Note: This is a historical writing of mine, written in 2014. I do not necessarily stand by every word of what was written, but enough of it is still useful that I thought it would be worthwhile to post.
This is in response to an article posted here.
As a former atheist who went through almost the inverse of the above process I thought it would be worth the time:
1) If there is no God then life has no meaning. Wrong. No one should ever reject the evidence for a conclusion simply because they dislike the conclusion. If there is no God then we are our own meaning makers. Period. Only after you realize God doesn’t exist will you see this.
In actuality, I believe that the statement is true. Loftus is correct though, we shouldn't shy away from the fact that without God there is no meaning just because we don't like it. Ironically he does exactly that in the next sentence by claiming to be able to invent meaning of his own, then slamming any possible arguments to the contrary by saying that theists will not be able to understand this.
As an atheist it was abundantly clear to me that the only possible meaning was meaning I created myself, but I also realized that it was nothing more than a daydream, something I made up and as such, inherently without meaning. But really I guess this all depends on the wiggle-room in the word meaning. I think it is clear that a theist would be claiming to have some kind of meaning that exists whether or not you are aware of it, agree or disagree with it. That, indeed, cannot exist in a purely naturalistic framework.
2) If there is no God then everything is permitted. Wrong again. The ones doing the permitting are people in their respective societies. Even if Thomas Hobbes is correct that we are at war with everyone else, we must still adopt some kind of reasonable social contract whereby we join together for the common good. If not, a society will collapse into chaos. Since no one desires chaos there are reasonable limits to what any society will permit. By contrast, if God exists there are no limits to what can be permitted when people believe something to be divinely authorized.
Again, this is deliberately misinterpreting the original statement to mean something different. To some degree, everything is permitted except that which we are physically incapable of, whether or not there is a God. However, the very concept of morally good and morally evil is without basis in a naturalistic worldview. You cannot hold a machine morally responsible and since, under the tenets of naturalism, we are all machines, there is no such thing as moral responsibility. We can kill them for breaking our laws but it makes no sense to speak of "right" and "wrong".
Put another way, to say something is "right" means that it is as it ought to be. To say that something is "wrong" is to say that it ought not to be that way. However, under a purely naturalistic viewpoint, everything is dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry and to say that something ought to be different is without meaning. To what are you appealing? It could never be any different than it is, because it is all a complex chemical and physical reaction playing itself out. You might as well say that vinegar ought not to react with baking soda.
Both of the first two points are good points, but Loftus is right, they don't prove anything. All an atheist has to say to shoot down the person arguing for God is "Okay, granted, life has no meaning and morality is an illusion". Granted most people are uncomfortable with that, but like Loftus said, no reason to disbelieve in the statement "There is no God" just because you are uncomfortable with the conclusions. The issue here is that the conclusions are inescapable. If you believe in meaning or morality, you already believe in God, you just aren't willing to admit it.
3) Science is no substitute for religion. Bogus. If there is one mark of the deluded mind (defined as "believing against the overwhelming evidence") it’s that somewhere along the line he or she must be ignorant of, or denigrate, or deny science. Religion has given us nothing in comparison to science. Faith-based reasoning processes are notoriously unreliable. They do not help us get at the truth. What do they offer as a substitute for evidence based reasoning processes?
Well, I don't know who says this exactly, but Science and religion are pretty close to complementary disciplines. Religion is replaced, for an atheist, by philosophy, not by science. Perhaps you could argue that the things of religion are without real value, but that would be a philosophical statement, and not a scientific one. The truth hidden in the poorly worded original statement is that there are many things that are very important to our lives that are untouchable by the scientific method. For example, how should we live? What matters in life? How do we become satisfied? Or "Does science work?"
4) God is the best explanation of the whole shebang. Spurious. Believers have always said this, even though science has made great strides in answering this question. God of the gaps arguments like this one have failed so many times in the past it’s quite surprising to see Randal still using it. Something exists. So either something—anything—has always existed, or something—anything—popped into existence out of nothing. Those are the choices. The best explanation for our existence is the simplest one. The theistic hypothesis is that a three-in-one God exists who never had a beginning or a prior moment to choose his own nature, who never learned any new propositions, who cannot think because thinking requires weighing alternatives, who cannot even laugh because nothing takes him by surprise, who created this world with its natural disasters, who doesn’t even benevolently act in the midst of our sufferings. This is no explanation at all. So many questions abound. The scientific hypothesis merely starts with an equilibrium of positive and negative energy along with the laws of physics. Grant this and there is a 60% chance something should exist. Given the fact of evolution there is no need for a God, and there’s no evidence he is involved in this process at all. The main thing scientists have not yet explained is the origin of life. If your theology hangs on that gap then you are betting against everything science has solved so far. And once you allow god explanations into your equations then most any god will do, even an evil one.
Thank you Loftus! I hate it when Christians use the God of the Gaps. However, I would point out that there are a lot of questions we can ask about the nature of the world that are fundamentally outside of the realm of scientific inquiry. Would you still call appealing to God as the most reasonable explanation of those things a “god of the gaps” mentality?
By the way, reason, rather than evidence is not a problem for most people who explore abstract ideas. Philosophy is built on it, as is mathematics. We are relying on our ability to reason about the world and on our intuition about how things work. In fact, the very idea of science, that evidence is a valid source of truth, is a philosophical statement arrived at through reason, not evidence (as using evidence would be a circular argument).
The qualm I have with the above is that Loftus unfairly caricatures the Christian perspective. I would still argue that there are things that most of us would agree are properties of our world that I think God is the most reasonable explanation of based on Occam’s razor and the limiting of assumptions. Of course, then we get into issues of what exactly the “simplest” explanation is, but as complex as God may be, all of the unanswerable metaphysical questions fall nicely into place under the Christian worldview while they remain mostly unanswerable or require dozens of independent speculations to explain under naturalism.
5) If there is no God then we don’t know anything. False. If so, chimps don’t know anything either. They don’t know how to get food, or mate or even where to live. Without knowing anything they should’ve died off a long time ago. And yet here they are. They don’t need a god to know these things. Why do we need a god for knowledge? We learn through a process of trial and error. Since we’ve survived as a human species, we have acquired reliable knowledge about our world. Period.
Loftus is missing the point here and failing to prove his case. The statement he should be trying to disprove is “If there is no God then we don’t know anything”. First he tries to reframe it as “If you don’t believe in a God then you don’t know anything”, which is how the chimp thing relates. It was an argument against a different statement that nobody made. The second chunk is basically trying to establish an alternative source of knowledge, but again, misses the point. Creatures survive without knowledge under naturalism. A human spasms toward reproduction based on the dictation of chemicals in his brain. There is no knowledge in such a system.
I have cobbled this together from Plantinga “…if materialism is true, human beings, naturally enough, are material objects. Now what, from this point of view, would a belief be? My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures.
"But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.
"I’m interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge.
"But here’s the important point: It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.
“Because if this belief — this structure — had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn’t a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn’t matter.
“Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we’ve seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn’t matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn’t matter whether that content is true or false. All that’s required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it’s also true, that’s fine; but if false, that’s equally fine.”
6) Love exists only if God exists. Erroneous. This is an empty rhetorical claim devoid of any content at all. Believers have always said this even during the Inquisition and witch-hunts. Randal should look at the evidence of the history of the church. He should consider the other primates who exhibit characteristics of love. He should also take seriously the evidence in the Bible that God is not love either, for he will squash you like a bug if you don’t obey him, which isn’t descriptive of love, much less parental love, or perfect love at all. It’s descriptive of a despotic king, of which Yahweh was modeled after.
Again, he has failed to argue the point laid out. The statement is that God must *exist* in order for love to exist. Not that he must be believed in. The point is that under a naturalistic viewpoint, love is a ghost in a machine, some artifact of certain evolutionarily adaptive hormones that cause us to act like we care and feel like we care. If you believe that love is more than an accident of chemicals, that there is a genuine connection between human beings (or members of any other species) then you already believe in God, you’re just unwilling to admit it.
7) Everybody has faith. Misguided. This may be true for most people, but it’s the problem, not the solution. Faith is a cognitive bias causing people to overestimate any confirming evidence and to underestimate any disconfirming evidence. Faith is an irrational leap over the probabilities. [When I say this I'm not saying Randal is irrational, only that faith is irrational.] Reasonable people think exclusively in terms of probabilities based on objective sufficient evidence along with sound reasoning about the evidence.
This is true no matter what. If faith is the belief in that which cannot be proven, we all have faith in the mathematical definition of sets. It can’t be proven. It has to be assumed. Most of us believe in free will, the existence of the outside world, of other minds. Of our own mind! We can’t prove these things, but we believe them. This is faith. Do you believe that objectivity exists? That evidence is a valid source of knowledge? Then you have faith. Those things can’t be proven.
8) Objective beauty exists therefore God exists. Foolish. There is nothing objectively beautiful or ugly in the world. There is just raw uninterpreted stuff. If we could see and hear the whole electromagnetic and sonic spectra then all we could see or hear would be white noise. How is white noise objectively beautiful? Without any objective beauty there is no argument to the existence of his evangelical God.
Well, I’ve never heard this particular argument… Yeah, I’d find it hard to demonstrate that there is such a thing as objective beauty. +1 to Loftus. [Now me: I disagree with this now.]
9) God best explains the miracles in people’s lives. Silly. Given the number of believers in the world and the number of rare coincidences that could occur in their lives I’m actually surprised there aren’t more miracle claims. Extremely rare coincidences happen. It’s what we would expect given the odds. There are no verifiable supernatural agents behind them. People merely see supernatural agents where there aren’t any because we’ve inherited this propensity from the animal kingdom, who thought they heard predators approaching merely at the random sound of rustling leaves. What we need are clinical studies, which are the best kind of scientific evidence for these claims, and nearly every scientific study done on petitionary prayer has shown it works statistically no better than chance.
Clinical studies and scientific inquiry with regard to miracles is akin to doing a psychological survey on someone and telling them exactly what you’re asking, why you’re asking it and how you intend to interpret the results. This misses the point that a sovereign omnipotent and omniscient being is the one being tested. He could simply refuse to respond and your experiment would show nothing. We’re not talking about magic here; we’re talking about the actions of a person and determining whether that person exists based on certain demands we make of them.
I think there are legitimate miracles that have happened and they deserve explanation, but the ones I would point to are the historical ones, the prophecy, and the big one, which is below, so I will continue…
10) God raised Jesus from the dead. Not true. No reasonable person today should believe 2nd 3rd 4th handed testimony coming from a lone part of the ancient world as we find in 4th century manuscripts written by pre-scientific superstitious people who doctored up and forged many of these texts. Almost all of our questions go unanswered, the kind of questions we have been able to ask of the rise of Mormonism in the modern world, leading us to reject it. What did the early disciples actually claim to have seen? Did they all tell the same stories? Did any of them recant? All we have is Paul’s first person testimony, and if we’re to believe Acts 26:19, he said his Damascus road conversion was based on nothing more than a vision.
Special Pleading. Loftus is throwing out sources because he doesn’t like them, not because they are inherently flawed. Certainly the earliest copies of the manuscripts are 2nd, 3rd and 4th century, but we have *thousands* of them. To say they were doctored or forged is to speculate wildly and discount the entire discipline of textual criticism. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the best documented historical events from before the creation of newspapers by any criteria you wish to base it.
The questions are only unanswered because you are throwing away the answers. How can I argue that a historical event happened if I am required to throw away all primary sources? Bear in mind, all this talk about doctoring and forging is pure speculation, completely baseless in the world of historical evidence. Is there any copy of Matthew or John out there that doesn’t contain the so-called “interpolations”? No.
Ironically Paul’s testimony, the only “first-person testimony” that Loftus points out is written by Luke, and therefore not first-person at all. Contrast this to John’s testimony in first John and the gospel of John, Peter’s testimony in 2 Peter, Matthew’s in Matthew 28. Also Paul’s first person writings are available in 1 Corinthians 15.
Conclusion
The point of it all is that naturalism refutes the assumptions it is built on. The inescapable conclusion of the naturalistic and atheistic perspective is that there is no such thing as morality, there is no such thing as a meaning of life, love, free will, the mind, and rational thought are all illusions. Unfortunately, this saws off the branch that the original line of thought was built on, but we can still believe in atheism, but only as an assertion of what is, by definition, blind faith, and can never be anything else.
However, if you think that love, free will, the self, the mind, purpose, morality, or rational thought exist, you must reject the tenets of atheistic naturalism. Since these things are fundamental to our experience of the world, I find that it takes far more faith to believe that logic, science, and rational thought are all false, then to say that perhaps my assumption that there is nothing beyond the physical is wrong.
To be clear, the above argument doesn’t prove Christianity, it merely falsifies atheistic naturalism. The question of whether Christianity in particular is true requires things beyond pure logic into questions of history, which the last two points are relevant to.