Here I Go Railing At Atheists Again

One of the main reasons I started this blog is to defend our faith against both materialists and fundamentalists. Christianity is being attacked from without and within by these two camps. Today I felt a need to take up some common atheist arguments. I’ve argued against these before, but they keep coming up in various places because they have a kind of unsophisticated ‘truthiness.” In other words, certain logically fallacious arguments can be accepted as fact because they seem reasonable on the surface, they match our preexisting bias or simply through constant repetition.

Genetic Fallacy: You Just So Happened to Be Born a Christian

I’m not kink-shaming, but people who quote Richard Dawkins seem to have a self-humiliation hobby. Dawkins is a fine biologist and a miserable philosopher. Despite his academic background in biology, I wouldn’t hire Dawkins to set a broken leg either. So, I’m not sure why so many people think he has anything worthwhile to say about ontology. Oh wait, I do know, it’s that truthiness again.

Yet, I’m going to quote Dawkins here: “I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one.”  Setting aside Dawkins’ endless supply of humble brags about his own precocious childhood cogitations, we’ve all had this idea before. Most of us also outgrew this kind of thinking because it is a genetic fallacy.

A genetic fallacy dismisses or validates information – depending on which side of the argument you want to take – based on the source of the information and not the validity of the ideas. Here Dawkins is saying that since your heritage influences your religious choices, your choice must be wrong. It’s not hard to debunk this. I mean, I happened to be born in a modern heliocentric culture, but if I was born in the Middle Ages, I might be a flat earther. Heliocentrism is still correct as best we can tell. Many of us happened to be born to theists, but that could just as well be a happy accident where we were introduced to truth. It doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.

Wherever you were born, I hope that unlike Dawkins, you reconsider any ideas that you had when you were nine, theistic or otherwise. Most of us can make our own logical conclusions about faith regardless of where we were born. Whether you choose to do so is up to you. Almost all my Christian friends in my generation have considered leaving or have left that faith for at least a period. I was born Christian. I left Christianity. I came back to it. I would myself argue that some of the appeal of Christianity to me is I understand the language. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true. I would rather study physics in English than in Spanish, but in either language physics is still physics. I don’t think that the differences between being born Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or anything else makes the kind difference in our shared reality a nine-year-old Richard Dawkins once imagined.

The Enormous Category Error: The Flying Spaghetti Monster

The origins of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were a well-intentioned parody aimed at strengthening the wall between church and state. The hilarious image is one that is easy for atheists to attach their ridicule, if only because it is irresistibly funny. So, a common atheist barb is that it is as logical to worship the FSM as it is to worship God. So let me separate these issues a bit. First, it is as logical to post commandments from the FSM in school rooms as it is to post the Ten Commandments. I can agree with this. This is the argument about church and state, and I don’t question FMS adherents’ sincerity. Comparing these two actions is valid, they are equivalent, and neither should be allowed.

Unfortunately for the atheist, the FSM is not in the same category as God and so cannot be compared. They are not equivalent. The FSM – or Big Foot, Krampus or Batman – are at worst obviously fictional or at best simply one more contingent thing in the universe. If what you are arguing is that we shouldn’t worship a contingent being, say an old man in the sky, I’m right there with you. But the God of all creation is not another being but is the source of all being. Being itself. FSM and God are not in the same category, it’s the simplest of all logical errors.

It would take several blog posts to explain why I’ve come to believe there must be a noncontingent source of all contingent reality. I think belief in this God is entirely logical but is beyond the scope of this little post. Instead, simply consider whether what you know of creation is consistent with the FSM or with God. The existence of something rather than nothing, a stable universe that seems to be based on information, the existence of morally imaginative beings with religious inclinations and a widely attested record of religious experience are in fact compatible with the God of classical theism. They are not necessarily compatible with the FSM. So, while this in no way proves the existence of God, it does nothing to rule out God’s existence either. If your milk is cold, I can’t necessarily prove you have a refrigerator let alone tell you who built or installed it for you. But the refrigerator is still a pretty good explanation for cold milk. It feels like atheists want a 100% verifiable proof for God rather than just wonder at the mystery that God is compatible with our experience. You can never prove a noncontingent source of all being using the limited and very contingent existence we happen to experience. I can’t prove God exists because God doesn’t exist — God is existence. But I can’t really even prove why your refrigerator came to be even if I’m standing in front of it. I mean, who at Whirlpool pieced it together? Were all the parts made in America? Who drew up the plans? Imagine if we never accepted any logical or scientific explanation unless we could prove our way out of infinite regress.

And speaking of infinite regress, at this point, the atheists among you may ask that favorite canard, “oh yeah, then who created God Mr. Smarty Pants?” Well, again, this is the same category error. A foundational aspect to my logical belief in God is that our contingent existence requires explanation, and that explanation require a self-subsistent noncontingent source of all that is. The God I believe in is the source of being and if I believe in a source of being as a logical necessity than I automatically believe that nothing created that source. Now, if your religious and philosophical education has been so derelict that you can only imagine an old man in the sky or a flying spaghetti monster, then you are taking a step toward your philosophical rehabilitation by denying their existence. 

If you ask, “who created God,” then you have narrowed the argument to either belief in a noncontingent source of all being or belief in infinite regress. The question, “who created God,” begs toward an assumption of infinite regress. In other words, the atheist who asks this question is conceding that it’s turtles all the way down. I have yet to have any argument sway me toward infinite regress. I could as easily ask, “who created quantum foam,” or, “who created an infinite multiverse,” as ask, “who created God?” The question itself paradoxically proves its own defeater. “Who created God,” seem philosophically naive compared to the real question, “why is there anything at all?”

Atheists arguing along these lines seem opprobriously unaware of the long history of classical theism that would argue that a perfectly simple, unchanging, noncontingent and noncomposite God is the very act of all existence. I am not worshipping some cosmic watchmaker, intelligent designer or Odin. I am worshipping that in which we have our very being. I will grant you that classical theism is a long way from believing in the personal and loving God of Christianity. There’s a lot more work to be done to get there. But to deny a source of all being borders on Nietzsche’s own warning of insanity. Now it is very possible that a friend may ask the question, “who created God,” in great sincerity and that is an opening to discuss infinite regress. But unfortunately, most often it is simply a stupid question asked by an incurious person.

Confusing How and Why

Atheists spend a lot of time saying that because we can demonstrate evolution in the biological record, demonstrate the evolution of moral ideas and show that Christian ideas and philosophy change over time, it must be true that God didn’t create any of this. The argument confuses how and why. Showing how something works is very different from asking why it exists at all.

I argued in my post, “Of Morality and Reason,” that this simple confusion of how and why ultimately results in nihilism. What is behind it is the difference between moral epistemology (the knowledge of morality) and moral ontology (the study of whether ultimate morality exists). The argument is essentially that if we can show that morality randomly evolved, then we don’t need a God. The conclusion of this line of thought is that nothing is ultimately right, or wrong, certain ideas simply promoted survival.

It seems to me that both can be true. God can create through evolutionary processes – both life and morality – and there can also be universally true morals. Morality promotes survival because it is inherent to our humanness.  All our instincts tell us morality is objective. Most atheists I know live as if this is true even if they would argue against it. How we get there is different than why.

I sometimes hear this argument in cosmology. It doesn’t matter to me if the Big Bang is true or if we are just a series of multiverses collapsing on ourselves time and time again. Either way, you’re not answering the why, you’re answering the how.

Atheism, Nihilism and Gnosticism

Before we feel too smug in our theism, I’ll leave you with some depressing thoughts about what atheists could be right about even if they haven’t thought it through for themselves. I think most atheists are happy just to claim there is no God and not consider the ultimate ends of their philosophy — nihilism or gnosticism. First, if this is all random chance, then nothing really matters, and nihilism is correct. There is no meaning, no reason, no purpose in our lives. Some philosophers starting with Kierkegaard and most recently leading up to The Daniels find absurdity to be life-affirming. In my own darkest moments, that is what I cling to.

To quote Dawkins one last time: “Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that’s also the definition of delusion.” Again, Dawkins is reliably wrong. Kierkegaard would like a word. Faith is not the lack of thought, it is the extension of your life when thought ends, when logic fails, when you’ve exhausted every reasonable means. You are more than just a brain in a bucket. Your meaning is not a mathematical formula. Faith in Christ doesn’t mean you believe the right things and are saved. Faith in Christ means you suddenly leap and recognize the Christ already inside of you even when the world around you is swirling chaos.

I choose the absurdity of my faith because I would rather risk being wrong while following Jesus. That is the way I’d want to be wrong. I don’t want to be wrong ignoring poverty or denying the stranger. I want to be wrong loving my neighbor. If there is no God, but I were to invent one, it would look exactly like Jesus. So I follow Jesus even though it often seems completely absurd. If there is no meaning, why not be a nihilist and live only for yourself? It’s because I find joy and beauty and meaning in that absurd faith. When I live into that absurdity, meaning suddenly — if only briefly — manifests. Meaning is incarnational through our faith.

I am, helpfully, still convinced by the logic of a noncontingent, uncaused cause of all existence. So, what haunts me more than nihilism is gnosticism. Specifically, the greatest arguments against God is not lack of evidence but the totality of our suffering. Children get cancer and die in unbearable pain, and it happens every day in every city. If I logically believe in God, then what kind of God allows this? I think the actual and strongest arguments from suffering may not lead to asking if there is a God but instead asking why God is unfair, unkind and even cruel. Why would a good God bring such a terrible world into existence?

I have my own reasoning for believing in a God of love, but I don’t think I’ll let you off the hook that easily with a pat answer. This should be a life-long struggle of every Christian.