exist on their own. God, however, being a necessary Being, does have the power to exist on His own. In fact, He’s the ground of all being Himself (“I AM”), and nothing can exist apart from His necessity. If God were to disappear, everything else would disappear as well.

From my beach reading, Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise:

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

The speaker here is "Starglider," a robotic alien probe that passes through our galaxy on an information-gathering mission. Clarke means Starglider to be an immensely intelligent entity, a sentient logical computer with the accumulated knowledge of a thousand intelligent species at its disposal. As much as I admire Clarke and enjoy his writings, I find it difficult that a super-intelligent being would propound such a sophomoric argument for the non-existence of God (and I assume that Clarke means Starglider to be speaking for himself here). Starglider's statement first jumped out at me because of its conspicuous similarities with Dawkins' 747 argument, against which I have been voluminously blogging lately. Indeed, the argument is downright Dawkinsian in its cheeky assumptions about its own cogency, as if it decisively ends the debate.

[In previous posts I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion. In my first post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In the second post I attempted to construct the argument formally so that we would have an easier time of dealing with it. In my last post I presented my first counterargument. Now I present my second. All page references are from Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). One quote is from Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996).]

Counterargument 2: God is Not Necessarily Complex

Recall that on Dawkins’ system of probability, an entity’s improbability of existence is directly proportional to the level of complexity that entity possesses. The first three steps of 747m are:

(i) All entities (potential or actual) possess organized complexity (C) in degrees.

(ii) For any degree of C possessed by any entity E, however, E’s possessing C entails E’s possessing improbability of existence (I) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of C possessed by E.

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

All this means is that, for example, my 1996 Nissan Pathfinder is more complex, and therefore more improbable, and therefore requires more explanation for its existence, than a three pound rock. For this second counterargument, however, we are going to focus on premise (vi) from 747m:

(vi) For any entity E1 that brings about the existence of entity E2, the degree of C possessed by E1 must necessarily be greater than the degree of C possessed by E2.

And (xv) from 747e:

(xv) However, if God created biological life then He would necessarily be more complex than even the most complex example of biological life.

Also, 747s can’t succeed without accepting either (vi) or (xv) as an implicit assumption, so it seems that this premise is crucial to the overall success of every version of the 747 argument.

[In previous posts I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion. In my first post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In the second post I attempted to construct the argument formally so that we would have an easier time of dealing with it. In this post I present my first counterargument to Dawkins' claims.]

Counterargument 1: The 747 Argument Fails to Show that Theistic Belief is Irrational

First, Dawkins understands his argument to be a very powerful ontological or metaphysical argument, outlined in the last post as 747m. The problem here is that even in this version Dawkins is mixing his metaphysics with his epistemology in an unacceptable way. Consider premise (iii). Recall that (iii) was:

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

Furthermore, according to premise (iv) the degree of R possessed by E is directly proportional to the degree of I possessed by E. But (iii) contains a subtle and not entirely legitimate assumption. To understand this, consider the following two propositions:

(HI) It is highly improbable that God exists.

(HR) It is highly irrational to believe that God exists.

The conclusion of Dawkins’ argument (or at least to 747m and 747s) is (HI). But (HI) is a metaphysical claim, while (HR) is an epistemological claim. It is clear that Dawkins thinks that (HI) somehow entails or at least implies (HR).

Albert Mohler is the president of the institution I attend and we both teach Adult Bible Fellowship classes at the East Campus of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville. Orson Scott Card is a Mormon and one of my favorite science fiction authors. His early novel Ender's Game is a modern-day classic of military sci-fi, and I just read the first sequel, Speaker for the Dead, last year. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they are debating one another at Beliefnet on the topic of whether Mormonism is really Christian. I admire Card as an excellent novelist and a sincerely religious man, but I'm with Big Al on this one.

[HT: Justin Taylor]

[Note: In a previous post I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion, but in my previous post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In this second post I attempt to construct the argument formally so that we will have an easier time of dealing with it. In order to ensure that I treat Dawkins' argument fairly I have formulated three different versions of his argument. In future posts I will show how theists can respond.]

The Metaphysical Version of the 747 Argument

Dawkins’ explicit claim is that the 747 Argument is aimed at (G), the proposition that such a being as God actually exists. If so, then the argument is essentially about metaphysics. It purports to show the extremely high improbability that a certain type of being actually exists. If we assume that his argument is against (G), and that his comments referring to certain theistic design arguments are only incidental to this primary aim, then we have an argument that looks like the following:

[Note: All page references are from Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006).]

In his recent book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins claims that he has formulated an argument against the existence of God that decisively trumps all challengers. Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and plucky standard-bearer for militant anti-theism, is supremely confident that his ‘Ultimate 747 Argument’ against the existence of God is not only successful in its aim of debunking theism, but that it is practically immune to any argument that can be brought against it. Indeed, Dawkins thinks the argument is more convincing than even the argument from evil, and that, “this argument … demonstrates that God, while not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed.” (109) Thus Dawkins takes his argument to be a particularly compelling inductive argument, one that shows the extreme improbability of God. In his view, this argument

is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument … The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. (113)

The conclusion of this argument, “is close to being terminally fatal to the God Hypothesis.” (61) In this series of posts based on a recent paper I wrote, I want to show that Dawkins' confidence in this argument is wildly misplaced, and that the theist's only trouble in answering it will be in determining which of the several available options will do the best job.

As much as I dislike the idea, it's time to start blogging on Richard Dawkins and his anti-theisic crusade. I'm currently putting the final touches on a paper critiquing Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against God's existence that he so loudly trumpets in The God Delusion. When I finish it I'll put it on the still under-represented Writings section. Until then I thought I'd start posting summaries of ideas I formulate in the paper.

Today our topic is Dawkins' treatment of arguments from religious experience as they are used to (1) justify belief in God or (2) "prove" God's existence. I'm not sure Dawkins understands the difference between these two purposes, but I'll set that aside for now. Dawkins thinks he can do away with arguments from religious experience in a mere six pages (if you find this hubristic, consider that he spends even fewer pages on Aquinas' five ways). However, even in these six pages there isn't much of an argument. Dawkins' contention is that the human brain has very sophisticated "simulation software," and that somehow spiritual experiences are manufactured by this fine piece of biological engineering. Here is a characteristic bit of Dawkinsian wisecrackery on the subject:

You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn’t vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people’s heads. We humour them but don’t take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.

When it comes to Christian apologetics, I'm no fan of what I would call "strong" presuppositionalism in the Van Tillian sense. I recognize that a presuppositionalist approach can have value in certain circumstances, but on the whole, I'm more of a cumulative case guy myself. That being said, this presuppositionalist blogger thinks Doug Wilson is using the presuppositionalist strategy very effectively in his online debate with Christopher Hitchens.

[HT: Justin Taylor]

Earlier this week Christopher Hitchens apparently debated Al Sharpton (of all people) on the existence of God. Here's the rundown, and Keith Burgess-Jackson scores the bout for Sharpton. Hitchens is one of my favorite liberals to read, while I find Sharpton to be a bloviating demagogue. But alas, in this battle my sympathies are with the Reverend.

Consider the following argument for God's existence:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This is the famous kalam version of the cosmological argument for God's existence, popularized in recent decades by Bill Craig and over which much ink has been spilled by theists and atheists alike. The question is this: is the religious believer acting rationally in accepting the above argument in the support structure for his belief in God? Notice the question is not, "Does the argument succeed?" but, "Is it rational to view the argument as supporting theistic belief?" The atheists generally argue against kalam by claiming that the argument fails: by challenging one of the premises, or claiming that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, or by pointing out that even if the argument is sound, it doesn't prove that the cause of the universe is anything like what theists call "God," just to name a few.

I think the second question is more appropriate, not because of any glaring flaw in kalam but because the last few hundred years of philosophy has shown us that it is difficult to achieve indubitable certainty on any matter from any argument. It's difficult to produce a rock-solid argument for the existence of the external world, or for past events, or for the existence of other minds, just to name a few very popular examples. Why think that God's existence can be proved to any greater extent than these? Now, maybe God, being the ground of all existence, can be proved in just such a way by just such an argument. But maybe not. It seems that the whole of Scripture doesn't point to people coming to knowledge of God by arguments to His existence but by encounter with Him directly or with His attributes indirectly.

My friend Aaron Hernandez, who has degrees in both biology and philosophy, recently took offense with me for something I said in this post:

Biologists do not often make good philosophers, and vice versa.

Alright Aaron, I grant the point. This statement doesn't seem fair. There is nothing in the intellectual makeup of biologists qua biologists that prevents them from being good philosophers. Indeed, intellectuals cross over disciplines quite often and have valuable things to say. So perhaps I should qualify my statement a bit, and say rather that a professional biologist, untrained in philosophy, is not as likely to make as good of an argument on any philosophical subject as a trained philosopher is. Likewise, a professional philosopher, untrained in biology, is even less likely to do biology successfully than a trained biologist.

The context of this statement was Richard Dawkins' critique of theism in his book The God Delusion. Dawkins fancies his arguments against belief in God as being devastating to theism and unanswerable by theism's proponents. But Dawkins, as I hope to show in a paper I'm writing, fails at this Herculean task he has set out for himself. His infamous '747 Argument' against God's existence is interesting, but lacks the logical potency that he thinks it has. The theist has multiple avenues of response, and I think most of us are justified in passing right over it as not being especially compelling.

So, again Aaron, I apologize for the statement. I needed to clarify what I meant, that it was the likes of Dawkins and P. Z. Myers that I was criticizing, not biologists who actually know something about philosophy.

Denny Burk has a good list of news stories and scholars' responses to this whole Jesus tomb silliness.

You can hear one "Dr. Terry Tommyrot" discussing his new book The Dawkins Delusion here. Dr. Tommyrot is not convinced of the existence of Richard Dawkins. He also believes that Dawkinsianism and its radical followers are forces for great evil in the world.

Here is a transcript and here is the original, but you really should hear the fascinating interview.

[HT to Uncommon Descent]

Here is the always witty Alvin Plantinga's review of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion. It's long, but I'll quote the best bit:

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he’s a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside) many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

I've been beating a similar drum for quite some time now. If - like the Dawkinses and Harrises of the world - you are going to continually holler and stamp your feet about the irrationality and danger of theism, you better have some pretty potent arguments to back up your claim. But alas, their arguments are batting solid .200s in the Little Leagues of serious philosophy. I suppose we should expect this. Biologists do not often make good philosophers, and vice versa. If I were to make a monolithic argument about biology it would probably be pretty febrile. But, unlike Dawkins, I understand my own academic limitations.

[HT to John DePoe]

In a comment, John DePoe pointed me to the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum that is soon to be held at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Christian apologist and uber-prolific author Alister McGrath will be discussing "The Future of Atheism" with diehard naturalist Daniel Dennett. I'd love to attend something like this, but my work schedule rarely lets me get away from Louisville. Hopefully NOBTS will make the audio of the conference freely available online.

Digg and YouTube Powering Atheism 2.0 discusses how the new militant atheism is using information sharing sites to further its agenda. I'm not sure how much cultural influence these sites are having, but I've certainly noticed an abundance of Dawkins and Harris promotion on sites like YouTube over the last few months. I find this disturbing, and not simply because it's atheism, but because of the type of atheism it is.

Well, what type of atheism is it? It's hard to define, and I haven't quite come up with a nifty catch-all name for it, but I explain it this way: the militant atheism of Dawkins and Harris makes claims against theism that far outpace the quality of its actual arguments against theism. In other words, they and the legions of internet trolls who promote them loudly and vehemently proclaim that all religion is irrational, dangerous, superstitious, etc., and then as evidence of this they produce arguments that professional philosophers do not find to be as devastating as their defenders make them out to be.

This is not surprising. By academic trade I am a philosophy student, and thus I am aware that any major argument I make in an area outside of my own discipline is likely to be specious, if not downright bad. Thus you will find no discussions on biology or economics on this site. Dawkins and Harris, however, seem strangely unaware of this basic principle. Hence they exit their own areas of expertise (biology and neuroscience, respectively) and brashly venture into the area of philosophy of religion and make minor league arguments against religious belief or the existence of God. They then parade these average arguments around in their books and articles and thereby claim that religion is intellectually defeated and that all religious belief is irrational.

You can see how this irks someone like me. The worst part of it is that Dawkins and Harris both say that religious belief in general causes violence (or at least more violence than enlightened atheism) and that religious people are the cause of much conflict and misery in the world. This is typical of polemicists such as these, but consider another scenario. Imagine if someone like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell were to claim that Islamic belief in general causes violence and that Muslims were the cause of most of the conflict and misery in the world. There would be no end of outrage in the land of the talking heads. Dawkins and Harris, however, cast an even wider net - on all religious people - and there is nary a cry of protest from the mainstream media.

Christians, for the most part, ignore Dawkins and Harris as wild-eyed atheist agitators (which they are) but they also fail to see the impact they and other antitheist polemicists are having on the culture. It's becoming vogue among a certain sector of young people to embrace Dawkinsian atheism. That Dawkins' and Harris' arguments do not merit the attention they receive is of no consequence. It's simply hip nowadays to bash religion as irrational, and two thousand years of theistic reasoning be damned! That these vitriolic Dawkinsians (the above mentioned legions of internet trolls being the most visible) ignore good arguments contrary to their own position is a moot point. They spread their message effectively, and I'm afraid Christian philosophers and apologists suffer from the same malady as the rest of Christendom: they do not take Dawkins and Harris seriously, and hence they ignore the spread of militant atheism right under their noses.

Because of all this I am considering changing the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. I had planned on doing something in the area of metaethics, but now I'm considering writing on the philosophical merits of Richard Dawkins' antitheist arguments. I'm also working on a long series of posts called "Letter to the Atheist Agitators" in which I show that the arguments of these atheist evangelists are not as strong as their supporters theink they are, and that they are - at some points - embarrassingly poor. I'm also considering taking Dawkins' latest arguments to task in a paper for one of my seminars this Spring, pending professor approval. So stay tuned. I have a lot more to say about the atheist agitators.

Over at the cleverly named Thinking Christian, Tom Gilson poses a challenge to theists that the formidable skeptic Dr. Logic posted as a comment. Dr. Logic believes that there really isn't a way that we theists can rationally say that theism has explanatory power over the world. What follows is the full text of Dr. Logic's challenge, followed by my reply:

In an opinion piece at the Dubliner, the atheist bulldogmatist Richard Dawkins makes the following claim:

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.

So in Dawkins' worldview, raping kids is morally superior to teaching them to sing "Jesus Loves Me." I think it's safe to say that Dawkins can no longer be taken seriously. Such misguided fanaticism does not deserve a shred of respect, especially academic respect. I believe that after these comments all reasonable people - atheist, Christian, and Darwinist alike - are justified in labeling Dawkins a myopically-inclined idiot.

And yes, I did just coin the term "bulldogmatist." Maybe I'll get a patent for it.

[HT to Jeremy Pierce]

Here is Bill Vallicella, addressing the issue of whether theistic belief is childish and, more specifically, whether people who believe in God are doing so because it somehow "comforts" them:

If God is but a comforting illusion we project into a Godless universe, then why do the major religions contain such dreadful notions? If our unconscious aim is to comfort ourselves, why do we (collectively and unconsciously) project notions that are terrifying and unsettling? For example, why, on Ash Wednesday, do Christian believers tell themselves that they are dust and unto dust they shall return? (Gen 3, 19: quia pulvis est et in pulverem reverteris.) This does not sound like a comforting escape from harsh reality, but rather a rubbing of one’s nose in it. One literally gets ashes rubbed into one’s forehead in the sign of the cross, the cross being the most horrible form of execution the brutal Romans could devise. Why don’t Christians tell themselves that they are really immortal beings who have nothing to fear from death? And why do they tell a story about a Last Judgment, a sort of final examination that it is possible to fail with disastrous consequences? Why do they speak of working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling? Why are the major religions so far from New Age feel-good pablum?

This reminds me of something I recently heard Mark Driscoll say. After preaching a blistering sermon on the reality of the wrath of God toward sinners, His hatred toward both unrighteousness and (in a sense) the unrighteous themselves, and the unmitigated horror at the prospect of experiencing His eternal punitive rod, Driscoll said something like, "People say Christianity is a made-up religion. But no one would make this stuff up!" Read Vallicella's whole post here.

This post is the first entry in a series I will be doing this fall on the validity of atheistic ethics. This topic is very important to my own faith and philosophy, and I am writing a paper on the subject for one of my seminars in Christian apologetics. I will be using this series to help organize some of my thoughts on atheistic ethics and metaethics in general. - Brian

Christian philosophers and apologists often claim that the only worldview that can sufficiently account for the objectivity (and thus the ultimate significance) of moral values is theism. Atheistic naturalism, in particular, is singled out as being particularly unsuited for explaining the objective status of moral claims. This seems to me to be true, and yet the atheists aren't convinced (but really, are they ever?). Not only does this claim seem to be very strong, it is one of the bedrock principles on which I justify my belief in Christianity. Since they are not just byproducts of natural selection or expressions of preference, moral values are clearly objective, and it is Christian theism that best explains this objective ontological status of moral values.

Upon initial reflection, this claim makes sense. Consider a world without God, the naturalist's world, a world that is physical and physical only. Matter and energy are the only sure things that exist. Other non-physical properties like minds minds or morals may seem to be real, but most likely they are only curious byproducts of the interaction of atoms and energy, and it seems very difficult to rescue them from this tragic fate. Consider, for example, someone you love dearly. She is a material entity, like a rock or a tree. In fact, the material in her - every single atom - was once non-human. "She" is entirely made up of the food that she has consumed in her lifetime (or, in the case of a newborn, of the food her mother and father have consumed). Dust she once was and dust she again will be. Why then, would you value her as something more than material? Why would it be wrong to harm her but not the same dust of which she is made? She simply is the dust, and nothing more. Certainly she is valuable to you, but if she has no objective value then your belief that she has value and ought to be valued expresses only a personal preference, and a preference that no one else is under any obligation to share. It is akin to your preference for Captain Crunch over Golden Grahams, for example, or your affinity for the Packers over the Patriots. And I think this is a real problem for atheistic naturalism.

Theism, goes the claim, has no such problem and thus makes more sense of our common sense moral judgments. A theistic world is one that allows for a significant supernatural realm. Since the one you love is more than material in this world, she has ultimate worth and value. She has a non-material soul and appropriates non-material value by virtue of her status as a creature of God, the ultimate source of all value and goodness.

All of this can be set forward as either an argument for theism or, at the very least, an argument against atheism. I am concerned with the latter here. Let's make the argument against atheism a little clearer by setting it out formally:

1. Objective moral values exist.
2. Any worldview that has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values ought to be rejected.
3. Atheistic naturalism has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values.
4. Ergo atheistic naturalism should be rejected.

This argument is certainly valid, but are its premises true? The atheists say no. J. L. Mackie, for example, essentially rejected premise (1) by claiming that moral values are not objective. The properties of "moral goodness" or "moral wrongness" do not actually exist in a material world, and thus when we use these terms we are simply expressing subjective human desires that help us get along in life. This may not give you a reason for dancing in your underwear, but it is no argument against the truth of atheism. In other words, moral values aren't real and you are worthless. And that's that, so deal with it.

Now the theist will automatically say that Mackie's moral skepticism is consistent with his naturalism and atheism, and indeed his view seems to be the most logical one to take if you are an atheist. I know if I were an atheist, I would take this view. But many atheists aren't convinced that this is the way to go, and most of them go about arguing against the argument above by contesting the truth of premise (3).

But how do they go about this? What arguments do they make? This will be the subject of subsequent posts in this series. I will examine the counter-arguments of three prominent naturalists and provide a theistic response. It's go time.

Next time: the atheistic ethic of Kai Nielsen

I'll be spending a long time driving this weekend as we head down to Florida for a family vacation. I decided to try and find some online audio lectures in apologetics and Christian philosophy that I hadn't heard before so I could burn them to CD and listen on the way down. I searched for a while and only found a few smatterings here and there, but then I stumbled on the motherload. There are a lot of good audio resources at this page as well.

I consider myself to be a marginally effective defender of the Christian faith. I spend a lot of time studying evidences for Christianity and why Christian belief is justified and reasonable. But there are times in face-to-face encounters with unbelievers where I realize how much farther I have to go to effectively be able to "give an answer" for my faith (1 Pet. 3:15) in all situations.

Here is a case in point: I currently preach and lead Sunday services twice a month on the fourth floor at the local county jail here in Louisville. Recently I finished preaching a sermon on repentance, and one of the inmates approached me in a very in-your-face way and asked me if I really believed Jesus was God. This happens occasionally, but in his insistence that Jesus could not have been divine, this man was much more adamant than any of the other objectors I had ever encountered. Since he was white, I just assumed he was a Jehovah's Witness and tried to answer his charges on those grounds. However, he kept mentioning Islam, and I began to wonder why this Jehovah's Witness was so interested in making comparisons between Christianity and Islam.

Call me an idiot, but it took me a few minutes to figure out he was a Muslim, not a Jehovah's Witness. Perhaps I was being too judgmental, but it never entered my mind that a white guy questioning the divinity of Christ would have been Muslim. I blatantly missed the Arabic script tattooed on his neck as well, so along with calling me an idiot you can call me unobservant.

I tried to adjust my course, but it was too late for that. I wouldn't really call it a debate anyway, since Mr. Muslim seemed more intent on overpowering me verbally than having a fruitful discussion on the divinity of Christ. However, he was very intelligent, and repeatedly said he had studied Comparative Religions in college and had chosen Islam as the best option. His basic argument was that Jesus - instead of being the divine second person of the Trinity - was simply the best Muslim in history, and that the text of the New Testament was corrupted and thus all the passages claiming Christ's deity could not be trusted. I attempted to tell him why I considered the New Testament documents to be reliable, but he kept cutting me off and telling me that I should read the book debunking the New Testament that he had read, a book authored by a Christian no less! This is the "I refer you to an authority that would obviously convince you, therefore my position is right," argument, but I digress.

What startled me was that I didn't have much of a response when he began telling me how perfect the Koran was and how the words of the prophet were perfectly preserved and passed down. I studied Islam in seminary, but it wasn't more than a surface study of the major tenets and flavors of the Muslim faith. I certainly don't believe the Koran is the word of God, but I found I didn't really have any arguments at the ready to back that claim up other than my belief that the Bible is the only true Word of God. Hindsight is definitely 20/20, and looking back I can see that there are multiple lines of argument I could have used, assuming my opponent would have let me make them.

But they would have all been indirect arguments that would have taken some thought to come up with. I needed more arguments at the ready, more logical, philosophical, and theological arrows to pull from my quiver at a moment's notice. This episode has reinforced my belief that there's more to doing Christian apologetics than defending theistic belief as having warrant. To be an effective Christian apologist, I understand that I must study a range of topics that is far wider than my limited area of specification. The practical apologist knows that effectively being able to give an answer for his faith in all situations takes a lifetime of study.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1, NIV

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1, NASB

I confess the following: early in my Christian life, I was somewhat embarrassed by Hebrews 11:1. I think I was focusing too heavily on some Bible versions' translation of faith as being the "evidence of things unseen." How could it ever be rational to take faith - an inner conviction of the mind - as evidence of something that you couldn't see? Wasn't this a perfect example of Freud's view of religious faith as being nothing more than wish fulfillment? In Freud's view, we want there to be a God. We desperately wish the story of the living, speaking God to be true so that we can know the meaning of our lives, so we take as evidence of these things the very fact that we believe them. It all sounded so ridiculously circular, as if the writer of Hebrews were saying: your faith is warranted simply by the fact that you have it.

I posted last week on why I thought the "Trilemma" argument wasn't a very good one. A fellow seminary student felt I was being a mite harsh in my treatment of the argument (I suppose it was the statement that the Trilemma belongs in the "dustbin of bad apologetic arguments" that gave him that idea), and I thought I'd give it a second chance, this time by examining what, if any, value the Trilemma argument has.

Certainly the argument as I formulated it in my earlier post is problematic, but I deliberately left out an additional premise that - when added - can make the Trilemma somewhat useful. With this additional premise the argument would go something like this:

(1) Jesus Christ made extraordinary claims about himself: his deity, his purpose, his power, and his unique relationship with God.
(2) Any man who makes these claims is either a liar, a lunatic, or else his claims are true (i. e. he is Lord).
(3) Jesus was not a liar or a lunatic.
(4) Therefore, he is Lord.

This formulation is much stronger, as the addition of (1) makes explicit what was implicit in the version I posited earlier. But it is (1) that is likely to cause all the commotion. The Bible skeptic will still maintain that (1) is not true, or at least that we can't really know if it is true or not, since the Gospel accounts are untrustworthy and thus the Jesus of history is not available to us. The task of the Christian apologist thus becomes showing that (1) is true, and the way to do that is to show that the picture of Jesus in the canonical Gospels is accurate. If the apologist can convince the skeptic that the statements and self-understanding of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels are largely accurate, then the Trilemma gains some force.

And this is how the argument can be effective. Consider a man who is interested in Christianity. He has been reading his Bible and he finds it highly implausible that all the extraordinary claims of Christ were put into his mouth by later Christian writers. For this man, the three-horned dilemma of Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord is a serious existential question that he knows can not be easily ignored. I have to admit that I'm not exactly sure how likely this scenario is. If someone already believes the New Testament is reliable, then they are already close to believing the accounts of Christ's miracles and Resurrection which - if true - provide much more evidence for his divinity than his claims!

However, it does seem that the Trilemma argument could be effective in building a cumulative case for the traditional Christian view of Jesus Christ. Thus it seems that the Trilemma can be rescued from the dustbin of bad apologetic arguments. Under certain conditions it can be misused and abused, but under others it can be a valuable instrument in the apologists' toolbox.

[ChristianThinker's note: For a good collection of scholarly defenses of the orthodox view of Christ, I highly recommend Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus.]

If we Christians are going to take up the apologetic task, we must do it well. There is no other option. The arguments we make must be good, and we must not claim more convincing power for those arguments that they actually warrant. To do so would harm the name of Christ, and thus would be a very undesirable anti-apologetic. Bad apologetic arguments must be rooted out and destroyed. Here is one that I think deserves special attention as an apologetic canard:

(1) Jesus Christ was either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord.
(2) Jesus was not a liar or a lunatic.
(3) Therefore, Jesus is Lord.

This argument was first posited in this form in C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Lewis is perhaps the greatest Christian thinker of the 20th century, and Mere Christianity profoundly impacted my Christian life, but that does not exempt him from making a mistake every now and then. The argument was later popularized and formalized by Josh McDowell in Evidence That Demands a Verdict, where he labeled it the "Trilemma" of Jesus' identity. The unbeliever is supposedly forced to choose between the three horns of this dilemma: since it seems highly unlikely that Jesus was either a liar or a lunatic, the argument goes, then his claim to deity must be true.

This argument - as far as I know - has not been used by any serious Christian apologist for quite some time now, but it is still prevalent in popular apologetics ministries, books, lectures, etc. It is also false, and its falsity is so irrefutably clear that it is difficult to think that anyone with any knowledge of Christianity or history could ever fall for it.

Why does the Trilemma fail? It isn't because the argument isn't valid, because it certainly is. But for a valid argument to work, the premises must also be true. Consider the following argument:

(4) If Spider-Man is the President of the United States, then he is the most powerful man in the world.
(5) Spider-Man is the President of the United States.
(6) Therefore, Spider-Man is the most powerful man in the world.

Now, this "President Spider-Man" argument is definitely valid, but it is also clearly false because premise (5) is not true. Spider-Man is not the President of the United States, and I am not entirely convinced that he even exists.

It is the same way with the Trilemma. Premise (1) is clearly false. The Trilemma-defender confidently claims that these are the only three options we have in trying to evaluate the claims of Christ. But there is a fourth option: Jesus Christ as legend. That is, the thinking person can take the skeptic's route. She can say that the Gospels are legendary accounts written by those with a theological agenda hundreds of years after Christ actually walked the earth, and that she is no more inclined to believe in the extraordinary claims of Jesus than she is to believe that Athena and the other Greek gods were flying around over the combatants' heads at the battle of Troy.

And this is in fact the route that the majority of non-Christians take. Few if any people consider Jesus to have been insane or a liar. There have been some people who have taken that road, but not many. Bertrand Russell famously said that he could never believe in Jesus since any man who taught that people went to hell was clearly immoral. We might consider this "Jesus as immoral" option to be in the same family as the "Jesus as liar" option, but neither of these enjoy any significant support today. In fact, the "liar" and "lunatic" options ought to be eliminated, as there is little reason for anyone to believe them.

The trouble is that when we delete the two false options (liar and lunatic) and add the true option (legend), the supposed dilemma becomes all but useless for apologetic purposes. Suppose I say to the atheist, "You only have the options of believing that Jesus was the Son of God or a legend!" The atheist simply shrugs his shoulders and says, "Okay. He's clearly a legend." There are certainly stronger arguments for the classical Christian view of Jesus Christ, but the Trilemma isn't one of them. It deserves its place in the dustbin of bad apologetic arguments.

[Christian Thinker's note: This post is part of an occasional series that attempts to answer popular objections to the Christian faith. This series does not deal with technical objections, but only popular objections that Christians are likely to hear from friends, family, and coworkers. For example, I will not be dealing with the philosophical objection that the doctrine of the Incarnation is incoherent, but I will deal with the objection that any claim of exclusive Christian salvation is an arrogant and intolerant claim.]

In this post from March I dealt - in an admittedly rudimentary and overly truncated fashion - with the objection that committment to Christian belief involves either an inability or an unwillingness to think critically. For this post I want to deal with a popular objection that is in the same family as what I called the "Deficiency in Critical Thinking" objection. I'll call this one the "Christians are Closed-Minded" objection, and I'll abbreviate it as CCM. There really isn't much to this objection, and when investigated it can actually be very difficult to see what it's all about.

Here is the scene: it is about 6:45 this morning and I, my wife, and my baby daughter are in the kitchen of our home in Louisville, Kentucky. My wife is sitting at the breakfast table eating Cheerios, and I am feeding the baby her rice cereal. My wife is actually sitting at the table's farthest chair, a seat that neither of us ever sits in. She has sat there because it is where the baby cannot see her; if she is in my daughter's field of vision then the baby will be too distracted to eat her cereal.

Consider this: it is extremely strange for all three of us to be in the kitchen at one time in the morning. My wife and I take turns getting up with the baby and feeding her, while the other one gets to sleep a little later. I can only remember one or two other times that all three of us were in the kitchen in the morning. My wife is up with us this morning because she has to get ready to drive to Alabama to see her family. She had planned on leaving Friday with the baby, as she usually does, but she decided to leave Thursday instead because the forecast for Friday across Kentucky and Tennessee was for heavy rain. Again, my wife has visited family in Alabama dozens of times in the four years since we have lived in Louisville, but I can never once remember her leaving on a Thursday.

My point is that the state of affairs that we found ourselves in this morning was highly out of the ordinary due to various factors. Now let's go back to the kitchen table. I am feeding the baby and my wife is eating Cheerios. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a robin sitting on the fence of our neighbors' house that is two lots down from ours. She admires the beauty of the bird and carries on with her breakfast. A few moments later, she sees something bright red or orange fall down from the gutter of the same neighbors' house. She thinks it is the robin but does not understand why he would be making a nosedive toward the ground. She looks closer at the house and sees a thin stream of smoke coming from the gutter area from which she had seen the orange-colored thing fall. At this point she says to me, "Brian, I think our neighbor's house may be on fire."