Warning: This is a long post. Pack a lunch. Maybe some pajamas.
Though I am sure atheists would say the same thing of Christians (and in many cases it’s likely true), conversing with atheists can be very frustrating, often because the conversation is uni-directional. Atheists talk and talk about how smart and reasonable they are, how they pride themselves on evidence not “faith” and then go on to exemplify none of the above. Let me explain by taking a look at two arguments Christian apologetics invest a lot of stock into.
The Cosmological Argument.
The cosmological argument, at least in its simple form is simple to understand. Here’s a very raw outline.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. The universe therefore had a cause.
The argument can, I believe, be pushed a bit more to show that the cause must be a timeless, free being with great power, or a God. As far as it goes, I think the argument if true ruins atheism. It doesn’t prove Christianity. It might not argue very far, if at all past deism, but if true it is a significant step. Is it a good argument, though? That’s not my purpose in this post — though between you and me, it is.
What I want to talk about is the response it gets. Simply put, it doesn’t. At least not on the popular level, and often not on the academic level. What do I mean? Let’s look at an example of another logical argument.
1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates was a man. 3. Therefore Socrates was mortal.
Simple, yeah? Well, imagine laying this out for someone and they respond by saying, “False! I’m a man and my name isn’t Socrates, but I’m mortal.” Doesn’t respond to the original point, does it? How about another.
1. All dogs have tails. 2. I have a dog at home. 3. That dog must have a tail.
A challenge to this argument could be presented… find a dog with no tail. What wouldn’t be a real challenge? “My cat has a tail, so your argument is false?” But this is exactly what happens with the cosmological argument. Rather that remake the wheel, and make it worse than the guy who did it right, read up on this post and then come back. So you think you understand the cosmological argument? Feser’s list of bad objections to the cosmological argument:
1. The argument does NOT rest on the premise that “Everything has a cause.” 2. “What caused God?” is not a serious objection to the argument. 3. “Why assume that the universe had a beginning?” is not a serious objection to the argument. 4. “No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc.” is not a serious objection to the argument. 5. “The argument doesn’t prove that Christianity is true” is not a serious objection to the argument. 6. Science has shown such-and-such” is not a serious objection to (most versions of) the argument. 7. The argument is not a “God of the gaps” argument. 8. Hume and Kant did not have the last word on the argument. Neither has anyone else. 9. What “most philosophers” think about the argument is irrelevant.
I’m not going to explain all of those (if you’re not going to click through and read Feser’s wonderful explanations, you’re not going to read me anyway — and I’d do a worse job). But these bad objections are almost universally the only arguments used against the argument, and even in academic settings. Just listen to William Lane Craig’s debates, arguably one of the the leading defenders of the argument. It’s as if the guys that agree to debate him don’t even take the time to read up what the argument actually is and just write it off. Dawkins has this down to a science, by the way. Just sayin’.
The Moral Argument
There are various formulations of this, but the main gist is this:
1. For objective moral laws to exist there must be a lawgiver. 2. Objective moral laws do exist. 3. Therefore there is an lawgiver.
And in turn the objections to this fall into just as bad of a pattern. Typical responses are as follows: “So you’re saying atheists can’t be moral?” Or “I don’t believe in God and know what’s right and wrong.”
The first one has absolutely nothing to do with the argument. It’s not even a remote inference, and in my experience this is the single most common objection. The second is a total confusion of the argument. The moral argument is about the ontology of morality… where it comes from. The challenge is about epistemology, or how we come to know about morality. An equivalent of this would be to say that, because I can learn the running stop signs is illegal, that there doesn’t need to have been an entity that made it illegal.
And so we return to my original point of the frustration in talking with atheists. (And for the record, this is a generalization. If you’re an atheist and this doesn’t apply to you… it doesn’t apply to you. It is widespread, though.) The frustration is that this manner of (non)objections comes from atheists, many of whom will in their first and third sentences (the ones surrounding the bogus challenge) will pontificate about how they prize reason and science and don’t take things on “faith.” They turn to “science” not some “bearded old man in the sky that wants to smite innocent people” to understand the world.
Yet when dealing with the cosmological argument, atheists will abandon modern science and insist that the universe might just be eternal (which, by the way wouldn’t defeat all version of the cosmological argument!). They side with science when they think it supports atheism but it gets ditched the second if makes them uncomfortable. Or, they’ll jump into non-scientific pontifications like the “multiverse” to explain the cause of the universe, though there is no evidence for it. And at best, all it does it push back the problem of origins, the challenge remains anyway.
Or you’ll have atheists, including some prominent thinkers that will simply attempt to abandon objective morality and say that nothing is really right and wrong. Or if they’re unwilling to go that far, they can take the Michael Shermer route and claim that they believe in objective morality but ground all their arguments for it in relative terms. They just rename relative morality. The problem is, we know morality exists. We know it’s wrong to rape women, to punch babies. We know it’s wrong to gay-bash and to fish in small lakes with jugs of acid. We know it’s wrong to burn down rain forests for the enjoyment of hearing endangered species scream in pain (HT: Moreland).
Could it be that deep down, we all know that God exists? Just maybe the Bible is right about it, that in our natural state we suppress the truth, and as a consequence we’ll do anything we can to avoid it. I think Christopher Hitchens is a perfect example of this. Hitchens is a very smart man. He’s also very witty and very funny. And he also says some very silly things. And if you’ll listen to some of his debates about the existence of God, he may dabble in the case against the existence of God, but he does’t ever stay there. He hates God. He despises him. Because of this a very smart man will say and even believe anything to escape.
HT: Wintery Knight
