The Nature of Agnosticism Part 3

 In this post I want to cover some of the essential components of theistic belief such as prayer and "true belief". I will also discuss some ideas I've had about the nature and causes of theism. 

Starting with prayer, If I think about “prayer working” I first must ask myself what a prayer is and what does it mean to for a prayer “work”. Does it mean “have an effect” on something? Does it mean “achieve its objectives”? From a common sense point of view, it would seem prayer is almost always a request for something; perhaps on behalf of another party. Many religious devotees will claim that prayer is a means by which you build a rapport with God. Jesus taught the correct way to pray using the Lords Prayer; the key is to address God in all of his glory before petitioning for aspects of “the kingdom” to be delivered to us on Earth. Muslims are required to perform Salah, which are a set of prayers required by the Five Pillars of Islam. In both instances, you praise God for doing something you find beneficial, ask God for guidance, or just to be “close” to God. It is common for the religious devotee to defend the objection to the efficacy of prayer to say things like “well, yeah you can’t ask god for a BMW he wont give you that”. This obfuscates the objection. I think it also presupposes something about Divine Psychology which Kevin Scharp elaborates on in this debate. We have no idea what God will do in any given situation. This is even supported by Christians who makes claims about the inability to grasp God (because we are so limited). I don’t want to get stuck on this point because the main objection has to do with the paradoxes of praying when God is tri-omni (omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient) and how he coincidently does not satisfy prayer requests for physically impossible things such as healing amputees.

Lets start with the first point: How it seems somewhat weird to pray given God is omniscient. This is actually an even broader topic of discussion if we think about how Gods foreknowledge might compromise Free Will. This is known as Theological Fatalism; if God cannot be wrong, and has a belief that you will do X in the future, then you simply cannot do otherwise because that would imply God had a false belief (violating his omniscience). This would mean our time here is strictly determined; which brings up a whole host of issues such as God condemning people to Hell before they are even born. Thinking about it like this, if you choose to pray, you actually never made the choice because God willed the prayer. God not only knew you were going to pray, but actually spoke it into existence when he created space and time. Lets first define omniscience. Referring to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy we see that it means:

"Omniscience is supposed to be knowledge that is maximal or complete. Perhaps knowledge of all truths, as (D1) puts it, captures that idea. But there are other features that might be included in such maximal knowledge when it is had by a perfect being. For example, perhaps a perfect being does not merely believe all true propositions but, in addition, could not possibly be mistaken. Perhaps, in other words, such a being is infallible, that is, necessarily such that any proposition it believes is true. Van Inwagen (2006: 26) adds to his variant of (D1) that it is impossible that there is a proposition q such that S believes q and q is false, which is equivalent to requiring that necessarily if S believes p then p is true. (See also van Inwagen 2002: 221.) It is conceivable that a being might satisfy (D1) by knowing all truths without its being such that it could not possibly hold a false belief. In that case infallibility adds an additional component to the standard account given by (D1)"

I think its interesting that omniscience might imply that everything is necessary and determined. Proverbs 16:9 claims that God has a predetermined plan for our lives; and it is common for people to console you by saying “God has plans for you”. If God is omnipotent, then you simply cannot undermine what his plans are for you, which would also seem to undermine this notion of free will. Now, suppose we are “asking” for something while praying. There is necessarily two outcomes of the request: it will happen or it will not. Let’s say your aunt is in the hospital with cancer and you pray to God for her to be healed. Given omniscience, God already knows her fate and requesting the alternative will imply God had a false belief in the past, violating omniscience. God knows which is going to happen, and god cannot have false beliefs. This includes false beliefs about himself. If God “changes his mind” in response to your prayer, this would mean that in the past, God had a false belief about what he was going to do in this situation. If God planned to change his mind, then this reduces to determinism.

If we formalize the argument it will look like this:

1. If God has foreknowledge that S will do A, then it is necessary that S will do A.
2. If it is necessary that S will do A, then S is not free with respect to doing A.
3. Therefore, If God has foreknowledge that S will do A, then S is not free with respect to doing A.

So if we think of it a bit deeper, omniscience seems to entail difficulties with “praying”, since certain paradoxes arise. Since God has a plan, the outcome you desire is already necessarily determined before your request. It is either part of his plan, or not part of his plan. According to scripture, if it is not part of his plan, then it will not happen because Gods plan is final and the most optimal. So if you ask for something that is not part of Gods plan then how can it happen? If it was part of Gods plan then it will happen regardless of your prayer. So in both scenarios, your prayer is “ineffective” in the sense that your action is causally inert. Now if we add in the Free Will dilemma, it seems like we completely lose our agency and that your prayer was actually predetermined. This makes prayer a bit more weird in that you were predestined to praise God by God himself. To me it seems that intentionality is meaningless on this paradigm.

This leads into my next critique; that which God chooses to respond to prayer in which there is a known statistical likelihood of some natural occurrence. We know there is a survival rate of cancer, brain tumors, car accidents, etc. We can characterize the likelihood of mortality very accurately when we have a given set of information. And yet, when we “pray” for a cancer patient and they recover, we attribute that to prayer. The reverse is not true, when they do not recover, God has a plan for them. This is obviously related to the first critique, but in the case of amputees it makes it even more apparent. You can pray all you want, but there will never be a case of an amputee growing back a limb. Why is it that God responds to prayer that have known recovery rates but is absent when there is no biological mechanism? The response will probably be “you don't know if he has never healed an amputee” or “God has plans for them” which returns us to the first critique and the problem of divine psychology. Some might say that this is akin to asking for the BMW. But doesn’t it seem a little odd to conflate the two requests?

Luke 11:9–13 states the well known phrase uttered by Jesus “Ask and you shall receive”. This is actually reiterated in sermons; claiming that God does not want you to shy away from asking him things. He will end up giving you what is best for you. But if I pray for a new limb, I will certainly not get it; unless Michael Levin makes significant advances in Bioelectricity research. A devote religious person will feel defensive by now, probably thinking “God gave Michael Levin the knowledge” in which I say “Seems a little odd that God will give an Atheist the knowledge to heal amputees, why can’t he do it himself?”. God works “Through” people to achieve his objectives; “God needs people to do what he wants?”. The omnipotence claim seems to be losing significant weight.

I have heard that “God Uses Others” to achieve his goals. I think this incredibly undermines the belief in agency and conflicts with any sense of agency we might have about our actions. If someone prays and God uses me to answer the prayer, did I really have a choice? Are we instruments or intelligent agents capable of acting out our own volition and compassion? This is one of the problems with prayer. If I decide to act kindly to someone, perhaps helping them in a time of need, then it seems that by definition, prayer has been answered because God used me to achieve the desirable ends. Of course, if something bad happened to you, God was not “using them” to achieve his ends; that was the Free Will of the person harming you. This theodicy is completely inconsistent and “God Using” us is non-explanatory. Consider the very nature of saying “God Uses us”; it completely undermines the Free Will defense against the argument from suffering/evil. If God selectively uses us in such-and-such ways as to do trivial things like shelter a homeless person, why can he not prevent us from such-and-such major evils that impact the world? If my act is not of my own volition, but simply an instrument to advance Gods Will (Which cannot be subverted), does this not render choice meaningless? If God intervenes in trivialities, why could he not intervene when Jews were being slaughtered during WW2 (like he did in Exodus) or during any other mass genocide?

As with many ambiguous Bible verses, some may reference one claiming we can “know” what God wants for us and that prayer is the mechanism by which we come to know it. Perhaps this is what they mean by “Prayer Working”; Romans 12:2 claims that you can discern the Gods Will. This is what is claimed in GotQuestions, along with this peachy follow up:

"As we walk with the Lord, obeying His Word and relying on His Spirit, we find that we are given the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). We know Him, and that helps us to know His will. We find God’s guidance readily available. “The righteousness of the blameless makes their paths straight, / but the wicked are brought down by their own wickedness” (Proverbs 11:5)."

This probably explains why many Christians think they are better than everyone else; they literally think they are God. But they point here is that prayer to them means aligning themselves with what God wills for them.

"If we are walking closely with the Lord and truly desiring His will for our lives, God will place His desires in our hearts. The key is wanting God’s will, not our own. “Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4)."

But isn’t this interesting? It is very apparent that “prayer working” is not something demonstrable or provable in any explanatory sense of the words. If we take prayer to be some sort of petition, and “working” to mean some sort of causal effect, it looks pretty clear that it does not work. And if when we say “prayer works”, we mean “I think God wants me to do this because I have some feeling in my gut and its the Holy Spirit telling me to make another decision”, it is necessarily unprovable. If you end up making a decision that was sub-optimal, all you have to say is that you did not listen to Gods Will or pray enough. If things are going bad for you, you can easily say that these are trials God is putting you through and more prayer will open your eyes to his path. The point is that you have to want what God wants because your desires are necessarily suboptimal and bankrupt. The latter is obviously just ideological insulation from any logical disproof. “You can’t know that I don’t know what Gods plan is for me, I feel the Holy Spirit”. “Prayer Working” is redefined ,not to mean “petition” and “causal effect” as in the colloquial way of understanding the words, but a revelation through faith in the Holy Ghost. You see, Gods plan can only be known if you are a believer, and you can only be a believer if you “truly believe” that prayer works and God exists. But it must be TRUE belief, otherwise you will not be informed through prayer. God will reveal his plan to true believers and he will perform miracles where necessary. This runs contrary to the “Ask and you shall receive” understanding of prayer and Gods alleged omnipotence. God has reason to heal cancer patients but not amputees? Seems oddly convenient.

If we define the phrase “Prayer Works” to mean something unambiguous and provable, this leads to the obviousness of prayer being superstition, “Why wont God heal amputees” is a simple question that illuminates this:

The question, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” probes into a fundamental aspect of prayer and exposes it for observation. This aspect of prayer has to do with ambiguity and coincidence.

To help you understand why this question is so important, let’s look at an example. Let’s imagine that you visit your doctor one day, and he tells you that you have cancer. Your doctor is optimistic, and he schedules surgery and chemotherapy to treat your disease. Meanwhile, you are terrified. You don’t want to die, so you pray to God day and night for a cure. The surgery is successful, and when your doctor examines you again six months later the cancer is gone. You praise God for answering your prayers. You totally believe with all your heart that God has worked a miracle in your life.

The obvious question to ask is: What cured you? Was it the surgery/chemotherapy, or was it God? Is there any way to know whether God is playing a role or not when we pray?

Unless you take the time to intelligently analyze this situation, it looks ambiguous. God might have miraculously cured your disease, as many Christians believe. But God might also be imaginary, and the chemotherapy drugs and surgery are the things that cured you. Or your body’s immune system might have cured the cancer itself. When your tumor disappeared, in other words, it might simply have been a complete coincidence that you happened to pray. Your prayer may have had zero effect.

How can we determine whether it is God or coincidence that worked the cure? One way is to eliminate the ambiguity. In a non-ambiguous situation, there is no potential for coincidence. Because there is no ambiguity, we can actually know whether God is answering the prayer or not.

That is what we are doing when we look at amputees. Think about it this way. The Bible clearly promises that God answers prayers. For example, in Mark 11:24 Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” And billions of Christians believe these promises. You can find thousands of books, magazine articles and Web sites talking about the power of prayer. According to believers, God is answering millions of their prayers every day.

So what should happen if we pray to God to restore amputated limbs? Clearly, if God is real, limbs should regenerate through prayer. In reality, they do not.

Why not? Because God is imaginary. Notice that there is zero ambiguity in this situation. There is only one way for a limb to regenerate through prayer: God must exist and God must answer prayers. What we find is that whenever we create a unambiguous situation like this and look at the results of prayer, prayer never works. God never “answers prayers” if there is no possibility of coincidence. We will approach this issue from several different angles in this book, but Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 are particularly important. The fact that prayers are never answered when the possibility of coincidence is eliminated meshes with another fact. If we analyze God’s responses to ambiguous prayers using statistical tools, what we find is that there is never any statistical evidence for prayer. In other words, when we statistically compare prayer to coincidence for explaining any situation, they are identical. For example, this article points out: It also says: No valid scientific study has ever found any evidence that prayer works. See this page for details.

As I referred to above, this is valid until some biologist discoveries regenerative limb processes that restore amputated limbs. And once this happens, people will say God gave us the knowledge. I think this sort of automatic response is a byproduct of the indoctrination. It is a moral obligation that we “Love God” first before all else because God is a Jealous God. This requires "glorifying god in all of his greatness"; since we are all subject to his creation, we did not make the discovery since all Good things come from God. This means we should not praise the person who made the discovery, since they could not have done so without God. You see how deep the ideology can take someone down the path of rationalization? God does not have to answer for not healing amputees, and who are you to question his ways? I don’t think people indoctrinated in ideology like this cannot understand the reasoning presented in the Why Won’t god Heal Amputees article; the problem is that it is directed at their sense of self and path to salvation so they get defensive and their critical thinking goes out the window. These types of people believe there are no coincidences.

A similar experience happened to me personally. I was born with a weird condition where my small intestine did not connect to my large intestine. In other words, I would have been another statistic of infant mortality. The paragraph below gives a nice outline of the variability in death rates.

Globally 2.4 million children died in the first month of life in 2020. There are approximately 6700 newborn deaths every day, amounting to 47% of all child deaths under the age of 5 years, up from 40% in 1990.

The world has made substantial progress in child survival since 1990. Globally, the number of neonatal deaths declined from 5 million in 1990 to 2.4 million in 2020. However, the decline in neonatal mortality from 1990 to 2020 has been slower than that of post-neonatal under-5 mortality.

The chances of survival from birth varies widely depending on where a child is born. Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest neonatal mortality rate in 2020 at 27 (25–­­32) deaths per 1000 live births, followed by central and southern Asia with 23 (21–­­25) deaths per 1000 live births. A child born in sub-Saharan Africa is 10 times more likely to die in the first month than a child born in a high-income country. Country-level neonatal mortality rates in 2020 ranged from 1 death per 1000 live births to 44 and the risk of dying before the 28th day of life for a child born in the highest-mortality country was approximately 56 times higher than the lowest-mortality country.

Here is some time series data showing the decline in infant mortality for various countries over the past 70-ish years. And this article gives another look at the summary statistics for infant mortality.

I show this information because it relates to “Why Wont God Heal Amputees”. I think what I had was some form of Intestinal Atresia. In modern times, this is one of those unambiguous conditions where we have carefully documented the death rates, prevalence, and procedures to address the issue surgically. When my doctor saved me, someone could have attributed it to God answering prayer. Which would be odd, considering I am now writing a blog post questioning that entire world-view, and he would have known this were to happen given omniscience. According to Wikipedia, the first Laparotomy (the surgical technique used in treating this condition) was first conducted in the early 1800’s and was not improved upon until the 1900’s. This means that for about all of humanities history, this was one of the unambiguous conditions that praying did not effect. It did not matter how hard someone prayed, the infant will die. And according to whatever theology you have, the infant probably had not formed belief in the Gospel and might not have been baptized, so looks like that little fucker is condemned (along with the millions of others who die annually; roughly 15,000 children per day). It becomes even more obvious when you look at the statistical correlations between socioeconomic status and death rates, that had I been born in another country, or born 50 years earlier, the odds of my survival would have been significantly altered. The point is that “answer to prayer” is highly dependent on economic factors such as level of technical advancement, science education, literacy rates, health care accessibility, and corruption. But of course, someone can say “its a miracle that any of it is even possible”; which is just another rationalization. Should the likelihood of your prayer being answered be conditional on economic circumstances you are born into, that are out of your control?

What kind of prayer does God answer, anyway? If I am struggling to survive, can’t pay rent, have a hard time purchasing food etc. and I get a generous donation from someone, is this an answer to prayer? If I am relatively successful, have stable income, don’t really need any more help to meet my basic needs, and I land a new business deal that allows me to purchase the new car I have been wanting; is that an answer to prayer? Should we praise? In both scenarios, the logic is identical. There is an unexpected absolute increase in wealth. One needs it more than another. We most certainly will call the first scenario an answer to prayer, and the second scenario something else. The crucial point however, is that the likelihood of wealth transfers or unexpected business opportunities is significantly higher in wealthier nations anyway. So this sort of “answer to prayer” again is conditional on social conditions.

Again, to summarize, the two main points of contention typically unanswered are the paradox of omnipotence and omniscience; and the ambiguity of “answered” prayers. I will link to each of the common rationalizations:

1. Not Part of Gods Plan: And a response concerning the illusion of this rationalization; Praying to a Jar of Milk
2. Sometimes the answer is “No” if it does not fit Gods plan
3. God can’t make it too obvious, he must stay hidden: Problems with Hidden God rationalizations
4. God is using the amputees as an example for a greater purpose: Again, see the divine ignorance problems and special pleading to divine psychology
5. Free Will: They chose to get their arm blown off, but what about people born with deformities?
6. God Inspires Scientists to solve the problem: See the example I gave above. Why would God allow the black plague to happen just to inspire a scientist?
7. Dont test God
8. Jesus Does not say When he will answer
9. Be patient, the answer to prayer will come: But notice, it never comes when the thing your prayer for is unambiguous
10. You can’t take those verses literally: Which ones are we allowed to take literally and on what basis?
11. I have no explanation, but people have believed in the Gospel for thousands of years therefore it is true
12. Why Christians Will Never be Able to Explain Prayer

If you consider the deep psychological impacts of believing in things like atonement, redemption, and salvation, it makes sense why religious people will completely shut out any arguments showing the ridiculousness of prayer. It is not simply “revising your beliefs” like a rational Bayesian; there is a very deep existential crisis someone potentially goes through when questioning topics of this nature. It is almost a matter of life and death for them. Anyone devoted to an Abrahamic religion is actually a Nihilist if you think about it. Any argument leading them to question their faith shatters the “true world” philosophy assumed in these world views. When fear of Hell and death, fear of loneliness, fear of instability etc. are at the core of the belief system, it should not be surprising why people do not respond to rational argument or have defense mechanisms, readily supplied to them by apologists, to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from encountering reality.

While thinking about the notion of prayer, I came across this wonderfully condescending article and decided to incorporate some of my responses into this post. It comes from a Catholic apologetics website. The audience is deliberately targeted towards a Christian audience, because as you'll see no one else would find this garbage convincing. Nevertheless, it speaks loudly about how theists cope with the existence of non-belief. The mere existence of people who disbelieve probably creates doubt among believers; the obvious solution for the apologist is to explain away the existence of disbelief as trivial, or unproblematic. I will sprinkle in some of my responses to each bullet point, but I'll start with the point on prayer. For full context, read the article, but briefly summarized: the apologist is trying to show the causal factors that lead to conversion into Christianity. Every point is a reaffirmation of a theistic world view, not a genuine empirical investigation. It's noteworthy that this comes from a Catholic apologetics website. Given the rapid decline of Christianity in "The West", Catholics are seeing the fastest rate of deconversion among all other sects, most becoming unaffiliated. This is a broader concern among Christianity as well. It's generally known that globally Islam is the fastest growing religion; something creating a sense of panic among some protestant movements. 

2. “EXPERIMENTATION” WITH PRAYER AND THE WORD OF GOD.

The Word of God is living. It has power beyond human comprehension because it is “God-breathed.” God speaks to man in many ways; but especially through prayer and the reading of the inspired Scriptures. When curiosity (or even interest) of non-believers leads to experimentation with prayer or reading the Bible the results can be shocking, as many converts attest.

Remember, this article is trying to show the reasons why Atheists convert to Christianity. It necessarily neglects all of the people who de-converted because their "experimentation with prayer" lead them no where.  So This can be summed up as “Some Atheists read the Bible and Prayed and became believers”. Of course, it will disregard all the “attestation” of former believers who have a thorough understanding of the Bible and have prayed consistently but still lost their faith. But here is some attestation from a “Scholar who tried out prayer and had it answered”:

Similarly, renowned sci-fi author John C. Wright distinctly recalls a prayer he said as an adamant atheist:

“I prayed. ‘Dear God, I know… that you do not exist. Nonetheless, as a scholar, I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken. So just in case I am mistaken, please reveal yourself to me in some fashion that will prove your case. If you do not answer, I can safely assume that either you do not care whether I believe in you, or that you have no power to produce evidence to persuade me…If you do not exist, this prayer is merely words in the air, and I lose nothing but a bit of my dignity. Thanking you in advance for your kind cooperation in this matter, John Wright.’”

He Then Got a response

“Something from beyond the reach of time and space, more fundamental than reality, reached across the universe and broke into my soul and changed me…I was altered down to the root of my being…It was like falling in love.”

Christians can’t seem to get enough of this sort of “testimonial evidence” (while obviously disregarding testimony running contrary to their beliefs). Lets take a look at who this “renowned scholar” is. According to his Wikipedia page, he has a J.D. and writes science fiction. I am sorry, but what scholarly work? A quick Google Scholar review shows absolutely no scholarly publications. Maybe there is some confusion about what a Scholar is:

Scholarly sources are written by academics and other experts and contribute to knowledge in a particular field by sharing new research findings, theories, analyses, insights, news, or summaries of current knowledge.

So what exactly is he contributing to? What is his specialization and academic distinction? How has he advanced our collective knowledge? Does having a degree and writing a fiction book make you a scholar? If this is what the author of the article believes, then God help us all. I wanted to digress on this point because its subtle and used primarily as a rhetorical device to reaffirm Christians. It is a common apologetic tactic: "Smart person who converted to Christianity, therefore you can remain strong in your faith". Obviously they want to ignore the fact that most of the converts are uneducated people from the developing nations; surprise surprise, evangelism doesn't work in well-educated countries. Might want to leave out that part. 

On to the content of the prayer: doesn’t it seem a little contrived or scripted? It feels like something someone made up in order to make their conversion appear more authentic. Remember he is a scholar and scholars are “all about the facts”; which is why you have the “I am forced to entertain the hypothetical possibility that I am mistaken” bit to really reinforce the fact that he is "objective". It seems like his objectivity is compatible with the efficacy of prayer (and yours can be too so don't have doubt!) because God leaves no room for ambiguity in his response. “Something from beyond time and space reached out to me”, how can you possible perceive of anything beyond space and time when perception is necessarily bound to the immediate physical? How do you know that your “revelation” is valid? This is part of the problem of confirming whether a revelation is indeed, a revelation. Since we are bound by space and time, the manifestation of the revelation must be physical; which is not a surprise considering God allegedly revealed himself to Moses in a flaming bush. You never hear about these types of revelations (in modern times) anyway, because no one would believe such a statement. Most conversion testimonies end up being something like "I experienced crazy emotions". This guys revelation was of course, ambiguous and unverifiable; like all of the rest.

The point is that these sorts of testimonials are quite ridiculous to the non-believer. They seem extremely performative and fake. It honestly just feels like a TV show when I hear these sorts of things; every testimonial is a well crafted script. And the best part is that other Christians use these well-crafted scripts to try and persuade non-believers of Christianity’s truth. Someone speaking to me (who I consider myself a reasonable scholar) will refer to THIS guys testimony, because IT MUST resonate with me. There is a certain type of testimony in the arsenal for all Christians to refer the non-believer to in the face of doubt. Want to convince someone that its reasonable to be a Christian? Point them to a reasonable dude who became a Christian. Let them hear the “testimony”. That will convince the non-believer. Little does the Christian know, but testimony is not that high on my list of “things that are convincing to me”. Combined with the first point the author made (something I'll dive into soon), hearing someone's testimony is hearing evidence for the truth, and if you don’t listen to the testimony (or think its a load of shit) you must be a stupid liar. If you want to truly understand the reasoning of a non-believer who disregards “testimony” of this sort, listen to what Richard Feynman has to say about Flying Saucers:

"Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" 

But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. 

To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all." "

But this is the thing Theists can’t wrap their heads around; the very structure of the Bible is fundamentally just the testimony of unconfirmed and unverified miraculous assertions made by uneducated peasants thousands of years ago. They whole-sale accept this as a form of evidence; so this is why they think ad-hoc testimony in modern times is reliable. I call it the Testimonial Bias; the tendency to give sympathy to ridiculous statements about revelation and rapture, while remaining ultra skeptical about everything else.

Many people will respond to this by saying that I simply need to have faith. This really isn't an answer to anything, rather its a form of gaslighting. Here I presented reasons demonstrating the claim "Prayer works" is seriously lacking substantiation, in addition to never experiencing a working prayer, and I am met with "yeah well you still have to believe". It works when you have "True Belief". This leads me to my second point, what could it possibly mean to "truly believe" something as opposed to, I don't know, untruly believing?  Many theists (especially apologists), maintain the belief that Faith is not necessarily "blind faith"; the basis of religious belief is fundamentally reasonable. In other words, they reject Fideism, claiming that religious faith is actually rational. Of course, they fail to realize that asserting I "need to have faith" when presenting reasons for doubt is the antithesis of rationality, showing their implicit definition of faith as the lack of substantiation. But they maintain that unbelief is what's actually unreasonable! Let's take a look at the first reason they provide for religious conversion, before diving deeper into this notion of "belief".

1. GOOD LITERATURE AND REASONABLE WRITING.

Reasonable atheists eventually become theists because they are reasonable; and furthermore, because they are honest. They are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads; and in many cases the evidence comes to the atheist most coherently and well-presented through the writings of believers in God.

Obviously what this implies is that a reasonable atheist who does not conform to a theistic belief is simply being dishonest. Lets put this in syllogistic form since the author of this article seems capable of understanding reason.

1. IFF you are reasonable and honest and Atheist, then you will come to belief
2. You are reasonable, honest, and an atheist
3. Therefore you will come to believe

Using Symbols:

1. A^B^C ⇔ D

It appears we have ourselves a classic case of logical conjunction. Referring to our truth table, any negation of the operand will imply the negation of the entire proposition. Thus:

1. IFF you are reasonable and honest and Atheist, Then you will come to belief
2. You are reasonable, Atheist, but Not honest
3. Therefore, burn in Hell

Of course the author is not employing reason as I’ve described. This is not a systematic argument laying out the truth conditions for a claim. The author is being arrogant, and using poor reasoning to do so. This looks like a classical case of Affirming the Consequent. Here are two examples:

Example 1

One way to demonstrate the invalidity of this argument form is with a counterexample with true premises but an obviously false conclusion. For example:

• If someone lives in San Diego, then they live in California.
• Joe lives in California.
• Therefore, Joe lives in San Diego.

There are many ways to live in California without living in San Diego, as long as they live in a Californian place other than San Diego.

However, one can affirm with certainty that “if someone does not live in California” (non-Q), then “this person does not live in San Diego” (non-P). This is the contrapositive of the first statement, and it must be true if and only if the original statement is true.

Example 2

Here is another useful, obviously fallacious example.

• If an animal is a dog, then it has four legs.
• My cat has four legs.
• Therefore, my cat is a dog.

Here, it is immediately intuitive that any number of other antecedents (“If an animal is a deer…”, “If an animal is an elephant…”, “If an animal is a moose…”, etc.) can give rise to the consequent (“then it has four legs”), and that it is preposterous to suppose that having four legs must imply that the animal is a dog and nothing else. This is useful as a teaching example since most people can immediately recognize that the conclusion reached must be wrong (intuitively, a cat cannot be a dog), and that the method by which it was reached must therefore be fallacious.

Now lets impose this structure on to the reasoning implicit in the authors statements.

1. If you are a reasonable, honest, and Atheist, you will come to believe Theism
2. You don’t believe Theism
3. Therefore you are not reasonable or dishonest

If one was “reasonable”, they would see the flaw in their reasoning and revise accordingly. It is clear that there are many reasons for disbelief and that the minimal set the author proposes is not exhaustive or even accurate. We can immediately reject the first premise.

Why does this one stand out for me so much? I see this all the time when reading the Bible. There are three explanations for disbelief: Hardened heart, liar, or influenced by “The Evil Flesh”. This is classic in group favoritism that reflects a serious deficiency in critical thinking. We typically think of “liars” as something socially repugnant. So the immediate explanation for the out-group is to label them something completely undesirable and worthy of criticism. They are “all liars”; in classic out-group homogeneity terms. It is this type of prejudice that ultimately leads to dehumanization of people not associated with your in-group. Yet, simultaneously, religious people will play the victim when people turn the criticism back on them. This sort of special pleading is seen by phrases such as “Christianity is under attack”. Maybe a non-believer does not want to even consider joining a congregation on the basis of outright prejudiced statements like the one above. Why would I sacrifice my critical thinking to join a hive mind? Statements like this only prove to me that Christianity is nothing more than collective narcissism. These statements make it seem as if I will fall prey to group polarization; the exact reason I stay away from politics. Just think about what the authors first statement boils down to: Those who don’t believe are either stupid or liars. It is this sort of smug superiority complex that rapidly deconverts believers and keeps those non-believers far away; at least in my case. Think about the second sentence: “They follow the evidence wherever it leads, and in many cases it comes to them most coherently and well-presented through the writings of those believers in God”. So what I can gather is that the ultimate bearers of truth are those who believe in God. They have attained all of the evidence. So a reasonable honest atheist who cares about evidence will be lead to the truth which is held by (you guessed it) a Christian! This can be paraphrased: “I am right, any contrary evidence is a lie, you are stupid for inquiring into that line of evidence, and you are either stupid or dishonest for rejecting my position”.

Following up in typical Sunday Sermon fashion, there is a “Testimony” presented by the author that proves his point:

Author Karen Edmisten admits on her blog:

“I once thought I’d be a lifelong atheist. Then I became desperately unhappy, read up on philosophy and various religions (while assiduously avoiding Christianity), and waited for something to make sense. I was initially appalled when Christianity began to look like the sensible thing, surprised when I wanted to be baptized, and stunned that I ended up a Catholic.”

Lets leave aside the fact that in this testimony, the individual claims they became desperately unhappy and began seeking something to satisfy her existential dread. This is one of the leading causes drawing someone to belief; supported by sociological theories such as Terror Management Theory. The truth of a proposition should be independent of your existential doubts. Nevertheless, this testimony is a great example of the rhetoric I constantly encounter. The author says “reasonable people will convert”, and here is an example of a reasonable person converting. Score for the team! And bonus points given to the author, his Authority is boosted! Suppose I construct an entirely symmetrical argument for the opposite claim. “Reasonable Christians come to leave the Faith because they are reasonable, and furthermore they are honest. They Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and it certainly does not coincide with Christianity”. I then quote a clever person who de-converted:

“I was once bombarded by a constant feeling of existential doubt because God was not responding to any of my prayers. I mustered up the courage to let go after reading Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer. I became confident in my reason and never looked back on the dogma. I sometimes can’t believe I didn’t have the courage to leave earlier”.

Would this line of reasoning convince a Christian that their belief system is false? Probably not. This is just a rhetorical tactic. This is not convincing for an Atheist because they do not come from a tradition of weekly sermons comprised of testimonials of people who “experience of the Holy Spirit”. This line of rhetoric works on a Christian because testimony and miraculous conversions are built into the belief structure. Consider Paul's conversion. These sorts of argumentative strategies work well for an audience predisposed to accept this sort of Sermon rhetoric. This is obvious in the next example they give; the all-time greatest modern Atheist convert C.S. Lewis himself.

Dr. Ordway mentions the eminent 20th century Oxford thinker, C.S. Lewis. Lewis is a prime example of a reasonable but unbelieving thinker who was willing to read from all angles and perspectives. As a result of his open inquiry, he became a believer in Christ and one of modern Christianity’s greatest apologists

G.K. Chesterton and George MacDonald were two of the most influential writers to effect Lewis’ conversion. He writes in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy:

“In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for… A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

How convincing is this to a non-believer? Not at all. This sort of reasoning only works on someone who already believes. Its an apologetic tactic used to strengthen conviction of the believer. “Look, this Atheist who is really smart and well-read, they ultimately realized that what you believe is the truth! Praise!”; Testimonials that work wonders on a Christian psyche, but never the converse. You will never find someone being convinced of the symmetrical argument in favor of the contradictory conclusion; because this is not about reasonableness, its about reaffirming assent and strengthening confirmation bias. Why does the conversion of C.S. Lewis mean so much, but ex-believers who apostatized such as Dan Barker, Robert Price, Teresa MacBain, Jerry Dewitt, Michael Shermer, Emile Durkheim, Rebecca Goldstein, and Bart Ehrman mean absolutely nothing? Because statements like this made by the author are not meant to be reasonable and open-minded to the truth. They are meant to reaffirm the in-group bias and amplify out-group homogeneity; that of non-believers being stupid liars. Consistency with Reason is one of the key markers of intellectual strength, and yet all apologists do is violate this principle repeatedly.

As I've mentioned in other posts, I don't think Theists become theists because of rational argumentation. No one really does; I at least find most of these arguments silly at best, a sheer waste of time and resources at worst. As I’ve frequented different church services, I’ve noticed something common among them all; a constant reiteration ad nauseum to “truly believe”. They will give examples of martyrs as the standard for what it means to truly believe (along with overt indications that martyrdom proves the truth of their religious doctrine) and encourage the audience to reach that level. This is because “Belief” in the doctrines are not enough, real Christians “Truly Believe”.

It would probably be useful to make the distinction between “Belief In vs. Belief that”. If prompted for my beliefs, I will normally respond by saying I am a Free Speech radical. I don’t just believe that free speech exists, or should exist. I believe that it is superior in all scenarios compared to the alternative; suppressed speech. This example of belief is a bit different since it is a belief in an optimal policy, not in an other wordily being. “Belief That” sounds a bit awkward if we think of it as a proposition that is true or false. Of course that I believe THAT free speech exists. Belief IN implies a stronger commitment to the powerful effects I think implementing this policy will have. Contrast this with religious belief. “Belief That” god exists is propositional; true or false. You have a propositional attitude towards the assertion. My position is that the truth value of the proposition is inherently unknowable. There is no possible way to determine whether it is true or false. I have a guiding principle; limit belief as much as possible in inherently unknowable positions. Some positions I must take a stance on; I believe that external reality exists and I am not a brain in a vat. This is unprovable, but as a matter of practicality it is unlivable. You can live without knowing whether God exists. To me it is not an existential question; whatever it may mean by the word “God”. The definability of “God” is significantly lacking; leading me towards theological non-cognitivism anyway. What does “God” even refer to? Contrast this with the “Free Speech” principle; I can in some sense, wrap my head around what this is supposed to imply. The words comprising the principle are intelligible to an extent; despite there being ambiguity. For the people who think that belief whether “God Exists” is existential, they might find it very important to decide whether they “Believe That” rather than leaving it open. Once they come to take a stance on the proposition (or are brought up believing it without ever questioning it), they will form “Belief In”. This is more akin to “trust”. In the Christian tradition, God formed a new covenant with “Man”, guaranteeing him salvation if he puts his “Faith In” Jesus. When someone says they believe in Jesus, what they are saying is that they believe in God, they trust that he keeps his promises (and loves us). Similarly, when I say I “Believe In” the free speech principle, I am asserting a sort of faith. I cannot prove or demonstrate that it is universally good, but I still trust in it as a guiding principle. For me, free speech is existential. I could not be writing this blog without it. Human expression is an inherent need, and without the freedom to express yourself, you live a suboptimal life not worth living. This belief rests on an even more fundamental principle I hold to be true: the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates was a martyr defending this principle. I believe it strongly, but if I am not willing to die for it and the free speech principle, would one say that I don’t believe it? And if someone is willing to die for it, would we necessarily say they believe it more than me? To me this sounds a bit fallacious, like affirming the consequent. Maybe this principle conflicts with the other principle I dearly hold: supporting the family, not neglecting their needs, not being selfish. Socrates dying for it makes little difference whether I believe in it. 

This website provides a good description of the distinction:

Thus, a belief-in can be thought of as the holding of an idea that cannot be proven or falsified. People can believe-in their children, meaning that they always consider them to be truly good people (even if their children have not demonstrated such qualities outwardly). People can believe-in an idea (such as democracy) without empirical evidence. One can believe-in a god or other supernatural forces even while acknowledging that such things may never, or could never, be proven. Most of us believe-in human rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech. Many believe-in freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Belief-ins are not empirical. Belief-ins are convictions and tend to come from within. Belief-ins are felt with our emotions. Once felt, they are recognized by the rational mind which, in turn, rationalizes them as if they were empirical. When two people argue over conflicting beliefs-in, no resolution will ever likely be found, for logical arguments depend on premises that have empirical truth.

Belief-thats are empirical. Let’s think of them as propositions we hold true because of empirical evidence. We are generally not as emotionally attached to our belief-thats, perhaps because they did not stem from emotions, but rather from observations. We believe-that vaccines prevent disease because of the plethora of properly obtained, scientific data. One may believe-that the germ theory of disease is true, because it allows for better predictions when treating patients as opposed to older ideas such as ‘The Four Humors”. Believe-thats can have measurable degrees of uncertainty. A meteorologist can believe that there will be a 70% chance of rain on Tuesday, based on observable facts today and applying scientific theory to come up with a prediction. When scientists use the words “believe” and “belief”, they are likely referring to believe-that and belief-that.

We should have a bit of context about “Belief” before we think about it in the context of this religion because Christianity is not a single “belief-in” but a belief system comprised of interlocking dependencies. I’ve reached the point where I ask the question “What the Hell are they supposed to believe?”. A religious person will say “The Gospel duh”. But what does that mean, when the Gospels themselves presuppose a specific textual interpretation of the Old Testament? Let’s start with a definition given in Chapter 6 of Religious Upbringing and the Costs of Freedom:

Evangelical Christianity is a form of Protestantism that holds that the only way to attain eternal salvation is to accept the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ, believe in the atonement sacrifice of his crucifixion, and maintain hope in the eternal physical and spiritual life that His resurrection signals.

There is a lot baked in to this statement that seems to be presupposed. It seems like you must: 

1. Believe in eternal salvation
2. Believe that it is attainable
3. Believe that God exists
4. Believe something very specific about the nature of God
5. Believe that Jesus existed, was man, and God
6. Believe that all of humans fell out of favor with God
7. Believe in Hell
8. Believe that God is going to send us all to Hell
9. Believe that we all deserve to go to Hell (especially Atheists)
10. Believe that there are non-physical “places” we are destined to and that other entities "exist"
11. Believe we can be forgiven for “The Fall” and be atoned
12. Believe we are incredibly stupid and require a shepherd like figure to lead us in the right direction

Now, once you presuppose all of this, you can believe whether Jesus was the sacrifice, his crucifixion the sacrificial offering, and that God resurrected him (who is also, God). Can “accepting Jesus as your savior” make any sense without presupposing something that we needed to be saved from something? Does Jesus make any sense if you don't first “Believe That” these assumptions are true? Christianity cannot just be the “Belief That” the gospels are true, when the gospels themselves are part of a continuum existing belief systems, traditions, and interpretive frameworks. These are only but a few “Belief-That’s” that are necessary for the Gospels to even make sense; but there are quite a few epistemological “methods” indispensable to this world-view, such as the belief in revelation.

“True Belief” can only make sense given this background narrative. But even if I share many the background assumptions, there is no guarantee I have to accept the alleged events in the Gospels. I think this is an important point to make because after having conversations with certain Christians, it seems they are blind to what they presuppose when they try to evangelize the youth. I remember speaking with someone who said “We have to learn how to communicate with the post-modern youth, there is tons of evidence that Jesus existed”. Isn’t it obvious how blind this is? It presupposes that the reason for the significant decline in Christianity is due to postmodernism. Of course, many Christians have probably never took the time to read postmodern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Sartre, Deleuze, or Lacan; they are simply regurgitating what their favorite apologist says. And while postmodernism is more prevalent in the world following WW2, it is not incompatible with Christianity. Political Scientist Aleksandr Dugin happily advocates for this as the ideal alternative to Classical Liberalism while simultaneously supporting a union between Church and State. Postmodernism is more of a direct challenge to Enlightenment World-Views; which I personally hold. I will concede that there have been methods from literary criticism such as deconstruction which are more radical in their conclusions; but can’t one argue this is partially a consequence of a thousand years of arguments over scriptural interpretation? Anyway, being a mythicist is completely independent of being influenced by postmodernism. I am not a Christian, have never been one, and it is not because I don’t believe Jesus existed. However, I don’t think it is an irrelevant question. Shouldn’t we desire to know whether the Gospels are historical by modern standards and not just embellished stories? This line of inquiry often feels like an “attack” on the Christian faith because rigorously establishing Jesus’ existence prior to the 18th century was never even a thought; it was just presupposed. But again, statements like the one above show that Christians do not understand that people are not de-converting because they lack belief in the existence of Jesus, they de-convert because they lack conviction in any of the theological presuppositions and claims made in the Gospel. I am not a mythicist or a postmodernist and yet I still don’t believe any of the miraculous claims made in scripture. That is why websites like this are just ridiculous: History for Atheists. It is verses like these that people question. Since the miraculous verses just so happen to be the ones void of any evidence, people usually conclude they are another legend like those of every culture in history. I’ve said this before; Christians do not even understand the audience they are trying to evangelize. I believe Jesus existed on the same grounds I believe Socrates existed. There is not much evidence for either, but for the sake of consistency, I ought to accept the existence of both historical figures. However, if someone told me Socrates resurrected himself, I probably would not believe it. Claims of miracle are necessarily a-historical, have zero evidence, and are at the core of non-belief. Someone might say “Well you believe other things without evidence, why not this?”. This implies that there is some sort of incentive. Why believe one set of unprovable miracles over another? Why believe something unprovable? Pragmatic reasons; this is the exact contention of many non believers. There really isn't any other reason to believe. 

Anyway, During the Quest for the Historical Jesus, certain scholars like David Price , Richard Carrier, and David Fitzgerald have concluded that evidence leans in favor of the non-existence of Jesus. This is certainly not the majority scholarly view, since Agnostics like Bart Ehrman think the proposition is preposterous, and is almost certainly not the majority view of the public. Conflating mythicism with postmodernism is just bizarre and honestly quite stupid; the three scholars I mentioned above do not advocate for, use, or incorporate postmodern concepts such as standpoint epistemology into their academic work; they have reached their conclusions using methods birthed from the enlightenment. Maybe Christianity is declining because evangelicals and apologists are so far removed from reality that they cannot properly diagnose the issue? “The youth” can’t even comprehend postmodernist philosophy (just like how they cannot comprehend the Trinity); what makes you think that postmodernism deeply rooted in their psychology? I think, that myself and many others born before the turn of the century, are Agnostic because we never had to go through the compulsory indoctrination of the background assumptions. Church was a choice, not mandatory. Consequently, concepts like “Sin” were not drilled into my belief structure, so much of the Bible seems silly. My agnosticism is more of a consequence of “modernism” rather than “post modernism”; British empiricism, logical positivism, enlightenment world-views, classical liberalism etc.

Whether Jesus was a myth by modern historical standards is irrelevant to the believer anyway. Belief in the gospel does not rely on evidence for the historical accuracy of any of the narratives. Can anyone actually claim they believe Exodus because of the historical evidence? Or the “Fall of Man” because they found an artifact proving Adam ate the apple? No one comes to believe it for those reasons. Most Christians grew up in a Christian household and already had these background assumptions firmly engrained from childhood. They believed first, and then found rationalizations afterward when confronted by “enemies of the faith” such as those godless Atheists. They do not learn empirical methods in the sermon or Sunday school; they go to take part in a community of already-believing Christians who take all of the background assumptions for granted. This is not about “proof” and never will be. If you think about the cognitive development of a child shouldn’t it be clear? Children can’t do any basic forms of reasoning or non-trivial evidence assessment before the age of 7. They learn about exodus in Sunday School; it is reinforced by the community they are engaged in and never questioned. Accepting Jesus should be trivial for anyone engaged in this compulsory education. There are some children who never experience non-Christian life until adulthood; and when they do they read about it in a very filtered way, typically demonizing outsiders as "worldly". All of our cognitive biases remain unchecked. We form in-group favoritism, out-group skepticism, never apply critical self-doubt, and this persists into adulthood unless the believer pursues some of these issues seriously. The question of “What causes religious belief systems” is interesting but I am going to save that for later. The crucial point is that it sure isn’t evidence and reason. All Belief formation tends to be a result of:

1. Desire for explanation
2. Seeking patterns in the external world
3. Assume intentionality or agency in those patterns
4. Look to others for corroboration
5. Check if it corresponds with existing beliefs
6. See if “Authorities” closely correspond with our judgment, or if the Tribe agrees
7. Repetition of the message
8. Personal experiences weighted more heavily

I came to realize this recently actually when listening to apologist William Lane Craig give justifications for belief. I come across this sort of apologetic argument frequently: belief coming from experiential knowledge is justified and that reformed epistemology is rational. In a nutshell, this “epistemology” asserts that beliefs do not require justification or evidence. Belief in God can be properly basic, in other words axiomatic, because of our Sensus divinitatis, human sense akin to our five perceptual senses that gives us direct knowledge of Gods existence (that Atheists just so happen to be missing). Wow, what a way to avoid the proving yourself. This sort of “epistemology” appears in presuppositional apologetics; where they presuppose Gods existence and treat scripture as axiomatic (beyond proof, used when proving other things). In other words, the presupposition of God is the ultimate standard; beyond reason, empirical evidence, and any other way of knowing. This is where you hear arguments like “where does logic come from” or “experience is only possible if there is a necessary being”. The logic is summed up below:

Presuppositionalism differs from other groups of Christian apologetics by accusing them of attempting to find neutral grounds (some facts or laws) to establish the Christian worldview. Van Til’s claims that the Christian must from the very beginning presuppose the supernatural revelation of the Bible as the criterion of truth in order to know anything else because all human knowledge presupposes the existence of the Christian God. Borrowing Kant’s transcendental method or argument, which I will discuss later, Van Til argues “The only proof for the existence of God is that without God you could not prove anything”. While criticizing non-Christian worldviews, Van Tilians usually argue they are incoherent in and of themselves and intelligible only because they borrow capital from the Christian worldview. The concept of coherence or consistence plays a crucial role in their defense of their views and in their attacks to their opponents’ as well. Clark puts even more emphasis on coherence. He views the truth of the Bible as an axiom which as the presupposition cannot be proved or disproved. However it must be tested for logical consistency with other presuppositions or axioms within the worldview. The Christian worldview is analogous to an axiom or formal system.

If its not obvious, there is an inherent circularity and intellectual dishonesty embedded in presuppositional apologetics. The presumption is that the Christian world-view is the only consistent and coherent one; simply by assumption. In this view, Belief in God is analogous to the mathematical axiom that you can connect two points in cartesian space with a line. I think its pretty obvious that the two are not even remotely analogical. Furthermore:

The critics of Presuppositionalism usually accuse it of committing a circular reasoning: Presuppositionalism rests on a belief in the Bible as the source of truth because it is inspired by God. Meanwhile we believe in God because the Bible affirms it and the Bible is the source of truth.

I don't want to dwell on this for too long since I wrote about it in one of my previous posts, but here is a list of problems illustrating the problems with this approach:

1. TAG (Transcendental Argument for God) can be used to justify any major religion.
2. In order to presume that the Christian god is the deity required for knowledge to exist, it follows that the Bible must be without question true in every aspect, or true in at least the parts that matter to Christians.
3. PSA is an un-parsimonious false analogy. (comparing dogmatic belief in a deity with reasoning)
4. PSA asserts un-falsifiable divine revelation as justification for their beliefs and downplays the importance of reason, when in fact reason is active at every level of their cognitive process.
5. PSAs must use non-biblical justifications in order to justify why their particular interpretation of the Bible is the correct one.
6. PSAs falsely states that you must need to know the source of logic in order to use it properly.

John Searle has an explanation of what “Belief” is, and how it differs from a presupposition. I personally like this explanation. Belief in God cannot itself be a presupposition because it presupposes the existence of reality, in which God can or cannot be apart of it. It just seems to me to be the antithesis of critical thinking (or thought more broadly). If you want more information on the pitfalls with this approach:

1. refer to this article.
2. or this critique from non-presuppositional apologists

I want to point out that at some level, all practicing Christians are in some loose sense, presuppositionalists. I referred to William Lane Craig above because I think this exemplifies my point. To my knowledge, he does not claim to be a presuppositionalist but definitely advocates for the reformed epistemology approach. I think that this approach to epistemology is very similar to presuppositionalism and that most apologists are closeted presuppositionalists. Take a look at what he says at 6:15 in this video. I shared this interview in a prior blog post but I am simply astounded by the insincerity. He mentions that Christianity is true simply on the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. This inner witness allows you to “know it is true” completely independent of the evidence. Any evidence to the contrary does not controvert the inner witness. If there is no evidence in favor of it right now, you will acquire evidence at some point in the future. To me this sounds identical to the claim “Belief in God is a presupposition”. Specifically he says:

if one’s religious beliefs are to be rational, there must be some other basis for them than the evidence. [Emphasis mine] And I think that there is. Through an existential encounter with God Himself every generation can be made contemporaneous with the first generation. We are therefore not dependent on historical proofs for knowledge of Christianity’s truth. [Emphasis mine] Rather through the immediate, inner witness of God’s Holy Spirit every person can come to know the truth of the Gospel once he hears it. So that’s how I leap Lessing’s ditch. Christian belief is confirmed by the historical evidence for those of us fortunate enough to be epistemically so situated as to be able to appraise it correctly; but Christian belief is not based on the historical evidence. [Emphasis mine] LINK (July 2007). Podcast: LINK (October 1, 2008)

In other words, reason and evidence do not matter when forming your belief about Christianity. I relate this to the presuppositional apologists because their logic seems to be identical. Craig does not need to demonstrate his belief; he can simply presuppose it because of his Sensus divinitatis. In other words, his "inner witness provides incontrovertible self-evidence for belief in God and biblical inerrancy". Does this not sound like the presuppositionalist? The irony is that this seems to be radical subjectivism. I initially came across this when a video was recommended to me on YouTube. Bill Craig is prompted by a Christian to answer whether the believer should raise the epistemic bar when deciding to accept Christianity. Craig follows up by stating we should lower the bar because even if there is a remote possibility of Christianity being true, the expected payoff far surpasses the expected value of being wrong. This is a form of Pascal’s wager, which can be countered with Athiest’s Wager (something I wrote about elsewhere). A brief note: I think Pascal’s Wager is misleading and doesn’t differentiate between different notions of uncertainty. If E(X) = Σ P(X)*V(X), and you have fixed V(X) = ∞, of course it does not matter if P(X) → 0 since infinity multiplied by anything is infinity. However, this is true under the notion of Risk, rather than Knightian Uncertainty. P(X) and V(X) are inherently unknowable, so the statement is vapid. Anyway, The key point is that Craig explicitly states that the burden of proof should be lowered. This is consistent with his prior statements; that belief is beyond evidence and reason. I mean, this is literally biblical. According to the Bible, God is the one who assigns Faith. “Belief In” and “Having Faith” cannot come from evidence and reasons; it is something God must implant in you. You don’t come to believe because of reason and evidence; you must have the inner witness which is delivered to us by God. I think these statements hold true for most Christians.

If we start thinking about what “True Belief” is and we listen to statements from top apologists it becomes clear that this is not something you rationally convince someone to believe. It is not something that you can convince someone out of either. To be clear, the basis of rationality and reasonableness is openness and willingness to change your position in light of better or new evidence or reasons. However, the position that Craig takes is literally the antithesis. So when we ask how a person formed their beliefs about Christianity and they give you X,Y,Z reasons, these are nothing more then ad-hoc rationalizations used to insulate their belief from doubt. They pretend that their reasons were rationally adduced and that's how they came to their position because they don’t want to come off as ignorant. But that is not what Belief is, in the Christian world-view. Belief is the incontrovertible zeal that you must hold despite reasons to the contrary, and God hand-picked you to have it. All evidence to the contrary is interpreted as evidence in favor of their proposition. The way they filter, assess, and identify evidence, reaffirms their belief structure. So when apologists pretend to be sophisticated with their sophistry, just remember what the top apologist of our era states. Here is another example:

Let’s quote more by Craig: “The witness, or testimony, of the Holy Spirit is its own proof; it is unmistakable; it does not need other proofs to back it up; it is self-evident and attests to its own truth. [Craig, Apologetics: An Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), pp. 18–22.]

There is something seriously wrong with rejecting evidence like this, be it historical, scientific, or more, especially since this same line of reasoning can be used by other believers in different deities and invisible unevidenced supernatural beings. Does Craig mean to say that he cannot be wrong? Yes! He knows Christianity is true without any basis in historical evidence. With this understanding, he has insulated himself from any and all objections and objective evidence to the contrary. He knows he’s right because he knows he’s right, and that’s the end of the matter.

Even if all of the evidence is against your position, a devote believer will find out someway to explain it away. This is consistent with the statements he made above. Here is another fun one from the article:

To see this for what it really is, consider the following scenario Mark Smith (of www.jcnot4me.com) presented to Craig for comment:

“Dr. Craig, for the sake of argument let’s pretend that a time machine gets built. You and I hop in it, and travel back to the day before Easter, 33 AD. We park it outside the tomb of Jesus. We wait. Easter morning rolls around, and nothing happens. We continue to wait. After several weeks of waiting, still nothing happens. There is no resurrection — Jesus is quietly rotting away in the tomb.” Smith asked Craig, given this scenario, if he would then give up Christianity, having seen with his own two eyes that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Smith wrote: “His answer was shocking, and quite unexpected. He told me, face to face, that he would STILL believe in Jesus, he would STILL believe in the resurrection, and he would STILL remain a Christian. When asked, in light of his being a personal eyewitness to the fact that there WAS no resurrection, he replied that due to the witness of the ‘holy spirit’ within him, he would assume a trick of some sort had been played on him while watching Jesus’ tomb. This self-induced blindness astounded me. [From page 191 of Why I Became An Atheist]

[From pages 192–193 of Why I Became An Atheist]

That’s what he says. According to Craig, God will not abandon us to the evidence of history or the “accidents of geography.” So there must be some basis for people to believe other than the evidence. How does he come to this conclusion that there must be some basis other than the evidence to believe? He’s assuming that which he needs to prove. He’s assuming his Christian God to explain away a problem — the problem of people who do not have adequate evidence to believe — and that his God would surely not ask them to believe if they couldn’t have access to the evidence.

Even though Muslims and Mormons claim to have the witness of God in their hearts, Craig denies that other conflicting faiths have this exact same self authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, or that their claims are even relevant to the witness he has in his heart.

According to philosopher Michael Martin, “To accept Craig’s thesis one must believe an outrageous and outlandish hypothesis: namely, that billions of people now and in the past were not telling the truth when they claimed that they never had such an experience.” [Michael Martin, “Craig’s Holy Spirit Epistemology” (1998), http://www.infidels .org/library/modern/michael_martin/holy_spirit.html] In other words, the evidence of billions of sincere nonbelievers is evidence that there is no inner Holy Spirit witness of the truth of Christianity. Dr. Craig is explaining away the evidence. Time and again the Christian apologist must concoct scenarios apart from what the independent evidence suggests.

In some sense Craig is saying something very obvious about the nature of religious belief that we are overlooking. He explicitly states that reasons and evidence are irrelevant when forming belief. He also mentions a historical fact that many believers who have not had access to evidence in the past, would have no reason to believe, so there must be some reason beyond all of this that is self-validating. This is completely true; people had no reason to believe and yet still did. The question becomes why? Why hold something to be true without having any reason or evidence in favor of it? Truth of the belief aside, the reasons people form beliefs of this nature seem completely independent of logic, reason, and evidence; beliefs are products of our socioeconomic circumstances. You can consider any situation in which evidence or reason is lacking, and for pragmatic reasons you make a decision; social factors play a significant role. In other words, what Craig claims is the “inner witness”, must be conditional on these cultural reasons we take for granted. So when a pastor or priest claims you need to “Truly Believe”, what are they actually saying? In other words, if consulting evidence and reason are irrelevant, what are the factors that determine a belief system? Why are some truths beyond belief, like certain mathematical theorems?

Background assumptions are crucial for evaluating claims made in scripture. Lets establish some basic terminology first. What is a miracle? Stanford Encyclopedia defines it as:

A miracle (from the Latin mirari, to wonder), at a first and very rough approximation, is an event that is not explicable by natural causes alone. A reported miracle excites wonder because it appears to require, as its cause, something beyond the reach of human action and natural causes. Historically, the appeal to miracles has formed one of the primary lines of argument in favor of specific forms of theism, the argument typically being that the event in question can best (or can only) be explained as the act of a particular deity.

Here are some explanations of miracles of a few philosophers on the Wikipedia page:

1. Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian: The Aristotelian view of God has God as pure actuality[11] and considers him as the prime mover doing only what a perfect being can do, think.[12] Jewish neo-Aristotelian philosophers,[13] who are still influential today, include Maimonides, Samuel ben Judah ibn Tibbon, and Gersonides. Directly or indirectly, their views are still prevalent in much of the religious Jewish community.
2. Baruch Spinoza (See also: Epistemic theory of miracles): In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus Spinoza claims that miracles are merely lawlike events of whose causes we are ignorant. We should not treat them as having no cause or of having a cause immediately available. Rather the miracle is for combating the ignorance it entails, like a political project.
3. David Hume (Of Miracles): According to the philosopher David Hume, a miracle is “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent”. The crux of his argument is this: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” By Hume’s definition, a miracle goes against our regular experience of how the universe works. As miracles are single events, the evidence for them is always limited and we experience them rarely. On the basis of experience and evidence, the probability that miracle occurred is always less than the probability that it did not occur. As it is rational to believe what is more probable, we are not supposed to have a good reason to believe that a miracle occurred.
4. Friedrich Schleiermacher: According to the Christian theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher “every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a miracle as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant”.
5. Søren Kierkegaard: The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, following Hume and Johann Georg Hamann, a Humean scholar, agrees with Hume’s definition of a miracle as a transgression of a law of nature,[17] but Kierkegaard, writing as his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, regards any historical reports to be less than certain, including historical reports of miracles, as all historical knowledge is always doubtful and open to approximation.[18]
6. James Keller: James Keller states that “The claim that God has worked a miracle implies that God has singled out certain persons for some benefit which many others do not receive implies that God is unfair.”

Now what about a prophecy?

• In religion, a prophecy is a message that has been communicated to a person (typically called a prophet) by a supernatural entity. Prophecies are a feature of many cultures and belief systems and usually contain divine will or law, or preternatural knowledge, for example of future events. They can be revealed to the prophet in various ways depending on the religion and the story, such as visions, divination, or direct interaction with divine beings in physical form. Stories of prophetic deeds sometimes receive considerable attention and some have been known to survive for centuries through oral tradition or as religious texts.

Now how about Divine Revelation? It was “revealed” to Paul why Jesus died on the cross. It was “revealed” to Joseph Smith the “truth” of mormonism.

• “Revelation” (lat. revelatio) is a translation of the Greek word apokalypsis, which means the removal of a veil so that something can be seen. Many religions appeal to purported divine revelations in order to explain and justify their characteristic beliefs about God, and revelation has usually been understood as an epistemic notion. Paradigmatically, it refers to alleged instances of divine speaking or special divine acts in history, although in a more general sense “revelation” can denote any means of divine self-disclosure, for example through nature.

Evidence is much harder to define because different domains conceive of evidence differently than others. What counts as evidence? What effect should evidence have on belief in a proposition? At what point do we say evidence is “enough” to justify belief in something? According to Craig, you don’t need evidence. But in the court of law, any scientific domain, and even day to day reasoning, we require and explicitly (or implicitly) define proof standards when accepting claims. On a probabilistic view, evidence is that which makes a proposition more or less plausible. Something does not have evidential force if the effective probability does not change after observing or acquiring it.

• Probabilistic approaches, also referred to as Bayesian confirmation theory, explain the evidential relation in terms of probabilities. They hold that all that is necessary is that the existence of the evidence increases the likelihood that the hypothesis is true. This can be expressed mathematically as P(H|E) > P(H). In words: a piece of evidence (E) confirms a hypothesis (H) if the conditional probability of this hypothesis relative to the evidence is higher than the unconditional probability of the hypothesis by itself. Smoke (E), for example, is evidence that there is a fire (H), because the two usually occur together, which is why the likelihood of fire given that there is smoke is higher than the likelihood of fire by itself. On this view, evidence is akin to an indicator or a symptom of the truth of the hypothesis. Against this approach, it has been argued that it is too liberal because it allows accidental generalizations as evidence.

Lets take this as our approach to evidence. As seen above, it is argued that it is extremely liberal in “what counts” as evidence. This will serve as beneficial to the believer; so we are not constraining them. But given what a miracle, prophecy, revelation, and evidence is, I think it becomes clear why religious belief (as Craig claims) is independent of evidence.

Suppose I grew up an evangelical Christian. There will be a variety of beliefs serving as a foundation for how I explain things. If we take religion to be an explanatory mechanism by which we make sense of the world; miracles, prophecies, and revelation will be a crucial foundation. In other words, belief in the proposition “Jesus rose from the dead” and the “evidence is that the bible says it” will have differing probability assessments from a person brought up with these background assumptions. A non-believer probably thinks prophecies are bullshit and miracles are simply extremely unlikely events requiring extraordinary evidence. Divine Revelation might be a schizophrenic symptom causing unusual behavior. For a believer, miracles are not improbable events (they happen all the time, just look around you!), and prophecies are part of their narratology. Believing the additional biblical claim “Jesus rose on the third day” is not controversial for a world view consisting on miracles, prophecies, and revelation(and a presupposed God that willed the events). There could be absolutely no evidence for this if your world view is evangelical but since The Bible is inerrant word of God and you were touched by the Holy spirit; you literally do not need evidence. It simply follows from the background assumptions (which I think are primarily an artifact of socioeconomic circumstances). Consider a muslim born in Saudi Arabia, believing at face value miraculous claims in the Quran. A Christian immediately becomes an atheist skeptic like David Hume when evaluating these miracles and prophecies; because they run contrary and are hostile to their own stance. And this is what I mean from the very beginning; “True Belief” is more than accepting “evidence”. When a pastor is prompting you to zealously believe, what they mean is “believe the whole system”. Believe not the claim “Jesus rose on the third day”, but “Believe that our conception of miracles is correct, prophecies can be fulfilled (they are not vague crystal ball fortunes like those other religions), and that God speaks to us in the form of Divine Revelation!”. In other words, its not “Believe X”, it is “Believe X and don’t question any of these things buttressing X”.

So this makes sense in the context of what Bill Craig asserts. If you have the witness of the “holy spirit”, empirical evidence is irrelevant. For someone not brought up in this background would require extraordinary evidence to accept a claim that God rose God from dead, the “inner witness” is sufficient by itself, and any shred of biblical testimony is just icing on the cake because the “inner witness” already presupposes its authenticity and authority as factual above all else. So if you are engaging with a Christian who is “about the evidence”; they probably aren’t. It is not about belief revision. The only way they can understand and filter information in the world is in a way that reaffirms these foundational assumptions. And as with all theories, it can easily be readjusted to fit the data. Its obviously circular, just like presuppositionalism. “Inner witness” (unfalsifiable, infallible) provides proof of biblical inerrancy, and biblical inerrancy reaffirms the “inner witness”; an event is observed, its interpreted within the belief system, it reaffirms the belief system, and therefore reaffirms the initial witness.

Lets go back to the Carl Sagan claim: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Lets throw in Christopher Hitchens as well: that which is is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Jesus being raised from the dead is not extraordinary to a believer, and what non-believers perceive to be a significant lack of evidence (empty tomb testimonial in the bible) is enough evidence for a believer; in fact it is the best evidence because their information base (primary way of interpreting everything) is the bible itself. The bible literally supersedes any contrary evidence; this is the testimonial bias I mentioned above. I will throw in “logical arguments” for God in here as well. Evidential reasons aside, there is no point in engaging with arguments for God because all of them presuppose the existence of God. Here is a nice explanation of Craigs interpretation of “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and why he rejects it.

It doesn’t seem like I am the first person to recognize this. In “Do Religious Beliefs Respond to Evidence?” and “Religious Credence is Not Factual Belief”, Neil Van Leeuwen argues the same thing:

Abstract

Some examples suggest that religious credences (or “beliefs”) respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton’s (1990) theory of make-believe.

Leeuwen refers to the notion of “evidential vulnerability” which characterizes religious credence as opposed to factual beliefs. A religious belief lacks evidential vulnerability because it is distinguished from the type of belief characterizing factual matters.

In addition, religious credences have further striking properties of their own: (a) they give perceived normative orientation in life (though their contents are not normative, religious agents take themselves to be doing good in virtue of acting on them Footnote1); (b) they are susceptible to creative elaboration that generates new credences; and © they are vulnerable to special authority: certain individuals — priests, shamans, gurus — are empowered to dictate their contents.

His main thesis is that a religious credence is marked by a lack of evidential vulnerability.

The Evidence Game Thesis: religious credences are not evidentially vulnerable, and their appearance of evidential responsiveness is typically due to an agent’s deployment of internal and external religious props (r-props), which function in religious enactments, including what I call The Evidence Game, in ways that parallel how props function in games of make-believe.Footnote2

The evidence game is what apologists play when prompted to provide justification for belief. It appears evidentiary when in fact it is simply performative. Leeuwen points out that the psychological process underlying this special pleading functions identically to make-believe games. An example Leeuwen gives is something I am familiar with when coming across “The Case for Christ”:

Apologists often urge that their religious texts are historical documents or even “eye-witness accounts.” Christian apologists, for example, often claim that the resurrection is supported by historical evidence, namely, the Gospels. So even if no religious texts are in fact historically accurate (or if all their supernatural portions are unhistorical), the fact that apologists seem to care about their historical status suggests that credences based on them might respond to evidence in some way.

When I came across this book I thought it was ridiculous that the author was coming off as a hard-lined evidentialist who couldn’t deny the evidence in favor of the resurrection. The book is incredibly flawed; but the point is that he is coming off as if his religious credences are responsive to evidence. To a non-critical thinker, he looks authoritative and reputable. When I developed my empirical mind, it was through books such as Analysis of Evidence and Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning, along with rigorous training in statistics. When I came across this book he just seemed very fraudulent; just by the description of the book itself. Anyone engaged in empirical work understands that there is always disconfirming evidence, and yet this was entirely absent in the book. And wouldn't you know it, the apologist from the Catholic website I listed above references this book as "reason why Atheists convert":

3. HISTORICAL STUDY OF THE GOSPELS.

Lee Strobel, the former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune and author of the influential work, The Case For Christ, is a prime example of what happens when an honest atheist sets out to establish once and for all whether the claims of the Gospels are reliable or not.

The irony with this one, is that it was the first example I came across when encountering ingenuine apologetic writings. To me this is the pinnacle of bullshit. After being unfortunately introduced to this book, I read the introduction to see what it is about, only to find that it’s written in the typical apologetic style that can only be convincing to existing believers. A student of evidence myself, I am familiar with evidentiary practice written by authors such as Wigmore, William Twining, and Susan Haack. I am also familiar with the epistemology of evidentialism. One could consider me, an honest non-believer fully dedicated to understanding evidentiary practices and commitment to belief revision. Apparently I am just a liar, since I found obvious problems from the start.

For starters, I am not sure why “Journalist” is given any credibility as “objective and unbiased” other than to enhance Strobel’s reputation as authoritative and reliable; to make the book more credible. A quick look at the media shows it is inherently tied up with a profit driven agenda. If you’ve read manufacturing consent, your mind may be ultra sensitive to the ways in which mass media can manipulate. Even without reading this book, simply asking whether journalistic objectivity is possible or actual, leads you to countless examples where journalists have breached objectivity standards in favor of sensationalism, defamation, and censorship (congruent with the propaganda model). I would argue that there is no inherent or obvious marker of journalism being committed to evidence and objectivity; so the citing his background does not enhance his credibility. Furthermore, it just begs the question; are those outside of the occupation committed to deceit and subjectivity?

Journalists have radically diverging opinions and consistently do no converge on truth or factuality. Science reporters typically do this by distorting the breadth of evidence within scientific databases; typically citing single articles that are consistent with their presumptions and neglecting to mention contradictory disconfirming results. If you read the book, this is exactly how Lee Strobel presents his material. Very broadly, if one is using their occupation as evidence for their preoccupation with “objective determination to find the truth”, one could ask what sort of pitfalls are commonly associated with this profession. A quick look at Media Bias can give you a nice introduction, but one in particular is obviously the confirmation bias. American press institute has a nice article covering how “objectivity” has lost its meaning. And this university has catalogued some of the common reporting biases. This university library catalog has some nice visuals describing the presence of bias.

Anyway, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole, but the point is that the reputability of journalism is not all that convincing for me. The point of showing all the ways a journalist can be biased, is to show that there is nothing inherent in “being a journalist” that necessarily enhances your authority as “an objective and evidence driven person” because simply observing the world shows this is not the case. This is done to boost the authors credibility, and this was an immediate red flag for me. However, the “objective Atheist searching for the truth and becoming a believer” trope captivates the minds of Christians (think back to St. Paul and C.S. Lewis). The testimony of a “skeptic” reaffirming their beliefs is much stronger than the testimony of some villager in Nepal, because “skeptics” are the ones who normally doubt Christianity; if a skeptic has converted, that is just like Paul converting so it must be true!

So right off the back, I had some questions concerning the presentation of this book. It seems like its trying to paint a picture of authoritative reputability, but is it just more journalistic prose? This is when I began reading the table of contents and the introductions to each chapter. It became clear that, this is exactly what the book is: journalistic prose. Lee Strobel begins every chapter with an elegant story containing metaphors and analogies. Each story contains a recollection of a legal case; and in each legal case there is some sort of theme surrounding the use of evidence and jumping to hasty conclusions; as in the introduction, the example of a potential false conviction. It’s also told in first person point of view, so Lee Strobel must personally understand all of the ways evidence can point in multiple directions; he even makes sure to use words such as “thoroughly examined” as if that the reader is supposed to know what he specifically did. Along with this, the theme of each narrative is to show that certain pieces of evidence (such as witness testimony) are far more credible than initially assumed (despite the immense amount of contradictory research done by Elizabeth Loftus, who pretty much wrote the book outlining all of the ways memory is inherently unreliable). This sort of priming is astounding, the prose definitely orients the reader to Strobel’s practical experience handling evidence and stopping at nothing for the truth. He is willing to pursue a question to its ultimate end, even to the point where unexpected evidence prompts reconsideration, while everyone else seems to be satisfied with the initial conclusion (just like us idiots who don’t believe the bible). If you’re noticing a pattern, this is Lee Strobel presenting his own testimony to a Christian audience, similar to other conversion stories, but in which he poses as someone concerned solely about facts and truth.

The problem with all of this however, is that books, articles, journals, and research dealing with empirical truths, do not give personalized context. They review the literature, show the methodology, and qualify their results. What Lee Strobel is doing storytelling using narrative and rhetorical techniques. In other words, he is doing journalism; implying an agenda and bias. This becomes obvious when you do a bit of digging and find that he converted before he conducted any of these interviews in his book. He already believed what he set out to prove. In other words, he didn’t follow the bread crumbs which lead him to Christianity, he constructed a sequence of bread crumbs predestined to arrive at Christianity. This is why you see ridiculous softball questions in the book, highly selective people he decided to interview who are all evangelicals, and weird things apparently Atheists say. You can kind of see traces of this in the very beginning:

1. “How could there be a loving God if he consigned people to hell just for not believing in him?” — I find this interesting because the problem of hell to me seems like a theological issue presumed by an Abrahamic Religion, not Atheism. To show the inconsistencies of theism, Atheists can point out Hell, but this is not a problem for Atheists since they don't believe in it. 
2. “How could miracles contravene the basic laws of nature?” — I am not even sure what this means; most Atheists would probably just say that miracles are ispo-facto unprovable and therefore not very reliable as a source of evidence
3. “Didn’t evolution satisfactorily explain how life originated?” — Biology 101 and the wikipedia page could have answered this one for you; it is a theory of dynamics, not origin.
4. “Doesn’t scientific reasoning dispel belief in the supernatural?” — Science can’t disprove God, there ya go. But it sure can chip away at beliefs theological in origin. 

These sure sound like “things a Skeptic would say” if you are a Christian who assumes things about Atheists because of what your Pastor says every sunday. This really hits home when he says the one thing so many Christians want to hear:

But that’s all I had ever really given the evidence: a cursory look. I had read just enough philosophy and history to find support for my skepticism-a fact here, a scientific theory there, a pithy quote, a clever argument. Sure, I could see some gaps and inconsistencies, but I had a strong motivation to ignore them: a self-serving and immoral lifestyle that I would be compelled to abandon if I were ever to change my views and become a follower of Jesus.

Here it is: All he wanted to do was Sin baby! He couldn’t handle the truth! Lets just look past the fact that he explicitly admits that he was extremely ignorant to philosophical argumentation and the scientific method; which would of course beg the question: so have you actually considered any contradictory evidence to whatever it is you currently believe or anything at all? Were you just a brainless vat, floating around in time and space, as your writings seem to imply? This is written for a Christian audience. Why wouldn't Christians be more skeptical of salesmen who are just telling them things they want to hear? Is this what I will become if I accept our Lord Savior?

This is not a book review of Lee Strobel’s masterpiece that has captivated the world, so I want to move on. But before I do, there was one part of the book that just absolutely drove me insane. Just to clarify, I come from a data driven, empirically minded background. The level of accuracy, specificity, reliability, coherence, and consistency is crucial when making data-driven decisions because there is a lot at stake. You cannot simply speculate when evidence is insufficient. With that in mind, I came across “evidence scholarship” that is simply arguing for historical fact on the basis of analogy, rather than direct inference from what evidence we have. One thing Strobel should know, is that evidence driven inquiry necessarily qualifies and limits the scope of what you wish to infer, and it is almost always messy, pointing in multiple directions. 

The example falls under the heading “The Gospels Theological Agenda”. The case in question is whether the Gospel of John is (in academic terms “Theory Laden”) biased by a theological agenda. In other words, was the author of the Gospel simply inserting theological presuppositions, filtering out facts or events that did not reaffirm the theology, or was constructing a historical account on the basis of what the author was intending to prove based on the theological presumptions. Think about it from another perspective; if I am retelling a story of something that happened to me to a specific audience, how am I crafting the story in such a way to make myself appear a certain way? Am I simply retelling the events without narration; constructing a chronological series of events? Or am I inserting, emphasizing, embellishing, ignoring, changing, adapting, or simply creating, content in order to fit my agenda? If I am collecting information to construct “the Gospel”, am I following best practices to avoid bias with compiling a list of the relevant facts? Did I collect information that only confirms what I wish to prove, and did I present it in an honest way free from additions or edits? If I made any changes to the raw evidence, did I make note of this to the reader? These same questions also apply to Strobel and his series of interviews. These sorts of questions emerge when you start asking “How was the Gospel written?” rather than just assume “Word of God”. Whoever the author of John is, couldn’t have been an eye-witness. So the question facing us is: How did he acquire the information presented to us in (this version) of the Bible? Think about it like this, suppose he interviews a person who was allegedly around Jesus prior to Crucifixion. Lets set aside the question “How do we know if the author of John verified that this interviewee was actually present where he claimed to be, and how can we verify that this interviewee was not simply hearing about the story second-hand through word of mouth?”. Lets say the guy responded with “They didn’t bury Jesus, the person in that tomb was Old-Man Jenkins!”; how do we know that the author of John didn’t simply throw away this interview since it didn’t support his theological agenda? More broadly, here are a few more obvious biases when conducting interviews or sampling:

• Conformity Bias
• Affinity Bias
• Non-response Bias
• Survivorship Bias
• Acquiescence bias
• Question Order Bias
• Primacy Bias
• Writing Survey Questions
• Selecting Study Participants

Did people at the time even consider reporting information in such a factual manner?

Craig Blomberg, being an evangelical scholar, will obviously think there was no agenda or think it is irrelevant. This is what I was mentioning before; the selection of the interviewees was obviously crafted in such a way to point to the conclusion Strobel wanted to prove (while maintaining the smoke screen that he is an impartial interviewer seeking the truth). This is classic journalistic bias in action; selective interviewing. If I am covering the Vietnam protests but have an pro-Vietnam agenda, I will likely limit the range of interviews I conduct to the counter-protestors who admonish the necessity of a protest. I am selectively sampling at this point; ignoring variability that might make my position seem less desirable. Your telling me Strobel couldn’t survey a range of scholars who might have differing opinions? This is what an “objective person seeking the truth” would do. Was the author of John objectively seeking the truth?

Here is the dialogue from the book:

“Doesn’t the fact that John was writing with more of a theological bent mean that his historical material may have been tainted and therefore less reliable?” “I don’t believe John is more theological,” Blomberg stressed. “He just has a different cluster of theological emphases. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each have very distinctive theological angles that they want to highlight: Luke, the theologian of the poor and of social concern; Matthew, the theologian trying to understand the relationship of Christianity and Judaism; Mark, who shows Jesus as the suffering servant. You can make a long list of the distinctive theologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.” I interrupted because I was afraid Blomberg was missing my broader point. “OK, but don’t those theological motivations cast doubt on their ability and willingness to accurately report what happened?” I asked. “Isn’t it likely that their theological agenda would prompt them to color and twist the history they recorded?”

So from the get go, Blomberg readily admits there are theological motivations behind the construction of ALL the gospels. This would be very similar to someone having a profit driven motive behind reporting the news. Now, unless you have an obvious political bias, I would argue that most “evidence minded people” would be aware of this factor, and seek multiple sources of information before forming an opinion on something you read in the news. You can imagine that the stronger the motivation, the more distorted the reporting becomes. Blomberg's response is predictable and Strobel’s interaction is hilarious:

“It certainly means that as with any ideological document, we have to consider that as a possibility,” he admitted. “There are people with axes to grind who distort history to serve their ideological ends, but unfortunately people have concluded that always happens, which is a mistake. “In the ancient world the idea of writing dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events, with no ideological purpose, was unheard of. Nobody wrote history if there wasn’t a reason to learn from it.” I smiled. “I suppose you could say that makes everything suspect,” I suggested.

Consider the word “possibly” and refer to the image below:

“Possible” is a term you use when something is NOT impossible, but very unlikely and not plausible. In other words, If I say something is “possible” I am assigning such little probability to it that I would bet against it the majority of the time. Blomberg saying that the theological agenda “possibly” distorting the content in the Gospel is so unlikely that is not even plausible. BUT THIS IS THE VERY THING HE NEEDS TO PROVE USING EVIDENCE. He needs to SHOW that manipulations were so unlikely that its not really a consideration! He just ASSUMES that the author of John was fully reliable but provides no reason to support this except by saying “It (this sort of bias) does not ALWAYS happen”, and then proceeds further by saying “Everyone else did it”. THIS IS NOT EVIDENCE BASED SCHOLARSHIP, THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION BASED RULE OF THUMB TO DISCOUNT ANY DOUBT. Of course there are instances where there have not been agenda-based historical writings; SHOW THAT THIS IS ONE OF THEM. Do not assume that this is one of them, when you readily admit that THIS IS NOT THE NORM. Furthermore, if you do suspect that there could have been tampering, point to evidence showing that it is trivial!

The response from Lee Strobel was hilarious: “I Smiled, You probably couldn’t trust anything then” (hehehe). This is the sort of dismissiveness that drives me crazy; “If you can’t trust the Gospel of John then you can’t trust anything from history”. Its the type of nihilistic rhetoric exclusive to Christian Apologetics you see time and time again: “They are just being skeptics and knit picking. The Bible is 100% inerrant and they are just lying”. So Lee Strobel, the “Father All Mighty of Evidence and Objectivity” readily overlooks the fact that Blomberg provided absolutely no evidence for his claim; he simply assumes the reliability. Lets continue to the rest of the dialogue:

“Yes, at one level it does,” he replied. “But if we can reconstruct reasonably accurate history from all kinds of other ancient sources, we ought to be able to do that from the gospels, even though they too are ideological.” Blomberg thought for a moment, searching his mind for an appropriate analogy to drive home his point.

So again, no evidence for the specific question, he simply asserts that other sources have the same ideological problems as the Gospels. But This is where it gets good:

“Here’s a modern parallel, from the experience of the Jewish community, that might clarify what I mean. Some people, usually for anti-Semitic purposes, deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust. But it has been the Jewish scholars who’ve created museums, written books, preserved artifacts, and documented eyewitness testimony concerning the Holocaust.” “Now, they have a very ideological purpose-namely, to ensure that such an atrocity never occurs again-but they have also been the most faithful and objective in their reporting of historical truth.” “Christianity was likewise based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space and time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.” He let his analogy sink in. Turning to face me more directly, he asked, “Do you see my point?” I nodded to indicate that I did.

So yet again, the author does not provide evidence to show that the author of John is unbiased and not driven by theological motivations; he provides an analogy to argue that the author is probably not biased. I have said this before, and I will say it again: Apologetics will never be about evidence, it will always be about bullshit. Since this book is supposed to be about “The hard-lined evidential pursuit of truth”, and the Scholar provides not evidence, but an analogy, to make his point, we can simply dismiss it. But lets consider how the two examples given are NOT analogues.

To start, why am I dismissing analogy? Because analogy is not proof of anything. The purpose of analogy is to compare two things (objects, events, stories etc.) to infer that what is predicated of the source can also be predicated of the target. It is an argument technique to persuade an audience that “Because X and Y are similar on attributes a,b, and c, they must also be similar on d,e, and f, even though we are not sure because there is no evidence”. Analogy is used specifically when we don’t have evidence for direct inference. It is a type subclass of metaphor or parable used for illustrative purposes; but is not a substitute for actual proof. It is necessarily a defeasible form of inference. In structured form:

• 1. X has certain characteristics a, b, r …
• 2. Y has the characteristics a, b, r …
• 3. But Y also has the characteristics x, y, and z
• 4. Therefore, X has the characteristics x, y, and z

Here is another variation:

• Scheme: (PS is the primary subject, A is the analogue, TP is the target predicate)
• Premise 1: PS is like A in S’ . . . S”
• Premise 2:A has TP.
• Conclusion: So, PS has TP.
• Example: The universe and a machine are similar in that both are divided into an intricate pattern of parts and subparts A machine has a maker. Therefore, the universe has a maker.

And the more general form:

• Major Premise: Generally, case C1 is similar to case C2
• Relevant Similarity Premise: The similarity between C1 and C2 observed so far is relevant to the further similarity that is in question
• Minor Premise: Proposition A is true( false ) in case C1
• Conclusion: Proposition A is true (false ) in case C2

Since this is not proof, we can dismiss it. But if we want to dismantle the analogy, we can ask the following critical questions:

• CQ1 : Is A true ( false) in C1?
• CQ2 : Are C1 and C2 similar, in the respects cited?
• CQ3: Are there important differences (dissimilarities ) between C1 and C2?
• CQ4: Is there some other case C3 that is also similar to C1 except that A is false ( true) in C3?

Lets target the similarity premise. Blomberg is claiming that (PS) the biblical authors are similar to modern historians (A) in that they both share ideological reasons for documenting the respective events. Modern historians have nonetheless, been rigorous and truthful(TP) in their work in maintaining the historical record regarding Nazi internment camps; therefore so were the early gospel writers. That’s it; that is his proof. Now I am very fortunate that his low standards are not the norm. Imagine if medical researchers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, your financial planner, or your doctor made decisions using such methods. Imagine for a second, overhearing a couple of civil engineers deciding to build a bridge saying “well, this other one worked, therefore this one will work”. It is absolutely absurd to consider any of this book as serious evidence scholarship. But gosh, the narratology in the book: “He turned his face directly to me and asked ‘do you see my point?’, I nodded to indicate I did”. If that convinced you Lee Strobel, I imagine you routinely get ripped off by salesmen wherever you go. The ultra skeptic couldn’t even question the validity of the analogy, let alone call out that no evidence was presented? I will show why the analogy is bogus since this skeptic couldn’t.

To begin, the Holocaust is very believable in that Genocide is a regularly occurring phenomenon across human history. The Gospels however, maintain that someone was resurrected from the dead and this was the only instance of a resurrection ever; the ultimate miracle. So we are comparing a regularity versus a miraculous (and inherently theological) event; the historical conditions surrounding the two are very dissimilar. Next, the Holocaust is not corroborated by a few patchy accounts; there are mountains of evidence confirming that it happened. Not only are there millions of eye witnesses, some of whom are still alive, there are literally physical artifacts proving it happened (mass graves, jewelry, the actual sites themselves). There is evidence from the perpetrators and the victims; not just one side as in the case of the Gospels. Not only was there confirmation from the Americans, but the Soviets as well. Lastly, we did not have to wait 60+ years for anything to be documented. We almost instantly knew what was happening; there was no oral transmission for generations following the alleged events. Anyone finding this analogy convincing wants to be convinced; they are not concerned with truth.

But I guess I am just not an honest non-believer.

Anyway, lets go back to Leeuwen's paper about the bullshit apologists pull. Leeuwen also notes this:

Moreover, religious actors often avoid evidence that seems like it could disconfirm their credences. Such avoidance might suggest (ironically) that religious credences respond to evidence after all. Why avoid that which would not have an effect anyway? Intercessory prayer seems to illustrate such avoidance. Barrett (Citation2001) presents four studies that suggest people are more likely to pray for divine interventions that involve psychological or biological changes than for interventions that involve mechanical changes; in other words, they are more likely to pray for God to change someone’s mind than for God to plug a leak in a boat. Barrett’s Study 4 is instructive: of 70 participants, only 2 reported on a questionnaire that they would pray for a divine intervention that would violate physical regularities (by way of contrast, 57 and 49 said they would pray for psychological and biological interventions, respectively). One explanation for such data (but not the only one Footnote5) is that people are avoiding creating situations that would produce counterevidence to their credences about God (e.g. credences with contents like that God is omnipotent, that God answers prayers, etc.). That avoidance suggests (again, ironically) that credences would respond to counterevidence, if it were encountered.

The main point is that even when religious people come off as receptive to evidence, they are most likely not. This should NOT be surprising given when Bill Craig mentions above. He explicitly states this: “Religious belief should not be subject to the shifting sends of evidence”. Leeuwen writes:

Still, most examples of apparent responsiveness to evidence on the part of religious credences are suspicious. They seem like opportunistic justifications for clinging to what one was going to cling to anyway. Furthermore, genuine responsiveness to evidence would undermine some other cultural functions religious credences characteristically have. For example, the evidential immobility of credences makes them good indicators of allegiance to a religious in-group: people with attitudes that defy evidence behave in striking ways that clearly mark their commitment to the group (Sosis and Alcorta Citation2003; Norenzayan Citation2013, Chapter 7). Otherwise put, if my credence that our god exists can be banished by something so trifling as mere evidence, how can you be sure that I am really committed to our group, which defines itself by allegiance to our god? Taking this point into account, we should expect religious credences mostly not to respond to evidence.

This corresponds directly with what the apologist admits. This shouldn’t be surprising anyway given that we know religious belief is inherently dogmatic. It is not the only form of dogma but definitely represents the canonical example. If religious credences are not subject to evidential vulnerability, what is the “game” people are playing when they do apologetics? If you think of Bill Craigs “Reasonable Faith”, it is an R-prop:

This section develops this view, deploying Walton’s notion of prop. How does doing this support the aims of this paper? Developing a general picture of how r-props work in religious practice allows us to say what is going on when religious credences appear to respond to evidence. R-props are entities in the world that, according to certain rules of a game, dictate some religious credences; and some r-props control credences in ways that resemble how evidence controls factual beliefs, without actually doing so via evidential vulnerability; hence the false appearance that those religious credences respond to evidence.

You can read the article for a fuller picture of what the Evidence Game theory means, but it seems to map directly on to reality given the statements explicitly mentioned by the worlds top apologist. The idea is that it APPEARS as if this line of apologetics is subjecting itself to evidential vulnerability, but really it is not subjecting itself to the nature of evidential inquiry (as Craig explicitly confesses), while appealing to the authority of the process. This is exactly what it felt like when reading parts of “Case for Christ”: it felt like a façade. Think about the message it is implicitly extending to audiences reading garbage like this: “We used all of the reasoning/evidence faculties that these ‘skeptics’ use and have concluded that Christianity was right all along! Not only are they wrong, but they are unreasonable for not accepting the truth! We are not only righteous, but smart enough to see all of the logic and evidence!”.

There is a class of apologetics that demonstrates the “truth” of religious belief by referring to “a former atheist” who “could not deny the arguments and evidence anymore”; they “had” to accept it. It was as obviously factual to them as the sun being in the sky. This is very appealing to a believer, as it reinforces their beliefs. The performative aspect is obvious: it serves as religious testimony, they kind you see in Church, that reinforces the group beliefs.

Most religious enactments are rituals, ceremonies, prayer episodes, burials, etc. that help people relate overarching narratives of their religions to their own personal narratives. An r-prop can generate credences that put one’s personal life into a wider story. R-props allow one to say (and creed), “The Virgin Mary visited me.” Or, “The servants in the afterlife will serve me.” But another form of religious enactment occurs less often, and it only sometimes connects personal and overarching narratives. This form of religious enactment arises in cultural contexts in which practices of giving arguments co-exist with religious traditions, such that people are tempted for various reasons to enact a game that merges the two. I call this The Evidence Game. All the features of religious enactment explained in the last section (points (a′)–(d′)) are present in The Evidence Game. The aim of The Evidence Game is to produce a narrative that portrays religious credences themselves as based on evidence.

Bill Craig fits this model. His “reasons” are part of the evidence game. The “inner witness” is what caused and reinforces his belief. Reasons and logic are secondary and tertiary. Rational arguments are the R-Props in this game. It is funny that I found this article because this is exactly what it felt like when I came across “Arguments for Gods Existence”. None of them were convincing and something felt off about them. Watching debates seemed to reaffirm what I originally felt; there was no amount of counter-evidence or argumentative defeaters sufficient enough to even get the religious person to say “Hmm you have a point there”. I think this could be a function of the existentiality embedded in religious credences; showing doubt is itself heretical. All of this is reaffirmed by the very statements expressed by apologists; belief actually comes from “inner-witness” and can be presupposed. The Evidence Game is a belief preserving mechanism. Not surprising since this is pretty much what the definition of apologetics is.

So what does a person do when he is skeptical of revelation as a source of knowledge, prophecies, miracles, praying, the “Fall of Man”, etc? What does this person do when they realize these completely contradict every notion of critical thinking? I guess it doesn’t matter, because when God feels like it, he will give that person Faith.

Additional Reading:

• What are Belief Systems?
• The Biochemistry of Belief
• Psychology: How We Form Beliefs
• A Cognitive Account of Belief: A Tentative Road Map
• Belief Formation: A Driving Force for Brain Evolution
• What is Indoctrination?
• Compulsory Indoctrination
• Abducted children and youth in Lord’s Resistance Army in Northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): mechanisms of indoctrination and control
• What is Indoctrination?
• A superb article against the religious indoctrination of children
• Conversion and Brain Washing In New Religious Movements
• The Development of Belief
• Is a Claim True? 4 Criteria to Evaluate
• Surprising Ways we form Beliefs
• Psychic Epistemology: The Special Pleading of William Lane Craig
• William Lane Craig Goes After Me For
• Why Reasonable People Should Not Debate William Lane Craig
• How Belief Systems Work | Episode 1010 | Closer To Truth

Like all of my other posts, this one is becoming incredibly long. I will finish up by responding to some of the other points in that Catholic apologetic article. 

4. HONEST PHILOSOPHICAL REASONING.

Philosophy means “love of truth.” Philosophy is meant to lead one to truth; and it certainly will, if the philosopher is willing to honestly consider the arguments from both sides and follow the best arguments wherever they may lead.

Ok this could just be nitpicking but philosophy means “love of wisdom”. I mean literally dude, c'mon. Back to the “honest” qualifier; and you can imagine where the “best arguments” lead you to. Since this is a Catholic apologetic website, I was awaiting the first mention of Thomas Aquinas. As in typical “testimonial” form, we have:

Psychologist Dr. Kevin Vost recalls his discovery of the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas:

“Pope Leo XIII had written in the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris that for scientific types who follow only reason, after the grace of God, nothing is as likely to win them back to the faith as the wisdom of St. Thomas, and this was the case for me. He showed me how true Christian faith complements and perfects reason; it doesn’t contradict or belittle it. He solved all the logical dilemmas.”

“The scientific types who follow only reason” echoes the “reasonable Atheist” debauchery from above. Doesn’t Kevin Vost realize that modern science, the science he presumably studied to achieve his degree, completely rejects Aristotelian science? During the Renaissance, it was the rejection of the teleological world-view subsuming Aristotelianism and Scholasticism that characterized Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy. These arguments can only be convincing under this presumption. I wonder how he compartmentalizes conflicting natural philosophies.

Furthermore, what branch of philosophy are you referring to? I never realized that philosophy was a monolith consisting of only one topic to argue for or against. Does Aquinas have a political philosophy? It seems like it is a regurgitation of Aristotle (as all of the scholastics were guilty of). What this guy seems to be doing is reducing all of philosophy down to the philosophy of religion. Aquinas’ Five Ways is no doubt significant in this respect, but shouldn’t we consider that every argument for the existence of God has been refuted, rebutted, or undermined? And given what I wrote about above, we already know these arguments are merely symptoms of motivated reasoning. It seems like someone well read in the philosophy of religion would realize this; which is probably why Five Ways is not convincing to modern philosophers. This is simply not how philosophy is done anymore (simple syllogistic arguments). This is how scholastic philosophy was done, and how we oriented our understanding of the natural world. Which is also why it is a little confusing that this Kevin Vost character says “scientists who follow reason”; science is a fusion of rationalism and empiricism. I thank the lord that we no longer solely use rationalistic methods to discern empirical truths; we build models, collect data, and test their reliability against experimental data. We use computational methods. Science moves forward when our observations get better, not when our arguments get more dogmatic.

When Vost claims that Aquinas proved that Christianity completes and perfects reason, I would just refer everyone to the idea of Fideism. In so many words, Christians want Faith to be reasonable and empirical, but that's not what Faith is (read your bible). If you are interested in a few philosophers of religion who are Atheist check out Graham Oppy, John L Mackie, Michael Martin, Quentin Smith, Nicholas Everitt, Paul Draper, Jordan Howard Sobel, Erik Wielenberg, Richard Gale, Michael Martin, Bede Rundell, Evan Fales, Alex Malpass, Gregory Dawes, and Martin Hagglund…. to name a few. As the author of this article mentions, it is good to consider ALL of the arguments. So if you find Aquinas convincing, read some professionals who do not find him convincing.

Moving on to the next testimony; Ed Feser is a philosopher who tries to revitalize the Aristotelian arguments. One thing to note about him, is that he rejects Newtonian Mechanics and thinks modern science needs to fuse with Aristotelianism. Anyone rejecting modern methods in favor of scholastic world-views should immediately be deemed suspect. Here is his testimony:

Philosopher Dr. Ed Feser, in his article, The Road From Atheism, recounts the shocking effect of opening himself to the arguments for the existence of God:

“As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.” Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”

Feser concludes:

“Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much. When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back. As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed. But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.”

It’s the last statement that is the smug narcissism we have all been waiting for. This guy must think he is God. I don’t think this requires any sort of argument; the majority of philosophers are Atheist or non-believers of some sort. Here is a list of some who may not specifically do Philosophy of Religion, but are nonetheless some of the most influential people to walk the planet. I mean is this guy really trying to say that Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, John Searle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Shelly Kagan, Thomas Nagel, Peter Singer, and Nietzsche (literally just to name a few) just simply did not “know enough philosophy” to believe in god? It is these sort of belittling comments that fry me. Of course, there is a correlation between the level of philosophical knowledge one holds and their degree of conviction in Theism. In modern times, it has heavily tilted in favor of non-belief. In Pre-modern times, it was heavily in favor of Theism. One would suppose that there is a third factor causing this “degree of belief” and that levels of philosophical knowledge are just incidental. Might I suggest, the absence of compelled belief that was ever-so present during pre-modern times? The majority of scientists are non-believers. This is probably an artifact of history; since compulsory indoctrination is not as prevalent and people are free to pursue alternative philosophies that explain the metaphysical and moral realms. Since we are in the spirit of comparing numbers (as if that does anything to demonstrate the truth of Theism), here are a few Atheist scientists. Notable on this list is Feynman and although Einstein is not on this list, he believed in Spinozas God. One could hardly call him a believer. I would argue that most mathematicians and physicists who aren’t explicit Atheists will hold this same belief.

6. MODERN ADVANCES AND LIMITATIONS IN SCIENCE.

Antony Flew was one of the world’s most famous atheists of the 20th century. He debated William Lane Craig and others on the existence of God. But eventually his recognition of the profound order and complexity of the universe, and its apparent fine-tuning, was a decisive reason for the renowned atheist to change his mind about God’s existence.

I am not really going to comment on much here. Fine tuning arguments are analogies (as I have shown above); they are not scientific. Intelligent design is not scientific. All fine tuning arguments rely on a common argument structure that is analogical in nature:

• P1. Thing A is either irreducibly complex or seems too well crafted to arise naturally
• P2. All things that share these features have creators, or intelligent minds behind them
• P3. Thing A is currently unexplained by modern science
• C. Therefore there was a fine-tuner who is omniscient

So you will see this in the watch maker argument or when people argue that the existence of DNA implies a guiding hand. An example from the article:

As Dr. Peter Kreeft has pointed out, no person would see a hut on a beach and conclude that it must have randomly assembled itself by some random natural process, void of an intelligent designer. Its order necessitates a designer. Thus if this “beach hut analogy” is true, how much more should we believe in an Intelligent Designer behind the vastly more complex and ordered universe and the precise physical laws that govern it (click here for William Lane Craig’s argument for the fine-tuning of the universe).

Apologists love the argument from analogy. I love it too, because it reassures me that my non-belief is valid; there is no direct proof for God’s existence. All of our current debate relies upon defeasible argument structures, and the arguments in favor are highly problematic due to the very nature of analogy. All of these criticisms of the watchmaker analogy hold for all of the fine tuning arguments. And here is Theoretical Physicist Sean Carol debunking the fine tuning argument.

Apologists love to use Antony Flew as another great example of an Atheistic conversion, but fail to mention that he never became a Theist; he became a Deist as far as I can tell. The same Wikipedia article that this author copies from also states:

One month later, Flew told Christianity Today that although he was not on the road to becoming a convert to Christianity, he reaffirmed his belief in Deism: “Since the beginning of my philosophical life I have followed the policy of Plato’s Socrates: We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

One could hardly call a Deist “on the road to Theism” anyway; unless you want to call Epicurus and David Hume “on the road to Theism”. These two were some of the most vocal critics of their time of Theism, so much so that they are typically just labeled as Atheists.

Also, I am not sure why William Lane Craig is the beacon of hope for Christian Apologetics when he explicitly states that belief in Christianity is completely independent of the evidence or arguments. He merely plays the Evidence Game typical of all apologists. If you want to see his complete lack of physics knowledge, watch this debate, in my opinion it will put to rest these ridiculous analogies and scientific misunderstandings. Closely related to the fine tuning argument is the rare earth hypothesis, which is examined and undercut by, you guessed it, an agnostic scientist who actually knows what he is talking about. 

Anyway, claiming to believe in God because of limitations in scientific advances is simply a God of the Gaps argument. If your conviction in Theism is conditional on developments in science, we can expect to see rapid conversions to Atheism in the next century. I don’t stake my belief in the metaphysical truths based on overly simplistic analogies and cute syllogisms.

Any “irreducible complexity” argument you encounter can easily be contrasted with this one counter example:

• P1. Economies used to be comprised of relatively simple trading patterns and institutions
• P2. Modern Economies are incredibly complex, irreducibly so. Economists have tried to reduce modern capitalistic economies to a set of simple dynamical equations but have not found success.
• P3. There was no guiding institution that transformed pre-modern economies into modern economies. In fact, modern economic dynamics are marked by a considerable lack of controllability.
• P4. The increased complexity can be attributed to self-organization , path-dependence, and emergence.
• P5. Top down control is actually associated with decreased levels of complexity; consider China prior to Deng Xiaoping or early Soviet institutions.
• P6. Therefore, complexity does not need a fine tuner, it can happen spontaneously.

I think I will just leave this here for now. In the next blog post I'll talk more about what I see to be the causes of religious belief, particularly Theism.