The Nature of Agnosticism Part 2

As I reflect more on my agnosticism I've come to some additional conclusions about the general tendencies or patterns of thinking entailed by agnosticism. I will mention a few arguments from the philosophy of religion that I find utterly unconvincing but are surprisingly convincing to a large fraction of theists, how we should be evaluating the worldviews that generate these faulty arguments, why it's pointless to engage in speculative argumentation, and how we should reevaluate our conceptions of the structure and nature of these types of belief systems. I'll preface this by stating that I've been recently exposed to a religious subculture in my late 20's without much prior involvement. My exposure and reactions come after attending undergrad, graduate school, a decade of reading philosophy and critical argumentation, and self teaching computer science. I've realized that I've had the privilege of growing up in a household that's been more or less open to free thought and has never enforced a dogma; political, economic, religious, or anything else. I'm not "de-converting", never have been officially part of any religious system, and have never been particularly interested in picking up any book related to theistic belief. However, I grew up with plenty of conservative religious folk in my community, and was not completely unfamiliar with some of the basic tenets of various theistic belief systems. This introduction is merely to provide a background because understanding personal trajectory and path dependency can help illuminate nuances that may be overlooked without such a context. I am literally approaching these questions at a point in my life where it's far easier to analyze central claims without any prior conditioning and while having the necessary tools to perform such an analysis. I think a few cases might exemplify how an agnostic approaches questions of religious belief so I'll start the next section describing some of my experiences.

I was always familiar with the pseudo-debunking arguments advanced by creationists. During my undergrad the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate happened, which I got a kick out of, but prior to that I was aware of various mythical references to a young earth and a flood. It wasn't until I became aware of the world of apologetics that I discovered a separate branch of foolery; attempting to prove that scientific explanations are predated by religious scripture. This was an interesting discovery for me because it represents a shift in strategy for belief preservation among religious denominations. Instead of trying to outright disprove something like, carbon dating methods for example, the strategy now looks for biblical verses that predate scientific discoveries, arguing that it's only possible to know such information by means of divine revelation. I recognized this rhetorical tactic from debate; what you do is identify premises that at first glance seem to undermine your own position, but then reframe them to show that they actually subvert the position that your opponent has advanced. I can definitely imagine that this would be overlooked by someone unfamiliar with persuasive techniques. It was at this moment when I realized how crucial varieties of apologetics are for belief preservation. Many of these arguments advanced by apologists are completely unconvincing to people who aren't searching for reasons to believe when they are facing doubt; they are designed for people who are already Theists. I soon learned that there are entire institutions dedicated to this practice, such as the Discovery Institute, and serve the primary function of alleviating doubt or uncertainty among young people transitioning into adulthood. The demographics of these types of audiences supports this proposition. If we conceive of religion as a system of interacting components, then we can see that different forms of apologetics function as mechanisms that preserve system structure, thus propagating the the lifespan of the system. You can even see apologetics in action dating back to some of the first theodicies (attempt to solve the problem of evil) in responses to the Epicurean Paradox. Like all institutions and practices, they evolve, which brings me to the new strategy employed to alleviate uncertainties surfacing due to scientific discoveries.

Late in 2022, attended an event where an apologist by the name of Charlie Campbell gave a talk on how to defend and reaffirm Christianity from those skeptical atheists. It's important to note that different theological positions tend to employ different apologetic strategies. For example, instead of denying scientific discoveries like a Southern Baptist, his strategy is to reframe the discoveries as supporting Theism. This distinction is not arbitrary; it determines how conversations with a Theist will likely proceed when questions like these arise or when someone is trying to evangelize you. I’ve always thought the mission of apologetics was interesting because part of the definition is “defense” which implies someone is “attacking”. The term derives from the Greek word "Apologia". In the ancient Greek legal system, the prosecution employed the "Kategoria" which is the accusation, and the defense provided the Apologia. This is very interesting psychologically, because it shows that Theists perceive this as a battleground, that they are on the defense, that the presumption of innocence is with them, and that open ended inquiry is something requires you to be "on guard" so to speak. Framing dialogue like this is obviously problematic but it's important to understand the framing; people learn apologetics because they feel they are being attacked (similar to the way social justice warriors perceive words as violence). I don’t think all Christian’s feel under attack but some do get extremely defensive if you say anything they deem problematic. I think apologists feed on these insecurities. Apologists give their followers a set of bullet points to regurgitate when questioned about (weak points?) in scripture, history, or facts contrary to the reality constructed by their worldview. In other words, they give them the “tools” to “defeat” any of those “skeptics” who are trying to “deconstruct their faith” or “dismantle the truth of Christianity”. You can imagine that, if your entire occupation is predicated on this notion, you will come across some ridiculous defense tactics. You start with your answer search backwards for the reasons to make it seem reasonable. This is what I encountered with Charlie.

To begin, the mindset of defense was very much present in the audience. At the end of the talk, the pastor came up to the stage and said “to all the young people, you will be going to college or the work force soon, and you now have the tools to defend yourself from the constant barrage of attacks you will certainly encounter”. This is not verbatim but the gist is here. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, I am sure there are people out there who are highly critical of religion and Christianity. Someone could probably perceive me as such. You can run into the Richard Dawkins type. But what I’m thinking is that this is a bit overstated and definitely appeals to fear. I went to two universities, six years of school, and sat in lectures at other universities and cannot remember a time where Christianity was singled out and attacked. There were times when aspects of Christianity were referenced maybe during a historical argument or philosophical position, or maybe in a comparative religion class or psychology of religion in which Christianity was part of a larger point of inquiry. There were times where we read Ancient Greek arguments for the existence of the soul and how this conception impacts our modern day thinking. There were times where we read St. Augustine’s confessions and broke apart his arguments. Maybe this is what is meant by “attack”. Obviously, it would be outrageous to dissect the arguments put forth by the originator of original sin concept. Or maybe they are referring to critical biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman; but again I’ve read his books and never got the sense he was trying to attack Christianity but rather call into question certain historical aspects that might conflict with certain theological positions. I had prepared a list of questions leading up to the discussion for the apologist, one of them being: is a question an attack? Anyway, this is the environment apologists create and operate in; and there are large audiences for this material. Naturally, an all encompassing world view like this will likely be tied to someone’s personal identity so any sort of question is necessarily an attack on the person.

The topic of the apologists discussion was “Scientific validity within scripture”. The flow of the entire argument goes like this:

There exists some scientific discovery
There exists a part of scripture that kind of resembles some of the conclusions reached by the scientific community
The Bible predated the scientific discovery
There is no way the authors would have known about the discovery without being guided by a divine force
Therefore god was apart of it, and the Bible is scientifically valid

He presented 10 points, I wrote down 8, but he noted that there is probably 3 dozen more we can talk about. Here they are:

“In the beginning”. Not infinite. Definite start. Many of Moses contemporaries thought the universe was eternal. Consensus in science was that universe is eternal. Cosmic background radiation, second law, motion of galaxies. Arno Penzias was the guy. Explains current state and expansion
Stretching out of universe: Isaiah 40 , spreading of heavens and tent to dwell in. Explanation of expansion: used for stability, but expansion is increasing causes problems in future? Claims that Atheist respond by arguing this was inserted into the bible after the fact. I've never heard this one. (My Question: retrodiction? Analogy ad hoc applied to observations?)
The stars: Galileo a devout Christian (strong emphasis on this point) proved there are many stars more than current estimates . Jeremiah 33:22, stars cannot be numbered more the sand of the sea measured. Modern astronomy says there are 2 trillion galaxies. This is evidence in favor of Jeremiah. Uses examples of pre-renaissance scientists being wrong about the count of stars. (My thoughts: Are you only noting a scientist is Christian when they were right? Whether or not Galileo thought it, his contemporaries didn’t and they put him in jail for heresy, and facts about their religious convictions seem irrelevant)
The sun: Moses said the sun is not a deity, modern science confirmed it. Psalm 19:6 proves it. (My thoughts: Cherry picking biblical verses? His contemporaries allegedly thought this. Were there any other civilizations who believed this?)
The shape of the earth: critics of scripture point to revelation 7:1 as indicating the earth is flat. But the apologist says John is just using a figure of speech and the critics are mistaken. Isaiah 40:22 says he sits above the circle of the earth, not a sphere. Book of job says god has inscribed a circle of surface waters, and that from a 2d projection circle means spherical. (My question: why do we consider this a figure of speech but not in the other instances? How do we distinguish figure of speech from biblical insight revealed to us?)
Earth hangs on nothing. Hindus believe it rests on a turtle. (My question: Are there any verses in Hindu scripture that are scientific in the way this guy is presenting?)
Second law of thermodynamics: psalm 102. Like a robe or garment, wear and tear. High entropic state to low entropic state, statistical mechanics. (My thought: Wouldn’t the second law imply that universe is not sustained? More cherry-picking?)
Source of water: the water cycle discovered in 1800s. Biblical defense: Ecclesiastes 1:7. Job 36 27–28.

I wrote more notes but excluded them here; my summary was this:

Summary: the whole thing is centered around cherry picking Bible verses to fit specific discoveries, while ignoring disconfirming evidence that shows the biblical worldview is wrong.

I’ve seen this type of apologetics before in the case of evolution. There is some verse in genesis that says something about “change” and this was used to argue that the Bible foreshadowed the discovery of evolution. I mean this is just silly. But I understand why there is a need to do this. Christian’s feel threatened when scientific discoveries disconfirm their world view, they don’t want to give it up, so they find a way to reconcile cognitive dissonance. So when a “skeptic” or “atheist” is “attacking” a Christian with facts, you have to prove that the Bible is indeed on par and superior to the scientific world view. It’s obviously silly because the Bible is a spiritual book, giving the reader guidance for salvation and how to behave. It is not meant to be empirically rigorous. From my perspective, confusing the two will just be the end of Christianity.

Anyway I’d like to dwell a bit more on my conclusion. The apologist claimed at the beginning that the most common atheistic refutation of these amazing verses predating modern science is that “they were inserted into the Bible after the fact”. I know that some people, including myself, have identified biblical verses were not in the original like the ending of Mark, but never for the purpose of bolstering a scientific discovery. That is ridiculous; if there were to be an insertion, it seems more likely the purpose would be to make the gospel more internally coherent, not externally correspondent without scientific discoveries. So it’s kind of a straw man, no one actually says that. What critics do say however, is that there are far more statements of fact in the Bible that do not correspond with modern science and that any verse that seems to predate science is a ludicrous retrodiction that was cherry picked ad hoc to fit current observations. Critics say that the disconfirming evidence is simply overwhelming, and that in the event the scientific consensus is overturned on some matter the Christian can just ignore the fact that the verse no longer corresponds to the scientific consensus. It's a win-win; if the hypotheses is redacted it's not like this would count against the Bible being somehow empirically accurate. This is my point with my summary. It seems a little strange to cherry pick Bible verses that kind of resemble a scientific discovery. The whole process of doing it is the literal antithesis of scientific inquiry; Scientists are careful to not cherry pick data to fit a theory. In this case it’s even more bizarre; the religious person cherry picks scientific discoveries to fit a very vague analogy randomly selected from scripture. I mean literally the apologist claimed that in point 2 (stretching of the universe) that the biblical verse is itself an analogy.

I could go one by one and dismantle each point but I think that misses the general criticism and is a waste of time. Furthermore, there are other people who spend time doing this; I'll link to a few videos below. For example in the first point (beginning of the universe), he claims that everyone thought the universe was eternal. I am not aware of this, but I do know that first cause arguments were put forward since Aristotle so I’m not quite sure who he is referring to. He claims that Moses contemporaries thought it was eternal but in genesis “there was a beginning”. I don’t even believe Moses existed so there’s that. But it's entirely irrelevant what Moses thinks. He uses Arno Penzias as the guy who proved the universe had a beginning. He also casually slides in there that he was a devote Christian. Which is hilarious because he was actually a Jew who fled the Nazis. The apologist cant even get basic facts correct. It doesn't matter, because the audience is just soaking it in uncritically. His religion is irrelevant anyway, but apologists love to throw those little facts in there. It’s like a “+1 for our team , those atheists are too stupid to realize that all the great scientists believed in god” argument subtly lurking that gets the crowd going. I could point to the fact that now, almost all scientists are agnostic or atheist. That would stroke my ego. The reason apologists do this is because there is a causal assumption subtly asserted in the phrase “so and so who did great things was also an X”. There are plenty of Christians who were scientists but this is merely a historical artifact. Everyone was a Christian in Europe and America. It explains nothing. Anyways I digress, Arno Penzias laid the foundation for Big Bang cosmology. Theists In general who do this sort of apologetics use this as proof that “there was a beginning”. But what they don’t understand is that there is not consensus that this was the begging of everything. It explains the apparent expansion from a high density state to the state we observe now. That is a huge difference and something you can literally verify yourself by looking at the Wikipedia page. The models also say nothing about the time shortly following expansion; because the equations explode. That is what a singularity is. Also, since it is a theory of the origin of space time it says nothing about what preceded the Big Bang and many cosmologists recognize this: it explains expansion of the observable universe. Anyway here is a blog post that kind of represents how “the enemy” thinks of these sorts of claims. I chose this point because it demonstrates not only the cherry picking and retrodiction, fitting of literary language to measurable facts, but also shows that the science itself is misrepresented. I’m sure not all of the science is misrepresented but In many instances they do not refer to the actual/current state of investigation. They cherry pick a point in time during the discovery process that fits their world view.

I do not think this is the end of the world. I would rather live in a world where Christians believe their book predates scientific discoveries rather than young earth creationists who deny everything. At least in the former case, they are somewhat aware of the state of affairs and maybe it can inspire a new generation of inquisitive students who want to pursue cosmology or evolutionary theory. Whether they think DNA is the “language of god” is unimportant. I do think many of these types are foolish; the entirety of the DNA argument for example relies on creating an analogue between God and a software engineer. If you want your faith to rest on an analogy be my guest; just realize that analogies are not facts. God is infinitely malleable, the conception of god has changed drastically through time and will continue. In the past, everything was conceived as "divine intervention" but now, in order to avoid god of the gaps arguments, evolution was how god "does" his creation. This obviously raises more questions then answers (like with animal suffering), which draws even more people away from Christianity. There will be clowns like this who want to “put atheists and agnostics” in their place but the fact is that the majority of people trained in science see no correlation between scripture and scientific discoveries; and many find the two incompatible. Personally, I think religion and science operate in different, partially overlapping, domains. There seem to be two classes of theists that come to mind; class number one straight up denies scientific discoveries and class two wants to reconcile. The Former tends to dispute that a scientific fact is wrong by virtue of biblical inerrancy alone. The latter class of people typically claim that the Bible is the foundation for all of the discovery and that “truth and facts are on their side”. My view that religion and science are orthogonal becomes challenged when I see debates like this with Matt Walsh and this science communicator. Clearly the domains are not entirely orthogonal; theists who “have facts on their side” have to quibble around and end up conflating scientific discovery with religious scripture. Maybe this arrogance of certainty persists because it stems from having a belief system that flags doubt as suspect. Anyway, the point is that if “facts were on your side” and “you care about objective truth”, you would do that, and understand the limits and nature of evidence based reasoning. As shown here, religious evidence tends to be in the form of anecdote or testimony. We have to agree on what counts as evidence before we can begin spouting "the evidence is on our side". Here is a quick list of facts that adherents of the former group tend to ignore and a study showing how creationists arguments are fallacious.

When I got home I started pondering in depth why this type of apologetic event is even in demand. Why do apologists exist? Is this a feature of all belief systems? Do other religions do the same thing? It clicked for me. Of course other religions do the same thing. Referring to point 6 above, the example of the earth “hanging on nothing”, the apologist contrasted this with Hindu understandings of cosmology. He claims that in Hindu scripture the world lives on top of a giant elephant. I agree this is absurd, almost as absurd of the notion that the earth is “hanging” and that it is backed my modern science. Is it hanging on a string? It clicked, anyone, in any religion, can reference a metaphor in their scripture and back-fit a scientific theory to it. The metaphor of “hanging” seems to fit better, then the metaphor of “resting” as in the case of Hinduism. Seems reasonable enough to the audience. And this is obviously a way to reaffirm that other religions are false, mythological, and scientifically inaccurate and that your faith in the Bible is justified (obviously this ignores the inaccurate claims else where in the Bible: here and here as an example) or more justified then other religions because "our metaphors are better". But surely, there are other verses in the Bhagavad Gita, or Quran, or in Buddhist teachings, that correspond with the modern scientific world view. Google “scientific accuracy in the Quran” and you will see many links, from Muslim apologists, who claim their Holy book is consistent with the scientific consensus of the world. They too cherry pick verses from scripture and claim their book was guided by god. In this website the first "scientific fact confirming the Quran" is:

Water: In Surah Al-Anbya, it was revealed: “We made every living thing from water, will they not believe?” (Quran, 21:30) and it was only after the discovery of the microscope that it was concluded that all living things consist mostly of water — while in the deserts of Arabia, the last thing a man could guess is that all of life ultimately came from water.

Well would you look at that, seems like the Quran was inspired by god as well. We know this because the scientific consensus of life emerging from water could not have been known by anyone living in deserts. The only way to know this is if god told us. This is the same exact logic used by the Christian apologist. Let’s take a look at the Hindu. Do the same google search and see what comes up. Unsurprisingly there are less because other religions do not have this “apologetics” disease running in them as strongly as Abrahamic traditions. But let’s see what they have to say. In this article:

The Bhagavad Gita states, All the planets of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is worth a thousand yuga, known to humankind; as is each night.[3] Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga must be repeated a thousand times to make a “day of Brahma”, a unit of time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets 8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was also theorized by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by contraction… a cosmos without end.

In other words, the theory of a cyclic universe aligns with the Hindu belief of reincarnation and therefore the scripture is rigorously aligned with science. This article references Einstein. If you are a Christian looking at this, of course it looks silly. But it’s justified when it comes to your own scripture. Is it possible that the facts of the universe are underdetermined and many religions can fit scripture to the data? Anyone can do this. Can the measure of “fit” instead be; how many errors are there relative to all of the truth claims put forth in my scripture? This would be problematic obviously because the “fit” is based on the metaphor chosen, I suspect you can do this infinitely many times. Here is a link that compares Buddhism to modern science. Do this exercise for every religion you can think of. Ironically for the case of Buddhism there is much more interest in the relation between science and the basic tenets of Buddhism; but this is by no means proof of anything.

Anyway I don’t Want to go on forever talking about this. But I do want to end it with reference to an article from Biologos, a Christian apologetics website, that kind of seems to understand what I am saying. As mentioned before, not all apologetics appeals to all Christians. The article is titled No, Modern Science is Not “Catching Up” to the Bible. He shows that this tactic of retrofitting actually threatens the notion of inerrancy.

To understand Bube’s point, imagine a Christian sharing the chart above on Facebook with a non-Christian skeptic. This skeptic is intrigued, and begins to do some of her own research on the context of the biblical references in the chart. What she will discover is that, in every single one of the cases above, these so-called revelations of modern science are based on a barest of biblical evidence. In every case, they are plucked entirely out of context and turned into atomized truth nuggets. There is little evidence that the writer of Job actually meant to talk about astronomy, or that the writer of Hebrews was in any way addressing modern atomic theory. These meanings are imposed upon the text by Christians who, under the influence of the “arbitrary inerrancy” view, assume such information must be there. A little help from Google will uncover an enormous library of articles by skeptics who have discovered hundreds of scientifically incorrect statements all over the Bible. Of course, when this skeptic confronts the Christian with this evidence, the Christian might respond that the Bible doesn’t really mean to say that our thoughts and emotions come from our kidneys (Psalm 16:7) or the sky is made of a hard, bronze-like substance (Job 37:18), or…or…or… But the skeptic will rightly see this as an entirely arbitrary approach to the Bible, in which the Bible predicts modern science whenever we can contrive a correct prediction, but when it seems to be at odds with modern science, suddenly that’s just poetry. The Christian has set up a standard for biblical authority under which the Bible cannot deliver. The net result isn’t a defense of the Bible, but instead an invitation for scorn and further unbelief.

From an outsiders perspective, if any apologist is going to convince a modern, scientifically literate, generation of non believers, you have to take the approach referenced in this article. This is a decent article too. But maybe it’s too “liberal” for the “conservative” Christian.

Below are some questions I wanted to ask the speaker but unfortunately there was no opportunity for the audience to interact:

You use the word “skeptic” to refer to people raising contention, can you provide a description of what class of people this refers to? What are their attributes? Is a skeptic someone who poses questions or is there something more pernicious?
Skeptic is used commonly with a strong negative connotation. This is exemplified by the very nature of an apologists profession. Someone who defends is necessarily defending from someone who is attacking. Does posing a question constitute an attack? If not, can you provide a description of someone with questions that does not imply a battleground?
I would consider the word "skeptic" to describe a property rather than essence. If I am skeptical of climate change, likely this deflates to being skeptical about a set of propositions within this larger system of inquiry. For example, I am skeptical of the catastrophic predictions of a warming globe, but not skeptical of the orthodox position that the globe is warming. Can you provide a distinction between this global versus local skepticism and how it applies in your work?
Skepticism is typically an attitude associated with critical thinking, is it possible to be skeptical of fundamental propositions in Christianity while still being a true believer? Is critical thinking orthogonal to faith?
Referring back to the example of climate change, if I am skeptical of some claim about catastrophic predictions, it is likely because the strength of evidence is not sufficient to warrant the claim. In your work, do you refer to this notion of preponderance of evidence? Are certain types of evidence stronger, or do they carry more weight, when considering claims of divinity? What should the level of evidence be, and can we apply it to divinity claims in other religions while still being confident in our conclusion? If so how?
Why is the evidence you present relevant or salient to your position? Evidence is typically underdetermined and can point in different directions, many times there is evidence in favor of the opposite claim. Is there any disconfirming evidence that would cause you to change your position if discovered? Have you looked for any?
At times you present archaeological evidence for your position. Renditions of history are notoriously unstable at times; there is a possibility that new data may completely overturn our previous conception. Do you think that if data were revised or contradictory data were discovered, the strength of your faith would be challenged? Is there a certain amount of evidence that should cause someone of non belief to become a believer or a believer to become a non-believer?
Many of these discoveries were not made until recent centuries. This implies that archeological evidence was not known for centuries preceding the construction of these techniques. If evidence is the bearer of justification, does that mean there was no justification for Christianity prior to scientific archeology?
If there are biblical verses that do not correspond with a scientific modern hypothesis, does that mean it serves as disconfirming evidence? Why not? Do we simply slap the label "metaphor" on it until someone else digs up a verse that loosely corresponds to a modern scientific fact?
Can you think of any silent evidence that might contradict any of the evidence presented? Should we think of this bit of evidence in a larger context?
Reliability is typically brought up. Reliability is also tied to a specific goal or purpose. In computing a system is reliable if it meets a quality threshold. In data engineering, content is reliable if it meets governance standards. Reliability is also a gradient, something is unreliable relative to a purpose or threshold. In computing and systems we have ways of verifying if something is reliable. We can check time stamps or event logs or even run anomaly detection. What methods of verification are available for assessing source testimony? Is there disagreement in the field over this notion? What are the standards applied when we say something is verified in this context ?

I'll finish this section here before I move on to my next topic. As mentioned before, I noted that there are other people who confront specific analogies purported by this brand of apologetics. Below are some additional references that might be useful:

So far I've given an example of how an agnostic would see through a specific tactic employed by an apologist. I don't think I've said anything really controversial so far. But something keeps popping up that I think should be addressed. Evidential approaches to inquiry necessarily require us to consult confirming, disconfirming, and neutral sources of data. Bayesian updating requires evaluating multiple hypotheses in relation to this body of evidence. Can we say in the example above the apologist was doing that? Clearly, they were not, as indicated by the questions I had concerning the content of the presentation. This leads to the notion of "Understated Evidence", a fallacy often overlooked when these silly "arguments" are employed.

The Fallacy of Understated Evidence was presented by philosopher Paul Draper to explain how Theistic belief tends to ignore or understate evidence that would make an alternative hypothesis, such as naturalism, more likely. In simple terms, think about someone who is advancing a claim. They may use evidence to support their claim (like a prosecutor against a defendant) but in the process may ignore or downplay evidence contrary to their hypothesis, or evidence that would support some set of alternative hypotheses. It is similar to someone ignoring disconfirming evidence; only favoring confirmatory evidence. Or it is similar to a person downplaying the relevance of a piece or collection of datum that may support a plausible hypothesis contrary to the cherished one. It is a type of inquiry one can apply when placed in the context of evidential inquiry; from this source:

“Draper makes use of an illustration with two jars of jelly beans. One is filled with mostly red beans and a small amount of blue beans; the other is filled with mostly blue beans and a small amount of red beans. Both jars also contain a few yellow beans. Someone takes a bean from a jar (we don’t know which). It’s a red bean. So which jar do we think it came from? The evidence in this case is compatible with the bean coming from either jar. But it’s surprising if it came out of the second jar and not so surprising on the assumption that it came out of the first. Certainty is not on the table. The evidence in this case doesn’t conclusively prove it came from the atheist jar and not the theist jar, but it is evidence favoring one hypothesis over the other.

So let’s say we keep taking jelly beans from one of the two jars. We know they’re all coming from the same jar, we just don’t know which. We draw another red bean. And another. And another. And another…until we have several red beans before us, only a couple blue beans, and one or two yellow beans. So at this point, we have a strong cumulative case that we’ve been drawing beans from the atheist jar. The evidence doesn’t prove once and for all which jar we’ve been drawing from, but the competing position is looking less and less reasonable. Given the evidence, we should conclude that we’ve been drawing from the first jar. We could still be wrong, of course. But that would be very improbable, since we’ve drawn so many red beans and so few blue beans”

Here’s the genetic structure of Draper’s f-inductive case. Let B=background information or evidence; E=the evidence to be explained; H=an explanatory hypothesis; Pr(|H|)=the intrinsic probability of H; and Pr(x|y)=the epistemic probability of x conditional upon y.

E is known to be true.
H1 is not intrinsically much less probable than H2, i.e., Pr(|H1|) is not much less than Pr(|H2|).
Pr(E | H2 & B) > Pr(E | H1 & B).
Other evidence held equal, H1 is probably false, i.e., Pr(H1 | B & E) < 0.5

If that didn't make sense, here is another source explaining what it means to Understate the Evidence.

Identifying this fallacy is genius because it applies to so many more cases outside of the Theist-Atheist debate. I think it also represents truly how an agnostic approaches these silly debates about what is true of metaphysics. At best, we are doing inference to best explanation to determine the most plausible explanation of these questions. At worst, we are merely speculating. The key to this argument is premise 3 and the defense(?) deciding to ignore or understate various bits of evidence. Much of the debate ends up being why one piece of datum is evidence in favor of either hypothesis, the strength (or impact) of the piece of evidence, and relevance of the data. From a critical thinking perspective, I think it forces people to ask the question “what even is evidence?” and “am I merely selecting observations to fit my preconceptions?”; it forces you to become aware of your selection mechanisms.

This is when I came upon this article “Understated Evidence and the Resurrection of Jesus”. Of course, this is part of a larger debate as to whether the historical Jesus can be demonstrated by modern historical standards and if the Gospels are “Eye-witness” accounts merely reporting the “facts” and “events”. This is obviously something very important to believers and see it as something they need to defend from “skeptics”. My test of veracity is simple: apply the standards consistently to other miraculous events from antiquity, or even in your daily life, and you will eventually be forced to accept quite absurd propositions. It is obvious where I stand on this: it is not a historically verifiable claim, but an article of Faith, dressing it up as “evidence” is silly at best.

To start, the author takes contention with the claim “First, R has a vanishingly low prior probability, far lower than any serious naturalistic explanation” where R refers to the resurrection. A few points to note are the descriptors “vanishingly” and “serious”. Take the first description: for something to vanish mathematically this means it is approaching zero. In the context of probability theory, if you have an event space, the fraction of the number of times the event has occurred represents the probability. If you want to be a Bayesian you can consider this your prior and then multiply it by some likelihood function. What is the relevance here? The simple reasoning is this: given the total number of birth/death events occurring through history, the number of actual or reported resurrections is exceedingly rare. Set that as your prior and you get a posterior that is incredibly low even if we grant favorable evidence such as biblical testimony. Another thing to note is that a probability of zero does not make a thing impossible. I am surprised Theists do not defend this much weaker claim; instead insisting that the probability must somehow be significantly large. I mean, isn't that the point of something being miraculous? No one expected it to occur, giving it significance. Here the author claims:

Okay, first I don’t think P(R) is “vanishingly low” unless we cut out certain important facts such as Jesus’ very strong and consistent claims of uniquely divine/messianic status, wide reports of his miracles of healing and exorcism, and his predictions of his own pending crucifixion in Jerusalem (to be followed by his resurrection). This is why I say the prior probability of the resurrection of Jesus, even if lower than comparatively more mundane events, has to be much higher than the probability of anyone else’s resurrection. And of course, if P(R) is much higher than some other probability, then it cannot really be vanishingly low (even the lowest probability is somewhere above zero).

Lets first take this seriously, and then tear it apart. Suppose we take all of this to be “evidence” (note this point here because many people will not take any of this to be actual evidence; it is unverified and overstates the significance or witness claims. This is most likely the case because it is not a reporting of historical fact; it is a narrative with metaphors and exacerbations), and the prior probability of the resurrection is higher than anyone else’s resurrection. The problem does not go away, because the likelihood of the event is still exceedingly low independent of prior beliefs. Suppose our prior is 0.9, and the odds are 1/100; this gives us 0.9*.10 = .009. That is exceedingly rare, even when we grant high likelihood. So even in the case where our priors are very high (because well, obviously, you are trying to prove it true), the posterior is still extremely unlikely. Now, lets tear it apart. Whether Jesus claimed to be messianic is debatable, by no means certain, and for all we know completely fictitious. The only source we have for this are the biblical records. That does not strike me as a source confidence, and if I were to make life changing decisions like converting to a religion on this basis and remained consistent with this evidential rule, I would probably believe just about anything you throw my way, including claims from other religions. If the CEO of any company decided to make an investment decision using this type of “evidence”, I assure you, the executive board would fire him immediately. There really is nothing to debate here; what's expected is for us to make a significant exception of our epistemic standards in this one particular case, while remaining inconsistent with our evaluations of other religious justifications based on the same structure of reasoning. On to the second bit of evidence: the wide ranging reports are completely unverified. If I recall correctly, apparently 500 people saw Jesus after his burial. Did we: interview any of these 500 people? Verify they were in a position to make the observation? Verify the person reporting this number was accurate? Verify that the person transcribing the “fact” was truthful? The list goes on. There are probably 50 more critical questions someone can ask. If “500 people saying something” is clearing the bar of burden of proof, then you are also likely to believe the guy you meet randomly at the bar who says he has banged 500 women. You will probably also buy his book. The last bit about comparative probability has a simple response: vanishing does not mean zero, the probability of a plane crash is vanishingly low but still non-zero. His last statement is just simply false. If P(X) > 0 and P(X) > P(Y), this does not entail P(X) > epsilon where epsilon is approaching zero. In other words, if some the probability of some alternative event is lower, and is vanishingly rare, the event under consideration can still be vanishingly rare. If you tell me that P(X) is 20 standard deviations from the mean, and P(Y) is 25 standard deviations form the mean, they are both still vanishingly rare asymptotically. Like what the actual fuck dude. P(X ^ Y) can still be very rare. Thankfully, Alas, you are starting to get the point:

Also it seems to me that the estimation of prior probability of an identifiable historical event ought to be substantially low in the first place, given that by definition specific historical events only happen once — which may explain why historians are typically not keen on Bayesianism and probability calculus to guide their research.

This actually is actually a huge question of historiography in general; can a science of history be possible? How do we discern fact from legend and myth? I would not count “Bayesianism” out entirely, especially if you read The Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning. History may be a bit more than pure conjecture or Inference to Best explanation; and in some sense this is what Bayesian thinking is. Nevertheless, you can construct probabilities given known facts and that is the entire point. If I am an archeologist and find a pyramid somewhere in the desert, what is the probability a pharaoh ruled in this area? It seems like we can construct likelihoods from evidence.

On to another point of confusion. The qualification “serious” is obviously a bit vague, but sensitivity dictates that we should not strawman the authors argument by applying a ridiculous example to prove the contrary. A naturalistic explanation of the moon could be that it is made of cheese, but obviously this is unlikely given our background knowledge. Not all naturalistic explanations are "good ones". But many are intrinsically more likely than supernatural explanations mainly because we cant even assign probabilities to things we cannot measure. Ruling out the "naturalistic" examples prima facie is literally absurd, if you call yourself a thinking person. Lets just assume for a second that the Gospels were not written a couple of generations later, and that there were actually first hand sources used in its construction. Lets also assume, all of the testimony was collected in unbiased non-selective ways. You still have problems with this type of evidence. It is broadly known by legal scholars and literally anyone who has lived a day on this planet, of the issues with reliability of eye witness testimony. It would be absurd to not even consider this as a possibility, given all of the research on memory biases, group level effects, etc. Like I said earlier, you actually have to throw away all of your critical capacities and common sense to accept it as undoubtedly more likely than any of these “naturalistic” explanations. EVEN IF the witnesses pass the criteria of veracity, WE STILL have countless of cases overturned after DNA evidence was applied in modern court cases. I am just illustrating the problem with labelling a hypothesis as "serious" or "unserious". Seriousness is a function of plausibility, which is a function of what we deem to be normal under assumptions of normality. These can be immensely skewed by ideological filters. The author of the post I think recognizes that there can be some bad "naturalistic" explanations of events, but then conflates the bad examples he constructs, with the seemingly reasonable alternative "naturalistic" explanations that resonate with people:

For instance, consider a naturalistic explanation involving a huge colony of countless millions of South American army ants that were drawn to the tomb by the decomposing corpse of Jesus by the barest hint of a stray scent, that travelled across the ocean using their own bodies as a bridge (they have been known to cross streams and rivers this way), that combined their efforts to move the stone from the entryway of the tomb and remove the body of Jesus, and then devoured the body, leaving only a skeleton in the desert. Though seemingly naturalistic (non-super-naturalistic), the South American army ant explanation would be neither appreciably parsimonious nor would fit appreciably well with our background knowledge of how the world works generally. The most we could say for such a scenario is “It’s logically possible.” But my example admittedly is not serious. So I guess what we need is (1) some objective means to distinguish naturalistic from non-naturalistic explanations, and (2) some objective means to distinguish serious from non-serious naturalistic explanations.

Now obviously everyone would agree with the authors example. But this is why they shy away from assigning probabilities to the events. Since "God raising Jesus" cannot be assigned a probability, this ludicrous example is more probable, but intuitively less plausible. But by making this claim, the author is trying to dismiss all alternative "naturalistic" explanations, not simply get us to reconsider that some alternatives can be explanatorily insufficient. What the author does not understand however, is that the "supernatural" explanation is not plausible unless you make a bunch of metaphysical assumptions, including the existence of God. So yes, under that set of assumptions, why wouldn't it be possible that God raised Jesus? But this is simply question begging. Only by invoking additional assumptions, and ignoring the plausibly constructed alternative hypotheses, can a resurrection become a "serious" explanation. From my point of view, it is almost as absurd as the ant example. Even if we adopt the additional metaphysical assumptions and ignore everything we know about nature, I can construct a series of alternative hypotheses explaining the event. For example: after Jesus's resurrection, Krishna evaporated his body and induced hallucinations among the people allegedly interacting with Jesus afterwards. In principle, there is no way to exclude this hypothesis without resorting to some presupposed theology. Invoking these metaphysical assumptions literally opens the gateway for all sorts of possibilities. The author states the need to distinguish between natural and non-natural explanations, which I think is rather simple: reference to a metaphysical being is by definition non-natural. If you invoke this being then you have made the distinction. Distinguishing serious from non-serious explanations is even more simple, instead of calling one “more plausible” as if there are a set of standards descending to us from somewhere that allows us to distinguish differing degrees of plausibility, just remember that “serious” is used as a description, or an attitude towards some proposition, not something measurable. If a hypothesis is aligned with data, and another one is not, we choose the one aligned with data. If something is unaligned with the data, then it is less serious. Use words that allow us to measure something. If I come home tomorrow and the house is a mess, a “serious” explanation is that my cats tore it up. A non-serious explanation is that a burglar came into my home, tore it up, left all my cash, the escaped while relocking the doors somehow. We can construct a series of “serious” explanations of the data I am observing in this scenario, given our background knowledge. All of which will be more likely then the other naturalistic explanation I posited about the burglar.

As it stands now, I don’t see that a naturalistic explanation for a phenomenon should be any more or less antecedently probable than a theistic explanation. Both God and nature are quite powerful in principle, as both are said by their respective spokesmen to be capable of creating the universe, creating life, imparting consciousness and moral awareness to humanity, etc. Besides, within the same “multiverse” scenario often postulated to explain fine-tuning of the universe on naturalism, anything logically and physically possible is also probable. The question, then, is not whether the resurrection has a low prior probability relative to naturalistic explanations, since both naturalism and theism can account for anything that actually happens.

Of course you don't, because Theism is presupposed in your world-view. Prove theism more likely than not, and then ask whether the theistic explanation is superior to the naturalistic. You are missing the first step. Show that a theistic explanation is even possible. You cannot presuppose the existence of a metaphysical entity; this is exactly what we are trying to prove to begin with. Naturalism can account for things that happen, but Theism requires a metaphysical entity to be postulated, which is additional and extraneous/non-simple. Furthermore, what if I disagree with your conception of the divine? Why are these properties of the self evident being, self evident? You have to suppose something very specific, which ends up equating just assuming the thing you need to prove.

The article then goes into a lengthy chain of reasoning why the resurrection is the “best explanation of the biblical facts” deriving from the (obvious) and widely attested propositions that

J (Jesus) is who he claimed to be: the Son of God, with access to divine power, and P, Jesus promised to resurrect three days after his predicted death and re-commune with his disciples.

Moreover, R explains the otherwise inexplicable alignment of the data, a diverse set of phenomena restricted to the mid first century and the region of Palestine: the empty tomb of Jesus, the postmortem appearances, and the rise of the early church.

And this is where I close my laptop. If its not obvious, (J) presupposes the divinity of Jesus. So in other words: of course resurrection is the most likely, (I) believe that Jesus was God, God can do anything. God also keeps his promises, he said 3 days, and that matches the record (no one could have possibly cherry picked the old testament to ensure it's aligned with the new testament narrative). What's a better way to prove your position? Assert it to be true and pretend you are reasonable and concerned about the evidence.

Perhaps an alternative? Let (N) be one of many "naturalistic" explanations grounded in observed phenomenon. Jesus was not resurrected. Assuming a tomb was empty (a tomb in which no one knows the location) and gospel stories are aligned in regards to the accounts of the events (there are not discrepancies), someone could have removed the body. Dying for your Faith is not a convincing counterargument to explain away behavior of the apostles, because people are willing to die out of strength of conviction in countless of cases: Communist revolutionaries, Islam, Osama Bin Laden, or maybe anyone burned as a heretic. All this tells us is that someone believed strongly in the mission. Phenomenon restricted to first century Palestine is very similar to the events of Joseph Smith or Jim Jones of Jonestown; but the radicalism in first century Judaic culture can be accounted for by Apocalypse prophesies of second century Judea. A list of messiahs shows that people gravitate to these personality types, and evidence from history of Roman history can explain instability in the region. Similar to instability in any failing modern nation state or region, messiahs emerge and new belief systems are birthed. Postmortem appearances were either fabrications or confabulations since we do not have any actual testimony from alleged witnesses (yes including none of the 500). Maybe the story was simply exaggerated over the 40–50 years it was in oral circulation, or disconfirming facts inconsistent with preferred theological assumptions were removed; contrary to the evangelical trying their hardest to proclaim that oral traditions are reliable despite mountains of evidence to the contrary even in modern times or the sheer unreliability of witness memory. One can say “they had an incentive to preserve the truth” in which I say “that is not evidence, but rather speculation. I can argue that actors had no incentive to preserve the truth”. Think about a child or political pundit who wants to convince you of their position; do you think they have an incentive to accurately paint an unbiased description of an event despite their motivations? Lastly, the rise of the early church can be explained mathematically like the spread of any other contagion. Its “truth” can’t explain the spread, because Islam and Mormonism are expanding even faster than Christianity, does that make them true? Lastly, other religions were not evangelical. There was no mission designed to convert people to Paganism. I would say, each of these facts can be explained in about 10 minutes without submitting to the quite phenomenal claim of someone rising from the dead. And lets not forget the actual claim; it was God who raised him from the dead. Now we introduced yet another unfalsifiable element; assuming God exists, there doesn't seem to be anything in principle preventing him from doing whatever he wants, including raising someone from the dead. If you already believe in God, then of course "its more likely" than any "naturalistic explanation". But isn't that the great benefit of introducing an omnipotent orchestrator? In principle, you cannot actually cite evidence or a probability to support any claim that "God did X". Therefore, dismissing objective measures (something the author is very keen to do) allows them to resort to "plausibility" (something I've written about elsewhere), but plausibility seems to be a function of preference in the case of the author; there is a vested interest to claim this to be the "best explanation" in order to remain consistent with the narrative structure of their belief system. I mean really, try looking at this from an outsiders perspective, then ask yourself if this explanation can be considered plausible.

Anyway, this branch of apologetics is particularly important to some people. Sometimes I pose the question "If Jesus did not rise from the dead, would you be a Christian?"; conservative evangelicals almost unanimously define this as a necessary condition for someone claiming the label. Interestingly, the virginity of Mary never seems to be high on the priority list for this subset of Christians. The problem is that this article of faith is now conflated as something "empirically demonstrable"; which is ridiculous, because it undermines legitimate forms of evidential inquiry by confusing people into thinking this is sound reasoning. Instead of viewing the Bible as a spiritual guide, its conflated as a historical document; something I see to be one of the driving forces behind many deconversions. For more on this branch of apologetics see some of the resources below; in particular the "minimal facts argument" that apparently proves the resurrection, and yet convinces no one who isn't already a Christian. This tends to be the case though, as mentioned in my previous blog post, apologetics really only appeals to people who already believe; it is not designed to be a legitimate form of inquiry. You'll notice in some of these articles a slant towards fundamentalism. This is exactly the variation of Christianity where this brand of apologetics seems to be most appealing.

How does this relate to understated evidence? Well, we have an example of someone trying to wish away disconfirming evidence while focusing on a small subset of contrived evidence that is highly assumption laden. They are dismissing the total evidence, while introducing elements that typically wouldn't constitute evidence if we honor consistency standards. For example, the author claims that Paul's conversion is evidence for the resurrection. If we take such a proposition seriously, then most revelatory religions would be equally "probable"; the only way to dismiss conflicting revelations would be to engage in special pleading. It's quite simple really; apologists introduce facts as relevant to the resurrection (such as the "expansion" of early Christianity) while ignoring the chain of reasoning required to establish something as evidence (and the implicit assumptions that glue the premises together). This is something I've written about elsewhere, so I won't go into it. But it's a general apologetic tactic; weaseling in some fact, labeling it evidence, while ignoring how such an inference implicit in their reasoning would yield other religions, such as Islam, equally true. They claim that "naturalists" ignore (and hence, understate this evidence), but fail to recognize that only a Christian would consider this evidence in the first place, given their world-view that privileges facts most wouldn't consider to be evidence. In other words, they are subjected to the problem of Theory Ladenness of observations. Apostles dying for their beliefs? Heck, why wouldn't that be evidence for something. It's when you consider that this chain of reasoning can be used for anything, that its weakness emerges. Something very common among Christian apologetics is the sheer lack of critical questioning; especially in obvious cases like this. But of course, this is due to the fact that apologetics starts with the conclusions (and typically sign statements of faith at their institutions, yet another sign of sheer unfaithfulness to the acquisition of knowledge), and constructs reasons ad-hoc. In their response to the fallacy, they misunderstand the fallacy, and the process by which we establish something as evidence. In the case of Paul's revelation, considering total evidence would require considering case reports of alternative revelations from contrary religions, and the utter lack of revelatory instances described by non-theists. There are quite a few alternative hypotheses that would explain this conflicting data.

Anyway, so far I think a trend is emerging. There is a tendency in some religious circles to place a strong emphasis on apologetics, but as we have been noticing, apologetics is a kind of professional defense mechanism designed for belief preservation. This makes sense though, especially with respect to systems of belief that have at their core some form of eternal punishment or paradise. In fact, it should be your duty to prevent people from losing belief, because in the grand scheme of things that's like losing a life. This life literally does not matter, it is transitory. This is why evangelists call it "soul saving"; they literally think they are preventing people from eternal suffering. If this is your motivation, then I suspect critical inquiry is necessarily placed farther down on the list of priorities. My main issue with apologetics is that it's kind of a smoke screen. Conversation and argumentation presupposes a form of inquiry where interlocutors are willing to update their beliefs in light of a strong counter-argument or compelling evidence. Apologetics simply ignores this, providing the façade of rational inquiry when instead it's simply motivated reasoning. I actually respect some of the feeble responses from people who aren't engaged in apologetics, at least I know where they stand at face value. But there are a list of quite uncompelling responses, some that are quite condescending or annoying, that I'll list below:

“Where do you ‘get’ your morals from?”
You need to respect peoples religious beliefs (but only mine)
You can’t know Gods Will, we are too ignorant
“It’s my truth”, “its true for me”
“One day you will see” (on the day of judgement or when you are burning in Hell)
“Ya know, I just don’t see how you can’t believe in something ‘bigger than yourself’. Look around you, who did all of this? Where did all of this come from?”
You are taking that out of context (for example slave torture in the old testament)
“I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist”
“I know because the spirit is in me; I have the ‘inner witness’ of the Holy Spirit”
“I have a personal relationship with Jesus”
“It’s not religion, its a relationship” (You are criticizing religion, I am talking about a personal relationship with my LORD)
“You have a hardened heart”
“That’s the old testament, it doesn’t matter anymore” and “I don’t hold to all of that in the Bible. My Jesus does X” (Your own personal Jesus)
“I have prayed but feel nothing”. Pastor: “Your not doing it right”
“You just want to Sin”
“You just want to be your own God”, “You think you are God”
“It’s not about rules, its about a relationship”
“Let me tell you my testimony”
“you can’t understand god’s mind with your human mind” “God works in mysterious ways”, “God’s ways are higher than our ways”,
“I’ve never met an Atheist on their deathbed”, “There are no Atheists in fox Holes”, “There are no real Atheists”, “you believe, you just won’t admit it”, “Who hurt you?” (angry Atheist trope), “Hitler was an atheist. Just like Stalin.”
“Atheists are bullies, they are on a mission to intimidate us into silence”
“You are so arrogant/prideful”
In the context of evolution or anything “Were you there?” (The only way to know anything is to be there?) , “So you think we came from Monkeys?”
“It’s what you feel in your heart"
“You actually believe” , “You just hate God”
“You really believe that everything came from nothing!??”
“Look how many people believe”
“I just wish you understood how great your life could be if you accepted.”
“Have you really explored what it means?”
“Well, we live in a fallen world”
“It’s true because the Bible says its true”
“You need the Holy Spirit to understand” (If the holy spirit is a by-product of salvation from accepting Jesus as your savior, but you need it to accept Jesus, this is circular and makes no sense. You need A for B but B for A)

If you ever meet someone who does not believe, don't say any of these conversation stoppers. And on the flip side, if you don't believe, don't belittle someone with religious beliefs or be an asshole, or assume something about their position. There are plenty of open minded Theists who have good conversations and intentions. I mean honestly I would much rather have a conversation with someone compelled for religious reasons then some meat head imbecile who can only talk about "the game".

Okay now I want to move on now to a few philosophical arguments I find unconvincing, followed by one that I find convincing, and then an analysis of worldviews in general.

1. "Moral Arguments"

I want to begin by sharing some resources to explore yourself. I won’t really be adding much here except some commentary of my own. Some of the content in these videos will be described in this post but if you want something more thorough, comprehensive, and philosophical then these videos will suffice. In addition, Philosophical Disquisitions has a series of posts WL Craig on Morality and Meaning (Series Index) where they provide in depth responses to some of the absurd positions apologists try and advance. I highly recommend reading that as well.

This comes as a response to the various assertions you will hear from Theists about the belief in God providing a basis for objective morality and how non-believers (presumably) have no morality, unless they admit the existence of God. It is ignorant indeed, but nevertheless here we are. Some will ask the question “Where do you ‘get’ your morality from?”, as if its something simply acquired, like receiving an object off of a shelf. Others will claim that certain moral facts are objective whether we believe in God, he just provides the metaphysical grounding. And even worse, some will simply distance themselves from you, out of the sheer panic and distrust associated with non-belief. This is not an exaggeration; non-religious people are consistently despised by religious communities according to Pew research polls, more than any other group. Theists tend to seem perplexed about non-believers who can prevents themselves from deviating from moral rules (or pester them with questions of accountability since they assume God holds themselves to account). It should be obvious that there is nothing preventing theists from deviating from their rules since we observe this deviation regularly. Their explanation however, usually reduces to “We have a sinful nature because Adam and Eve rebelled against God, and we inherited this tendency”. The flaw with this reasoning about Original Sin is obviously circular: We have an inherent rebellious nature, and this is due to our rebellion against God… but our rebellion against God cannot be the cause of our sinful nature, because for our rebellion against God to even occur we must have had a sinful nature to begin with, meaning that God must have intentionally created us this way. Combine this with the fact that Adam and Eve both had no knowledge of Good or Evil and we have a peculiar situation where someone is punished despite not knowing what the rules are. Some apologists will try and claim that Adam and Eve knew right from wrong (despite it being impossible in their state of innocence since they have not attained the knowledge prior to eating the forbidden goodies) by playing word games such as redefining what knowledge means; but this is not a post about the Bible so I will move on now. The point is that you, the non-believer, are on trial. This is significant because many people are persuaded by this family of arguments due to it's implicit scare tactic; not believing that God exists somehow implies a radical subjectivism with regards to morality. Of course, this could be a position held by someone claiming to be an Atheist, but the negation of Theism doesn't necessarily imply this outlook. In fact, there are actually dozens of metaethical accounts of objective moral realism that are entirely secular, but seem to be ignored by these moral arguments and the religious community. This is probably due to the inherently biased nature of apologetics and other dynamics related to belief preservation. If you are unfamiliar with metaethics it might be useful to survey some of the writings but my main point here is to show that Modified Divine Command Theory is truly ridiculous.

I kind of understand the concern of Theists. If I conceived of morality as a “command to be followed” and saw that someone didn’t acknowledge the existence or legitimacy of the commander, I might also assume they were a loose cannon. Suppose someone in the United States rejected the legitimacy of our constitution and existence of the nation state; I might assume that they will be unbound by the rules enforced by the institutions that I believe are justified. The unfortunate misunderstanding of the Theist is that morality can never be command based; so reasoning this way results in a false equivalence. But I am not here to expound on my own understanding of morality from a Secular perspective. If you are interested, you can read any book on secular moral philosophy to get started; but know that I entirely reject Command Based Morality theories. I also think that religious institutions severely downplay the necessity of developing skills in moral reasoning; probably because I believe that morality is inherently coupled with knowledge and our ability to discover moral truths (i.e.; moral epistemology) and the religious conception simply involves obedience to a pre-written set handed down by tradition. Our knowledge of morality is fallible and the way we come to understand morality is not dissimilar to other empirical methods from the sciences. Therefore, in my view, morality cannot just be something written on a stone and handed down from some guy who claims to have had a revelation from the God whom I don’t believe exists. It is fundamentally about ourselves and our relationship to one another, and possibly other sentient beings; it has nothing to do with a “transgression against God”. Blaspheming the holy spirit does not constitute an unforgiveable behavior. Moral violations seem to be related to goal oriented reasoning; behaviors that divert us away from our collective goals historically seem to be what we identify and label as immoral. The goals are almost universally related in some form or another to pain/suffering minimization, maintenance of tranquility, fairness, and creating environments for humans to reach their potential given their interests. And lastly, it is almost certainly an iterative/experimental process where we make mistakes but nevertheless can redirect ourselves on a path to moral progress if certain communicative preconditions are achieved such as an approximation of the Veil of Ignorance. Any moral system that does not incorporate human happiness and flourishing as a necessary condition, I take to be inherently immoral. I am not arguing that happiness is sufficient for a comprehensive view of morality, but I nonetheless cannot conceive of a “True” moral system that seeks to maximize suffering. If all humans cease to exist, then there would be no moral law. Therefore, morality cannot be objective in the timeless/space-less sense implied by the word “objective”. Moral truths are true in the sense of stop signs being true. But stop signs are social constructions! Yes, but I doubt that you would blow through a stop sign during rush hour traffic. That should give you a hint as to how something can be socially constructed but nonetheless True (in an objective, stance independent sense). Furthermore, we can imagine a scenario where there are more stop signs than needed to achieve our dual collective goal of minimizing collisions and time spent in the car on our way to our destination. So we can see just briefly, that rules are something that can be tinkered with and optimized given our goals, constraints, and knowledge about the world. To me it seems that morality is something that we discover after iterations of trial and error and depends upon collective agreement (but not exclusively). It also seems we must have the capacity to act morally, otherwise we wouldn’t hold someone accountable. Suppose some moral rule requires you to perform something physical; ask yourself if it would be immoral to not fulfill the requirement if you are physically unable to achieve the goal. Ought implies Can (or so I believe). I am not saying this is comprehensive; just some food for thought. Is it a Sin to run a stop sign? Why don’t we hold animals or toddlers accountable for the consequences of their decisions? Is morality connected with proper neurological development (it seems like someone should be capable of acting morally)? Why is it that we can always find exceptions to alleged moral universals such as Lying? Is it that moral reasoning is inherently defeasible and non-monotonic (i.e.; not deductively certain)? Isn’t it interesting that it’s almost universally understood that the reasons and motivations for someone’s action should be considered during moral evaluation? Can someone identify the “categorical” extenuating circumstances which distinguish moral-lying from immoral-lying? Isn't it also interesting how thought crimes are deemed to be incorrect moral criteria in all situations except the Biblical account? It seems strange that overcoming a negative thought is conflated with actually doing the thought. I suppose two major thinkers that would resonate with me are Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. But like I said before, I am not going to delve into this matter. I want to do something different here.

If you encounter a fundamentalist or some sort of evangelical, this will be most applicable. If they have any experience with apologetics, they will almost certainly throw the “Moral Argument” for Gods Existence at you. This really isn't an argument in my opinion, more of a scare tactic. Again, it’s assumed that the “Atheists” morality is “subjective”. In the fundamentalists view of the world, “subjective” is synonymous, actually its probably isomorphic, to “anything goes”. The argument begins by assuming that morality is objective, and reasons that God must exist otherwise morality would be subjective. This does two things; it pigeon holes you into claiming that morality is subjective (if you want to argue against the first premise), which essentially tar-and-feathers you among the believing community who equate subjectivity with being “merely arbitrary”. They might also call you a relativist (since fundamentalists seem to be unable to make necessary conceptual distinctions due to their black and white world view), which also has a handful of connotations such as “communist”, “woke”, or “unintelligent”. I chose to pick on this argument simply because it acts more like an ad-hominem then a syllogism; the pragmatic effects of the argument serve to sharpen division, hatred, and hostility towards non-believers. It should also be obvious that Arbitrariness is conceptually distinct from subjectivity. And furthermore, Arbitrariness is also conceptually distinct from Randomness. I want to make that clear because in the fundamentalists mind all of these concepts are equivalent. If i am formalizing a mathematical proof, I may choose Theta as a logical symbol to represent the average of an ensemble. This decision is entirely arbitrary. It reflects the convention in the mathematical community; which the decision was made. It is not random however, I am not going to draw a Penis to represent the average. Yes I capitalized Penis; this is whom I worship.

In it’s raw form, the argument is an inference to the best explanation. It assumes the truth of a premise, and reasons backwards that the most likely explanation for this assumption (which they almost always simply regard as a fact, without ever having established the fact with argumentation) is the existence of God. Here it is:

If morality is objective and absolute, God must exist.
Morality is objective and absolute.
Therefore, God must exist.

As alluded to above, I obviously take issue with the second premise. It is merely assumed, something my pin-headed Agnostic brain cannot accept. Even if I accepted the premise, the argument is sneaky because there can be an alternative explanation of the alleged objectivity of morality; perhaps it is written into our DNA (AHA! if something is ‘written’ then there must be a ‘writer’!). Alas, I guess I am a subjective Marxist communist. More or less all I am saying that even if P2 is true, it is a non sequitur to assert God's existence before ruling out plausible alternatives. And Of course, the objective-subjective distinction in this instance is almost as arbitrary as the notion of God; why can’t I assume an Emotivism position to the question at hand? I am going to dive much deeper into the argument in just a moment. Before I do, I just want to make a quick observation that Euthyphro’s dilemma still has not been answered satisfactorily by any religious philosophy to my knowledge. Almost every apologetic response sounds like this: “uhh derrr God is Good, derr, false dilemma derr”. Which I say: If God’s nature is “Good” then… we shift the problem…

1. we vacate the term “good” of independent meaning and it just becomes a stand-in for saying “godly”

2. consequently, there again arises a question why is godliness desirable, or why one ought to do things that are godly. This is a question of why certain end-goals are desirable in the first place. It also implies the question “Why ‘ought’ we do things that are commanded?”

Therefore we create a new dilemma:

1. God’s nature is said to be good in virtue of God having it

2. God’s nature is said to be good in virtue of some other standard

and we’ve effectively pushed the problem from God’s will to God’s nature and we’ve solved nothing, and that’s why Euthyphro’s dilemma is still mostly expressed in its original form.

If you are unfamiliar with the argument refer to this video from Jeffry Kaplan: The Greatest Dialogue Plato Ever Wrote.

So I will pretty much be summarizing the counter-arguments presented in this video “Countering the Moral Argument”. I will essentially be listing out the undercutters and defeaters here, but for a full analysis check out the video.

Objection 1:

What does God have to do with moral values? The argument seems like a valid argument, but consider this absurd argument with the same logical form:

If 2+2 = 4, then leprechauns exist
2+2 = 4
therefore leprechauns exist

The apologist will need to establish the relevance between God and morality. They do this using modified divine command theory. This is similar to what the response is to Euthyphro. “Goodness is ontologically equivalent to the nature of a loving God”. If you are familiar with the ontological argument, you will see that the moral argument reduces to:

If god does not exists, then objective [God’s nature] does not exist
Objective [God’s nature] exists (because God exists).
Therefore, God exists.

So you can see here, like the modal ontological argument, the apologists merely defines God into existence. It is a non-sequitur; morality exists because God must exist. By admitting that Goodness exists, and making God and goodness equivalent, God is defined into existence.

Objection 2:

Defining goodness is a central issue in moral philosophy. Apologists think moral values, are there own fundamental category independent of other categories of existence. Even if we accept this as true, we can still assert that Theistic religions adopted this position from Platonism, which would mean they are independent of God.

Objection 3:

Morality can be objective (according to the criteria for objectivity purported by adherents to the possibility of objective morality) without being its own metaphysical category or object. The vast majority of meta-ethical theories in moral philosophy are compatible with atheism. None of them require a God. Consider John Rawls’ social contract theory, Railton’s Reductive Naturalism, Larry Arnhart’s ‘Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature’, or the Ideal Observer Theory. Each of these are objective; there are reasons that apply equally to all moral agents. This is precisely what is described in the moral argument as necessary for objective morality.

Objection 4:

No one can show that objective moral values exist. This is precisely what I stated before; premise 2 is merely assumed. Apologists will appeal to deeply held moral intuitions as justification rather than direct proof. Consider WLC justification: “But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it. There is no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world” — WLC Does God Exist?. Notice this is just a recapitulation of what I described above; the apologist asserts the second premise as true. There is a problem with appealing to deeply held intuitions (they can conflict with other deeply held intuitions that are contradictory), but first lets summarize the argument:

Our intuitions strongly indicate that morality is objective
We should trust our intuitions enough to believe that morality is objective
Therefore morality is objective

We can construct alternative meta-ethical theories of objective morality using these same intuitions.

Objection 5:

Euthyphro Dilemma; see above. I will just reiterate the problems with Modified command theory. Stating that God == Good simply pushes the problem out one step. Philosopher Jeremy Koons points this out: “Are the properties like loving-kindness, impartiality, and generosity good because god possesses them in his nature, or does god possess them in his nature because they are good?”. Apologists respond by choosing the first horn of the dilemma; God being Good is a philosophical primitive (brute fact). The problem is that Modified Divine Command Theory says that the intentions and consequences of an action have absolutely no bearing on the goodness of that action. This conclusion is extremely counter-intuitive, and violates our deeply held moral intuitions. This precisely contradicts the justification from intuition apologists uses to support the second premise in the original argument; someone can state with equal validity that the justification for P2 is counter-intuitive.

Objection 6:

Most meta-ethical theories will reduce goodness down into a philosophical primitive that ends up being a moral brute fact. A brute fact is something that is true that has no explanation, and is not logically necessary. Erik Wielenberg has constructed a meta-ethical theory called “Non Natural Moral Realism”; the theory terminates in such a way. “Love is good” is an example of a moral brute fact, we don’t need any further explanation. Modified Divine Command Theory also terminates in a brute fact. Apologists can’t object; the arguments are symmetrical in terms of their structure. “God has a loving nature” is itself a brute fact.

Objection 7:

Moral Realist meta-ethical theories will reduce down to philosophical primitives that end up being some kind of brute fact. The moral argument implicitly relies upon a coherent and accepted definition of value; which unfortunately both sides do not agree upon. Theists assume value comes from God, which thereby they define God into existence. Without a God, there is no value. Non-believers state that value does not need a God to legitimize it. Non-believers will state that consciousness and other relevant factors differentiate us from the world of external objects, thereby making us valuable. It is a kind of argument from scarcity; we are inherently valuable because there really isn't any other type of thing in existence that can do the things we can do. We have the ability to reason, to love, be happy, express sentiment, and apply systems of value. If you see the debate below with WLC and Shelly Kagan this is illustrated. WLC will say “Well were just blobs floating around in space, what gives us value”, and Kagan refutes this idea beautifully.

Objection 8:

Modified Divine Command Theory entails an unworkable moral absolutism. MDCT holds that moral values are grounded in god’s unchanging nature. If god’s nature is inherently truthful, then we derive the moral absolute: it is always wrong to tell a lie. But as mentioned above, 5 seconds of thought and we can provide a counter example to the general rule. Suppose you are a German peasant in WW2 hiding Jews from the Nazi’s. The Nazi’s come knocking on your door asking if you are hiding Jews. Since it is absolutely wrong to lie, you ought to tell the truth and send them to their death. You can see how this counter-intuitive result doesn’t sit well with our deeply held intuition that consequences matter. You can also imagine a scenario where two moral absolutes are incompatible; we do not have a method of prioritizing one rule over another in any given situation. All are equivalent on this view; which again, is obviously absurd. Multiple moral absolutes can conflict. Some apologists respond by claiming we should apply the “Greater moral absolute” in these situations. However, this contradicts MDCT, because it entails that parts of God are greater than other parts. If god’s necessary nature is the absolute standard of goodness, how can there be any possible gradation of his nature? Is one aspect of god’s nature “more good” than other parts? What standard do we apply to determine which parts of god’s nature are the greater good? Any such standard of goodness would necessarily exist apart from god’s nature!

Objection 9:

Christianity and Modified Divine Command Theory combined leads to moral absurdities. The Christian god has commanded what we would strongly intuit as moral abominations such as genocide and slavery. Apologists try and defend this by claiming more or less that it’s good because God commanded it (he must have had a reason, its just His ways are too complicated and mysterious for us to understand). A lot of these justifications end up being reduced to some consequentialist line of reasoning (something which I think all reasoning must reduce to) in which God is bringing some greater good and whoever is on the receiving end must deserve it. For example, WLC defends genocide of the Canaanites by saying “It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God” — Reasonable Faith Website. This is obviously bullshit. You can see more in this video “God’s Hypocrisy: The Case Against Objective Morality”. This guy runs through biblical examples showing that God’s morality is very far from objective. For a more scathing view of religious morality, see God's Hypocrisy: The Case Against Objective Morality.

Objection 10:

MDCT is self defeating on moral obligations. These are behaviors we “ought” to do. MDCT claims that our moral obligations and prohibitions are directly constituted by a loving god’s commands. But this is self defeating, if our moral obligations are constituted by god’s commands, where does our moral obligation to follow god’s commands come from? Take for instance the command “Thou shalt not steal”; why ought I follow this? Does god issue a command to follow his commands? What about the obligation to follow that command? Typically a response to this will entail some sort of circularity or appeal to punishment. So it reduces to “you ought follow this command or else some punishment is warranted”; in other words, it is good because I say so and you better not question me. Some other apologists (WLC) might claim that you ought to follow the command because it is coming from a credible authority (god). In other words, they are deriving an ought from an is (you ought do Z because X who commanded Z is a Y), which is a violation of the is/ought distinction. This is not inherently a problem. It becomes a problem when we admit usage of this reasoning in certain circumstances (special pleading for MDCT) and reject its usage in other theories that do not appeal to a god. Atheists can define moral obligation in this exact way. I could equally state that one ought not harm a sentient creature because concious creatures are capable of suffering. Someone will respond and say you cannot derive an ought form an is. Great, but lets apply this fallacy consistently. The main point is that “god commanded me to” leads to an infinite regress. “What obligation do I have to follow god’s commands?” and if the answer is “What obligation do I have to follow that command”, this leads ad infinitum to the same reason “God commanded it”.

Objection 11:

Under MDCT, God has no moral obligations or duties. This violates our moral intuitions, and hence should serve (under the Theists criteria) as evidence in favor of the negation of the hypothesis. Consider a quote from Tracie Harris: “You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, ‘When you’re done, I’m going to punish you.’ If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God”; if we think about this quote it should be obvious, we all have a deeply held moral intuition that it would be immoral to watch an event from occurring if it is preventable. This leads to obvious moral absurdities. All of the Old Testament atrocities are justified according to apologists. Consider this quote from WLC: “ According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses”. But again, this is a counter-intuitive proposition. Intuitively, we all think that rules should be applied equally to everyone, even the people enforcing or implementing the rule. There should not be exceptions for rules that are meant to be universally applicable to all citizens of a country for example. But this just shows that Theists want to have their cake and eat it too: Morality is objective, but god does not have to follow it (in other words, it is not objective). And since “god is Good”, this means that somehow, all of the atrocious behavior we read in the Old Testament was actually good; we are just too stupid to understand it.

Before finishing up, I highly recommend this debate between Shelly Kagan and WLC: Is God Necessary for Morality? It shows in real time, the sheer absurdity of MDCT. If you don't want to watch the whole thing, this video sums it up nicely. In short, I began to notice this after observing religious communities, the negation of theism does not imply nihilism. In fact, I think it is precisely the opposite; you have to be a nihilist in order to find religion convincing.

2. “Ontological Arguments” and Their Relation to Other Bad Argument Strategies such as "Presuppositionalism" and "Reformed Epistemology"

Ontological arguments attempt to “prove” the existence of god purely from reason alone, without reference to the external world of sensory experience. They do this by taking an axiomatic approach, arguing for existence based purely on the concept of god. These arguments are considered to be “good arguments” but all of them share peculiarities that render them tautological and question begging. These arguments seem to be favored by the branch of apologetics that merely presume the existence of god based on Plantinga’s “reformed epistemology”; evidence is unnecessary for demonstrating existence and a believer is rationally justified based on their “inner feelings” alone. For a brief reminder of the apologists sheer lack of intellectual rigor and dismissal of evidence based reasoning, take a look at this video about the Holy Spirit; the subsequent discussion of ontological arguments will make sense as to why believers find it convincing.

These arguments have a long history dating back to St. Anselm where he first devised the first ontological argument:

It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
God exists as an idea in the mind.
A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
Therefore, God exists.

Before evaluating an argument we must first discuss some of the evaluation criteria that people use to determine whether an argument is worth consideration. Any argument attempts to infer a conclusion based on a chain of reasoning (in this case the existence of a god). The components of this chain are premises, propositions that can be in principle shown to be true or false. This sequence of propositions connected together forms a structure that can be evaluated. Structural soundness is called Validity in basic logic; if the premises are true then their truth implies the truth of the conclusion based on the logical form used in the argument. Notice that validity says nothing about whether the premises contained in the argument are actually true; it only pertains to the structure of the argument itself, guaranteeing there are no logical contradictions for example. An argument is Sound when the structure is logically valid and the premises are true; the conclusion is monotonically entailed by the premises. These evaluation criteria derive from Classical Logic (Predicate and Propositional Calculus). Logical systems are interesting in that everything contained in the axioms is contained in their entailments. Logical systems depend heavily on the selection of these axioms and definition of basic terms. Lets take a look at an argument that is logically sound but semantically vacuous.

P1. All Quips are Quacks
P2. X is a Quip
C. Therefore X is a Quack

Notice that this is logically valid but we cannot assess whether it is sound because we have no idea what the terms contained in the argument refer to. Validity is therefore an extremely basic bar to meet for an argument; if the premises don’t lead to a contradiction then it passes this check. This can be restructured into conditional form:

P1. If X is a Quip, then X is a Quack
P2. X is a Quip
C. Therefore X is a Quack

I can construct a logically invalid argument to demonstrate structural deficiency.

P1. If X is a Quip, then X is a Quack
P2. X is a Quack
C. Therefore X is a Quip

It should be obvious that this is a case of affirming the consequent, a type of Formal Fallacy that implies a structural deficiency. Here is an example that will make more sense based on terms we are familiar with:

P1.If someone lives in San Diego, then they live in California.
P2. Joe lives in California.
C. Therefore, Joe lives in San Diego.

Visually we can understand why this doesn’t make sense based on the logic of sets.

Obviously there are more places to live in California than San Diego. The fact that you exist in the set of agents living in California does not imply that you live in any particular subset. Likewise, because you belong to the larger set of people who are Quacks does not mean you are a Quip. Here are a few basic formal fallacies to watch out for.

Like I mentioned before, most arguments pass the validity criterion. This is true of Ontological arguments as well. The problem derives from their soundness. In particular, every instance or variation of the Ontological argument is simply an example of Begging the Question based on dubious premises that merely assume the conclusion they are trying to prove. What you have to pay attention to is the propositional content of the premises contained in the argument. What are some critical questions for assessing the soundness of an argument? You can ask something like these:

How are the terms defined in the premises? (Hint, this is the main problem for Ontological Arguments) Do they suffer from any Fallacy of Definition? (Persuasive Definitions)
Have the premises been demonstrated? Or are they probabilistic, plausible, or based on common sense? Are they Ambiguously worded or inconsistent with the baseline definitions?
Are the senses of the words disambiguated or is your interlocutor equivocating?
What are the assumptions, or basic axioms, supporting the argument? Do you agree with them? Are they self-referential? (Hint, Ontological arguments do this)
Do the premises require evidence? Are they deduced from other arguments? Are they merely proved by assertion?
Have the premises met the burden of proof?
Do they suffer from any fallacies?

Typically the interlocutor will have to justify the truth of their premises and show there aren’t any obvious problems based on some of the questions listed above. Showing an argument is sound is very much related to persuasion.

Okay now that there are some preliminaries covered lets discuss the basic ontological argument.

Lets summarize the argument. God is that which is the greatest conceivable Being. In other words, Anselm is defining what it means to be God. A concept existing only in the mind (under the assumption that greatness entails existence in the real world) is inferior to thing actually existing. Therefore, if God is the greatest conceivable thing, it must also exist in the real world (by the definition of greatest Being). Nothing can be greater then the greatest thing, otherwise that thing would be the greatest thing. Therefore, a greatest thing exists in the real world, and that thing is God.

There is nothing logically invalid about this argument, but it seems to be problematic. Immanuel Kant noticed a problem with the “existence” premise, the assumption that greatness entails actual existence. According to his division of premises into Analytical (that which can be known independent of experience) and Synthetic (that which can only be known through experience), statements of existence are synthetic and therefore cannot be known a-priori, only a-posteriori. More specifically, a synthetic proposition is one whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept, while analytic propositions are those whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept. So for example, stating a bachelor is unmarried is a vacuous tautology because it is simply implied by the definition of Bachelor. If I say some specific person X is a bachelor, the fact of there non-marriage is implied automatically. If I wanted to state that all Bachelors are bald, this would be a synthetic statement relying on sense experience and verification. For more on the analytic/synthetic distinction see this post in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kant noticed that the Ontological argument confuses the fact that “existence” can only be known a-posteriori because “existence” is cannot be an property of a subject.

Kant goes on to write, “‘being’ is evidently not a real predicate”[63] and cannot be part of the concept of something. He proposes that existence is not a predicate, or quality. This is because existence does not add to the essence of a being, but merely indicates its occurrence in reality. He states that by taking the subject of God with all its predicates and then asserting that God exists, “I add no new predicate to the conception of God”. He argues that the ontological argument works only if existence is a predicate; if this is not so, he claims the ontological argument is invalidated, as it is then conceivable a completely perfect being doesn’t exist.[23]

See this discussion for an example of Kant’s reasoning, I will paraphrase below:

It means that “to exist”, while a verb grammatically, is not some action or quality or feature something has, that you can add to describe a subject. It isn’t like other verbs or verb phrases.

For example:

1. The boat is big

2. The boat is buoyant

3. The boat is existing

Is the third one like the first two? Kant says no.

There is a long tradition in making a distinction between what something is (its essence) and that it is (its existence). Kant is falling in this line of thought, but with some nuance and a twist.

When we predicate something of an individual, we are describing either what it is (say, substance) or some attribute it has (its quantity, position, action, etc.). When I say ‘the boat is buoyant’, I am saying it has a quality of floating in water despite its weight. Predicates describe the way something is.

Kant is emphasizing that existence is not a predicate. It isn’t something we can describe objects by. It isn’t what something is, and it isn’t what something has. Existence is special.

Kant made this point in response to an argument that is traditionally understood to claim that since God is the most perfect being, it would follow that God has existence as an attribute. God must have that attribute (existing), if he is the best and most perfect being. God’s infinite power and infinite knowledge logically follow by definition of who God is; but the argument also says that existence follows logically too (“the predicate [existence] is contained in the subject”).

Kant says that is a mistake in reasoning.

When we describe things, no subject has existence as a necessary feature just because that is what it is. By contrast, trees have trunks, boats are buoyant, red pandas are cute; all of these attributes or qualities or possessions are understood as belonging to the subject (tree, boat, red panda) as soon as you know what the thing is. These predicates are contained in the subject. But is there anything that has existence contained in the definition of what something is? Nope, because existence isn’t the kind of thing you can put into a definition of anything.

So in other words, you cannot define existence as part of an entities essence. This makes sense honestly from a common-sense point of view, if it were acceptable then I could literally define anything into existence, however absurd my conceptualization of the thing. Every single ontological argument falls to this shortcoming, at some point in the argument they will define God as that which exists. But existence cannot be part of an individuals definition as shown by Frege and Russell. As I mentioned before, defining God as that which exists (based on this idea of “greatness” implying existence) merely begs the question. The argument can be reduced to the following:

P1. God Exists
C. Therefore, God Exists

There is a reason why this sort of apologetic argument strongly clusters with presuppositionalist approaches and “reformed epistemology”; they all merely assume and assert the existence of God. Many counter-arguments leverage the arbitrariness of defining God into existence by constructing Reductio ad Absurdum arguments that prove the existence of entities we would find completely absurd. Some arguments even define non-existence as a property, proving the non-existence of God.

Some apologists counter by stating the analytic/synthetic distinction is a false dichotomy. This is obviously absurd, because analytic and synthetic propositions still exist; rejection of the distinction merely entails there are more than two categories a proposition can fall into. Whether or not the criticism of Kant’s distinction is strong, it is irrelevant because mathematical logic shows existence cannot be part of a things essence (as shown in this stack exchange post). Existence is a quantifier acting on a predicate, therefore existence itself cannot be a predicate.

Kant’s proof, that existence is inherently accidental, is roughly as follows: Suppose that the existence of some A enlarges A. In that case, A and (A + existence) were different concepts. And then the proposition “A exists” would be necessarily false. Because if A exists, then it is actually (A + existence) which exists, and (A + existence) is, we assumed, different from A.

With all of this in mind, lets move on to the “Modal Ontological Argument”. The structure of the argument will be very similar with the exception that this formulation utilizes something called “Modal Logic” and “Possible Worlds”. Modal Logic is concerned with Modalities; statements of necessity and possibility. First-Order logic is concerned with entailment relations such as sufficiency, while modal logics (plural because there are multiple axiomatic formalizations of these systems) are concerned with valid inference of propositions containing the concept “possible” and “necessary”. A Possible World is a philosophical Heuristic used to enumerate (or conceptualize) all of the ways our world “could have been”; there is a possible world in which I have purple hair, there is a possible world in which the Nazi’s won the war etc. There are philosophers like David Lewis who hold Modal Realism positions, positing that possible worlds are “real” in some sense; most of the time, and in this argument, the concept is used as a heuristic. Modal ontological arguments are used to fool the untrained thinker into saying “well I guess it’s possible God could exists”, which implies (according to the axioms of S5) the existence of an actual God. Lets see the argument:

It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
Therefore, a maximally great being exists

So the argument is tricky if you don’t ask any critical questions about definitions of terms. In this formulation “Maximally Great” is defined as an entity whose existence is necessary. In other words, we define God into existence just how Anselm did implicitly. However, I think this argument is even more horrible because “necessary existence” is itself a contradiction. See this video for further explanation.

What does it mean for something to be “necessary” anyway? The argument depends heavily on this notion of necessity because by the axioms of S5, if something that is necessary is possible, this reduces to saying it exists in all possible worlds and is necessary in all possible worlds. In other words, when someone concedes that it is “possible that God exists” but they overlook the implicit definition of God as a necessary being, then they admit that it is possible that something necessary exists, which entails the thing exists in all possible worlds (and therefore this world). But to say that “God’s Existence is Necessary” is to imply that the statement “God Does not Exist” is a contradiction. According to the definitions of necessity, to say something is necessary is to say that the negation of the proposition implies an impossibility. So for example, 2+2 = 4 necessarily true because it is impossible for this expression to sum to something other than 4; it is necessarily true based on the axioms of algebra. Can the proponents of the argument seriously claim that the statement “God Does Not Exist” entails a contradiction akin to the expression 2+2=5? You can argue this if you want, but it is patently absurd. So not only does this argument inherit the problems identified by Kant; it contains numerous additional problems including this concept of “necessary existence”. In addition, the notion of “maximal greatness” is inherently non-sensical, so I wouldn’t even grant the possibility of a “Being” that somehow contains these contradictory attributes (See the Argument from Incompatible Attributes). But other then the fact that God again is simply defined into existence, the argument is valid, but Begs the Question. I think someone can be confused into thinking this argument has merit because of a misunderstanding of what validity means. Logical validity alone cannot tell you anything about the external objective world, it can only tell you whether you formulated your argument correctly. Logic is to argumentation what grammar is to natural language; an invalid argument is similar to an ungrammatical sentence, it is not formed in accordance with the syntactic requirements of that language. When your sentence is grammatically correct, it does not follow that it is semantically meaningful. Similarly with logic, a valid argument says nothing about the content contained in the structure. Logical validity guarentees the structural integrity of your argument; but the person presenting the argument can use manipulative definitions that obfuscate the meaning of the propositions contianed in the argument. The modal ontological argument follows this tradition with every other ontological argument; by defining God as something that exists necessarily, we define God into existence, resulting in circular reasoning, the conclusion is simply a restatement of the premises. We can reduce the modal ontological argument down to the following:

P1. God Exists Necessarily
C. Therefore God Exists

Whether I accept the argument, it still suffers from the Symmetry Problem. The idea of Symmetry in philosophical argumentation is that the structure of an argument can be used to support an identical argument, with the negated conclusion. What happens if we ask if its possible God does not exist?

P(1) It is possible that God does not exist, i.e. there is some possible world where God does not exist.
P(2) God is defined as a necessary being, i.e. exists in all possible worlds.
P(3) If there is one possible world where God does not exist, then there is no possible world in which God exists in all possible worlds.
P(4) If there is no possible world in which God exists in all possible worlds, then it is impossible that God exists.
C(1) It is impossible that God exists.

We can also arbitrarily define into existence any sort of entity we desire. Consider the following:

P(1)’: Let us define a unicorn as an equine necessarily existent being with one horn.
P(2)’: It is possible that a necessarily existent unicorn exists.
P(3)’: If it is possible that a necessarily existing unicorn exists, then a necessarily existing unicorn exists in some possible worlds.
P(4)’: If a necessarily existing unicorn exists in some possible worlds, then a necessarily existing unicorn exists in all possible worlds.
P(5)’: If a necessarily existing unicorn exists in all possible worlds, then a necessarily existing unicorn exists in the actual world.
P(6)’: If a necessarily existing unicorn exists in the actual world, then a necessarily existing unicorn exists.
C(1)’: Therefore, a necessarily existing unicorn exists.

How about we use it to prove the existence of alternative belief systems such as Pantheism?

P1. A being that contains all the parts of another plus one extra part is the greater being.
P2. There cannot exist any part that is not a part of the greatest possible being.
P3. Therefore, the greatest possible being encompasses the entire universe — hence Pantheism.
P4. If 1. is false, there is no reason to believe that the greatest possible being encompasses anything — the greatest possible being is indistinguishable from nothing.
P5. If 1. is false and 4. is false because the greatest possible being is the one that encompasses all intrinsically positive things and no intrinsically negative things, then “a being that exists is greater than one that does not” is not true unless existence is intrinsically good.

A successful argument should be able to unambiguously point to a conclusion, without circularity, symmetric defeaters, or questionable premises. The modal ontological argument fails on all of these. The process itself is fundamentally flawed. See this video for the Anti-Modal Ontological Argument:

Like I mentioned before there are many variations of this argument. Kurt Gödel presented a version of the argument, which like the other versions, is valid but dubious. I don’t want to dive into this one. If interested, feel free to watch this very thorough description (Gödel's Proof of God - In Depth) and see it suffers the same problems as its historical predecessors.

At the beginning of this article I expressed my concern that ontological arguments should be clustered among related intellectually bankrupt debauchery such as Reformed Epistemology. If you think belief in God is basic, then you can merely assume God’s existence, acting as if this belief is a First Principle, axiom, or brute fact. In contrast, I can simply assume the inverse/negation and **alas** we are at a dialogical stand-still. All of these arguments reduce to “I know God exists, I do not need to prove it, everyone else is wrong, you are dumb for disagreeing with me”. If you think these people are actually interested in advancing our understanding of reality, you are mistaken; they simply want to assert their dogma, label it “basic” based on some bogus line of reasoning, and play word games under the guise of “rigorous inquiry” when really they already have their minds concluded. The absurdity is unreal; God is a statement about external reality and thus cannot be axiomatic. For a good discussion on proper ways of constructing a-priori formal systems and ontological arguments, see these videos below.

Philosophy Engineered: Responding to Objections, Axioms
Philosophy Engineered: Language of Logic
Philosophy Engineered: What is Truth?
Philosophy Engineered: Everything Wrong with the Modal Ontological Argument
Majesty of Reason: Ontological Arguments from Anselm to Gödel
Majesty of Reason: A User's Guide to the Modal Ontological Argument
Majesty of Reason: Graham Oppy responds to Josh Rasmussen's Ontological Argument
Debunking the Modal Ontological Argument 6 Ways from Sunday
Existence is Not a Predicate by Immanuel Kant
Parodies of Ontological Arguments
The Modal Ontological Argument
The reverse ontological argument: James Henry Collin
Ontological Argument
Betting on Necessity: The Modal Ontological Argument, Theoretical Bullshit

Very closely related to the ontological style of argumentation is this notion of "Presuppositional Apologetics". If you are unfamiliar with this branch, then lucky you. It truly is like talking to a wall. I think these modal ontological arguments are simply a more sophisticated version of the tactics these apologists employ. I lump these two together because there really isn’t much of a distinction to be made in practice. Both methods attempt to insulate religious belief from scrutiny, justification, and critical inquiry. These ideologies manifest in expressions such as “you can’t even comprehend this sentence without God” or “I know it to be true independent of any evidence or reason”; the sort of conversation stoppers that make it explicitly clear that your interlocutor has no interest in revising their beliefs in light of evidence or refutations. Below is the worlds leading apologist explaining his “self authentication” independent of evidence and argumentation (yet engages in debates under the false pretense of belief revision). Notice he says “witness of the Holy Spirit”, we will touch on this “inner feeling” later. He also mentions belief shouldn’t be dependent on the “shifting sands” of evidence, but this is exactly what is needed for inquiry to be rational.

Lets start with belief: it is typically conceived to be a propositional attitude held by an agent with respect to the truth value of that proposition. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge and rationality of belief. Some beliefs cannot be rationally defended on the basis that their content is assumed by the very act of reasoning. These kinds of beliefs are said to be basic; they do not depend on justification from other beliefs, they operate as the fundamentals making rationality possible. A closely related concept is the First Principle; a proposition that cannot be deduced, it is axiomatic. Consider the axioms of algebra or set theory ; basic definitions also fit within this category such as the definition of a line. We can build up logical systems of truth based on these starting points. There are a couple of basic beliefs guiding rationality itself that cannot be proven rationally; our cognitive faculties are sometimes accurate and we have access to an external reality. There are different epistemological theories that provide explanations of justified belief, one under discussion being “Reformed Epistemology” suggested by a Theistic Philosopher of Religion Alvin Plantinga, which directly attempts to criticize classical foundationalism. The idea behind foundationalism is quite simple really; justification for a proposition can result in an infinite regress so there must be “basic beliefs” that are self-evident not requiring justification from auxiliary beliefs. What Plantinga attempts to do is argue that foundationalism is self-referentially incoherent and that other beliefs not contained in the set of beliefs considered basic according to foundationalists should be inserted (hint hint; God can be considered axiomatic). Similar to how we do not need to justify memories or other non-provable things we experience, Plantinga suggests that we literally have a “sixth sense” called the Sensus divinitatis which serves as “a self evident experience of God which confirms ‘His’ existence” and that no amount of evidence or reason to the contrary can disconfirm this experience. In other words, “I felt God and you can’t tell me otherwise, that's how I know he exists” (you can see WLC doing this in the videos above). Reformed Epistemology is simply an Argument from Divine Sense because (as you will see later) this divine sense cannot account for contradictory religious experiences among competing religions; Plantinga simply dismisses them on grounds “they are not properly basic, they are non-credible”. I’ve got to admit, this is a wonderful moment; Theists are beginning to recognize that they have to resort to ‘its true for me’ in order to validate their beliefs. Plantinga simply dismisses all other religious experience on grounds they are not “properly” basic (ie; because there are defeaters undermining the credibility of their proper basicness) while ignoring the plethora of defeaters for his own position, isolating himself from belief revision. This is what we have in academia ladies and gentlemen. It should be obvious that belief in the existence of a God cannot be properly basic because the very notion of Theism presupposes assumptions that must be considered before forming the concept. Here is a brief video series introducing the concept with a video dedicated to criticisms at the end:

Is Believing in God Basic? pt.1 Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology: Prof. Matt McCormick
Is Belief in God Basic? pt. 2 Plantinga's Critique of Foundationalism: Prof. Matt McCormick
Objections to Taking God as Basic, Reformed Epistemology pt. 3: Prof. Matt McCormick
Countering Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology & Randal Rauser's Apologetic

What is a presupposition? Similar to a basic belief, a presupposition is an assumption taken for granted used to assist with communication. There are many different types of presuppositions considered within linguistics including conversational, conventional, and pragmatic; all of which are indispensable for any communication to even take place within a linguistic community. An example on Wikipedia: “Have you talked to Hans?” (presupposition is that Hans exists). The crucial point is that a presupposition is a background belief related to a specific utterance that must hold for communication to be meaningful between interlocutors. Similar to the notion of a defeater, presuppositions can be overridden if on inspection are demonstrated to be false. Similar to the notion of basic belief, there are certain presuppositions that seem to be necessary for thought to even take place. You can guess what the “presuppositional apologist” takes to be a presupposition. Like the basic belief, these proponents do not see God as “something to prove”; in fact most arguments for God end up being tautological (as mentioned earlier, they merely assume the concept of God in the premises). Since the “God concept” is a prerequisite to all thought, arguing for its existence is pointless; everything makes sense according to the inerrant revelation contained in the bible. Furthermore, anyone who denies or questions the existence of God is lying. Below is a playlist describing and rebutting this approach in detail. This video nicely summarizes the debate tactics of Sye Ten Bruggencate (one of the biggest practitioners of the approach). If you don’t want to watch a playlist or long video, check out two quick videos below that show the absurdity with this approach to apologetics. Belief in God cannot be properly basic or a presupposition, John Searle describes why very briefly at 7:30. But how do advocates of either position defend against criticisms? Anyone who disagrees with their position is doing so because of Sin. Amazing isn't it.

Before I move on to an argument that I find intuitive, a brief comment on philosophical arguments for the existence of God in general. I find most arguments, Theist and Atheist, very silly. The entire enterprise seems like an utter waste of university resources, but they still impact people nonetheless, even if the impact is always ad-hoc. My Agnosticism does not entail finding "half of the arguments convincing and the other half convincing". It is not a balancing act. My stance is that in principle we cannot gain any knowledge of the subject through argumentation because the subject is characterized by radical ambiguity with conditions of Knightian uncertainty. This is something I touched on in my last blog post. I don't think people come to believe the proposition "God Exists" through critical deliberation of all possible alternatives; something I've illustrated above with reference to leading apologists. There is a philosophy of religion blog called Ex-Apologist that has compiled 200 (or so) Arguments for Atheism. I do not tend towards non-theism because I've thoroughly analyzed these arguments and have come to a conclusion. I am very familiar with the literature in philosophy of religion, but nothing is really compelling; in the sense of someone being compelled towards a specific proposition because they found incontrovertible evidence for the guilt of a crime for example. Nothing can move a person more than empirical evidence. Since there is none for God, because by definition he leaves no trace of discernable evidence, I am not moved towards theism. As I mentioned in the first blog post, Agnosticism to me seems somewhat of an attitude or predisposition to inquire a certain way. The argument I find convincing comes from a philosopher who seems to characterize the patterns I would call Agnostic; this probably explains why the argument is so intuitive to me.

3. Argument from Divine Hiddenness

I typically do not find arguments for the existence or non-existence of God compelling in either direction. Many of them are simply equivocal; we have no clear definition of what the referent means in the statements “God Exists” or “God does not exist”. This means I tend to be Ignostic (also referred to Theological noncogntivism) when it comes to “God”; people arbitrarily come up with incompatible features and attribute them to this “being”, they assume this “being” has a psychology similar to ours, attributing motivation and intentionality to its “actions”, and they all seem to have their own definition of “God” conditional on the time and place in which a dialogue takes place. An Ignostic sees “God Talk” as something very incoherent; I simply cannot conceive of what they are talking about most of the time. When a somewhat coherent definition of God is provided, I become an Agnostic because whatever “being” is contained in the concept, it usually follows that in principle the “existence” is non-demonstrable by any acceptable method of inquiry. The believer merely assumes its existence in every argument (something I have major critiques of).

The act of thinking about “Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing” or “How it’s possible I am even able to think about the question” are by no means trivial; but “God Talk” trivializes all of the nuance that can be had in such a discussion, in many cases due to the misapplication of Occam's Razor. The leap from curiosity of our place in the cosmos to “Admit your sins so God can save you from God because there are 3 components of God who are all 1 God, and eat this cracker and juice while your reciting some words of a guy who claimed to had a vision of God” has always been an unfathomable non-sequitur for me. In addition, people keep telling me of their amazing experience of God through prayer, worship, and church but I've lived for almost thirty years, literally go to church, and have never experienced anything remotely similar to what these people are talking about. There are many explanations for their alleged experience, but in principle I find none of these compelling on grounds that my non-experience is equally valid and there is no validation mechanism for guaranteeing the veracity of their alleged experiences. For further analysis of experiential arguments see the video 10 Experiential Arguments for God: An Analysis; this is not going to be the main topic of this post (although it is definitely adjacent).

As mentioned above, most arguments are simply nonsense; what is worse is that apologists of all Abrahamic religions use them to bolster their inconsistent revelations. I like the argument from Divine Hiddenness because it argues from a commonly held conception of one of Gods attributes to the non-existence of God. The idea is simple; God is assumed to be all-loving. If you have this attribute, then you would seek to have a relationship with your subjects. There are some people who truly seek to know whether God exists, but have had no shred of evidence or reasonable experience pointing them to Gods existence. Therefore, the most likely explanation of this absence is that God does not exist. The formal argument is listed below:

(1)There are people who are capable of relating personally to God but who, through no fault of their own, fail to believe.
(2)If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there are no such people.
(3)So, there is no such God (from 1 and 2).

For the defense of premise (2), Schellenberg’s reasoning provides the following sub-argument:

(2a)If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then there is a personal God who is unsurpassably loving.
(2b)If there is a personal God who is unsurpassably loving, then for any human person H and any time t, if H is at t capable of relating personally to God, H has it within H’s power at t to do so (i.e., will do so, just by choosing), unless H is culpably in a contrary position at t.
(2c)For any human person H and any time t, H has it within H’s power at t to relate personally to God only if H at t believes that God exists.
(2d)So, if there is a personal God who is unsurpassably great, then for any human person H and any time t, if H is at t capable of relating personally to God, H at t believes that God exists, unless H is culpably in a contrary position at t (from 2a through 2c).

(2d) is tantamount to premise (2) of the main argument.

(4)Necessarily, if God exists, then God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be.
(5)Necessarily, if God perfectly loves such finite persons as there may be, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t.
(6)Necessarily, if for any capable finite person S and time t, God is at t open to being in a positively meaningful and reciprocal conscious relationship with S at t, then, for any capable finite person S and time t, it is not the case that S is at t non-resistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
(7)There is at least one capable finite person S and time t such that S is or was at t non-resistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.
(8)So, it is not the case that God exists. (from 4 through 7)

What also follows from this are the empirical facts about belief prior to monotheism emerging as dominant. Humans existed for thousands of years believing in all sorts of Gods, why would God not make his presence more obvious until very recently? How about the geographic distribution of theistic and atheistic belief? There is a version of this argument building off the notion of hiddenness and inconsistency between religions cross culturally. The idea is simple; there is statistical predictability with regards to what supernatural beliefs you’re likely to be brought up in. A naturalistic description is the most plausible explanation of such a distribution

Other countries and geographic regions display an uneven distribution of belief and nonbelief, even though it is not as stark as it is in Thailand and Saudi Arabia (Pew 2012). According to Maitzen, even if we grant, just for the sake of argument, the success of some of the theistically friendly explanations of nonbelief in individuals, none of them explain the “geographic patchiness” of nonbelief. That’s because those explanations invoke motivations, attitudes, and dispositions that “do not cluster by country or culture so as to show up twenty times more often in Thailand than in Saudi Arabia” (Maitzen 2006: 184). After all, it’s not as though the Thai are twenty times more likely than the Saudis to be resistant to belief in God’s existence, or in need of prompting to recognize the wretchedness of life without God, or in need of the sort of risk that’s required of a passionate faith in God; it’s not as though the Thai are twenty times more likely than the Saudis, upon coming to believe in God’s existence, to be coerced into love, trust, and obedience, or disposed to act out of improper motives like fear of punishment, or be presumptuous in their relationship with God, and so on (2006: 180–185). Indeed, even if we grant, just for the sake of argument again, that there is great value in a diversity of belief and nonbelief in God’s existence,

why doesn’t this valuable diversity flourish within the cultures of Saudi Arabia and Thailand? Naturalistic explanations, including cultural and political explanations offered by social science, have an easier time of it, compared to theistic explanations since, on naturalism,

the patchiness of theistic belief has everything to do with the notoriously haphazard play of human culture and politics and nothing to do with God: the messy, uneven data have messy, uneven causes. (2006: 183)

Moreover, it seems implausible that God would be selective in the way God related to different people groups, as though God took considerably more pains to make sure that those in the Middle East, rather than Thailand or China or India, came to belief. One would antecedently expect that God would have the motivation and wherewithal to treat all people equally on this score, which is hard to square with God’s love and justice. So it is that the demographics of nonbelief are better explained naturalistically than theistically, and so those demographics constitute evidence for atheism (cf. Zagzebski 1994).

The responses to both versions of hiddenness are abysmal; they reduce to a Molinist notion of predestination and the ad-hominem “you were never a true non-resistant believer”.

Notice that this obviously does not prove all conceptions of God are wrong; it simply shows that, given a commonly held attribute of one particular conception of God, its existence is unlikely given what we experience. I like this approach because its very simple, it doesn’t have a pretentious/pseudo-intellectual feel like I see in “fine tuning” or “first cause” arguments; it relies on our common understanding and shows that, given the conception, a naturalistic explanation is more likely given the facts of non-belief and inconsistent revelations. I think that an argument like this would not be as convincing if formulated during the middle ages or some other dogmatic time period where we were firmly convinced disbelief was caused by satanic forces (as seen in St. Thomas Aquinas justification for the inquisition and other hegemonic ideologies such as manifest destiny). The response of Satanism would be unambiguously simple and convincing, given the lack of cultural fusion, religious pluralism, and free speech characterized by post-enlightenment industrial societies. “The Devil”, “resistance to the truth” or other tribal, dehumanizing, or ad-hominem explanations simply cannot hold for countries like Thailand, Iceland, China, South Korea, Germany, and Uruguay who are much less likely to be Theistic; given a growing understanding of social scientific mechanisms of belief, the increased contact between cultures during the age of globalization, and comparative religious studies. John Schellenberg actually has a five part discussion of his argument on YouTube, here is a link to the first video.

If you want to see how apologists try to refute this argument you can take a look at Divine Hiddenness: Mike Winger's Desperate Dance Around God's Disappearance. There are more objections listed here, I think you can anticipate what sort of responses an argument like this will generate.

Closely related is this argument from non-belief. It is similar in that it shows the inconsistency between the existence of god and a world in which people fail to recognize him. There are two discussions I enjoyed watching, involving an ex-apologist who claims this to be one of the main drivers to his disbelief. Both this and divine hiddenness don't even need to be formalized arguments; the premises are just incredibly intuitive.

Conclusion: Evaluating Worldviews

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism etc. are not propositions that can be demonstrated as true of false. This should be obvious; they are complex traditions of stories, narratives, customs, and rituals that persist over space and time. Some of the content within these domains is propositional, but to express the statement “X is True” (fill in any religion for X) is non-sensical; parts of the composite can be demonstrably false but how does this transfer to the whole? Identifying and refuting the truth-value of the dogma central to any religion misses the point; you can show the Trinity to be incoherent and non-Trinitarians emerge, you can show the incoherence of Hell and Universalists emerge. Belief lingers on because these dogmas are hubs within a network of intertwined beliefs; weakening the hub does not destroy the entire network, new connections can emerge after a process of reconciliation. We need to understand this reconciliation process; in other words, we need to think about the conceptual apparatuses and forces that cause a reformation of a new belief network after dogmas become weakened. Networks have a tendency to reconstruct themselves, but there are specific mechanisms by which certain belief networks (world views) come to reorganize and persist. We need to think about the process that generates the structure and how this process can create structurally similar manifestations of the belief network (what we call “world-view”). If you understand this process, you can understand why these patterns seem to persist. The term “World-view” denotes a cluster of structurally similar belief networks that are generated by similar underlying processes; I think we need to evaluate the mental models and cognitive processes that give rise to these belief networks in the first place.

Above was a rather verbose way of saying the obvious: people do not “accept” belief networks on rational grounds and their reasons provided when questioned are motivated rationalizations. I honestly doubt whether anyone came to believe in God by means of rational argumentation. Take the assumption of Biblical Inerrancy as an example; Christians will simply assume that the Bible is void of all possible error. They approach the Bible already believing in God and dedicate themselves to the position that the Bible must be true. Their belief in the existence of God was already instantiated prior to reading the Bible; they come to the Bible already a believer, and belief in God and biblical inerrancy mutually reinforce one another to strengthen the belief network. What I am saying is that we need to understand the arrow of causality and the self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms that strengthen the connections within the network. I think analyzing these arguments could be useful (in a limited way) for understanding the processes that reinforce and recreate the belief network. For example, take the Fine Tuning argument. This is apparently one of the best arguments for the existence of God, and yet I am completely unmoved by it. The question becomes, why is it convincing for some people and not others? Many arguments for God presuppose the existence of God (just like the presupposition of biblical inerrancy) and this argument is no exception; the very phrase “fine tuned” implies an agent to “do the fine tuning” (it presupposes agency). If you have a belief in the supernatural, then this argument becomes more meaningful despite it being fundamentally flawed. Watch this video to see how easy it is to defeat the argument: The Fine Tuning Argument debunked by a Jar of Beans.

It is very simple; we do not understand the data generating process that generated the observed constants, and a-priori reasoning about probabilities independent of knowledge of the data generating process is fundamentally problematic. We don’t know how life originates, therefore we cannot assign a probability to the occurrence of life since we don’t have access to a sample. Even if it was fine tuned, the act of fine tuning is fundamentally improbable, because fine tuning would have only happened once. Does this stop believers from being convinced and persuaded by the argument? No! This reveals something very deep about the cognitive processes that bias our preference in favor of certain persuasive arguments. The fine tuning argument is fundamentally Teleological and metaphorical; these are the very mechanisms that motivate supernatural belief in the first place. The Fine Tuning argument is merely an artifact of a mind that already believes the proposition in the first place. It does not add anything new, it is the product of a belief network with certain properties; we should not confuse the directionality, people do not become Theists because of this argument, they are already Theists with certain cognitive predispositions who construct this argument in accordance with those underlying processes that formed their belief network in the first place.

What I am proposing is that, instead of directly countering demonstrably false statements expounded by Theists, or instead of being mislead by silly red herrings such as “minimal facts arguments” or “first cause arguments”, we should probably understand the cognitive mechanisms that generate such trivialities in the first place. Think of these “arguments” as merely products of a system that is operating according to fundamentally different principles and constraints than non-theistic minds. Or at the very least, consider the possibility that perhaps different mechanisms functioning within our cognition are activated under “theistic scenarios”; situations where these networks become more highly activated (of course for some people, they are always activated). I am not going to be able to answer these questions here, I am simply pondering some ideas I've been having over the past few months; why is religious dogma so sticky with respect to some minds and not others? Doxastic Voluntarism appears to be patently false; so what tendencies, structures, processes, or mechanisms generate and recreate networks associated with supernatural belief? How should we be evaluating worldviews to begin with?

The best way to evaluate the word-view is to understand the stories, metaphors, narrative structure, teleology, reward systems, and patterns of behavior they produce; providing meaningful reinterpretations that point out the absurdity and silliness of the stories. An example of this can be seen in this post about being “Made in God’s Image”. Theists usually presuppose we have been created with an intended purpose, and use the phrase “Made in God’s Image” to demonstrate or justify our superior position within the larger biosphere. Of course, when I heard this (among many other theistic concepts) I found it incredibly silly and non-sensical. However, it’s important to realize this concept is a component and product of a larger narrative history that has developed and evolved over time; it is endogenous to the larger system, and also feeds back into the narrative, strengthening it further. In the process of showing the incoherence of the phrase “Made In God’s Image” (by extending it to its logical conclusion), you indirectly cast doubt on to the underlying narrative, acting as a weakening force that decouples the tightly coupled network of interconnecting concepts. Perhaps another thing to consider is to point out the resemblance of the narrative structure to other stories we consider mythical; this causes internal tension by creating a feeling of inconsistency with respect to the application of intellectual standards. It is generally regarded that Osiris, Romulus, and Theseus are Historical Fiction despite the overwhelming similarities between them and the stories outlined in the New Testament; perhaps pointing out that fact and asking why Christianity deserves special pleading could be flash a light on the broader inconsistency.

What are some other concepts we can evaluate and reconsider?

Consider Matthew 22:35–40; Can love actually be commanded? I’ve always thought this one was a bit weird, given that love is a response, not a conscious action. Also, if Ought implies Can, how is it reasonable to command a moral obligation that cannot be done?
Following from number 1, and other verses indicating God’s relentless insistence that all the attention be placed upon him, the obvious absurd consequence is that this teaches a form of codependency. This potentially leads to self-worth issues, as indicated by revered songs such as “Amazing Grace”; “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound, to save a Wretch like me”. In fact, this is applauded in Christian circles; the first person to acknowledge their pathetic existence is seen as the wisest.
This leads to the notion of Vicarious Redemption. We are such pathetic wretch’s that God is justified in torturing us forever in Hell. There is nothing we can do on our own to redeem ourselves from the sickly position we occupy in this “fallen” world, we are diseased, needing someone to pay our debts for us. In every other instance we can possibly conceive, we recognize that punishing someone else for your mistakes is the exact opposite of moral accountability. Another phrase for this is Substitutionary Atonement; but this literally just begs the question, why do we need a scapegoat for atonement to begin with?
Ancestral Sin stands fundamentally in opposition to the notions of responsibility enshrined in modern constitutions; it makes absolutely no sense for your guilt to be inherited from a fictitious ancestor.
Now lets consider Matthew 5:27–32; this is striking to me, because it is a justification for Thoughtcrime; and crucially, the thought is equivalent to the action. Furthermore, why are lust and anger the only thoughts explicitly contemptable, despite a plethora of human motivations that could seemingly lead to negative outcomes? Should we not consider ourselves accomplished for overcoming deviant thoughts and non acting on them?
In the process of reading about verses condemning humans for thought crimes, I came across other articles about Christians allegedly being punished for praying. This leads me to my next point; The Martyr Complex. Not only is martyrdom seen as one of the ultimate goods, it seems to be encouraged. This creates an odd situation where Christians genuinely believe that the mere existence of criticism against the actions of a Christian, is a form of oppression and persecution. The mere existence of a secular state implies the victimization and “attack” on the Church. In Catholicism, Martyrs are granted the status of “Saint”; someone burning with passion who is unwilling to compromise their dogma; and in many situations, who is willing to snuff out the threat at any cost.
Following from number 6, you start to see very odd behavior based on this victim complex. Henry Hildebrandt, a deplorable fundamentalist zealot like all of the others, found himself in a Child Abuse controversy, that which was justified on a “Biblical Basis”, and thus was not abuse. His followers fled the country after his church was investigated, out of “encroachment on their religious freedom”. Child abuse is justified if you can find biblical justification (something that is more generally a problem with command based and scripture based morality), and anyone wanting to intervene is simply “attacking Christianity”. Like I said before, any criticism is met with Martyr Complex type behavior. Another great example of this warped way of thinking is analyzed in “Understanding the Kim Davis Fallacy”.
On the topic of Child Abuse and victimhood, I'll leave a link to A superb article against the religious indoctrination of children and The Massive Damage Done by Sunday School and Catechism. This follows from what I mentioned above; even the very existence of alternative perspectives is seen as an “Attack on Christianity”. Teaching scientific methods, critical thinking, and the mere existence of other religions is viewed as a process of victimizing Christians. Please watch Dan Dennett’s response to Pastor Rick Warren on the possibility of having world religions taught in United States public schools. This obviously ties back to verses condemning religious pluralism in the Bible.
Pivoting slightly to something else; the Tower of Babel story is just fundamentally immoral. The whole world speaks the same language, unites under a common cause, and sets a goal in complete unity. What does God do? “And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.””. Much of human suffering comes from simple miscommunication, and God deliberately causes this? I mean its hilariously fucked up when you think about it; Scriptural misinterpretation, the fractioning and divisiveness of the Church, the existence of a plurality of religions; and all of the subsequent violence because we cannot communicate.
The Problem of Hell and actually, the complete incoherence of Heaven; and all of the problems associated with rewards based moral systems like this. The video “The Problems with Paradise: 7 Reasons Why Heaven Fails” is an excellent deconstruction of the concept of eternal paradise.
Restating The Passover and the Genesis Flood Narrative for what they are: Murder.
The constant degradation of anything labeled “Earthly” and the “Flesh” being inherently evil and subordinate. This is simply an expression of what Nietzsche correctly identified as a “True World Philosophy”. This is littered obviously all throughout the Bible; the very idea of the “Thy Kingdom Come” exemplifies the concept. This manifests in real life by an utter contempt for anyone trying to make their situation on Earth better; homeless people don’t need to be clothed and fed if they are spiritually nurtured.
Apocalyptical “Ent Times” hysteria as manifested Luke 21:34–37 and Revelations. Just like the Martyr Complex, everyone is looking for signs of the “End”, and sadistically desire the impending doom looming on “the enemies of God”. To me this is one of the most grotesque aspects of Christianity. This way of thinking leaks its way into politics obviously; every progressive step towards human rights has been identified as one more step towards the incoming Judgement of Gods Just might.
Theocracy; Thy Kingdom Come. Time and Time again, dictatorship is preferred to freedom, responsibility, and intellectual curiosity. This is when ridiculous contortions of definition such as “Freedom Through Submission” that are used as rationalizations for the clear contradiction between freedom and tyranny. The Bible literally advocates for ignorance.
God’s idea of Justice in Book of Job. After wiping out Job’s family, he see’s it as “just” to simply replace the old children with new ones? This is divine compensation?
Many claims are based on Divine Revelation, which is fundamentally problematic from a verification point of view. In addition, all of the biblical prophecies are complete bullshit and cherry-picked ad-hoc (see Why Atheists Reject Biblical Prophecy)
Given the ridiculous nature of the commands in the Bible, many Christians live very inconsistent lives. See The Inconsistency of Christian Living and Doubling Down On Christian Inconsistencies + Excuses For Why They Don’t Care.
Christianity promotes and welcomes infantilization; as mentioned before it relishes in keeping its adherents ignorant and insolated from society. This is clear in their songs of worship, embedded in their lexicon (Calling God Abba and referring to people as misguided sheep), demonstrable in bible verses, and institutionalized in their social structures (Becoming God’s children : religion’s infantilizing process).
The Bible is completely silent with regards to Human Rights. In fact, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is frequently admonished by religious congregations as the penetration of “secularism” into our “Judeo-Christian” rooted nation. Ironically, they also like to take credit for the development and expansion of human rights (by cherry picking bible verses that sound relevant, like The Image of God), but historically every advancement has been blocked by the religious organizations.
Christianity is fundamentally opposed to open-mindedness. In fact, aversion to open-mindedness is absolutely necessary for the dogma to sustain itself in a large majority of its adherents. The Big 5 Factor Models consistently show strong correlations with religious belief and low Openness to Experience. Being open-minded means willingness to consider new ideas; in many practical situations this is absolutely necessary. It just so happens that belief in the True World actually doesn't have any immediate consequences, so there is no direct corrective mechanism that can force the religious to reconsider their beliefs like there are in scientific settings. See Open-mindedness by QualiaSoup.

These are just a few things to consider that are more productive then engaging in pseudo-intellectual arguments proposed by apologists. You need to remember that the religious start with their conclusion and reason backwards, arbitrarily selecting philosophical positions that strengthen their silly arguments. These are nothing more then Red Herrings. There is absolutely no setting outside of Universities where this lack of intellectual rigor would qualify as legitimate inquiry. The blog post The Failing Blame-Based Model of Spirituality describes the pernicious tendencies of Abrahamic models; I highly recommend.

Okay so there is a lot of content here. I will just leave it as is because this is getting ridiculously long.

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