NOTE: This was written by IrishFarmer and originally posted on Atheism is Dead (True Freethinker‘s predesesor).
Hello again. I’ve been away for a while, but I’ve been anxious to get back to the “amateur blog” crowd and so here I am.
I always thought my biggest strength in writing was as a commentator, because I’m no philosopher myself. I prefer to dissect, or critically examine (if you will), other people’s thoughts for the entertainment of my readers (really, for my own entertainment). So, with that in mind…
I stumbled across this blog, inappropriately titled “Atheist Wisdom”, and went from intrigued to disappointed. No offense to the author, but any blog calling itself “Atheist Wisdom” should probably live up to the name, and this blog definitely doesn’t. Instead, from what I can tell, the blog contains random quotes like, “Prayer has no place in the public schools, just like facts have no place in organized religion.” Or, “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish.” Quotes which are notable possibly for their wit, but not exactly for the depth of rational thought put into them. In fact, these quotes are nothing more than expressions of prejudice against religion or the religious.
From there, it only gets worse. The author seems to respect the intellectual black hole known as Religulous by Bill Maher, not to mention that he thinks Sam Harris is a serious player in the God Controversy.
Should I even bother mentioning that he links to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible?
Of course, it’s easy to criticize the shallow aspects of Joe Anybody’s blog, what I’d rather do with this post is get to one of his/her(?) more thoughtful pieces. Namely, this one, entitled “Questions from Believers”.
Here, he attempts to give answers to common questions that theists might ask of athiests, and succeeds. Succeeds, that is, at answering the questions. The content of the answers is another story.
These answers exemplify some of the common mistakes in reasoning that atheists make, and being the nice guy that I am I thought I might help atheists out by showing them where they go wrong.
Questions #1: Utilizing each of the historical facts conceded by virtually all contemporary scholars, please produce a comprehensive natural explanation of Jesus’ resurrection that makes better sense than the event itself.
Answer #1: Well here are four that spring immediately to mind, and I’m confident I could think up at least a dozen more. The witnesses lied. The resurrection was faked by someone. The event was entirely made up after the fact by the authors of the gospels. Jesus wasn’t really dead. Each of these explanations make much more sense than a guy coming back from the dead after three days, which is something that we all know is physically impossible.
Where to start… First off, the author hasn’t lived up to the questioner’s requirement to provide an alternative that “makes better sense”[sic]. I could claim that aliens stole the body, replaced it with an aged clone, and perpetrated one of the biggest hoaxes in history. This is an alternative, but I don’t think anyone would argue that it “makes more sense”.
Fact is, each alternative demands to be weighed against one another to see which is most likely. None can be written off as unreasonable (or declared reasonable) until this is done. The author doesn’t do this, he simply assumes that as long as he has a logically coherent, naturalistic alternative, he has the right answer (or is at least able to rule out the “miraculous” answer). He does this by assuming that any possible answer has to comply with his naturalistic philosophy (read: unproven assumptions).
Each of these explanations make much more sense than a guy coming back from the dead after three days, which is something that we all know is physically impossible.
In other words, he assumes that naturalism is true – and so by extension, so-called “miracles” don’t happen – and so some sort of naturalistic explanation must be true. It doesn’t work this way, unless he can provide some outside reasoning to explain why we should just accept that these sorts of things really don’t happen.
Notice he calls a resurrection “physically impossible”. This would only matter if you assume that physical forces are never bypassed, overridden, or changed (whatever you want to call a miracle), however that begs the very question at hand. His response is basically that this miracle can’t happen because according to him this miracle can’t happen. That sort of statement is useless to the discussion.
Furthermore, no one (Christian or otherwise) argues that the resurrection happened “naturally”, whatever it really means for an event to occur naturally. Instead, Christians would probably argue that it was an Act of God that brought Jesus back from the dead. So, the Christian can agree that it is physically impossible, that without God’s intervention it won’t happen. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, nor does it make any alternative that contradicts the Bible more likely – at least not on those grounds alone.
Question #2: Given the commonly recognized and scientifically supported belief that the universe (all matter, energy, space, time) began to exist a finite time ago and that the universe is remarkably finely tuned for life, does this not (strongly) suggest that the universe is ontologically haunted and that this fact should require further exploration, given the metaphysically staggering implications?
Answer #2: Nobody knows whether or not the matter and energy began to exist a finite amount of time ago. We think it existed as a singularity, a region of infinite density and infinite space-time curvature. What happened before that is potentially a meaningless question given that the big bang (i.e. the expansion of this singularity) is when we think time, as we know it, began.
The problem with this answer is in the answer itself. If the the universe has its origin in a singularity, and the big bang is what we call the event that marks the start of time, then without any elaboration we’re forced to conclude that the universe began to exist a finite time ago. Whether or not the universe exploded from a singularity is neither here nor there, since even according to this particular atheist, time has a definite beginning.
Note:
What happened before that is potentially a meaningless question given that the big bang (i.e. the expansion of this singularity) is when we think time, as we know it, began.
Notice that the original question never mentioned a “before” the big bang. The atheist answer is reading too much into the question.
Of course, since the original question never mentioned a “before the big bang”, the atheist is obviously reading into the question what they expect the question actually means.
Then, the author ends his answer with:
And “the universe is fine-tuned for life”? No. Life is fine-tuned for the universe, or at least our tiny corner of it.
I’d answer this, but since he didn’t actually provide a tangible response (only a bald assertion, much like the original question did – to be fair), I have nothing to go on. By comparison, this reminds me of two children arguing:
“Yes you are!””No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
And so on…
It’s out of the scope of this post to discuss fine-tuning, anyway.
Question #3: Granted that the major objection to belief in God is the problem of evil, does the concept of evil itself not suggest a standard of goodness or a design plan from which things deviate, so that if things ought to be a certain way (rather than just happening to be the way they are in nature), don’t such ‘injustices’ or ‘evils’ seem to suggest a moral/design plan independent of nature?
Answer #3: I don’t accept that “the problem of evil” is the main objection to the belief in God. There are many other factors, and every atheist has come to his or her conclusions via different thoughts and concepts. For me in particular, it’s the complete lack of any evidence. And no, I don’t believe that the fact that we can recognize an act as “evil” means that there must be an objective standard for “good”. This is like saying that because I find olives to taste bad, there must exist somewhere a food that tastes absolutely perfect.
It’s interesting to me that this atheist doesn’t think that the Problem of Evil is a good objection to theism. That might have something to do with him being a moral nihilist.
In this case, the atheist is right. Simply because we have a moral sense, does not mean that our minds are apprehending a realm of objective moral values. However, simply because the atheist is a moral nihilist, doesn’t mean that our moral sense does NOT apprehend a objective moral values.
Please explain how something can come from nothing, how life can come from non-life, how mind can come from brain, and how our moral senses developed from an amoral source.
Open-ended questions like these prompt nothing more than simple responses. Making the problem worse is that it only asks for an explanation. Any explanation will do, no matter how plausible or substantial.
That said, there are some things in the atheist response that are worth thinking about.
The details [about scientific explanations for our morals and so on] are being fleshed out more and more each day by scientists and experts the world over. The amount of evidence for the truth of these ideas is growing. And they require no god or supernatural elements to work.
The thing to note is the last line. What the atheist is essentially saying here is that these scientific theories are (approximately) true, and don’t depend on God’s existence for their truth. Of course, these theories also don’t depend on atheism either. So what that ultimately has to do with God’s existence is beyond me.
It seems to me that too many atheists assume that because a scientific theory doesn’t imply God’s existence, it implies God’s non-existence (or at least implies that God’s existence is irrelevant). I’m not seeing a logical chain leading to this conclusion, so if any atheist can explain this for me without referencing their own personal assumptions, I’d appreciate it. Fact is, there is no logical connection between scientific inquiry and atheism.
Question #5: Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second Law of Thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?
Answer #5: This question seems to be built on several unfounded assumptions. The idea that “the physical universe is not eternal” is not “clear” to me. Then, “everything came from outside the universe” or “everything came from nothing”? These are not the only options. How about “everything was always here, in some form of other”? The big bang theory does not refute this, and if something had to have always existed, it might as well be the universe than God. And an atheist is a person lacking belief in a god. The descriptor “atheist” says nothing about a persons belief regarding the origins of the universe any more than about their taste in music.
This answer is contradictory and confused, at best. What the question involved was the idea that the universe had a definite beginning in time, which the atheist even conceded in a previous question. So when the atheist claims it isn’t “clear” to him/her, then s/he simply can’t seem to keep their answers straight on this issue.
How about “everything was always here, in some form of other”?
To say something was “always” here, is rather vague. If, for instance, I want to assume that “always” means “since the beginning of time”, then the universe has always been around whether or not God created it ‘out of thin air’. However, it occurs to me that the question implies that the universe is not infinitely old. I could go on and on about this issue at some length, but for now it’s sufficient to say that the universe is not infinitely old. If you want to ignore the scientific evidence, then you still have the seemingly endless amount of logical contradictions involved in an infinitely old universe. It simply isn’t possible.
Fact of the matter is, time (in any form) must terminate in the past with some kind of origin. So the atheist has not dodged the dilemma stated in the question.
And an atheist is a person lacking belief in a god. The descriptor “atheist” says nothing about a persons belief regarding the origins of the universe any more than about their taste in music.
Atheists really think we theists are suckers. We watch them fight tooth-and-nail against theism, and then turn around and claim that they’re incredibly militant because they just lack a belief in God.
Actually, I can identify with the fact that atheists simply lack a belief in God. As it turns out I don’t actually believe in God, I just lack a belief in an atheistic universe. :\
When are atheists going to drop this pathetic defense for their beliefs?
Question #6: If our cognitive faculties were selected for survival, not for truth, then how can we have any confidence, for example, that our beliefs about the reality of physical objects are true or that naturalism itself is true?
Answer #6: Much of this question can be discarded. It boils down to “How can we believe in anything?”. This question should be more unsettling to the theist than the atheist. The answer is that, philosophically, we can never be certain about anything, but we can test ideas by repeat measurements, theories, models and verification of predictions. God fails these tests, whereas my hypothesis that “if I drop a brick on my foot, it will hurt” is based on past experience and my knowledge of the world. Science works.
This is actually the best question in the whole blog post. It’s a devastating argument against metaphysical naturalism (and by extension, atheism)and it was entertaining for me to watch the atheist respondant trip all over himself trying to answer it. This sort of response is typical of atheists when this question is brought up (in my own experience, of course).
First off, why should this question be more unsettling for theists than atheists? In traditional theism, God is the ultimate measure for truth, and has endowed us with self-awareness and the ability to comprehend Him – and thus Truth. Theists shouldn’t be concerned at all.
The answer is that, philosophically, we can never be certain about anything, but we can test ideas by repeat measurements, theories, models and verification of predictions. God fails these tests, whereas my hypothesis that “if I drop a brick on my foot, it will hurt” is based on past experience and my knowledge of the world. Science works.
This flimsy response basically amounts to the atheist saying, “God fails the test of scientific inquiry, and therefore all beliefs regarding God are useless at best.” When atheists make this sort of accusation, they don’t see the three fingers pointing right back at them. That is, atheists don’t realize that they themselves have pre-scientific philosophical beliefs, which don’t pass scientific inquiry (obviously, since they’re pre-scientific), but without which their worldview would crumble (not to mention, science would be impossible). One such belief is the simple assumption that the outside world actually exists and isn’t just a sense illusion. This can’t be scientifically verified, and so by this author’s own narrow epistemology we can know that he is – in fact – wrong. Or at least, his supposedly scientific worldview is incorrect based on his own worldview.
Positive/strong atheist beliefs like what you see above are the reason it’s become memetic for atheists to retreat into their shells and claim, “I don’t believe that God is nonexistent, I just lack a belief in God.” If you critically examine any of their beliefs, they crumble like so much dry leaf [sic].
So, since we can see that theists have nothing to worry about epistemologically speaking, and this atheist’s own epistemology is self-defeating, I think this question requires a bit more examination than the atheist is willing to give it.
The answer is that, philosophically, we can never be certain about anything, but we can test ideas by repeat measurements, theories, models and verification of predictions. God fails these tests, whereas my hypothesis that “if I drop a brick on my foot, it will hurt” is based on past experience and my knowledge of the world. Science works.
I’m sure by this point, everyone is so used to hearing this response that it doesn’t need to even be put into e-ink, but if the author is so sure we can’t be sure about anything, then why is he so sure about what he’s saying?
It’s like s/he’s only paying lip-service to the philosophical ramifications of his own beliefs, and then ignoring them to continue believing in mutually exclusive things. Doublethink, if you will.