(Author’s note: This continues a series answering objections to the Christian worldview. A week or two ago I made a call for folks to send me their “best shot.” For the other posts in the series, simply follow the links and the pingbacks in the comments section.)
I really enjoy interacting with people who have questions and doubts about the Christian worldview (perhaps that’s because I’m one of them!). People in my Alpha group are posing some great issues, and some of the folks have made some great challenges in the Calling all Skeptics thread.
The f0llowing, though, is not among that number. It comes from Greta Christina, and several people have made more or less the same challenge. Since Greta’s was the most forcefully stated, I’ll use hers as a representative:
“[There is a] complete and utter lack of solid evidence for God’s existence. The ‘evidence’ that’s typically cited by believers for God is either religious texts (circular thinking — ‘I believe the Bible because the Bible tells me so’), or the argument from design (shattered by the theory of evolution), or ‘lots of people believe this and they can’t all be wrong’ (sure they can — lots of people believed that the sun went around the earth, too), or their own person intuition (demonstrably fallible — and not reliable as a sole source of information). I have never seen any evidence for God that would be accepted as solid by any good scientist, historian, or archeologist.”
Where to start…
First, notice that she sets fire to straw men:
“The ‘evidence’ that’s typically cited by believers for God is either religious texts (circular thinking — ‘I believe the Bible because the Bible tells me so’), or the argument from design (shattered by the theory of evolution), or ‘lots of people believe this and they can’t all be wrong’ (sure they can — lots of people believed that the sun went around the earth, too), or their own person intuition (demonstrably fallible — and not reliable as a sole source of information).”
I’m tempted to not even address her, because she obviously hasn’t taken the time to search out the more sophisticated defenses of theism and Christianity. They are out there (links to substantiate in a minute). If she has taken the time to search them out, she chose to omit mention here, which is worse. I know there are some pretty good atheist apologists out there, and I try to interact with them when appropriate (Ex: Rowe. I interact with him a bit here.). She takes shots at the man on the street Christian, then confidently declares victory.
Tell me, which Christian philosopher has argued that “I believe the Bible because it tells me so?” William Alston, perhaps? J.P. Moreland? Doug Geivett? Alvin Plantinga? Paul Moser? Paul Copan? Eleanor Stump?
The way she starts out reminds me of ye old artful dodger Richard Dawkins.
Secondly, she assumes that if there is no “evidence” to believe in God, then we shouldn’t. This, though, is far from solid. There are some things we are warranted in believing sans evidence. I need not have “evidence” to be justified in holding the belief that rape is wrong, nor do I need to have an argument for my belief in the existence of other minds. Some, like Plantinga, have argued that belief in God, for some, is indeed properly basic.
Next, she claims that the argument from design has been “shattered by the theory of evolution.”
This is news to me. I love the loaded language there (“shattered.”). Me thinks she overplays her hand, just…a…bit.
Part of the problem here is that the word “evolution” is highly ambiguous. If she is merely talking about change that happens over time within a species (i.e., Darwin’s finch beak illustrations, as well as the peppered moth experiments. Some have doubted the veracity of the peppered moth experiments, though), then even the staunchest Southern Baptist can accept it. It poses no challenge to theism and Christianity whatsoever.
If, however, she is talking about macro-evolution, or the grand story of Naturalism (The universe is a closed system of cause and effect, mutation + natural selection is responsible for all progression of life from the primordial soup to man), then I’m left scratching my head as to how that could “shatter” the argument from design.
The teleological argument has a much wider scope than the explanation that assumed by evolution. One of the things the teleological argument focuses on is the conditions that would permit the evolution of intelligent life in the first place. For instance, how could life begin at all naturalistically? I know evolutionary biologists don’t typically focus on this issue; they start after life has begun.
But if you are going to argue that the teleological argument has been “shattered” by evolution, you need to tackle that issue. It’s the least you could do.
Go here for an analysis of Dawkins’ treatment of the teleological argument. It is actually a review of the whole book, so you will have to scroll down a ways to get to the evaluation of Dawkins’ rebuttal to the teleological argument.
I know naturalistic explanations have been attempted (i.e., Dawkins’ “multiverse;” scroll about half way down the link for the subsection on the multiverse theory.), but these explanations are clever stories that are often just as metaphysical as the theistic explanations they reject. Notice the number of times the word “might” or its cousins appear in talk of the multiverse theory. That should tell you something.
What’s more, they are much more complicated (Occam’s razor, anyone?) because they multiply entities unnecessarily (for a rebuttal of the multiverse theory, see Craig).
At any rate, even if the design argument is not a good argument for God’s existence, that does nothing to support the notion that belief in God is unjustified and/or irrational. There are many other arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological argument (go here for a few articles answering challenges to the argument), the argument from consciousness, or the moral argument (More here). There’s the argument from contingency (similar to the cosmological argument).
There are arguments from the resurrection of Jesus (no, that is much, much different from “I believe the Bible because it tells me so.” If you can’t see the difference, I don’t know what to say to you.). Alvin Plantinga has given “Two Dozen (or so)” theistic arguments (click here for his lecture notes. One of these in isolation doesn’t prove the existence of the biblical God, but he’s not claiming that. But put them all together, and a powerful case begins to form.).
Others reason that some fact of the world, like evil or morality, is best at home in a theistic worldview (I take these as variations of the moral argument).
NOTE: if you are going to respond, please pick one of those arguments above, read it, consider it, then give a reasoned response. I tire of smarmy drive-by one-liners.
Of course, some have ventured non-theistic explanations of those phenomena, but they usually end up not explaining the phenomena naturalistically. Rather, they end up eliminating it instead, substituting something else in its place, and labeling that “morality” (or whatever the phenomena is, be it consciousness, free will, etc.).
For example, if you try to give an evolutionary account of ethics, you end up leaving out the prescriptive nature of morality and you substitute merely describing the origins of behavior we call “moral.”
Thirdly, I really wonder what she would count as “evidence,” and if the evidence she has for her own beliefs would satisfy that criteria. I’ve ran into some atheists whose definition of “evidence” is so stringent that they end up throwing even the most commonsense knowledge into doubt, as well as most of ancient history.
A few examples: though they might not explicitly state it, some hold that only things verified by the five senses count as evidence, and/or only things verified by the hard sciences count. Others go so far as to hold that only God “showing Himself” directly would count (As if He would jump through the hoops of someone actively trying to run from and deny Him. He usually doesn’t play those sorts of games with those who aren’t really interested in seeking Him.); never mind that God shows Himself directly all the time…but you actually have to be looking (see p6 of the link…RockHarbor is the church I attend, and one of my closest friends witnessed the event).
I don’t want to put things in Greta’s mouth, so I can only ask the question at this point and wait for her to be more specific. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if there were a decent bit of deck-stacking going on.
Lastly, she states,
I have never seen any evidence for God that would be accepted as solid by any good scientist, historian, or archeologist.
Wow…that’s a pretty tall claim to stand behind. Off the top of my head, I can think of a good many scientists and historians that are sympathetic to evidence for God’s existence: Edwin Yamauchi (professor of history, Miami Univeristy), Paul Johnson (one of the greatest historians of the 20th century), Guillermo Gonzalez (formerly at Iowa State), Michael Behe (Biochemistry, Lehigh University), Robert DiSilvestro (Biochemistry professor, Ohio State University), Henry Schaefer (five time nominee for Nobel Prize), William Dembski, ( Francis Collins (Scientist: Human Genome Project). Here is a lecture by Schaefer where he lists a great man more scientists. You might debate the belief of some, but no doubt many of them admit evidence for God.
Like I said, that’s just off the top of my head…
While we’re at it, she might think Darwinism is a veritable rock of gibraltar, but many scientists are starting to doubt that.
I’d say her insinuation that there’s no evidence for God that would be accepted by any good scientist, historian, or archaeologist is a huge hyperbole.
She might respond by saying, “I meant *good* historian/scientist, etc. These guys are quacks.”
If that is her response (I don’t know, I’m just conjecturing. We’ll wait for her to come back and offer a counter), then I sense a bit of jerry-manding in her meaning of “good.” These fellas possess impeccable credentials. They are experts in their fields. Their fields are relevant to our question. Just because they are proponents of ideas you don’t find palatable doesn’t make them quacks.
At any rate, in the end, their credentials aren’t the main focus: their arguments are. Their arguments need to be addressed on their own merits. While authority does add weight to someone’s words (on matters of the heart, we listen to cardiologists, not car mechanics), but the ultimate question is, “why does this authority hold this belief?” not “what is this authority’s pedigree?”
Her words about lack of evidence reminded me of a famous exchange with Bertrand Russell. After a questioner asked him what he would say if he met God after his death, Rusell responded: “not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”
Bullfeathers. He’s given plenty of evidence. If someone won’t believe on the strength of the evidence He’s already given, they won’t even believe if He appeared in front of them and said, “I am God. I exist.” They’d most likely explain that away too, just like everything else.
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