April 14, 2020

April 14, 2020 By

Studies in Flew’s Justification of His Change of Mind and the Predictable Reaction of Atheists

[Antony Flew’s words will be in blue]

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For a prior overview about Flew’s importance in the world of philosophy and the resurgence of theism in those circles, see Dr. Phillip Blosser’s blog article (filled with links to interesting related materials), Former atheist, Antony Flew, now believes in God. See also his page on infidels.org, which gives several links to older papers.

The flurry of stories on this topic which were prevalent in the media around 9 December 2004, were typified by the following, in the Guardian Unlimited:

Famous Atheist Now Believes in God [link from The Guardian now defunct]Thursday December 9, 2004 10:01 PM

By Richard N. Ostling

AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God – more or less – based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he’s best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people’s lives.

“I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins,” he said. “It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.”

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article “Theology and Falsification,” based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

. . . biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew says in the new video, “Has Science Discovered God?” . . .

The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain’s Philosophy Now magazine . . .

[Here is what he wrote, in his now-online letter: “Probably Darwin himself believed that life was miraculously breathed into that primordial form of not always consistently reproducing life by God, though not the revealed God of then contemporary Christianity, who had predestined so many of Darwin’s friends and family to an eternity of extreme torture.“But the evidential situation of natural (as opposed to revealed) theology has been transformed in the more than fifty years since Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism.”]

. . . if his belief upsets people, well “that’s too bad,’‘ Flew said. “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”. . . Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

The Sunday Times of Britain (12-12-04) took a similar view, in its article, Sorry, says atheist-in-chief, I do believe in God after all, by Stuart Wavell and Will Iredale:

One of the most renowned atheists of the past half century has changed his mind and decided that there is a God after all . . . Flew, the son of a Methodist minister, is keen to repent. “As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and correct the enormous damage I may have done,” he said yesterday.But he is unlikely to proclaim his faith from a pulpit. He is still not a Christian and dismisses the conventional forms of divinity as “the monstrous oriental despots of the religions of Christianity and Islam”. He also stands by his rejection of an afterlife.

. . . Darwin’s theory of evolution does not explain the origin and development of life to Flew’s satisfaction. “I have been persuaded that it is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinarily complicated creature,” he said.

Flew finds the conventional explanation that life arose out of a complex chemical brew or primordial soup “improbable”. So he is emulating Socrates and “following the argument wherever it leads. The conclusion is — there must have been some intelligence”.

His volte face is all the more remarkable given his vehement denial of internet rumours in 2001 that he had renounced his atheism. His response was entitled: “Sorry To Disappoint, but I’m Still an Atheist!”

The latter article (8-31-01), however, reproduced on The Secular Web, contains fascinating tidbits that go far beyond the usual atheist party line. For Flew wrote:

[I]t can be entirely rational for believers and negative atheists to respond in quite different ways to the same scientific developments.We negative atheists are bound to see the Big Bang cosmology as requiring a physical explanation; and that one which, in the nature of the case, may nevertheless be forever inaccessible to human beings. But believers may, equally reasonably, welcome the Big Bang cosmology as tending to confirm their prior belief that “in the beginning” the Universe was created by God.

Again, negative atheists meeting the argument that the fundamental constants of physics would seem to have been ‘fine tuned’ to make the emergence of mankind possible will first object to the application of either the frequency or the propensity theory of probability ‘outside’ the Universe, and then go on to ask why omnipotence should have been satisfied to produce a Universe in which the origin and rise of the human race was merely possible rather than absolutely inevitable. But believers are equally bound and, on their opposite assumptions, equally justified in seeing the Fine Tuning Argument as providing impressive confirmation of a fundamental belief shared by all the three great systems of revealed theistic religion – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

. . . In short, I recognize that developments in physics coming on the last twenty or thirty years can reasonably be seen as in some degree confirmatory of a previously faith-based belief in god, even though they still provide no sufficient reason for unbelievers to change their minds. They certainly have not persuaded me.

I’ve been contending for years that theism is at least as reasonable a position as atheism, particularly in the context of attempts to interpret Big Bang cosmology. It is very nice to observe one of the world’s leading atheists “concede” or agree with this (when he was still a card-carrying atheist). Many atheists have no toleration whatever for the eminently reasonable (and, I think, rather obvious) position which holds that theists (not Christians: one subset of the larger group, involving many more tenets and presuppositions) are at least as reasonable and epistemically justified as atheists — wholly apart from the opposite conclusions that each party arrives at.

For them, Christians and even theistic philosophers must be seen as simpletons and ignoramuses (or reasonable facsimile thereof), caught in a medieval belief-system and hopelessly behind the times. Not so, said Flew, over three years ago.

The best source at present to learn about Flew’s newly-adopted opinion (from his own words), seems to be an interview by evangelical Protestant philosopher Gary R. Habermas; subsequently published in the Winter 2004 issue of Philosophia Christi: the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, considered one of the best journals of philosophy of religion in the world. The article notes that Habermas “has debated Flew several times.

They have maintained a friendship despite their years of disagreement on the existence of God . . . Over the next twenty years, Flew and Habermas developed a friendship, writing dozens of letters, talking often . . .” Furthermore, the introduction states that the interview “took place in early 2004 and was subsequently modified by both participants throughout the year.” Habermas’ words will be in green; Flew’s still in blue:

. . . I don’t believe in the God of any revelatory system, although I am open to that. But it seems to me that the case for an Aristotelian God who has the characteristics of power and also intelligence, is now much stronger than it ever was before.Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?

Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.

Then, would you comment on your “openness” to the notion of theistic revelation?

Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

. . . [you commented] that naturalistic efforts have never succeeded in producing “a plausible conjecture as to how any of these complex molecules might have evolved from simple entities.” . . . You mention a number of trends in theistic argumentation that you find convincing, like big bang cosmology, fine tuning and Intelligent Design arguments. Which arguments for God’s existence did you find most persuasive?

I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries. I’ve never been much impressed by the kalam cosmological argument, and I don’t think it has gotten any stronger recently. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.

So you like arguments such as those that proceed from big bang cosmology and fine tuning arguments?

Yes.

. . . when I was in college, I attended fairly regularly the weekly meetings of C. S. Lewis’s Socratic Club. In all my time at Oxford these meetings were chaired by Lewis. I think he was by far the most powerful of Christian apologists for the sixty or more years following his founding of that club.

Although you disagreed with him, did you find him to be a very reasonable sort of fellow?

Oh yes, very much so, an eminently reasonable man.

. . . So of the major theistic arguments, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological, the only really impressive ones that you take to be decisive are the scientific forms of teleology?

Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

. . . If God is the First Cause, what about omniscience, or omnipotence?

Well, the First Cause, if there was a First Cause, has very clearly produced everything that is going on. I suppose that does imply creation “in the beginning.”

. . . In your view, then, God hasn’t done anything about evil.

No, not at all, other than producing a lot of it.

. . . I still hope and believe there’s no possibility of an afterlife.

. . . you have also written to me that these near death experiences “certainly constitute impressive evidence for the possibility of the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain.”. . . Elsewhere, you again very kindly noted my influence on your thinking here, regarding these data being decent evidence for human consciousness independent of “electrical activity in the brain.” If some near death experiences are evidenced, independently confirmed experiences during a near death state, even in persons whose heart or brain may not be functioning, isn’t that is quite impressive evidence? Are near death experiences, then, the best evidence for an afterlife?

Oh, yes, certainly. They are basically the only evidence.

. . . So you think that, for a miracle, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is better than other miracle claims?

Oh yes, I think so. It’s much better, for example, than that for most if not of the, so to speak, run of the mill Roman Catholic miracles.

. . . You have made numerous comments over the years that Christians are justified in their beliefs such as Jesus’ resurrection or other major tenants of their faith. In our last two dialogues I think you even remarked that for someone who is already a Christian there are many good reasons to believe Jesus’ resurrection. Would you comment on that?

Yes, certainly. This is an important matter about rationality which I have fairly recently come to appreciate. What it is rational for any individual to believe about some matter which is fresh to that individual’s consideration depends on what he or she rationally believed before they were confronted with this fresh situation. For suppose they rationally believed in the existence of a God of any revelation, then it would be entirely reasonable for them to see the fine tuning argument as providing substantial confirmation of their belief in the existence of that God.

. . . What do you think that Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, and A. J. Ayer would have thought about these theistic developments, had they still been alive today?

I think Russell certainly would have had to notice these things. I’m sure Mackie would have been interested, too. I never knew Ayer very well, beyond meeting him once or twice.

Do you think any of them would have been impressed in the direction of theism? I’m thinking here, for instance, about Russell’s famous comments that God hasn’t produced sufficient evidence of his existence.

Consistent with Russell’s comments that you mention, Russell would have regarded these developments as evidence. I think we can be sure that Russell would have been impressed too, precisely because of his comments to which you refer. This would have produced an interesting second dialogue between him and that distinguished Catholic philosopher, Frederick Copleston.

In recent years you’ve been called the world’s most influential philosophical atheist. Do you think Russell, Mackie, or Ayer would have been bothered or even angered by your conversion to theism? Or do you think that they would have at least understood your reasons for changing your mind?

I’m not sure how much any of them knew about Aristotle. But I am almost certain that they never had in mind the idea of a God who was not the God of any revealed religion. But we can be sure that they would have examined these new scientific arguments.

C. S. Lewis explained in his autobiography that he moved first from atheism to theism and only later from theism to Christianity. Given your great respect for Christianity, do you think that there is any chance that you might in the end move from theism to Christianity?

I think it’s very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. But, if it did happen, I think it would be in some eccentric fit and doubtfully orthodox form: regular religious practice perhaps but without belief.

I ask this last question with a smile, Tony. But just think what would happen if one day you were pleasantly disposed toward Christianity and all of a sudden the resurrection of Jesus looked pretty good to you?

Well, one thing I’ll say in this comparison is that, for goodness sake, Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not.

In his review of Christian Roy Varghese’s book, The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God, Flew wrote:

I pointed out, after quoting a significant sentence from the fourteenth and final chapter of The Origin of Species, that one place where, until a satisfactory naturalistic explanation has been developed, there would appear to be room for an Argument to Design is at the first emergence of living from non-living matter. And, unless that first living matter already possessed the capacity to reproduce itself genetically, there will still be room for a second argument to Design until a satisfactory explanation is found for its acquisition of that capacity. You have in your book deployed abundant evidence indicating that it is likely to be a very long time before such naturalistic explanations are developed, if indeed there ever could be.Our disagreements begin with any shift from the God of natural theology to the God of a Revelation.

In a December 2004 phone conversation with humanist Duncan Crary [link defunct], Flew stated:

We must follow the argument wherever it leads. I’ve never thought I knew that there was no God. I merely thought there is no sufficient reason that there is . . . I’m quite happy to believe in an inoffensive inactive god.

The Sunday Times article of 19 December 2004: In the beginning there was something (an interview by Stuart Wavell; link now defunct]) offers more fascinating information:

I’ve never thrown my weight about as an unbeliever. I’ve joined unbelieving organisations but I haven’t attacked belief.. . . My positive belief is in an Aristotelian God. Aristotle never produced a definition, but his God was not interested in human beings. He would have said that if God had really been concerned with human behaviour he would have made us behave according to his own way . . . On the Aristotelian view, the question doesn’t arise about the nature of God.

. . . I don’t want a future life. I want to be dead when I’m dead and that’s an end to it. I don’t want an unending life. I don’t want anything without end.

. . . there’s a world of difference between finding that there’s some very powerful, intelligent being in the background and finding that what you’ve discovered is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel.

. . . Darwin saw that there was a problem with the origin of life. It had to begin with a creature capable of producing creatures that are not always identical to their parents. It is simply out of the question that the first living matter evolved out of dead matter and then developed into an extraordinary, complicated creature of which we have no examples. There must have been some intelligence.

. . . I don’t consider the question of God is definitively proved. All Schroeder is saying is that all the chemical complexities that have to be dealt with are such an enormous improbability. This is not a proof but it will do until a proof comes along.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Antony Flew’s thinking, I thought it would be fun and interesting to briefly examine how atheists and agnostics are reacting to it. I am as interested in the psychology and sociology of unbelief as in the philosophy of it. I immediately predicted in my mind when I heard about Flew’s change of opinion, that many in the community of atheists and secularists and skeptics, and so forth, would immediately start to (more or less irrationally and emotionally) minimize and dismiss both his thinking process and he himself.

They would be willing, so I thought (based on my own significant experience in dialogue with them), to cast him to the wind just as quickly as they formerly thought he was an able and worthy representative of their position.

In fact, the entrenched, knee-jerk, almost intellectually reactionary position that many atheists have assumed almost requires this. A search on the Internet tonight quickly confirmed my strong suspicions. In fact, the article just cited reports the hysterical atheist reaction. Wavell writes:

With equal alacrity, the wrath of unbelievers has rebounded on Antony Flew, the philosophy professor responsible for this heresy, leaving him shaken and not very philosophical.

Flew himself complains:

I have been denounced by my fellow unbelievers for stupidity, betrayal, senility and everything you could think of. And none of them have read a word that I have ever written.

Richard Carrier, a frequent contributor to The Secular Web, in his article, Antony Flew Considers God…Sort Of (10-10-04), provides a good insight into atheist / agnostic reaction:

Antony Flew is considering the possibility that there might be a God. Sort of. Flew is one of the most renowned atheists of the 20th century, even making the shortlist of “Contemporary Atheists” at About.com. So if he has changed his mind to any degree, whatever you may think of his reasons, the event itself is certainly newsworthy. After hearing of this, I contacted Antony directly to discuss it, . . . Antony and I exchanged letters on the issue recently, and what I report here about his current views comes from him directly.. . . he is increasingly persuaded that some sort of Deity brought about this universe, though it does not intervene in human affairs, nor does it provide any postmortem salvation. He says he has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal “prime mover.” It might not even be conscious, but a mere force. In formal terms, he regards the existence of this minimal God as a hypothesis that, at present, is perhaps the best explanation for why a universe exists that can produce complex life.

. . . Flew’s tentative, mechanistic Deism is not based on any logical proofs, but solely on physical, scientific evidence, or the lack thereof, . . .

. . . Flew took great care to emphasize repeatedly to me that:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species … [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms. [letter of 19 October 2004]

After presenting a fairly accurate picture of Flew’s opinions, Carrier then assumes the usual (almost obligatory) “smarter-than-thou” atheist routine and belittles Flew:

. . . he confesses he has not been able to keep up with the relevant literature in science and theology, which means we should no longer treat him as an expert on this subject . . .. . . there is much to criticize in his rationale even for considering Aristotelian Deism.

Flew has thus abandoned the very standards of inquiry that led the rest of us to atheism. It would seem the only way to God is to jettison responsible scholarship.

This would appear to be his excuse for everything: he won’t investigate the evidence because it’s too hard. Yet he will declare beliefs in the absence of proper inquiry. Theists would do well to drop the example of Flew. Because his willfully sloppy scholarship can only help to make belief look ridiculous.

This comes as no surprise at all, to anyone familiar with the dripping atheist disdain of theism and especially Christianity. Yet, to be fair to Carrier, he does present some late information (less than three weeks’ old, as of this writing) from Flew which shows that he thought some of his earlier rationale for the adoption of deism (while not sufficient to reverse his newfound belief) was flawed:

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.. . . I have been mistaught by Gerald Schroeder . . . it was precisely because he appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said about physics. (Letter to Richard Carrier, of 29 December 2004)

Carrier has a field day with this information:

Apart from his unreasonable plan of trusting a physicist on the subject of biochemistry (after all, the relevant field is biochemistry, not physics–yet it would seem Flew does not recognize the difference), this attitude seems to pervade Flew’s method of truthseeking, of looking to a single author for authoritative information and never checking their claims (or, as in the case of Dawkins, presumed lack of claims).

But he concedes: “Despite all this, Flew has not retracted his belief in God, as far as I can tell.”

For another subtle, but definite dig at Flew’s reasoning processes, see “Flew’s Flawed Science,” by Victor J. Stenger (Professor of Physics and Astronomy). The unproven and gratuitous atheist assumptions here are legion. But then, what choice does a materialistic scientist have? The universe could only have come about by other physical processes, as matter is all that there is. God and spirit are ruled out beforehand, so the materialist is confined within his own self-created box of epistemological and metaphysical premises and possibilities (and non-possibilities). Flew dared to try to step outside the “orthodox box” of scientific and philosophical materialism, so he is quickly becoming anathema.

One Internet Infidels Discussion Board will provide a representative (I’m quite sure, typical) example of atheist / agnostic spin on former hero Flew (“how the mighty have fallen”).

“JSWilkins” starts in on the ridicule, right on December 9th, when the story was breaking:

. . . his reason is surprisingly weak – he cannot conceive how DNA got going . . . the conclusion is based on an argumentum ad ignoratium. There is no logical conundrum here. It concerns me that Flew does not see this, but then he is only following the standard opinion of hard selectionists like Dawkins. But his argument is an argument from ignorance. He may find it compelling personally, but it is not compelling logically.

Jeff Lawson gives us the patented materialist circular argument:

Well, I have news for Flew: this is not science! I hate to have to espouse the scientific method, so I won’t. Suffice to say, Flew is proffering macro-level conjecture in place of sound theory. In this day and age, rational interpretation of observations must be encoded in productive theories, i.e. theories that are not only entirely consistent with a precise subset of reality but that tell us more than we knew before. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics do this in spades. In comparison, Flew’s ideas are little better than the utterances of the religious: someone who claims to have ‘scientific evidence’ for his creationist ideas but in reality is about as far removed from science as it is possible for an academic to be; I suppose, after all, he’s only a philosopher.

Vinnie provides us with sanctimonious atheist dogmatism:

. . . we have to ask, is Flew a deist or does he subscribe to the absurdity presented by supernatural theism?The last argument raises the issue of an “immaterial being” (in the sense of being non-universal!) interacting with a material world. How is this notion even meaningful?

[i.e., “how could anything possibly be true in any possible world, but materialism? Nothng else can even have meaning, let alone be true”]

E. Garrett (of presumably agnostic persuasion) is one ray of light in this sad spectacle:

Carrier is all too willing to write off one of the brightest minds for our cause. Carrier has devoted his life to studying the origins of life, which those of us who have only spent 50 or so years at should strongly consider. Carrier’s comments of how Flew is forgetful, is petty at best. We all are forgetful and that doesn’t make us any less intelligent.Being that we are capable of higher thinking, let us exercise our brains. Rather than writing off such a smart man, let us spend time studying what he has to say. Read what Flew has read so that we can be a little better informed than the man that would rather insult a great thinker than to do his homework and study for himself.

mike a. is also quite refreshing:

I suggest the secularists force naturalism to either come up with a better story (good luck), or take the lead in opening the door to “other than natural” sources of intelligence (maybe this is the “metaphysical naturalism” your moderator speaks to?)–no “G” word required. The train is going in that direction anyway, as Anthony Flew recognizes. It is possible that, like religious fundamentalists, no amount of evidence will allow secularists to consider forces acting outside the observable space-time framework. Just remember that if that is the case, you don’t have an opinion–you have a dogma.

Then the “true believers” start in again with the condescension. Jehanne opines:

Flew’s “conversion” should not be surprising to those who are true materialists. It just means that “his genes” have finally conquered “his intellect”.

Vinnie concurs with what is now becoming the fashionable spin:

Flew still accepts that “neo-Darwinian evolution” occured to the best of my knowledge as well. I don’t know what the hell he is thinking. I think his genes may have finally caught up….

“macula2020” shows a bit more sophistication and suggests that the whole thing is a plot to sell books, because Flew could not be so stupid as to believe in any sort of God;

I’ll preface my syllogism with the reminder that it represents my opinion only.Although it may at first appear to be an ad hominen attack on Flew, it is not. It is simply a rational hypothesis that illuminates less transparent aspects of Flew’s announcement.

Premise 1. Flew, as an expert in critical thinking and atheistic philosophy, would not commit the fallacy of using a God of the Gaps argument to conclude that God existsPremise 2. Flew, as an expert in critical thinking and atheistic philosophy, would stimulate widespread public attention and interest by announcing his personal belief that God exists

Conclusion: Flew has announced his belief that God exists in order to generate attention and controversy.

Evidence:-Flew or his agent contacted the Associated Press newswire and NBC News via press release with this “story” on or around the same day that his new video, “Has Science Discovered God?” was released.

-every publisher and author knows that controversy sells books; not only has his video just been released, but the new edition of “God and Philosophy” is scheduled for upcoming release.

Administrator DM (former evangelical Christian) feels a need to go after C.S. Lewis, because Flew spoke so highly of him:

Lewis was, in my opinion, both a weak atheist and a weak theist in the sense that he has an extremely poor understanding of correct reasoning (as demonstrated in his book “Mere Christianity,” for example, where he commits one reasoning error after another) . . . Lewis and McDowell–especially–are lightweights when it comes to the quality of their reasoning.

Dominic Milioto brings strict ad hominem to the table:

Flew is a cop-out that’s what. Sounds to me like an old man, confronted by the end of life, making one final desparate attempt at salvation. He has little faith in future generations separating the chaff from the wheat: explaining what now is not.

“tw1tch,” on the other hand, gives us the fair-minded, charitable approach:

Huh…just read Richard Carrier’s updated article on Anthony Flew’s change of viewpoint.I must admit that I am disappointed in the tone of Carrier’s article. Here, in front of God (pardon the expression) and man, the perennial atheist…indeed the foremost thinker of modern atheism…in his twilight years simply changes his mind. Flew has probably done more for atheism, its philosophy and furtherment than any living person. In all probability, he has done more for atheism than infidels.org ever will.

That’s quite a sobering thought. Even more sobering is how, Carrier, in an almost unbelievably comical display…nonchalantly dismisses Flew’s reasoning as ‘willfully sloppy’ and levels charges against Flew of intellectual laziness. Sigh. Intellectually laziness….again, this is a man who has written more books on the subject of athiesm than Mr. Carrier most likely ever will.

Sour grapes are natural fellas. I can’t hold this against you. However, I can’t help but to think that this sheepish (and rightfully so) dismissal of Flews reasoning is more pychological defense mechanism than honest, unbiased assessment.

Perhaps he just changed his mind…no need get ugly about it.

Y.B nevertheless chimes in with more patronizing snobbery:

Erm? Sorry, but I and many others would have been like “Anthony who?” until the ID camp started spinning his “conversion”.

Richard Carrier then sophomorically responds:

Flew’s actual impact on contemporary atheism is virtually nil . . . by his own admission, Flew’s methods have sunk beneath even that of college freshmen.

So what’s the fuss about, since this is a “nobody” we’re dealing with? These guys are quick; you gotta give ’em that . . .

Nothing the least bit surprising here, to those of us who have dealt with the hyper-polemical brand of “Internet atheists.” Many atheists “in real life” (even on the Internet) are fine people, with great integrity (I have atheist friends, and have greatly enjoyed dialogues with several of them), but unfortunately, when they mass together online, the sort of insulting snobbery seen above usually predominates (even, alas, against one from their own camp until about two months ago).

But then, I hasten to add that the same sort of thing occurs in Christian circles, too, so one might say that original sin (along with huge shortcomings in both charity and logic) has been amply proven in the observation of both camps.

Atheist prejudice and condescension is far more likely to usher Flew into Christianity than any arguments by (apologist) folks like myself. You learn all sorts of fascinating things when undergoing a conversion from one thing to another . . .

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(originally posted on 1-18-05)

Photo credit: photo of Flew’s 2008 book on Amazon.com.

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September 9, 2019

September 9, 2019 By

I first ran across former Christian minister and atheist John W. Loftus back in 2006. We dialogued about the problem of evil, and whether God was in time. During that period I also replied to an online version of his deconversion: which (like my arguments about God and time) he didn’t care for at all. I’ve critiqued many atheist deconversion stories, and maintain a very extensive web page about atheism. In 2007 I critiqued his “Outsider Test of Faith” series: to which he gave no response. Loftus’ biggest objection to my critique of his descent into atheism was that I responded to what he called a “brief testimony.” He wrote in December 2006 (his words in blue henceforth):

Deconversion stories are piecemeal. They cannot give a full explanation for why someone left the faith. They only give hints at why they left the faith. It requires writing a whole book about why someone left the faith to understand why they did, and few people do that. I did. If you truly want to critique my deconversion story then critique my book. . . . I challenge you to really critique the one deconversion story that has been published in a book. . . . Do you accept my challenge?

I declined at that time, mainly (but not solely) for the following stated reason:

If you send me your book in an e-file for free, I’d be more than happy to critique it. I won’t buy it, and I refuse to type long portions of it when it is possible to cut-and-paste. That is an important factor since my methodology is Socratic and point-by-point. . . . You railed against that, saying that it was a “handout.” I responded that you could have any of my (14 completed) books in e-book form for free.

Throughout August 2019, I critiqued Dr. David Madison, a prominent contributor to Loftus’ website, Debunking Christianity, no less than 35 times. As of this writing, they remain completely unanswered. I was simply providing (as a courtesy) links to my critiques underneath each article of Dr. Madison’s, till Loftus decided I couldn’t do that (after having claimed that I “hate” atheists and indeed, everyone I disagree with). I replied at length regarding his censorship on his website. Loftus’ explanation for the complete non-reply to my 35 critiques was this: “We know we can respond. It’s just that we don’t have the time to do so. Plus, it’s pretty clear our time would be better spent doing something else than wrestling in the mud with you.” He also claimed that Dr. Madison was “planning to write something about one or more of these links in the near future.” Meanwhile, I discovered that Dr. Madison wrote glowingly about Loftus on 1-23-17:

When the history of Christianity’s demise is written (it will fade eventually away, as do all religions), your name will feature prominently as one who helped bring the world to its senses. Your legacy is secure and is much appreciated.

This was underneath an article where Loftus claimed: “I’ve kicked this dead rodent of the Christian faith into a lifeless blob so many times there is nothing left of it.” I hadn’t realized that Loftus had single-handedly managed to accomplish the stupendous feat of vanquishing the Hideous Beast of Christianity (something the Roman Empire, Muslims, Communists, and many others all miserably failed to do). Loftus waxed humbly and modestly ten days later: “I cannot resist the supposition that my books are among the best. . . . Every one of my books is unique, doing what few other atheist books have done, if any of them.”

These last three cited statements put me “over the edge” and I decided to buy a used copy of his book, Why I Became an Atheist (revised version, 2012, 536 pages) and critique it, as he wanted me to do in 2006. Moreover, on 8-27-07 he made a blanket challenge about the original version of this book: “I challenge someone to try this with my book. I might learn a few things, and that’s always a goal of mine. Pick it up and deal with as many arguments in it that you can. Deal with them all if you can.” His wish is granted (I think he will at length regret it), and this will be my primary project (as a professional apologist) in the coming weeks.

Despite all his confident bluster, I fully expect him to ignore my critiques. It’s what he’s always done with me (along with endless personal insults). I’m well used to empty (direct) challenges from atheists, based on my experience with Madison and “Bible Basher” Bob Seidensticker, who also has ignored 35 of my critiques (that he requested I do). If Loftus (for a change) decides to actually defend his views, I’m here; always have been. And I won’t flee for the hills, like atheists habitually do, when faced with substantive criticism.

The words of John Loftus will be in blue.

*****

John Loftus’ chapter 4 is entitled, “Does God Exist” (pp. 79-102)

The atheist maintains that the material universe either popped into existence out of nothing, has always existed, is self-caused, or is just a natural brute fact arising form the laws of physics. . . . Atheist philosopher Quentin Smith claims that our universe came “from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing.” He argues that the universe caused itself to exist. (p. 79)

This is one of the very best arguments against atheism (simple and elegant). Even Loftus concedes on the same page that this view is “extremely unlikely — or possibly absurd.” Granted, he also thinks the view that “Something — anything — has always existed” (which would include an eternal God) can be described in the same way. But it’s quite notable and in my opinion, a huge concession in holding that atheist explanations of the existence of the universe are no more plausible or likely than the traditional Christian belief in creation of the universe (all things) by God.

Thanks, John! I’ve been making the same argument for at least 30 years: contending that both competing views of the origin of the universe (theistic and atheistic) cannot be absolutely proven, and require axioms: in effect, “faith.” Atheists routinely claim falsely and groundlessly that their view of ultimate origins is rational, “scientific,” and requires no faith, whereas ours (here it comes!) is irrational, anti-scientific (or at least non-scientific / non-empirical) and requires unsupported blind faith. Loftus cuts through that pretense, and I appreciate it. It’s a breath of fresh air. Both sides necessarily entail unproven axioms and non-empirical (purely philosophical and/or religious) starting-points.

[the classic ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments (dealt with in pp. 81-97) are far too involved to delve into for my purposes, and others do a far better job, anyway, so I will leave the defenses of these three classic arguments up to them. Loftus mostly summarizes both espousals of these arguments and criticisms of them (i.e., he does little more than “survey the literature” from a thoroughly biased atheist perspective). I agree that none of them absolutely prove God’s existence. But considered together, I think they raise many troubling objections for the atheist to consider, and that the cumulative evidences suggest that God’s existence is far more probable and plausible than His non-existence]

I’m not certain some kind of god doesn’t exist. I just don’t think so. (p. 97)

Fair enough. There is still a little door open to convince him of God’s existence, then.

[T]his [the teleological / design argument] was the same argument that convinced a possibly stroke-affected Antony Flew to become a deist before he died, after being possibly the leading atheist thinker of the last century. (p. 97)

I’ve been looking and looking, with all the search capabilities of the modern Internet, and I can’t find anything about Flew having had a stroke at all: let alone one that would affect his reasoning, so that he would become a deist. I’d love to know where Loftus discovered this alleged bit of information, and how verified it is. The closest I got was a reference in the Wikipedia article about Flew, that referenced “an article in The New York Times Magazine alleging that Flew’s intellect had declined due to senility,  . . .”

Following the link to the article (dated 4 November 2007), I see that the words “senility” or “senile” never appear in it; nor does “dementia.” It makes passing references to his “memory failing” / “his powers in decline” / “halting” diction and a mind “in decline” (he was  then 84). But all this — even if true — is far, far from alleging the serious claim that a stroke affected his philosophical reasoning ability. So where did Loftus acquire such a belief: even if it is only speculative?

The same article notes that well-known atheist Richard Carrier wrote to Flew in 2001, and that Flew replied on the 3rd of September:  “I have for a long time been inclined to believe in an Aristotelian God who (or which) does not intervene in the Universe.” He was at that time 78, so whatever “a long time” means, it is clear that the essence of his change of mind was not “before he died” (implied: right before; stroke or no). Nice try!

Thus, to uphold this hypothesis, one would have to establish that Flew suffered a stroke before whatever year his “Aristotelian god” inclination began (a “long time” before he reached age 78: so he himself stated). It doesn’t look very hopeful. But  atheists had to come up with something to discredit Flew’s newfound belief (I documented a good deal of this at the time in a discontinued paper of mine), and so Loftus gives us this nothing burger.

[following an argument from Richard Dawkins] Of course, if evolution is unguided, then God doesn’t exist.” (p. 97)

This doesn’t follow at all, and is a strikingly weak argument to make. There is no necessity that I can see for God (if He exists) to be compelled to “guide evolution.” If God is only a deist-type god, a la the “late period Flew” or David Hume (who accepted a form of the teleological argument), then by definition He would not guide it, since deism posits a God Who creates and then withdraws from any governance or supervision of His creation (His providence and sovereignty are denied). But even a full theistic and biblical God wouldn’t have to literally guide evolution (however such a thing is construed). He could simply have put the potentialities into matter that would enable it to evolve and bring about all that we see today. St. Augustine was pondering that live possibility 1600 years ago.

This God . . . had a body that needed to rest on the seventh day and was found walking in the “cool of the day” in the Garden of Eden . . . Still later, the God of the Bible was stripped of physical characteristics and became known as a spiritual being (John 4:21-24), although he may have been thought of as an embodied God when impregnating Mary . . . (p. 102)

Loftus, like probably 50 other atheists I’ve interacted with, doesn’t have a clue about biblical anthropomorphism and anthropopathism. This is part of the profoundly ignorant (almost universal) atheist misunderstanding of the many biblical literary genres and ways of expression. It’s all the more case if an atheist came out of fundamentalism, since they never understood or fully understood these factors even as a Christian.

This also gets into the related involved topics of theophanies and the angel of the Lord [see section II, part 3 in the link, and see also a second article] as God’s representative, which I have written about. It’s not likely that Loftus has much of an understanding of these matters, and the standard Christian / biblical view that God the Father is invisible: at least not from these particular out-to-sea “parting shot” statements in this chapter. We’ll see if he exhibits any better understanding of these more advanced matters in theology, as we proceed through the book.

It’s beyond ludicrous to claim that Christians ever believed that a supposedly physical God the Father impregnated Mary (best I can tell, this is what Loftus meant). In Christian belief from the start, she became pregnant by the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:18: “she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit”: RSV): and a spirit is what it is. The Holy Spirit is immaterial and He has no body. So this is truly beyond the pale. Bringing about a miraculous pregnancy in Mary no more requires a “physical” God the Father or Holy Spirit than creation does. Loftus is just pulling these things out of a hat.

Lastly, Loftus is getting way ahead of himself in bringing up trinitarianism in a chapter about the theistic arguments, since virtually all Christians would readily agree that those arguments do not establish a trinitarian God (though they are consistent with that). Rather, the Holy Trinity is revealed in God’s inspired revelation: the Bible. It’s not the conclusion of a philosophical argument.

***

Photo credit: John Loftus at SASHAcon 2016 at the University of Missouri; Mark Schierbecker (3-19-16) [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

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May 26, 2019

May 26, 2019 By

This is a follow-up discussion: brought about by an atheist’s response to my article, “Atheist vs. Christian Ignorance of the Bible: A Brief Observation.” The words of gusbovona will be in blue.

*****

Atheist here.

1. Part of the problem atheists have with the Bible is that they suspect its god doesn’t care about communication with humans precisely because one must work to figure out exactly what the Bible means. Presumably the god of the Bible would know what would communicate effectively without the danger of mis-interpretation. And, a Bible that requires interpretation looks too much like a Bible with no deity behind it.

All books require interpretation, so why would it be the case, according to you, that somehow the Bible, granting for the sake of argument that it is inspired revelation from God, would be the simplest book in the world? I think that is actually the last thing we would reasonably expect in such a book. If the Bible were so simplistic that any young child could immediately grasp it, we can be assured that it would be roundly mocked by atheists even more than it is now. They would say, “you expect us to believe that this tripe was written by an infinitely intelligent, omniscient God?!” See my article: Why We Should Fully Expect Many “Bible Difficulties”.

It’s not so much a question of simplicity (although an argument can be made for the simpler, the better) as it is of the need for interpretation.

I grant that all writings need interpretation, but some need more than others, and the difference can be vast; the less interpretive difficulty, the better, in general, would you agree?; and the vast amount of interpretive difficulty with the Bible argues for a lack of divine influence.

There is a certain middle ground. I believe that the main doctrines of the Bible are indeed clear, once one attains a fair amount of familiarity with it (learns the basics of hermeneutics and exegesis and systematic theology). Then it’s relatively easy to interpret it. But history shows that folks, generally speaking, need guidance in terms of having definite answers: “the Bible / Christian faith teaches thus-and-so.” That is the role of an authoritative Church and tradition, which the Bible itself teaches the necessity of (I wrote four books about the topic of biblical and Church authority), and which is one of the strongest rationales for Catholicism and Orthodoxy, over against Protestantism.

Theological truth also entails complexities, the more one gets into it, just as science and philosophy do. Philosophers and logicians talk about elegant simplicity, but that doesn’t always hold. Relativity and quantum mechanics and black holes are very complex and counter-intuitive, but they are considered to be profoundly established in physics and astronomy, more so than Newtonian physics, which is simpler and far more intuitive.

The Bible also teaches that men do not understand the Bible and spiritual truths because of their own corruption and rebellion. Hence the Apostle Paul writes: “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14, RSV). And Jesus taught the same:

Matthew 13:10-13 Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” [11] And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. [12] For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. [13] This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

This “spiritual” factor understood, it then becomes a causative factor in the ability to interpret Scripture properly. One has to be open to the things of God. If not, they won’t “get it.” And this is what I consistently see in atheist attempts to interpret the Bible. There is no willingness to properly learn (very little intellectual humility), and there is outright hostility. This is why I compare the atheist view of the Bible to a butcher’s view of a hog. The Christian views it as “Shakespeare from God” or as a wonderful painting, that has to be unpacked and revealed to be the marvel that it is. This takes some significant effort and labor, but it’s not at all impossible.

You are still conflating simplicity/complexity and interpretation. My point was about interpretation. Something very simple can still need to be interpreted correctly, and something complex can require very little interpretation.

Yeah, I agree. As I have argued, there are both simple and complex aspects to understanding the Bible and interpreting it.

***

2. Can you give an example of someone disrespecting the Bible?

I provided many in the links in the above paper. Here is one of my personal favorites, though, because of the astonishing and amusing ignorance of the view set forth: Flat Earth: Biblical Teaching? (vs. Ed Babinski).

It’s difficult for me to guess exactly what statement in the link you provided that was disrespectful. Can you just quote a single sentence or a paragraph? Or do you mean that mis-interpreting the Bible to contain an absurd cosmology is the disrespect itself?

The latter. But broadly speaking, to ask an apologist like me to list the ways in which atheists disrespect the Bible and Christianity is like asking me what I love about my wife (I’m very happily married). It’s very difficult to answer, because it’s a thousand things. So I provided a list of my articles that deal with this topic. The evidence is ample therein, and in many other dialogues of mine with atheists. Bob Seidensticker is Classic / Textbook Exhibit #1 of atheist biblical ignorance and hubris. And he challenged me to defend the Bible. Once I started doing so and refuting his nonsense, he fell off the face of the earth. What a coincidence . . . Please tell him “hello” from me if you ever talk to him, and let him know I’m still alive and kickin’. :-)

I didn’t ask you to list the ways that atheists disrespect the Bible. I asked you for an example. I can take the example of Biblical cosmology, but I didn’t want you think I was asking for a list, or even an exhaustive list.

***

3. You appear to trust your “long experience in dialogue” over a scientific study. Are you aware of the dangers of accepting one’s long experience in an empirical matter?

The topic is very complex. As I noted: “People have differing levels of understanding in all human groups.” It would highly depend on how the research was conducted (unfortunately, the link I thought I made to the study is not there), but, as with any large group, one has to take into account differing degrees of education. Thus, if we surveyed “Christians” completely at random, sure, we would see a lot of ignorance, since most Christians (to our shame) are poorly educated in theology: which is a large reason why I became a professional apologist.

The comparison needs to be between educated Christians, who understand Christian doctrine, and atheists who also have a fair degree of biblical knowledge (or claim to, anyway). This is where my experience in dialogue becomes quite relevant, because I think I have demonstrated over and over, that many atheists who make out that they are such experts on the Bible, are far from it. So, for instance, one could consider my 32 refutations of one atheist who makes these claims: Bob Seidensticker (I see that you follow his blog). He shows himself to be biblically and theologically ignorant (in matters of simple fact) and out to sea again and again.

Or one could observe how abominably ignorant Richard Dawkins: one of the most renowned atheists, is about Bible matters, in my paper on that: Richard Dawkins’ “Bible Whoppers” Are the “Delusion”.

In other words, what we need to do is compare the most knowledgeable in each camp, not take some survey of Joe Blow Christian on the street vs. the typical atheist, who is usually relatively more educated (because they are usually persuaded to be an atheist in hyper-secularized academic settings).

I think you misunderstand my comment. I wasn’t talking about you disagreeing with atheists like Seidensticker, I was talking about you reaching a conclusion based on your personal experience even though it differed from a scientific study:

Grimlock: 

If the average atheist’s knowledge of the Bible is abominable, the average Christian seems to be even worse off. (At least in the US.) [source from Pew Research]

You: 

So I reject a view that holds that they are more ignorant of the Bible (as an entire class) than atheists. It’s a joke. And I know so for certain, from my own long experience in dialogue.

The two things are not mutually exclusive. As I have explained my view in much greater depth, it is seen, I think, that it’s perfectly complimentary to any of these studies. I freely grant that Christians en masse are scandalously ignorant of theology, too. So it is necessary to compare the “cream of the crop” of both camps, to make a penetrating, insightful comparison. You have to get a theologian or apologist like myself up against a proclaimed atheist “expert” on the Bible, to see how each party fares.

It seems to me that a survey that says that Christians know less about the Bible than atheists do is mutually exclusive with a conclusion (in your case, drawn on personal experience) that rejects the idea that Christians are more ignorant of the Bible than atheists.

***

 

Photo credit: Tobias Van Der Elst (7-16-17): Morteratsch, Canton of Graubunden, Switzerland [Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0 license]

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May 24, 2019

May 24, 2019 By

I made a statement: “Atheist knowledge of the Bible and exegesis (generally speaking) is abominable.”

Atheist “Grimlock” replied: Fun fact: If the average atheist’s knowledge of the Bible is abominable, the average Christian seems to be even worse off. (At least in the US.) [source from Pew Research]

I do love me some empiricism.

This is a major reason why I do what I do: I’m an educator. But at least Christians approach the Bible with respect, which makes it a lot more likely that they will figure out its true meaning: a lot more than those who approach it like a butcher approaches a hog, or a lumberjack, a tree. So I reject a view that holds that they are more ignorant of the Bible (as an entire class) than atheists. It’s a joke. And I know so for certain, from my own long experience in dialogue.

People have differing levels of understanding in all human groups. What is objectionable is the atheist who comes in, guns blazing, thinking they know so much more about the Bible than Christians do. Atheists generally pride themselves for being the “rational” and “scientific” people and constantly imply that Christians are neither. Hundreds of examples of that exist in my own dialogues alone.

Lastly, many atheists (especially the ones who love to pick at and mock the Bible and claim that it is filled with alleged “contradictions”) come from fundamentalist Christian backgrounds (I never did, myself). Invariably, when they attempt to interpret the Bible, they do it with that inherited fallacious and ignorant way of doing so, from fundamentalism (hyper-literalism and virtual ignoring of linguistic, contextual, cultural, and literary genre factors). Thus, they generally make two major mistakes:

1) They assume that all Christians are anti-intellectual fundamentalists, as they once were.

2) They assume that anti-intellectual hyper-literal, “wooden” biblical interpretation is the only sort that exists, or is the “mainline” approach.

Related Reading:

Atheist Bible “Scholarship” & “Exegesis” [3-18-03]

Flat Earth: Biblical Teaching? (vs. Ed Babinski) [9-17-06]

“Former Christian” Atheists & Theological Ignorance [7-21-10]

Dialogue w Atheist: Joseph of Arimathea “Contradictions” (??) (Lousy Atheist Exegesis Example #5672) [1-7-11]

Reply to Atheists: Defining a [Biblical] “Contradiction” [1-7-11]

The Census, Jesus’ Birth in Bethlehem, & History: Reply to Atheist John W. Loftus’ Irrational Criticisms of the Biblical Accounts [2-3-11]

“Butcher & Hog”: On Relentless Biblical Skepticism [9-21-15]

Genesis Contradictory (?) Creation Accounts & Hebrew Time: + Refutation of a Clueless Atheist “Biblical Contradiction” [5-11-17]

Alleged “Bible Contradictions”: Most Are Actually Not So [6-8-17]

Atheist “Refutes” Sermon on the Mount (Or Does He?) [National Catholic Register, 7-23-17]

Reason, Science, & Logic Not the Exclusive Possessions of Atheists (+ Double Standards in How Christian Conversions are Treated, Compared to the Often Chilly Reception of Critiques of Atheist Deconversion Stories / Atheist “Exegesis” of the “Doubting Thomas” Passage) [7-24-17]

Richard Dawkins’ “Bible Whoppers” Are the “Delusion” [5-25-18]

Atheist Botched Biblical Exegesis: Example #4,974 [7-23-17; expanded on 7-3-18]

Atheist Inventions of Many Bogus “Bible Contradictions” [National Catholic Register, 9-4-18]

Seidensticker Folly #21: Atheist “Bible Science” Absurdities [9-25-18]

Seidensticker Folly #23: Atheist “Bible Science” Inanities, Pt. 2 [10-2-18]

Seidensticker Folly #25: Jesus’ Alleged Mustard Seed Error [10-8-18]

Bible “Contradictions” & Plausibility (Dialogue w Atheist) [12-17-18]

Biblical Knowledge of Atheist “DagoodS” as a Christian (Specifically, the Biblical [and Patristic] Teaching on Abortion) [12-13-10; expanded on 3-14-19]

Reply to Flimsy Atheist Biblical “Exegesis” #145,298 [4-5-19]

Seidensticker Folly #32: Sophistically Redefining “Contradiction” [4-20-19]

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(originally on Facebook, 7-5-18)

Photo credit: The Dunce (1886), by Harold Copping (1863-1932) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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March 21, 2019

March 21, 2019 By

Catholic writer Mark Shea has recently written two posts (one / two) having to do with the beautiful African-American folk song, or spiritual, Kumbaya (which probably dates from the 1920s). His point (as usual), is to bash political conservatives, but (also as usual when he does that), he is dead-wrong and, I think, entirely misses the point. Here are two examples of his choice remarks:

I was somewhat taken aback with the surprisingly bitter contempt heaped on certain songs and, in particular, for the raging hatred so routinely poured out on ‘Kumbayah’. I’ve always kind of liked it and have been made to feel for 30 years as though sticking my neck out to say that was to invite the disgust of all Right-Thinking Catholics Everywhere.

We live in an age of ‘thoughts and prayers’ Christian conservatives who use words, empty piety, and respect for symbols as a prophylactic against the weightier matters of the law. The idea that one can heap contempt on kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, love, joy, peace, patience and any talk of social justice is now endemic among super-Catholics, right next to the idea that ritual or theological correctness is all that matters.  The idea that getting your words and rituals correct is the opposite of the fruits of the Spirit is utterly foreign to the New Testament.  May God heal the schism between orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

He cites his friend, Catholic writer Sherry Weddell as well:

[I]in the Catholic world – especially online – I heard the term “Kumbaya” used over and over by white “conservative Catholics” as an expression of contemptuous disDain [sic] for any kind of Catholic practice associated with the honoring of kindness, gentleness, long-suffering, love, joy, peace, patience. Any talk of social justice and of repentance was also Kumbaya.

And again:

I refuse to waste another nanosecond of time hearing some culture war conservative heap scorn on “Kumbaya”. Don’t waste your breath around me.

As one of these dreadful, pitiable, ultra-compromised political conservatives (i.e., according to the Gospel of Mark, one of those who denies the gospel and Christ, idolatrously worships antichrist Trump as a cult follower, is not really pro-life, and is a “Christianist” rather than Catholic), I have nothing whatsoever against the song. I like it (as I love many folks songs): particularly the soul-moving Joan Baez recording of it.

We used to sing it at pro-life rescues in the late 1980s, along with other songs common among the civil rights protesters of the early 60s (such as Eyes on the Prize). Now, I can only speak for myself, and not for tens of millions of conservatives (who, no doubt, have many diverse opinions, just as any large social group does), but I think Mark is missing the mark (no pun intended) by a wide margin.

As far as I have seen (and of course, speaking generally), the sarcastic or contemptuous conservative reference to Kumbaya is not to the song itself, but rather, refers to the naivete and mindless utopianism of many liberals and leftists: symbolism over substance: “talking the talk but not walking the walk”; engaging in mere self-congratulatory verbal rhetoric, rather than actually doing something to help struggling people and to solve various social problems.

I know for sure that this is how I have heard Rush Limbaugh (no small conservative influence) reference the song, many times, when he talks about liberals getting together, “throwing Frisbees for peace, lighting candles, and singing Kumbaya” (in other words, doing the touchy-feely, warm fuzzy stuff — fine as far as it goes — but not acting upon these impulses, to actually bring about positive social change. Here is an altogether typical example of Rush referring to it in this way (I’ve listened to his show off and on for now almost thirty years):

In 2008, 2012, “Obama’s gonna make it all happen: Utopia, end climate change, promote love and peace, end racism, all of that!” In 2008: Nobel Peace Prize, on the come. Obama hadn’t done anything. But just his presence, just his aura, just his existence, was gonna cause the bad guys of the world to lay down their arms and join hands and sing kumbaya. But what really happened? President Obama went on to become a veritable warmonger. (5-22-18)

That is what conservatives are driving at in mentioning the song at all. But — I can’t emphasize enough, it’s not the song itself, or what its lyrics express, but rather, how it is used in these “rituals” of “do-nothing feel-good-ism”.

It reminds me of the way the John Lennon song Imagine is viewed (as this big anthem of love and peace and harmony). I’m a huge Beatles and John Lennon fan, and love the song itself (as a melody). I have a review of the remastered Sgt. Pepper album that is on the first page of the Amazon listing (out of 3,035 reviews!). But here, John failed lyrically, and delivered a disastrous message.

The song starts out with, “Imagine there’s no heaven . . .” and later he wishes for “no religion, too.” And I always think, “yes, that thought absolutely terrifies me.” The gist of the song is typical Marxist post-religious messianic utopianism: if only we could get Christianity out of the way, there would be peace and harmony everywhere.

Hogwash!  Nothing could be more opposite of the truth. John was in one of his always-temporary phases at the time: infatuation with Marxism. In fact, a few years later (after going through about four more phases) he seriously entertained becoming an evangelical Christian, till his wife put an end to it.

In that case, the words itself were objectionable. But the song has become a symbol (with an outrageously false premise), regardless of what its lyrics convey. Kumbaya has become a symbol, too, and its association with mindless utopianism is what we conservatives object to.

When I read Mark’s posts, I was curious about the specifics of my own references to Kumbaya. I knew that I had mentioned it in the fashion that I have described. With word-search capabilities, I easily found seven usages in my own articles on Patheos. Here they are, with brief present commentary in blue:

*****

1) The way to get beyond that is not to put our heads in the sand and go throw a Frisbee and sing Kumbaya around the fire, ending the night with a group hug. It’s talking it through: listening to each other; interacting with opposing arguments. That’s how adult Christians should be able to resolve things. But if some people want to manifest that they cannot engage in a discussion without getting angry and insulting, then it’s a free country. All I can do is delete the worst offenses. (The Preference of Receiving Holy Communion from a Priest, 12-18-13)

Here I was calling for mature, adult back-and-forth discussion of internal Catholic differences, rather than pretending we have some sort of “unity” when we do not in fact have it.

2) Catholics have community, precisely because we are united around this set of truths called “Catholicism.” It’s not just arbitrary: “hey, look, a billion people all believe thus-and-so, so I’m gonna go join in and throw Frisbees and sing Kumbaya!” It’s based on the finding of a real truth that really is there: “true truth,” as Francis Schaeffer called it. Thus, those of us who follow that ancient Christian tradition are classified as infantile nuts, because we are still so silly as to believe that we can know truth with certitude, in Christ, and in His Church. (Radically Unbiblical Protestant “Quest for Uncertainty”, 2-12-14)

True unity is found in the Catholic Church: grounded in its doctrines and moral teachings and tradition, not merely “a billion people” supposedly all agreeing on a relatively superficial level.

3) Once again, an atheist came onto my page, guns blazing, was banned, and now he is crying in his beer and gathering all his like-minded cronies about him, group hugging, with lots of warm fuzzies,  singing of Kumbaya (oops! atheists don’t sing that, do they?), and whining and crying about how nasty all the wicked Christians are (me foremost of all, of course), who deign to ban a person who violates their blog rules. This is the second time in the last ten days that an entire atheist “feeding frenzy” thread was devoted to how nasty, terrible and all-around unsavory and stinky I am. I’m Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler, all wrapped into one hideous beast. (I Actually Enforce My Discussion Policy (What a Novelty!), 10-31-15)

I was mocking an atheist whom I banned for uncivil behavior, noting that he went and surrounded himself with a bunch of fellow clones in a groupthink effort to “prove” what a nasty beast and all-around unsavory fellow I am for simply enforcing simple rules of moderation and constructive online discourse.

4) Obviously, we had to utterly defeat the Nazis. That was the existential threat to the world 75 years ago. Likewise, today, we have to utterly defeat ISIS. The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be, and many more thousands will die as a result of our stupidity, cowardice, and appeasement. So we need to go and defeat them ASAP, and thereby eliminate the problem that is (largely) causing the refugees and the terrorist acts. That is more compassionate, because it saves exponentially many more lives of innocent people. When will we ever learn from history? It’s so absolutely frustrating. This ain’t rocket science. The problem won’t “dry up” and go away by means of our putting our heads in the sand and throwing Frisbees and singing Kumbaya. (Re Refugee & Terrorist Crises (My $00.02), 11-21-15)

I was making the point, again, that we had to do something about the refugee crisis, brought about in the Middle East by ISIS. Trump did exactly that, by virtually annihilating ISIS, while Obama had done nothing. So who cared more about the children and other innocent refigee victims?

5) Presidents Clinton and Obama, following Chamberlain’s noble lead, prevented nuclear conflict with North Korea all this time. Who does Trump think he is, to mess with all that peace? Trump needs to learn the wimpy, spineless jellyfish appeasing method of diplomacy, so we can be in a nuclear-free world. If only he does that, then Kim will tie all his nuclear missiles to a giant Frisbee and let them float up to orbit, while we all sing Kumbaya together and get back to agreeing about butchering preborn children: the one mass murder we all can agree is perfectly acceptable. (Trump’s Inadequate Rebukes of Rocket Man & Neo-Nazis, 8-13-17)

President Trump actually took concrete steps to get rid of the nuclear threat of North Korea, as opposed to the appeasing mentality of Neville Chamberlain (with Hitler) and Presidents Clinton and Obama. They were, as Trump says, “all talk and no action.” After the second attempt, when he walked away, even liberals praised his sensible realism and unwillingness to compromise on principle.

6) Then at length, the Protestants offered the world the spectacle of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619), in which Calvinists anathematized the Arminians (a vast majority of today‘s Protestants) who dared to disagree with their extreme and false doctrines. This was no Kumbaya / “isn’t it great that we’re all one big happy family and not Catholics?!” lovefest among fellow Protestants who had honest disagreements, to be amiably worked out over ale or rum, with chicken legs, by a warm fire. (Critique of Ten Exaggerated Claims of the “Reformation”, 10-31-17)

Here I was sarcastically mocking the oft-heard Protestant claims of a broad unity amongst themselves, over against us wicked Catholics. When they actually met together formally and discussed doctrine, a hundred years after their Revolt began, the above was what occurred. Even the common contempt towards the Catholic Church didn’t suffice to create real, tangible doctrinal unity.

7) The “progressive” trend against this sort of outrage and in favor of “a common humanity” was, so [Richard] Dawkins informs us, derived from “deeply unbiblical ideas that come from biological science, especially evolution”(p. 271). Okay. Materialistic evolution (which forbids God to play any role in it at all, according to Dawkins and atheists generally) fosters respect for life and commonness among all humankind. Wonderful! Ah, but wait! Dawkins utterly contradicts all of this touchy-feely, warm fuzzy Kumbaya love for one and all in the following proclamation: [I cite his words] . . . This grotesque” “scientism” mentality then leads to the evil justifying of abortion, and for that matter, to the ritual human sacrifice of born children by the Incas, Aztecs, and many other cultures (though Dawkins seems utterly unaware of that logical consequence of his stated position). (Richard Dawkins’ Outrageous Hypocrisy on Abortion, 5-21-18)

Dawkins engages in touchy-feely mindless utopianism, based on the excess of scientism (which is not simply love of science, but making science the epistemological “be all and end all”): all the while ignoring the plight of the smallest and most helpless and innocent among mankind: the preborn child.

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Lo and behold (irony of ironies), I even found an example of Mark Shea himself referring to Kumbaya in a similar way to the above, in a post of his that I host on my own blog:

The Pope [Pope St. John Paul II], of all people, is almost uniquely aware of the difference between utopianism and Christian faith (he’s lived under two utopian systems). He’s written extensively on the impossibility of utopian schemes. . . . So I think it extremely unlikely that he now imagines that the goal is a secular utopia of religious leaders singing Kumbaya. Rather, I think it obvious he is acting on the sensible counsel of Lumen Gentium to work in common with people of good will for what can be achieved while, of course, not sacrificing the truth that the Church’s revelation is — alone — the fullness of God’s revelation. (Defense of 2nd Ecumenical Gathering at Assisi (Mark Shea), 2-6-02)

There you go, Mark. The way you referenced it is the way we lowly, contemptible conservatives also do. Not that you will correct yourself . . .

As we saw above, Mark’s ultimate concern (if we can look past his ubiquitous and wrongheaded insults) was a worthy one (but wrongly applied in a broad, prejudicial, most unfair way to conservatives). He wants to combine good works with faith: a thoroughly Catholic and biblical impulse. And so he wrote in his second article:

I’m working on a book on the creed. One of the things I’m realizing is that a considerable discussion needs to happen, centering around Jesus’ saying, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and not do what I say?” He ends with the stark and terrifying warning that those who do this will be told “I never knew you.  Depart from me, you evildoers.”  There is no comparable warning to those who do as he says but do not call him Lord.  It’s almost as though he cares more about obedience than about empty words, “thoughts and prayers”. It’s the same lesson as the parable of the sheep and the goats. . . .

It’s also the same lesson as the parable of the two son who were asked to work in the vineyard by their Father.  The one son said ‘yes’ but did not go.  The other said ‘no’ and then went and worked.  Which did the will of his Father?

Yes! I totally agree. I write about this all the time: especially when I am refuting Protestant faith alone mentalities. And this, in fact, was my primary emphasis in my thoughts, in mentioning Kumbaya sarcastically or tongue-in-cheek. We have to do much more than simply engage in empty, shallow symbolic rhetoric and feel the warm fuzzies and good liberal Woodstock vibrations. And so, to sum up my seven instances in this particular regard:

1) We have to really solve Catholic internal difference by serious dialogue; not pretend they don’t exist.

2) Catholicism provides the basis and “glue” for a truly real and profound unity, not just a pretended commonality.

3) I noted how an atheist couldn’t be civil with us Christians, and as a result retreated into his clonelike enclave of back-slapping insulting atheists. I’m not saying that all atheists are that way, but this group was, and such cliquish tribalism is very common online among all belief-systems.

4) We can’t just talk about how much we want to help poor refugee children in the Middle East. We need to take concrete steps: in this instance, annihilate the ISIS monsters.

5) We had to do something concrete to alleviate or at least lessen the North Korean nuclear threat. Trump did that, while all the Presidents before him back to 1953 sat on their hands.

6) Protestants have not actually exhibited some supposed marvelous internal unity. One prime example of that was their synod in 1618-1619. Lots of utopian, vaguely or subliminally anti-Catholic, naive talk; no true unity.

7) Atheist Richard Dawkins talks a good game about human togetherness and “common humanity”: deriving from his religion of materialistic evolutionism: all the while hideously excluding children in their mother’s wombs.

I don’t see how Mark could or would disagree with any of this, save for my #5, in which The Abominable Beast Trump did a very good thing. That’s not possible, according to Mark, because he is the antichrist (just like Trump is not truly [wink wink] a pro-lifer, either. Right). So if we took out Trump and kept the other six examples, along with Mark’s own, we see that there is no hostility towards Kumbaya whatsoever: not one shred or iota.

The point I was making every time was that we need to act upon our expressed ideals; not just engage in empty words and sit on our butts, never intending to act upon them. This is precisely what Jesus calls us to do:

Matthew 7:21 (RSV) “Not every one who says to me, `Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

And so (whaddya know!) it turns out that the conservative impulse and motivation in this respect is precisely like the (proclaimed) best liberal intentions (not to mention biblical commands from our Lord Jesus and St. Paul): words must be merged with action: faith and works: walk and talk, not just talk alone (sola verbe?). Mark’s two posts are divisive and will separate Catholics and promote further mutual suspicion and hostility. But I write for the sake of better mutual understanding and unity.

I humbly inquire: which approach between these two (mine and Mark’s) is more biblical and Christlike? Is it better to be conciliatory and to seek unity among Catholics, or to misrepresent other Catholics in the effort to perpetuate yet more needless division and unbiblical, unethical tribalism?

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Mark Shea chimed in about this article, after I announced it underneath one of his two:

No. It’s about Kumbaya. And a religious cult that spends its waking hours passionately defending a gutless coward who stays up till all hours tweeting his hatred of a dead man who was tortured for his country while the coward was lying about bone spurs and being treated for venereal disease as his ‘personal Vietnam’ has lost all right to pontificate about ‘mindless naivete’.

I haven’t analyzed the latest controversy regarding John McCain at all. I have stated in the past that Trump’s earlier remarks about McCain’s captivity in Vietnam were dumb and indefensible. So as usual, Mark is dead-wrong about me (assuming for a moment that this has any relevance at all to the topic at hand; it really doesn’t).

And this is what passes as “rational argument” from him. It’s equal parts pathetic and absurd and sad.

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Photo credit: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at the Civil Rights March on Washington, 8-28-63. Provided by the National Archives and Records Administration [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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March 11, 2019

March 11, 2019 By

I wrote the following on my old blog (1-7-11), to a Christian friend who was basically saying that we should ignore atheists:

I think we can be friends with atheists by stressing the many things that we still hold in common. I get along far better with them than I do with anti-Catholic Protestants (because the latter position is largely prejudice-based and immediately viciously self-contradictory). Not all of ’em, but ones like DagoodS (and there are a considerable number like him) who are able and willing to engage in normal discourse . . .

Within a friendship there can be friendly debate and back-and-forth (think of, e.g., Chesterton and Shaw, or Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copleston). I immensely enjoy it, myself. My apologetic, philosophical, inquiring mind tires of always talking with Christians I agree with. I want challenge and stimulation. I’m a Christian first but I am also a thinker, and the thinker likes stimulation and challenge and broadening of intellectual horizons.

Thirdly, I like to offer dialogues as a pedagogical, teaching method, to illustrate the faults and flaws (in this instance) of atheist thinking. I don’t expect to convince DagoodS (ain’t holding my breath), but I can show many hundreds, maybe eventually thousands of others that his reasoning doesn’t fly, when he attacks the Bible and/or Christianity. I do that by directly confronting and refuting it.

And who knows? DagoodS and other atheists and agnostics might be convinced in the long run, at least of some things. C. S. Lewis was an atheist. Tolkien and others didn’t ignore him. They befriended him, and he eventually came around. Many other cases have occurred. I used to be a “practical atheist” myself (living as if God’s existence makes no difference in life). I did that pretty much the first 18 years of my life. If Christians had ignored me I might still be in that place (though I highly doubt it).

Atheists almost certainly ain’t gonna come around if we shun and insult them and psychoanalyze their interior motivations. We can go after their arguments, though. And I do that vigorously!

DagoodS may have ill motives (just like anyone might). I don’t know that, and I would say it is very difficult to know. I prefer to stick to a man’s arguments and leave his soul to God and his closest friends: with whom he shares his deepest thoughts and motivations.

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[added on 12-12-18] I did enjoy my debates with DagoodS [listed under his name on my Atheism web page]. Of course, I think I prevailed, but he gave it the old college try, and I admire his zeal, enthusiasm, and passion for what he feels to be the true and the good. I think inquisitive, thoughtful people can benefit from our dialogues, and be challenged one way or the other.

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[the following dates from 7-21-10 and was entitled, “Why Atheists and Christians Should Talk to Each Other and Debate the Issues”]

I think a large part of the problem on both sides of the atheist-Christian discussion (to the extent that there actually is any at all) is that we too often call each other names and misrepresent each others’ positions. Atheists think Christians are dumbbells and that the Bible is filled with absurdities and makes no sense.

Christians, on the other hand, too often regard atheists as utterly rebellious, wicked folks who have no ethical principle. So it’s “‘stupid’ vs. ‘wicked.'” Political debates usually amount to largely the same dynamic. It gets very wearisome.

Both are ridiculous stereotypes, and if we try to get along together in this world and seek any common ground whatever, both sides need to get past that. I’m trying to do what little I can as one person to change the poisoned atmosphere.

People talking to each other and trying to understand each other as human beings is where it’s at. We have far more in common than I think most on either side realize.

Atheists will have to be with lots of Christians; especially in America, so it is in their interest to better understand them. Likewise, atheism is a growing movement, and Christians would do well to truly understand what makes atheists tick and what motivates them. Talk, talk, talk (and read the other guys’ stuff), is the only way to do that.

I respect anyone who makes an attempt to grapple with important issues that face all of us, and who uses reason to do so. That includes atheists.

I have far more intellectual respect for an honest atheist (and I think most are that) than I do for an anti-Catholic Protestant who says I (as a Catholic) am not a Christian or a liberal Christian who plays around with Christianity and hardly believes what he purports to believe in the first place, or a raving fundamentalist who thinks that Christianity and reason and common sense and higher culture are almost mutually exclusive.

Respect for thinking and for ethics is what we have in common, so sure, I can respect an atheist insofar as those things are concerned. I don’t have to take a position that they are all raving lunatics and simpletons (or wicked, etc.).

There are people like that in both camps, to be sure, but to put everyone in one box is absurd and profoundly intolerant as well. We don’t have to agree with a person to have a measure of respect for that person’s overall view and his or her person.

It takes a lot of patience on both sides to have the Christian-atheist discussion, and it can get very frustrating dealing with people who look at things very differently from the way we do. That works the same way whatever we believe.

I have my moments when I get fed up, too, believe me. But I think it’s a discussion worth having (i.e., the whole Christianity vs. atheism thing) as long as there is an atheist around who wants to keep talking and to keep it on a friendly level.

Some things bind most atheists together (as with any group). In other ways, they are different. Same thing with Christians. Atheists generalize about Christians every bit as much as Christians do about them. I have condemned lousy stereotypes on both sides.

The Dawkins / Hitchens mentality doesn’t do anyone any good (not even atheists, I would submit): anymore than the “angry feminist” or “angry Marxist” or “angry black man” or “[materialistic] evolutionists fighting the ID folks to the death” impress anyone who is truly interested in the world of ideas and actual dialogue. There has to be a certain rudimentary calmness, charity, and tolerance.

Both sides gotta chill out and talk to each other and establish friendships if possible. And we can learn from each other about various issues. The approach to discussion and tolerance for opposing views and respect for reasoning and science and dialogue in general is the common ground that we have.

It’s becoming a lost art in our society (assuming if it was ever “found”), and I am frequently disturbed by that, myself. Civil discussion and seeking greater understanding of other viewpoints is what it’s about. I like to be stimulated by opposition. I’ve made a whole apologetic career out of that. cool

People (of all stripes of belief) are so often reluctant to make any effort to understand a different viewpoint. That has to stop. Someone has to try to make an effort to change that in some fashion. Otherwise we are left with shouting matches, back-patting clubs, and mocking and belittling.

I argue my positions passionately, but I fully agree: it doesn’t have to be personal, and there is no need to demonize the other person and consider them a “bad” person just because of what they may believe.

Conversation in our society (and above all, on the Internet) has become so intolerant, trivial, or insubstantial, and often literally an insult to anyone with any intelligence or wits, that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack to stumble upon some solid challenging dialogue and people actually using their heads for a change.

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Related Reading:

Secular Humanism & Christianity: Seeking Common Ground (with Sue Strandberg) [5-25-01]

Are Atheists “Evil”? Multiple Causes of Atheist Disbelief and the Possibility of Salvation [2-17-03]

16 Atheists / Agnostics & Me (At a Meeting) [11-24-10]

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(originally  7-21-10 and 1-7-11 )

Photo credit: geralt [PublicDomainPictures.Net / CC0 Public Domain]

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February 18, 2019

February 18, 2019 By

Mini-Dialogue with an Atheist

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This is from my analysis of the deconversion story (i.e., from Christianity to atheism) of “Anthrotheist”: a very pleasant, enjoyable dialogue. I have slightly revised it and added many links. His words will be in blue.

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I honestly didn’t ever intend to claim that the Bible was meant to be a science textbook, but hasn’t it served at various points in history as exactly that?

Sometimes it is misunderstood as that, by less sophisticated and insufficiently educated Christians.

Wasn’t the position of the church for at least some time that the Earth must be the center of the universe exactly because of a passage about the Earth being set on its foundations and the sun and moon moving about it?

Yes. Later it was better understood that that was phenomenological language: the same sort that all of us use every day: “the sun comes up and goes down.” Or some of the language was poetic and not intended to be literal (as was done in describing God Himself too: what is called anthropomorphism and anthropopathism).

Without knowledge of heliocentrism (or any science at all), it’s perfectly logical (and not absurd) to assume or conclude that we are stationary and it’s the sun that is moving. And many great scientists did that, too (backed up also by Aristotle and other notable philosophers). At least one great scientist did even after Copernicus (Tycho Brahe).

I know that it describes the creation of the world, and that description counters many current understandings of the order in which things had to happen; literal readings of scripture aside, when a text says “First this, second this, third that,” and so on, that isn’t at all poetical or allegorical.

The ancient Hebrews had very different conceptions of chronology and time, and often, texts that we casually interpret as literally chronological, were not intended to be (I’ve written about the Hebrew conception of time). Early Genesis is a combination of symbolic language (trees and picking fruit, talking serpents) and some real, literal things (the earth did have a beginning — as science also tells us –; there was a primal human pair, who did “fall” and rebel against God).

The word for “day” (yom) was understood to not have to be literal, at least as far back as St. Augustine (d. 430). Nor do Catholics believe that the Flood was global. The language there was partially figurative or non-literal.

I suppose the point that I am trying to make is that it is all well and good to say in modernity, “the Bible isn’t a science textbook,” exactly because we now have science textbooks. Prior to that invention, far more stock was put in the Bible’s capacity to explain the world, and that stock has only receded in response to the epistemological successes of science.

Yeah; science (originating in a Christian worldview, not an atheist one; formulated in Christian and medieval minds) was a great advance in human knowledge about the material world, and even interpretation of the Bible was improved because of it. I think that’s great. It didn’t prove that the Bible was wrong; only that we interpreted it wrongly in some respects. Biblical interpretation is a human field of knowledge where we can improve and do better over time. The Bible itself didn’t change, but over time our understanding of it can improve.

That is the loss that I refer to. It isn’t that the church has tried to stymie science, just that by its own hand it has limited the Bible to spiritual matters (whether that amounts to a diminishing of the Bible’s stature is another matter, and I suspect that you don’t believe that it is at all).

The Bible is primarily about spiritual matters. When it touches upon matters that are scientific in nature it is not inconsistent with science. We believe that God created the universe ex nihilo. Science eventually figured out that it began in an instant with a Big Bang (the theory was formulated by a Catholic priest-scientist), which was not inconsistent with our existing view at all. It’s quite harmonious with it. Science came up with evolution (conceived in a then-theist — not atheist — mind, by Charles Darwin).

Nothing in the Bible requires us to believe that Adam was necessarily created in an instant. It says that God made Him from the dust (“the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground”: Gen 2:7, RSV). The “formed” could very well have been a process of millions of years, from matter. It’s interesting that it doesn’t say that God created man out of nothing, but rather, from the dust (matter). To me, that almost implies process itself.

Thus, there is no necessary contradiction. The real contradiction comes with materialistic science, that attempts (inconsistently, among some scientists) to rule out God as impossible in the whole process (even with regard to ultimate origins). That contradicts Catholicism and the Bible (and I would say, logic as well). But evolution itself does not, as long as God isn’t arbitrarily / dogmatically excluded from the process.

And so on and so forth. No unanswerable contradiction between Christianity and science has been demonstrated.

See my related papers:

Old Earth, Flood Geology, Local Flood, & Uniformitarianism (vs. Kevin Rice) [5-25-04; many defunct links removed and new ones added: 5-10-17]

Galileo: The Myths and the Facts [5-11-06]

Dialogue on the Galileo Fiasco and the State of Scientific and Astronomical Knowledge in 1633 (vs. Eric G.) [5-13-06]

Adam & Eve, Cain, Abel, & Noah: Historical Figures [2-20-08]

Richard Dawkins & Double Standards of the “Religion vs. Science” Mentality / Galileo Redux [3-20-08]

“No One’s Perfect”: Scientific Errors of Galileo and 16th-17th Century Cosmologies [7-29-10]

Christianity: Crucial to the Origin of Science [8-1-10]

Christian Influence on Science: Master List of Scores of Bibliographical and Internet Resources (Links) [8-4-10]

33 Empiricist Christian Thinkers Before 1000 AD [8-5-10]

Christians or Theists Founded 115 Scientific Fields [8-20-10]

Noah’s Flood & Catholicism: Basic Facts [8-18-15]

Do Carnivores on the Ark Disprove Christianity? [9-10-15]

Galileo, Bellarmine, & Scientific Method [10-20-15]

Science and Christianity (Copious Resources) [11-3-15]

Dialogue with an Agnostic on Catholicism and Science [9-12-16]

New Testament Evidence for Noah’s Existence [National Catholic Register, 3-11-18]

Modernism vs. History in Genesis & Biblical Inspiration [7-23-18]

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(originally 8-14-18 on Facebook; rev. 2-18-19)

Photo credit: Noah’s Ark and the Flood [Max Pixel / Creative Commons Zero – CC0 license]

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August 23, 2018

August 23, 2018 By
This exchange took place on the ExChristian.Net site, in response to my critique of the webmaster Dave Van Allen’s “anti-testimony.” Dr. Arvo’s words will be in blue. My older cited words will be in green. Dave Van Allen’s words will be in brown.
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Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

You start by responding to Dave’s comment “None of this proves or disproves Christianity…” with the statement “If such stories give no reason whatsoever to reject Christianity then (not to be insulting), I humbly submit: what good are they at all?”

You erroneously equate lack of “proof” with “no reason whatsoever to reject Christianity”. That is a gross misinterpretation. Dave is acknowledging what is manifestly true–that neither side can be PROVEN absolutely. However, proofs are not what we employ when deciding upon empirical matters; we marshal evidence. I submit to you (not to be insulting) that the difference is enormous, and that the weight of evidence is not on the side of Christianity.

That’s a good point, and it did cross my mind. However, in light of Dave’s later comments, I think I was justified in reading it the way I did, and not in the more technical epistemological sense you suggested. For example, Dave claims in the combox:

My mind was opened to reality, and is continuing to be opened to reality, as the myths and gods of my youth are abandoned to be replaced by reason.

Also: he describes Christianity as “primitive imaginings” and a “phony cult” that “enslave[s] the mind.” It is supposedly anti-science and (most ridiculous of all) allegedly “caused the Dark Ages.” To me this implies that somewhere along the line he assumes Christianity has been rationally disproven, or at least so discredited that he has justification to speak in such insulting and derogatory terms.

And that gets back to my point: either he thinks his deconversion story offers some of the reasons why he thinks Christianity is false or it doesn’t. If it does, where are they? I saw none as I examined it. If it doesn’t (as I interpreted), then what good is it? Frankly, who cares about horror stories of the ignorant, anti-intellectual fundamentalists he mostly associated with? It may tickle the fancy of former Christians who love to hear these things, but it doesn’t advance the discussion at all. It is merely anecdotes about fools.

And I would add that if he couldn’t extricate himself from such know-nothingism for 30 years, what does that say about his intellectual discernment? Does he mean to imply that he couldn’t find a single Christian congregation anywhere for 30 years, that respected the mind and science and philosophy, and had a thought-out view of culture, politics, the arts, etc.? I find that astounding. Catholicism (my group) certainly offers all that. And many Protestant groups and congregations do. I’ve been in them myself (as a former Protestant evangelical). But it doesn’t reflect well on his own judgment as a Christian.

In response to Dave’s story about asking difficult questions as a child, DA responded “I would ask the child back: ‘why do you presume to question God’s purposes for doing anything, or act as if we would or could or should understand everything that God does, in the first place?'”

What a terrible answer. You are, in effect, saying that the child must simply accept the story as given, without testing it against their own experience or their own notion of justice and compassion. While the latter ought not be the ultimate yard stick, it should certainly sound an alarm if a religious teaching proclaims compassion yet appears to lack it in its most basic teaching. I should think it far better to explain why we should accept that god’s actions appear less charitable than the child’s own would have been, and why the child should continue to seriously question actions that appear unkind or downright devious.

I didn’t say all that. You read that into what I said. My point was simply to note that we shouldn’t expect to know all about God’s deepest purposes, by the very nature of the case (or Being). Later I made analogies to the many deep mysteries of science (origins of life, DNA, why gravity acts as it does, etc.). I’m contending that if we can acknowledge mystery in science, why not also in theology? In that context I was presupposing belief in God. If you grant that, then given the traditional theistic / Jewish / Christian concept of a transcendent, monotheistic, omniscient, omnipotent God, it is foolish to think that we can figure all that out, since clearly such a Being is many magnitudes greater in thinking ability.

That was my point: not that one should render blind faith, or be a fideist. I have always opposed that. I would never urge that on anyone. Now, if people in your past or Dave’s taught that they were wrong, and I fully agree with your general critique of their mentality.

“…many atheists collapse Christianity into know-nothing fundamentalism, so that it can be dismissed as ‘anti-intellectual’ and ‘anti-science’…”

I don’t know who the “many” are that you speak of.

Isn’t it obvious even in this combox? For example:

rd:

. . . the total fallacy of religions is anyway? Your longing for a belief in the after life that you are willing to deny the obvious? The obvious truth being, that it’s all a lie.

Anytime you need faith in order to believe something, you are expected to go beyond your own intellectual honesty and accentually lie to yourself knowing full well deep down inside it could not possibly be true.

Kill the old self and lie to the new self, step beyond reality into mental delusions of psuedo [sic] grandeur.

. . . incredable [sic] imbecilic nonsense . . .

It was clear in Dave’s deconversion as well. Such rhetoric is very common among atheists / agnostics / skeptics / “freethinkers”. Look at Dawkins and Hitchens, for heaven’s sake. There are exceptions (you seem to be one of them and I know others personally from the Internet and in “real life”) but I stand by my generalization, based on many years of experience of debates and discussions. I used the word “many”; not “most” or “almost all.”

At exchristian.net there are hundreds of Christian visitors who zealously place themselves into this category by refusing to examine any of their beliefs and by attempting to discredit science in the large with childishly simplistic and fallacious arguments. We, as a rule, do not use such visitors as an excuse to dismiss anything (which is what you are apparently suggesting).

Why deal with them at all? If thinking Christians and ex-Christians agree that they shouldn’t be dealt with seriously, then why the obsession with them? It’s because (in my humble opinion) that is the easiest way for an ex-Christian to live with his or her decision to leave Christianity. It’s in their interest to caricature Christianity into the silly anti-intellectual wing of it, so it can be rejected (because even a Christian like myself would readily reject the same things insofar as they are stupid and mindless). You take the very worst, fringe aspects of something in order to reject it.

In fact, some sites, like Debunking Christianity, openly state as a matter of emphasis and policy that they are interested mainly if not solely, in dealing with fundamentalist Christianity. 95% or so of the remaining sectors of Christianity are ignored (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, more sophisticated brands of Presbyterianism and Calvinism in general: folks like Alvin Plantinga, Anglo-Catholicism, Methodism, etc.).

Serious analysis of a competing view will deal with the most respectable form of it, not the dumbest and least respectable.

However, they do get dismissed because they contribute nothing.

And then a serious Christian who comes along gets to deal with all their baggage and the latent hostile attitudes, as if they represented the sum of Christianity . . .

“…what makes him [Dave] think that he knows better than scholars who have studied these things for years? This is a common motif in atheist deconversions. They know better than everyone else.”

Tell me, which scholar should we all listen to?

I wasn’t talking about any particular one, but all of them as a class. Again, if one is to rationally dismiss a point of view, shouldn’t he at least seek out some of the better representatives of it?

Yes, of course. Do you imply that people here have not done that?

My replies had to do with Dave Van Allen, not all 473 skeptics at ExChristian.Net.

That was my point. I kept wondering if Dave had even tried to do that, or if he would ask a question of some pastor who wouldn’t have a clue, and then just give up, as if no Christian on the face of the earth could offer the slightest reply to his probing questions.

Many made a desperate effort to rescue their waning beliefs by pursuing a wide spectrum of apologetics, looking for something well-founded. The Webmaster himself went though this. 

If so, there was no indication of it whatsoever in his anti-testimony.

It sounds as though you chastise them for not having settled upon your particular brand of Christianity. Each sect could take the same stand (and to a degree, that’s what they do). 

My reply had nothing whatsoever to do with Catholic distinctives over against other brands of Christianity. I never defend Catholicism when debating atheists, but Christianity in general.

Not everybody thinks Catholicism is the most rational branch of Christianity–I’m sure you are aware of that. (To the regulars here: Please pardon my understatement.)

No kidding? I’m so shocked I think I’ll faint.

You know as well as I that 1) what some scholars have to say is not worthy of the name “scholarship”, and 2) there are legitimate scholars on both sides of practically any issue.

Sure, but that was irrelevant to my point, clarified above.

In the end, each of us must decide which line of reasoning is most coherent and has the greater force of evidence (thanks, in part, to the efforts of legitimate scholars).

Indeed. That’s what I’m saying: read the best of both sides, in any given debate, not the best of one and worst of the other, or only one side.

That’s what I’ve done for close to thirty years. Do you claim to have read the best on both sides?

I try to familiarize myself with the best arguments, yes (money- and time-permitting). I prefer one-on-one discussion with informed advocates, but it is rare to find such people.

* * *

Do I know better than everyone else? No, I don’t believe so, and I don’t claim to. But I have a well-thought-out position–one that is coherent, and has benefited from exposure to nimble minds on both sides (Plantinga, who you mention, is among them).

Good for you. I would say exactly the same about my own view. Looks like you and I, then, may be able to engage in some excellent, fruitful dialogue. It’s the love of truth and reason and dialogue that allows that to take place.

Bottom line: don’t dismiss all atheists as simply thinking they are smarter than anybody else.

Many clearly do think so. Again, I appeal to the rhetoric commonly seen here and in similar places, about how “imbecilic” and “obviously false” Christianity is. That is the language of condescension and a “know-it-all” mentality. You are an exception, apparently, but exceptions don’t disprove the rule, as they say.

Instead, I encourage you to address their arguments with the same dedication that they put into forming them.

I did my best with Dave’s anti-testimony, and am doing so presently. Thanks again for your thoughts. I enjoyed the discussion.

***

(originally 9-28-07)

Photo credit: WenPhotos (1-24-15) [Pixabay / CC0 public domain]

***

August 15, 2018

August 15, 2018 By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “In this blog, I’ve responded to many Christian arguments . . . Christians’ arguments are easy to refute.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” I’m always one to oblige people’s wishes, so I decided to do a series of posts in reply.

It’s also been said, “be careful what you wish for.”  If Bob responds to this post, and makes me aware of it, his reply will be added to the end along with my counter-reply. If you don’t see that at the end, rest assured that he either hasn’t replied, or didn’t inform me that he did. Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, word-search “Seidensticker” on my atheist page or in my sidebar search (near the top).

*****

In his post, “God Creates Evil” (4-27-18; update of original post from 8-20-14), Bob stated: “God also has no problem with rape (Deuteronomy 22:28–9), . . .” Later in the article, Bob claims that God “advocated” rape. In another paper (originally 12-13-13), Bob opined: “The Bible . . . talks about when rape is okay.” And again on 6-17-15: “[T]he Bible says much about all sorts of embarrassing marriage customs and prohibitions sanctioned by God: . . . rape for fun and profit, . . .”Alright; let’s take a look at his passage and alleged “prooftext”:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (RSV) “If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, [29] then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her; he may not put her away all his days.”

First of all, that is not having “no problem” with rape, in the Mosaic law which we believe was given to Moses and the ancient Hebrews by God. Christian apologist Glenn Miller, who runs the wonderful Christian Thinktank website, dealt with the topic of rape in the Bible at extreme length. He commented on this passage as follows:

Here is a clear case in which the rapist has (1) stolen the girl’s ability to guarantee paternity, and by doing so has greatly limited her future options; and (2) has limited her father’s options of arranging a good marriage for her. The rapist is now forced to become what he has cheated the girl out of—a ‘well off’ husband. The fifty shekels bride-price (see below on the Exodus 22.16 passage) is five years worth of average wages, and is the price  paid by the Pharaoh Amenophis III for the women of Gezer destined for his harem! The girl’s future is now assured—she has a guaranteed support source (he cannot divorce her)—and she has a ‘big’ bride-price on deposit. The law has protected someone who was attempting to help the community, by preserving her virginity.

How all that is somehow deemed as God having “no problem” with rape is, I confess, beyond my rational capabilities to comprehend. Of course, Bob, in his rush to mock God and Christianity, neglects (for some odd reason) to also include the passage immediately preceding:

Deuteronomy 22:25-27 “But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die. [26] But to the young woman you shall do nothing; in the young woman there is no offense punishable by death, for this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor; [27] because he came upon her in the open country, and though the betrothed young woman cried for help there was no one to rescue her.” (cf. 22:23-24)

Does that sound like God is all gung-ho about rape? The rapist is to be executed. Nothing is to be done to the woman because she has done nothing wrong, and the rape is analogous to someone being murdered. The difference in the earlier case was the woman not being betrothed (the cultural difference of which was explained by Glenn Miller above).

In the article, “What does the Bible say about sexual assault?”, Southern Baptist Katie McCoy writes:

The Bible is not silent about rape. The accounts of sexual assault against women are heartbreaking, even gruesome. But they are not brushed under a rug or hushed up. In fact, of the three accounts describing a woman who was sexually assaulted, each of them precipitated civil war. When Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, was violated by the son of a neighboring ruler, Shechem, her brothers murdered him, his father, and the all of the men of his city in revenge (Gen. 34). After the Unnamed Concubine was gang-raped and left for dead by men in the tribe of Benjamin, the other tribes went to war against them upon hearing of her injustice (Jgs. 19-21). And after Tamar was raped by her half-brother, Amnon, her brother Absalom killed him, and incited a rebellion against his father, King David (2 Sam. 13). Rape was neither covered up nor ignored. Instead, it was answered and avenged. It was such a cultural convulsion that it was answered with outrage and further violence. The cases of rape in Scripture tell us something about the cases of rape we are hearing today: These women must be heard and they must be protected.

Christian apologist Kyle Butt, takes on another unsavory atheist tactic regarding the Bible and rape, in his article, “God did not condone rape”:

Militant atheists of the 21st century delight in accusing God of condoning the most heinous immoralities. They insist that the God of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament, was a murderous villain guilty of far worse than His human subjects. Richard Dawkins accused God of being a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (2006, p. 31 [The God Delusion] ).

One attempt that has been made to bolster these unfounded accusations is to suggest that in the Old Testament God condoned rape. Dan Barker commented: “If God told you to rape someone, would you do it? Some Christians, ignorant of biblical injunctions to rape, might answer, ‘God would never ask me to do that’” (Barker, 1992, p. 331, emp. added). If the honest truth seeker were to ask to see the “biblical injunctions to rape,” he would be struck by the fact that no such injunctions exist.

The passage that is most often used to “prove” that God condones rape is Numbers 31:25-40. In this passage, the young women who were taken captive after Moses destroyed the Midianites were divided between the Israelites and the priests. The priests were given responsibility for 32 of the women. Skeptics often suggest that these women were supplied so that the priests could abuse them sexually and rape them. But nothing could be further from the truth. The skeptic errs greatly in this regard either due to his ignorance of God’s instructions or willful dishonesty.

In Deuteronomy 21:10-14, Moses specifically stated what was to be done with female captives:

When you go out to war…and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife (emp. added).

It is important to understand that God has never condoned any type of sexual activity outside of a lawful marriage. The only way that an Israelite would be morally justified in having sexual intercourse with a female captive was if he made her his wife, granting to her the rights and privileges due to a wife. Notice that the Israelite male could not “go in to her” (a euphemism for sexual intercourse) until she had observed a period of mourning and cleansing, and he could only “go in to her” with the intent of being her husband.

When the skeptics’ allegations about God condoning rape are demolished by the very clear instructions in Deuteronomy 21, the attack is usually shifted, and God is accused of being unjust for allowing war prisoners or slavery of any kind, regardless of whether or not rape was permitted.  . . .

For the skeptic to imply that God condoned rape, using Numbers 31, without mentioning Moses’ instructions in Deuteronomy 21, is unconscionable. It is simply another instance of dishonest propaganda designed to discredit God and the Bible.

***

Photo credit: The Rape of Tamar (c. 1640), by Eustache Le Sueur (1616-1655) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

***

August 8, 2018

August 8, 2018 By

Dr. Ted Drange is an atheist philosopher, renowned in atheist circles for his arguments against Christianity. Back around 2001, he started vigorously challenging me. At first I had no idea that he was a philosophy professor (which was a bit unfair, and should have been disclosed, but anyway . . .).  This particular argument was much ballyhooed on Jeffrey Jay Lowder’s Secular Web. He wrote there about it, and several papers along these lines; also about Dr. Drange in particular:

Philosopher Theodore Drange introduced a related but distinct argument for atheism in his 1998 book, Nonbelief and Evil. Drange calls his argument simply the “argument from nonbelief” and bases it upon all nonbelief, not just reasonable nonbelief. (In “Nonbelief as Support for Atheism,” Drange states he considers the distinction between culpable and inculpable nonbelief to be both unclear and irrelevant.)

Apparently the book was in part derived from a 1996 article, “The Arguments from Evil and Nonbelief .” It’s that article that I respond to below. It was from Dr. Drange that I learned (back in 2001 when I first encountered him) that otherwise intelligent atheists and academics like himself often don’t have the slightest clue what they are talking about when describing Christianity or the Bible.

Subsequently, I’ve seen countless examples of this ignorance and attempted “appearance of knowledge” where in fact there is little (and have numerous related posted dialogues to more than prove my assertion). Expertise and credentials in one area (philosophy or, oftentimes with atheists, science) doesn’t necessarily carry over into expertise in another (biblical exegesis and hermeneutics and the fine points of historic Christian doctrine). Credentials and book learning in completely separate fields can’t produce an “instant Bible scholar” or “Church historian” without the requisite study.

This trait was rather spectacularly exhibited by the famous atheist Richard Dawkins, in his (sadly) influential book, The God Delusion. I recently read it and critiqued it; particularly his outlandish pseudo-“arguments” regarding alleged biblical teachings.

Dr. Drange’s words will be in blue.

*****

According to this objection, which may be called “the Free-Will Defense” or FWD for short, premise (A3) of ANB is false because there is something that God wants even more strongly than situation S and that is the free formation of proper theistic belief.

It doesn’t follow that He wants it “more.” He wants both (as far as that goes), but both cannot (or often, or potentially cannot) exist together, and even an omnipotent being cannot make it so, if He creates and allows free will in human beings. I suspect that this misunderstanding will be the seed of further fallacious arguments . . . We’ll see.

God wants people to come to believe the propositions of set P freely and not as the result of any sort of coercion.

Indeed.

He knows that people would indeed believe those propositions if he were to directly implant the belief in their minds or else perform spectacular miracles before them.

In the first instance, yes, but that would be the coercion that God doesn’t desire. The second is untrue because it is known that whatever miracle occurs, many skeptics like you guys on this list will disbelieve it (see, e.g., Luke 16:30-31), because you either rule out the possibility of the miraculous beforehand (“define it away”) or make verification practically impossible, so that no miracle can occur, let alone a belief in God which oftentimes follows such a remarkable happening. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, who wouldn’t believe that he healed a blind man, when He did it right in front of them. They cared little about demonstrable fact (John 9:1-41 — all).

But for him to do that would interfere with their free will, which he definitely does not want to happen.

Miracles don’t interfere with free will, but people often refuse to believe them because of their false philosophical presuppositions or, e.g., unwillingness to accept the conclusion that the miracle suggests, about God, or about the difference that a God would make in their own life and responsibilities.

Since God’s desire that humans retain their free will outweighs his desire for situation S, it follows that premise (A3) is false, which makes ANB unsound.

It doesn’t “outweigh” anything in God’s desires; it is simply a state of affairs that makes sin and rebellion against God, and evil possible, and hence, human beings not believing in God, etc.

There are many objections to FWD. First and foremost, assuming that God wants to avoid interfering with people’s free will, it is not clear that that desire actually conflicts with his desire for situation S. Why should showing things to people interfere with their free will?

It doesn’t; I agree.

People want to know the truth.

Some do; not all, by a long shot. Of course all of us here are pure truth seekers who flee in horror from all falsehoods, no matter how minor. :-)

It would seem, then, that to show them things would not interfere with their will, but would conform to it. Even direct implantation of belief into a person’s mind need not interfere with his/her free will. If that person were to want true beliefs and not care how the beliefs are obtained, then for God to directly implant true beliefs into his/her mind would not interfere with, but would rather comply with, the person’s free will.

Only if he were free to change his mind. If not, it would interfere with his free will and free choice.

An analogy would be God making a large unexpected direct deposit into someone’s bank account. It would make the person quite pleased and would not at all interfere with his/her free will.

Sure, but this is irrelevant to the question at hand. The truly free person can now take that money and squander it in whatever fashion he likes. Likewise, free persons can reject God, even if they know that He is exactly what Christians claim Him to be, just as people rejected Jesus during His lifetime, even though He was an obviously and extraordinarily good person by virtually any criteria of ethics and behavior towards others.

Furthermore, as was explained previously in Section I, there are many different ways by which God might bring about situation S. It is not necessary for him to use either direct implantation or spectacular miracles. He could accomplish it through relatively ordinary means. It would be ludicrous to claim that free will has to be interfered with whenever anyone is shown anything.

Again, I agree. But this goes off into different ground from ANB proper (at least as Steve presented it). It’s really very simple: if people can freely choose, then that must include the possibility of a rejection of God. That’s utterly obvious, and is proven by the very beliefs of the folks on this list. You have all chosen to reject a belief in God. You claim there is no God to even reject.

Whether or not God actually exists is beside my current point. You have chosen to deny it. So if God exists, clearly there are people who reject Him and deny that He is the Supreme Being, worthy of a full allegiance, and so forth. If He does not exist, you still have freely made the choice. If you haven’t freely made it, then what is the point of having any discussions here at all, since we are all believing what we must believe and can do no other?

People have their beliefs affected every day by what they read and hear, and their free will remains intact. Finally, even the performance of spectacular miracles need not cause such interference. People want to know the truth. They particularly want to be shown how the world is really set up. To perform miracles for them would only conform to or comply with that desire. It would therefore not interfere with their free will. Hence, FWD fails to attack premise (A3) of ANB because it fails to present a desire on God’s part that conflicts with his desire for situation S. That failure makes the Free-Will Defense actually irrelevant to premise (A3).

What is irrelevant here is the shifting to this “spectacular miracles will prove to virtually every person that there is a God” approach. I suppose that is part of Ted’s overall argument (as I have heard him argue this before). But if so, it should have been a prominent part of the original presentation. I deny this new premise, and I deny that FWD rests on some alleged conflict between different desires of God. I am contending that FWD is true because there are certain things that even an omnipotent being cannot do, not because God desired one thing more than another.

Even if there were people whose free will would be interfered with by God showing them things, it would seem that such people would be benefited by coming to know how things really are. Quite apart from the issue of salvation, just being aware that there is a God who loves humanity and who has provided an afterlife for it would bring comfort and hope to people.

Sure it would. The Christian view is that all people know this without even a spectacular miracle before their eyes. And they know it by creation itself. The Apostle Paul makes the argument in Romans 1:18-32. He says that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” can be known by His creation (Romans 1:20). It’s a simple presentation of the Teleological Argument. Then he goes on to state that people reject truth even when they know full well what it is (Romans 1:18,21,25,28). The biblical and Christian view of human nature is far more pessimistic, and doesn’t see man as this objective truth machine who will inevitably follow truth whenever it is presented.

And again, that argument works and is fairly self-evident whether God exists or not. If He does, and if Christianity is true, then all of you disbelieve it. That shows both that you have the free will to do so, and that (granting our premises) truth can be rejected. If there is no God, on the other hand, then all of us Christians are rebelling against the obvious truth of atheism. You present your crystal-clear arguments to people like me and I reject them utterly. In that case, I am not seeking the truth you find to be so obvious and compelling. Either way, people are not truth-seekers by nature, and Ted’s point here fails, as clearly and demonstrably untrue, in both a theistic and an atheistic state of affairs in actuality.

A loving God would certainly want them to have such comfort and hope.

And He provides it, and all men know it, at least in outline form. We disagree on how much evidence is needed to establish that God exists. All anti-supernaturalists place the bar of “proof” so high that it will never be reached for most individuals in the world.

So, even if it were granted that showing things to some people interferes with their free will, FWD would still not work well, for it has not made clear why God should refrain from showing them things of which they ought to be aware. Such “interference with free will” seems to be just what such people need to get “straightened out”.

He has done so. There is creation itself; there is the law written upon our hearts” and conscience (Romans 2:15); there is widespread agreement across religions and cultures about basic moral tenets, and a religious awareness itself. And there is the Christian revelation and religious experience and miracles performed in history, and the life of Jesus, and (above all) His Resurrection, and on and on.

There are all kinds of evidences. It’s never enough for the atheist. That is the point, not that God should provide sufficient evidence and hasn’t done so. So again Ted is arguing in a circle. He assumes that this presentation of evidence is lacking, when in fact it is not. So that leads him to make silly arguments, such as, “it has not made clear why God should refrain from showing them things of which they ought to be aware.”

There is a further objection concerning God’s motivation. FWD seems to claim that God wants people to believe the propositions of set P in an irrational way, without good evidence.

I don’t see how, unless one accepts Ted’s straw man presentation of what both Christianity and FWD supposedly teach.

But why would he want that? Why would a rational being create people in his own image and then hope that they become irrational?

He doesn’t. It’s a straw man. Atheism is the irrational path, and it is chosen voluntarily.

Furthermore, it is not clear just how people are supposed to arrive at the propositions of set P in the absence of good evidence.

I agree.

Is picking the right religion just a matter of lucky guesswork? Is salvation a kind of cosmic lottery? Why would God want to be involved in such an operation?

Indeed. More non sequiturs . . .

Sometimes the claim is made that, according to the Bible, God really does want people to believe things without evidence. Usually cited for this are the words of the resurrected Christ to no-longer-doubting Thomas: “because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

This is not an encouragement of belief without evidence, and quite obviously so, as this very passage occurs when Jesus has appeared to Thomas after His Resurrection, telling Thomas to put his hands in his wounds. So, clearly, Jesus isn’t enjoining a blind, irrational, non-empirical faith, because He has just appeared, offering empirical proof in His own resurrected body! That might be enough even for Ted! If I fell into a tree shredder in front of Ted and came out hamburger, and then my body came back together and I was resurrected and came to Ted and had him feel all my shred-wounds, perhaps he would suspect that there was something to this afterlife business. Or he could convince himself that he had too many drinks, or was hallucinating, etc.

To reach such a conclusion of supposed “fideism” or “blind faith” in this passage, context has to be thrown to the wind, and literal absurdity adopted as “exegesis.” Jesus is not knocking evidences for faith at all; rather, He is simply praising those who can believe without having to have such miracles as a requirement before they will believe. And that is because there are many evidences of Christianity besides miracles.

Also, Peter praises those who believe in Jesus without seeing him (I Peter 1:8). But the message here may not be that God wants people to believe things without any evidence whatever. It may be, rather, that there are other forms of evidence than seeing, such as, for example, the testimony of friends. Perhaps God is simply indicating that he approves of belief based on the testimony of others.

Yes, much better. This is exactly what Peter is saying here. He is simply extolling their faith. But the same Peter appealed to empirical eyewitness testimony of the risen Jesus: his own (see, e.g., Acts 2:32, 2 Peter 1:16).

Note that, earlier, the resurrected Christ had upbraided some of his disciples for not trusting the testimony of other disciples (Mark 16:14). His words to Thomas may have been just a continuation of that theme.

Correct. And He rebuked them precisely because they were disciples and had seen enough miracles to know Who Jesus was. In other words, it is a special case, if one had walked with Jesus for three years and missed all His miracles, and wouldn’t even believe Him when He predicted that he would rise from the dead (see, e.g., John 10:17-18).

Thus, it is not clear that God desires irrational belief on the part of humans, nor is it clear why he should want that, if indeed he does.

Good; now you know that Christianity is not blind faith or fideism at all. Quite the opposite; we stake our claims on empirical evidence and eyewitness testimony.

As another objection to FWD, even if it were true that showing people things interferes with their free will, that seems not to have been a very important consideration for God. According to the Bible, he did many things, some of them quite spectacular, in order to cause observers to have certain beliefs. An advocate of the argument needs to explain why God was willing to do such things in the past but is no longer willing to do them in the present.

Again, Ted assumes that miracles no longer occur: more circular argument. For example, there was the miracle of the sun at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, connected with the Marian apparitions there. Thousands of people saw the sun spinning like a pinwheel; then all of a sudden everyone was dry, where before it was rainy and muddy. The ground was instantly dry too. This was a crowd of thousands, and is a miracle somewhat similar to Ted’s hypothetical of (if I remember correctly) “John 3:16 written on the stars.”

Here was something involving the sun (in some sense) and the elements (rain) and thousands of eyewitnesses. But will Ted accept that? Of course not; he will dismiss it as a fairy tale and nonsense. And if the same thing occurred tomorrow and Ted was there, I suspect that he would find some way to reject that, too, because his prior presuppositions do not allow such a thing.

My best guess as to the nature of the miracle at Fatima is that God simultaneously made everyone see the same thing, by changing something in their brains or eyes. The water and mud drying up is something else again. That would be a miracle where the thing itself changed, rather than perceptions of it. God could, of course, do the same thing with the stars, in Ted’s scenario. We could even look at it in a telescope, but if God performed some sort of galactic optical illusion, we wouldn’t know if the stars had actually moved, or if our perception was altered. None of that is logically impossible for God to do.

Something remarkable happened at Fatima, and all the skeptic can say is that there were thousands of nutcases there, or it was a communal acid trip or something (just as with all the implausible alternate “explanations” of Jesus’ Resurrection). The cavalier dismissals of strange happenings are often as ridiculous as the detractors of miracles claim alleged miracles are. How many people can be nuts at once, for heaven’s sake?

Finally, the claim that God has non-interference with human free will as a very high priority is not well supported in Scripture. According to the Bible, God killed millions of people.

Millions, huh? I am dying to know how you arrive at this description of “millions.”

***

Surely that interfered with their free will, considering that they did not want to die.

God is also judge and has the prerogative over life and death. He created it, so He can take the life away and judge human lives. This shouldn’t be a controversial notion for anyone who advocates abortion, where a human being who merely conceived (not created) a child has a so-called “right” to destroy it as they choose. I don’t think your average child in the womb (with a heartbeat at 18 days and brain waves at six weeks) “wants to die” either. And that wrecks their free will.

So one (who holds such a view on abortion) can hardly quibble with the notion that God has the power of life or death over those whom He created. But God’s judgment is perfectly just and righteous, whereas child-killing is not at all. And the Creator-creature gulf is much greater than the big person-little person distinction. God killed people because they deserved judgment. We kill our own because they are small and helpless and inconvenient. Yet we sit in judgment of God?

Furthermore, the Bible suggests that God knows the future and predestines people’s fates.

God predestines only to heaven, not to hell, as most Christians have believed (excluding Calvinists). And even that involves human cooperation. It is a paradox and one of the most mysterious elements in theology, but man is free in some sense, within the parameters that God sets, just as the fish freely chooses where to swim in its fish tank, not being very conscious of the limitations of the glass edges of the aquarium.

That, too, may interfere with human free will. In addition, there are many obstacles to free will in our present world (famine, mental retardation, grave diseases, premature death, etc.) and God does little or nothing to prevent them.

But He also takes into account how these would affect people’s choices, religion-wise. When there is an eternal afterlife, that vastly changes the perspective on suffering on this earth. All atheists have is this life, so suffering is a much greater difficulty in their position and attempt to find meaning in life, than in the Christian position. The atheist life on earth is analogous to the entire universe, whereas the Christian life on earth is but one atom of the entire universe. The rest of the universe is analogous to the relative amount of the afterlife in one’s existence.

This is not conclusive proof that God does not have human free will as a high priority, but it does count against it. It is at least another difficulty for the Free-Will Defense. Considering these many objections, the argument seems not to work very well. Let us turn to a different defense against ANB.

I disagree entirely, and have stated my reasons why. We are either free beings or we are not. The alternative is determinism, which would render this whole discussion meaningless, as it was not free, but only an inevitable playing-out of some molecular process. Why bother convincing someone when it is not in your power to do so because they can only do what they are programmed to do?

***

It is not that atheism is obviously true, but that ANB (which very few people know about) is obviously sound.

Rather, it is obviously false because it is built on fallacious premises, as I have already shown, and will continue to demonstrate as we proceed.

The concept is so very simple: If God were to exist then he would want people to be aware of the gospel message (what his son did for them) and could cause them to be aware of it. But most people on our planet do not even believe the gospel message. Hence, God does not exist.

Hogwash. If God were to exist then He would want people to be aware of Him, in order to obtain eschatological (a 50-cent word, meaning “last things,” or “in the end”) salvation. He does that in ways which are more than merely the proclamation of the gospel (as explained in Romans 1 and 2). Thus, every person has the opportunity to be saved, whether they hear the gospel or not.

Therefore, God has indeed made fair provision, and your argument crumbles to dust (insofar as it is directed at the internal inconsistency of some supposed Christian belief-system). The Christian view already anticipates this objection and has more than adequately provided a counter-response to it.

What you need is more knowledge about how Christianity views salvation, and the attainment of same. You argue against something that Christians don’t hold in the first place. Small minorities hold such a position, but I’m sure you don’t want your argument directed towards those folks, but towards mainstream Christianity.

You say that God refrains from enlightening people on the matter because for him to do so would interfere with their free will,

That is not my argument, as explained several times already.

but that assumes something false: that enlightening people interferes with their free will. It just ain’t so!

I agree! If only you guys could figure that out. This forms no part of my argument, correctly-understood. Maybe Alvin Plantinga has explained better than I did.

In fact, it’s the exact opposite: enlightening people (especially about matters of importance to their future) enhances their free will. It increases their options and makes them more free than they were before.

I agree again.

It is ignorance, not enlightenment, that interferes with free will.

I think it makes for a much less-informed free will. To that extent I agree.

Why is it that people who have heard ANB remain Christians? It is because Christianity, which has been drummed into their brains from very young, comforts them, and it is also, that they really have not thought ANB all the way through.

In other words, you opt for the traditional atheist/skeptical recourse to the ignorance of Christians, and infantile recourse to God-as-Father. That won’t work with me or any informed Christian, and the tables can be turned, too, as I have done here in the past, with my “psychology of atheism” posts.

They come up with unsound defenses, like FWD, and are not aware of the refutations of those defenses.

Feel free to overcome the arguments I have given. Bald, unsubstantiated claims are not impressive. Whether or not some Christians are ignorant or misinformed (as indeed some are) has no bearing on the truth or falsity of my arguments.

How could having free will interfere with everyone knowing a certain truth? People have free will and yet they all know that stars exist. Why couldn’t the proposition that God exists be as obvious to everyone as the proposition that stars exist? . . .

Indeed it is:

Romans 1:19-20 (RSV) . . . what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (

David Hume made a very similar argument:

Wherever I see order, I infer from experience that there, there hath been Design and Contrivance . . . the same principle obliges me to infer an infinitely perfect Architect from the Infinite Art and Contrivance which is displayed in the whole fabric of the universe. (Letters, 25-26)

The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion . . .

Were men led into the apprehension of invisible, intelligent power by a contemplation of the works of nature, they could never possibly entertain any conception but of one single being, who bestowed existence and order on this vast machine, and adjusted all its parts, according to one regular plan or connected system . . .

All things of the universe are evidently of a piece. Every thing is adjusted to every thing. One design prevails throughout the whole. And this uniformity leads the mind to acknowledge one author. (Natural History of Religion, 1757, edited by H. E. Root, London: 1956, 21, 26)

Or was Hume simply ignorant of ANB too, or was it because Hume had Christianity “drummed into his brain from very young,” which “comforted” him, leading him into a silly and false philosophy that had been expressed by St. Paul some 1700 years earlier?

***

(originally 2-26-03; new introduction added on 8-8-18)

Photo credit: StockSnap (uploaded on 8-6-17) [Pixabay / CC0 Creative Commons license]

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