It’s moving day. The old accommodations have been quite nice, and I’m very happy with the service I at WordPress.com. To be perfectly honest, I’m losing one or two sidebar widgets by moving to my own host. The new place has a lot more room for expansion and customization though, and will let me set up a corresponding web site that doesn’t have to fit itself into the blog way of doing things.

The new site for the blog is http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/, and the new RSS URL’s are:

• http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/?feed=rss2
• http://blog.evangelicalrealism.com/?feed=comments-rss2

Also new, and I hope you’ll all bear with me on this: I’m going to put a few ads in the sidebars, just to help pay the bills. Given the topic of conversation around here, I expect a lot of the ads will be for religious books and web sites, which isn’t entirely bad. I’m always looking for new topics to post.

I’ll continue to keep an eye on this blog, of course, but all future posts will be at evangelicalrealism.com. All the old posts have been copied over and hopefully the user accounts have transferred as well. I’ve relaxed the commenting policy quite a bit, though, so you shouldn’t really need an account any more.

See you there!

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 8 )

Up to now, Geisler and Turek have focused on eliminating atheism as a possibly true worldview, which they claim to have accomplished in chapters 1 through 7. Polytheism (and inadvertently Trinitarianism) were likewise disposed of at the beginning of Chapter 8. According to G&T, that leaves only three possible contenders for the title of True and Accurate Worldview.

The main point is that the right box top for the universe shows a theistic God. That means that only one of the three major theistic world religions can make the cut of truth: either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Now, logically, all of these theistic world religions cannot be true—because they make mutually exclusive claims. Moreover, it could be that none of these world religions is completely true. Maybe they have theism right but little else. That’s possible. However, since we know beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists and that he has the characteristics we’ve listed above—characteristics that include design, purpose, justice, and love—then we should expect him to reveal more of himself and his purpose for our lives. This would require that he communicate with us. One of the three major theistic religions is likely to contain that communication.

Having leaped to the conclusions that God is characterized by design, purpose, justice and love, it’s not surprising that Geisler and Turek would take this opportunity to jump to a number of other conclusions, such as the conclusion that God is a He.

Let’s just think about that one of a moment. Gender roles are fundamentally reproductive roles. Our own psychological makeup is such that we tend to associate a number of additional characteristics to each gender role, as well as social expectations, traditions, and other stereotypes. But masculinity and femininity are fundamentally defined by sexual reproductive function.

Geisler and Turek have just got done declaring that there can never be more than one God, because God is infinite. By their own definition, then, God cannot reproduce, since there cannot be more than one of It, nor can It die and be replaced by a successor, since a God that has come to an end must necessarily be a finite being. God therefore cannot have a reproductive role, and cannot therefore be male.

That’s the conclusion G&T should have come to if they had stopped to think about God’s reproductive status. But they didn’t. As with their prior discussion of what we can “know beyond a reasonable doubt,” they have a clear picture in mind of what conclusion they want to reach, and they reach it by simply mentioning some evidence, and then claiming that this evidence leads to that conclusion, whether there’s any real connection between the two or not.

They do the same thing with the idea that, given God’s allegedly known characteristics, it is reasonable to conclude that one of the world’s three major monotheistic religions must be correct. It’s certainly true that we ought to expect a loving, purposeful, and omnipotent deity to be communicating with us, should there be anything He (or It) wants us to know. But notice the flaw in G&T’s reasoning: if the loving, purposeful, all-wise Creator of the Universe set out to communicate truth to us, why would there be three mutually-exclusive religions competing for the title of True and Accurate Worldview?

Communication is only successful when the recipient of the message understands what is being communicated. If the message is garbled, tampered with, or unheard, the message-sender has failed to communicate. Assuming that God did try to communicate a true worldview to mankind, then, our first and most obvious observation is that God has largely failed, as demonstrated by the fact that at least two of the 3 major monotheistic religions have gotten it wrong, not to mention all the polytheists, pagans, animists, atheists, and other non-Christian alternatives out there.

A God Who had an infinite desire to communicate the truth, coupled with infinite wisdom in determining how to transmit this message intact, coupled with infinite power to implement His wise design, could not possibly fail to impart to each of us a true and accurate worldview. The fact that Geisler and Turek find it necessary to write a book about apologetics is proof of the absence of any such divine attempt, ability, or desire.

Next time, we’ll take up the classic rationalization that apologists often use to try and wiggle out of this dilemma: free will. I hope you will choose to be there.

A Roman Catholic priest with the impressive (and quasi-military) title of “Legionary Father Thomas D. Williams” tackles what he calls the “myths” being spread by atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens. In a post entitled “Myth 1: Atheists Are Smarter,” he writes the following:

It is a common myth of our day, not surprisingly propagated by atheists, that religious believers are undereducated folk who have abandoned the use of reason in favor of blind faith.

I think he has a point. It’s not necessarily true that a believer has less education or intelligence than a non-believer, and even if it were true it would be, at best, an ad hominem argument against belief itself. The real issue is not who has the most intelligence and/or education. The real issue is who makes the best use of what they do have. And it is on that basis that believers tend to suffer in the comparison.

Not surprisingly, Fr. Williams never quite gets around to exploring that aspect of the question, preferring instead to focus on the easy counter-examples of intelligent believers and people who, in the past, have spoken favorably about religiosity.

Sam Harris writes that because of the religious belief of its citizens, the United States appears to the rest of the world “like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant.”

…

I have lived in Europe for 17 years, and there is no question that Americans’ unapologetic religiosity makes Europeans uncomfortable.

Yet many eminent thinkers throughout our history, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, have interpreted religious conviction to be America’s greatest strength.

What Williams fails to mention is that de Tocqueville was most particularly impressed by the two qualities American religion manifested in the early to mid 1800’s: tolerance, and an emphasis on personal virtue over doctrinal dogmatism. Sadly, as our secular understanding of the real world has increased, those two qualities have tended to migrate away from the conservative Christian camp and into the liberal/humanistic camp. Well, sadly for believers, at least.

It does not require much in the way of education or intelligence to be intolerant of others, and dogmatic intolerance is the trait that, more than anything else, makes Europeans and other civilized folk uncomfortable. American believers are not only intolerant, but frequently attempt to force everyone to abide by their intolerant, sectarian standards, and that is indeed a reason for believers to be embarrassed.

It is well known that the coastal, semi-skilled knowledge-class prides itself on its liberal, irreligious views, and that religious practice suffers on the coasts and on university campuses. What this means is up for debate.

Unfortunately, Williams appears to be uninterested in exploring that debate. Which is too bad, since the question is very interesting. It gets even more interesting when you consider it’s not just a coastal phenomenon—universities in general tend to grow more liberal and irreligious over time, regardless of location, even if they are originally founded as seminaries and religious schools. Universities emphasize unbiased, open inquiry, plus objective detachment and an eagerness to discover the truth. These qualities have historically proven to be incompatible with maintaining a defensive, dogmatic insistence that one’s primitive ancestors already gave us The Truth.

The intellectual elites were also far more susceptible than common folk to the lies of Leninist ideologies.

And were among the first to recognize the genuine problems with Leninism. Open-mindedness does not make you infallible, it simply equips you to recover more rapidly from mistakes. Imagine how different Fr. Williams’s own life might be if the Roman Catholic Church had been able, after early missteps, to recognize the lies of the ascetic ideology which claims that God wants priests to be celibate and will supernaturally enable them to live in chastity and purity…

Any correlation between faith and education tells us precious little about whether or not God actually exists.

If it is true, as Jesus suggests, that the simple and humble see important truths more easily than the learned and the proud (Matthew 11:25), then it would not be surprising for the uneducated to be as wise or wiser in the ways of God than the hypereducated.

In the Gospel, as in The Emperor’s New Clothes, children see reality more clearly and honestly than pedantic adults.

The key to the Emperor’s New Clothes, however, is to recognize the difference between believing just because men say so and believing what you actually find in the real world. A small child can indeed look at the real world and see for themselves that the God men speak so much about is a God who, like the Emperor’s New Clothes, does not show up in real life.

What’s ironic is that Williams begins by admitting that educational level does not tell us anything meaningful about God’s existence, and then in the very next paragraph starts attempting to claim that education is inversely proportional to one’s ability to perceive God. Where the Emperor’s tailors claimed their magic cloth was so fine that only the extremely wise could see it, Williams croons softly that God is so virtuous, only the “intellectually innocent” have the purity to perceive Him. Warning us about the Emperor’s New Clothes, he tries to sell us the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Again, it’s not how much education or intelligence you have, it’s how you use what you do have. Just think a little: if God exists only in men’s minds, then the quality of the mind will indeed determine whether or not you perceive Him, and Williams’s argument is correct. Education crowds out God because it fills the mind with knowledge, leaving no mental room for imaginary deities. But if God exists outside of men’s minds, then all He needs to do is show up. Education does not make you go blind, so if God shows up then we can all see Him, educated or not. But if God does not show up, then believers cannot have observed Him either, and their claims about Him must be mere inventions.

Since he’s on a roll, Williams continues contradicting himself. After arguing that “[c]ommon sense often seems to be suffocated in the more-rarefied airs of the academy,” he turns in the very next sentence to the claim, “This is not to say that some of the most eminent minds of history have not been religious believers.” Clearly, then, education and intelligence cannot be genuine obstacles to perceiving God, despite everything that Williams claimed only a few paragraphs previously.

He goes on to list a number of highly-regarded scientists and intellectuals who, in ages past, have achieved great intellectual insights while still holding to the dominant religious beliefs of their time. Good for them. None of those achievements happens to include finding any reliable, objective means of observing God, or even of verifying His existence, but oh well. They were geniuses and believers, but even they couldn’t pull that one off because God does not show up in real life, and consequently they didn’t have anything to work with.

He closes with a pious, and somewhat self-righteous, appeal to the Common Man versus the Intellectual.

Give me an honest, hardworking man or woman over a self-important academic any day.

In the end, the important truths of life are accessible to all, not just to the worldly wise.

Right. “Honest+Hardworking=Us” and “Self-Important+Academic=Them,” got it. Smart people are the enemy; us dummies need to stick together because we’re better’n them.

Sigh. At least he got the last sentence right. The important truths in life are those which are accessible to all of us, because they are part of the objective reality we all experience in common. It’s not the fault of the “worldly wise” that God universally fails to show up, and thus leaves Himself equally inaccessible to all.

We’ve been looking at schooloffish’s post “DOES YOUR WORLD VIEW PASS THE TEST?,” about whether various worldviews (naturalism in this case) live up to standards of self-consistency, evidence, and “what the experts say.” In today’s excerpt, schooloffish thinks he has found some problems with evolution that all those PhD biologists have somehow failed to notice.

Since evolution postulates that things evolve from simple cell organisms into complex ones, there should never be a stage where the complexity of an organism cannot be reduced to a less complex stage (calledirreducible complexity). Has any one ever wondered how the heart could have continued to work as it mutated from two chambers to four? How could such a defect still keep the mutated creature alive? How could an animal with a half flipper and half leg survive? It seems logical to assume that a half flipper would not allow the organism to swim and the half leg wold make hunting on land impossible as well. It seems that the organism would starve to death of be a perfect meal for a non-defective creature. Lastly, how can abiogensis occur? How did a rock turn into DNA? These questions have been largely ignored because they show that the naturalistic world view should only be rejected as false.

Well, no, actually, that’s not true. Not only have these questions been extensively studied, scientists have made some significant progress towards finding reasonable answers. It’s not the questions, it’s the answers that are being ignored—by creationists.

For example, consider the evolution of the heart from two-chambered to four-chambered. How could an organism continue to survive such a transitions? Could an organism survive with, say, a three-chambered heart? Well, yes, ask almost any amphibian or reptile. Their hearts are three-chambered. Some of them even have a partial septum, the beginnings of a wall that could eventually divide the chamber into two separate ventricles. It does take a bit of thought and effort to work out the exact progression(s) leading from no chambers to two chambers to four chambers. But it’s not an impossible task, if you’re willing to find the answers instead of using the existence of the question as an excuse to bail.

What about creatures like the mudskipper, a fish whose limbs are adapted to serve both as fins and as useful legs on land? Is it true that the species is starving to death because its limbs are transitional between flippers and feet? Not at all; in fact the transitional limbs are rather an advantage. That’s the way evolution commonly works: each transition that arises must first succeed as a net advantage (or at least be adaptively neutral) before it can serve as the basis for the next variation. Until that variation arises, the “transitional” trait isn’t really transitional. It’s simply a sound, functional adaptation. Thus, by the time it has succeeded long enough to become a transition to something else, it has already proven that it is not a show-stopping, evolution-breaking dysfunction.

Abiogenesis, finally, is a question that is still in search of a definitive answer, but notice the difference between the scientific worldview and the creationist worldview: in science, the existence of the question is a reason to look for scientific answers; in creationism, the existence of the question is a reason to stop looking for scientific answers and to turn to superstitious answers (i.e. “God Did It”) instead. Small wonder that science has had better luck in finding reasonable and verifiable explanations for things!

And even though science is still working on puzzling out the answer to the question of what happened billions of years ago (under conditions that leave no fossil records), there is every indication that an answer exists to be found. For example, if life “evolved” from non-life, we would expect there to be intermediate states between life and non-life—chemical structures that, while not entirely alive, are more than just inert molecules. And we do: viruses neither eat nor excrete, but they replicate. So, too, do prions: malformed proteins that are even simpler than viruses and that cause problems like mad cow disease.

So once again, when we evaluate the naturalistic worldview in the light of informed consideration of the evidence, we find that naturalism is so powerfully self-consistent that even in cases where we don’t yet have all the answers, we still find the things that ought to be there if the naturalistic explanation is correct. Contrast this with the supernaturalistic view that God loves us, wants to be with us, and is wise and powerful enough to eliminate any barrier separating Him from us, etc: the things that ought to show up in real life (i.e. God Himself) consistently and universally fail to do so.

It’s clear which worldview has problems with the evidence, even granting that naturalists are not omniscient. The problem with supernaturalism is not just that it lacks answers to complex questions, it’s that the real world fails to be consistent with the plain and obvious answers to even simple, fundamental questions. Go back billions of years, if you must, to try and find some obscure scenario you can claim as God actually doing something real, but the problem isn’t what God might have done somewhere when no one could see Him. The problem is His consistent failure to do the things He’s supposed to be willing and able to do today.

Last time, Vox used the “play dumb” excuse for not being able to fathom what sort of evidence might convince Dawkins that God was real. This week, he plays even dumber by sharing his own suggested list of potential “evidences” against Christianity.

But if rabbit fossils found in a Pre-Cambrian strata would suffice to disprove evolution, then surely a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins should easily be able to come up with a few propositions that would suffice to falsify a specific religion such as Christianity. I suggest a few possibilities:

• The elimination of the Jewish people would falsify both God’s promise to Abraham and the eschatological events prophesied in the Book of Revelation.
• The discovery of Jesus Christ’s crucified skeleton.
• The linguistic unification of humanity.
• An external recording of the history of the human race provided by aliens, as proposed by science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and James P. Hogan.
• The end of war and/or poverty.
• Functional immortality technology.

Setting aside the obvious fallacy of demanding that Dawkins prove a negative, it might be fun to take a look at these “evidences” and how they actually relate to the question of whether or not Christianity is true.

Number one, would eliminating the Jews really disprove Christianity? Hardly. First of all, we’ve got Matt. 3:9 as a backup in case the Jews ever are absorbed into the ethnicities of their neighbors. But more importantly, we already have examples of falsified Biblical prophecies, like Ezekiel’s prophecy that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the city of Tyre such that it would never be rebuilt, or Jesus’s prophecy that at least some of the people standing with him in Jerusalem would not die before seeing the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom. Far from admitting that failed prophecy falsifies their religion, Christians simply insist that the prophecy has not failed, we have merely failed to interpret it correctly. That’s a universally useful rationalization, since no matter how explicitly the Bible predicts something that fails to come to pass, we can always claim that its “true” meaning is a spiritual one that ordinary mortals cannot easily grasp.

The discovery of Jesus’s skeleton? Right. And if we did find Jesus’s remains, exactly how long do you think it would take Vox and other Christians to simply deny that they were the bones of the real Jesus? It’s not like we have DNA samples or Jesus’s dental records to allow for a positive ID. And that’s assuming Jesus’s remains did survive for 2,000 years. Most don’t.

Even if they did, and if we could positively ID the body as belonging to Jesus, one trip to 1 Cor. 15 would give Christians all the Scripture they need to claim that the spiritual body that is raised is not the physical body that is buried. (In fact, that sort of view is very likely how the resurrection rumor got started in the first place.) Believers who think Jesus is truthfully in their heart would have no trouble believing he truthfully rose in the kind of spiritual body that could live inside someone’s chest without medical compromises.

The rest of the “evidences” get even sillier. A “one world language”? That might actually happen some day, given the Internet. What would that have to do with Christianity being false? Maybe Vox is thinking it would somehow disprove the Tower of Babel story? But Genesis says nothing about God decreeing that men would henceforth and always be confused in their languages.

Aliens with an external history of the human race? Why not propose a simple time machine instead? I mean, as long as we’re thinking up possibilities that we can safely assume will never happen, right? But even then, an alien history of the human race would, at best, make old-earth creationism sound more plausible than young-earth creationism. The True Believer could (and undoubtedly would) insist that God was as involved in past events as believers claim He is in current events, whether or not He showed up on newsreels from Btoghetkitmaku in the Orion nebula.

The end of war and poverty? Again, might happen someday, but not likely in our lifetime. Functional immortality? Ditto. But what would either of these have to do with Christianity being false?

What’s significant in Vox’s list is that he is plainly avoiding the obvious criteria (i.e. is Christianity consistent with itself and with observable objective reality) in favor of a bunch of fake criteria that have little or nothing to do with the truth of the Gospel, and are merely contrived to be virtually impossible to find. He’s not even being terribly subtle about it: he’s creating a pretext for claiming that Dawkins cannot prove a negative (i.e. God’s non-existence), despite the transparent flimsiness of his “suggestions.”

Why is he avoiding the obvious tests of Christianity and trying to distract us with fluff and feathers? I think the answer to that one is also obvious.

Let’s continue our look at naturalism, as discussed in schooloffish’s post, “DOES YOUR WORLD VIEW PASS THE TEST?” Today we find him taking up the argument from design:

What we see is an orderly Universe where everything is in a perfect location to allow for humanity to thrive. If the sun was just a little hotter, or colder, life could not exist. If the continents were a little bit out of alignment, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn would seize to flow and the world would be covered with ice. If our sun was just a little bit younger or older, our orbit would be such that the planet would be unable to sustain life. The fact is the Universe seems to be ordered, not in chaos as Darwin would have had us believe.

Needless to say, a scientific theory is basically a reasonably accurate description of some particularly orderly aspect of the natural world. If the universe were “chaos,” as schooloffish puts it, a theory like evolution would not even be possible. The absence of any predictable laws of cause and effect would completely invalidate science as we know it.

What schooloffish seems to miss here is that naturalism is based on the observation that the universe is orderly and makes sense. Of course, part of the reason it makes sense to us is because we are the products of that natural order. We’re used to it, as it were. Our own mental machinery was forged in the orderly, natural environment we are now seeking to know and understand better. Chaos is precisely what Darwin and other naturalists do not expect, because their science (our science) is based on observation, and we do not observe a chaotic universe. We view a cosmos that is complex, interesting and subtle, but amidst all that variety and infinite detail, we find a relatively small number of elegant, basic principles that organize and invigorate the whole.

Schooloffish takes the anthropocentric view that the universe is perfectly adapted to suit humanity, but in point of fact it would be more accurate to say humanity has become perfectly adapted to exist in the cosmos as we find it. This is not surprising: we clearly exist, therefore we already knew that nature was going to be turn out to allow for our existence. All science is doing is uncovering the precise hows and wherefores that made our existence possible. Granted, if conditions were significantly different, then life AS WE KNOW IT might not exist. Perhaps some other race of organisms would be debating whether some deity created the universe specifically for them.

But, as we know, it didn’t turn out that way. We’re here, and the reason we’re here is because of the inherent orderliness of reality. We like to think that we are the ontological center of the universe and that everything revolves around us, but science has a way of penetrating and deflating such selfish conceits. Sure, the world looks flat, in our common experience, from our limited frame of reference, but that doesn’t mean it really is flat. Yes, from where we stand it does look like the rest of the universe is moving around us (after all, it doesn’t feel like we’re flying through some vast, airless expanse), but that doesn’t mean that our home planet is necessarily the center of the universe, or even of our own solar system.

And yes, conditions right here happened to be such that intelligent life happened to arise and start going ooo and ahh over the fact that the conditions were right. But honestly, so what? There is no law of nature that scans through the cosmos, looking for life-friendly conditions, and disrupting them. There’s no particular reason why intelligent life should not arise as one consequence of the subtle and intricate interactions of the laws and forces of Nature.

So once again, schooloffish has failed to find any actual inconsistency in the naturalistic world view. There is no natural law preventing intelligent life from arising under suitable conditions, and (contrary to his mischaracterization of Darwin) neither evolutionary science nor any other science predicts that we should find the kind of chaotic, lawless environment which would prevent natural forces and processes from operating the way we observe them today. Science is based on observation, first and foremost, and what we observe is a self-consistent reality that conforms perfectly to natural and materialistic laws, without exception.

Over at Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views,” Senior Propagandist Jonathan West criticizes Dawkins for—are you sitting down?—comparing a rabbi’s speaking style to Hitler’s.

Now, after denouncing Expelled as “wicked, evil” and an “outrage” for pointing out that Darwinism was one of the intellectual influences on Nazism, Dawkins has compared a popular Rabbi who dares to criticize him to Hitler! And he did it no less on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. No, I’m not joking. As I’ve said before, it’s getting really hard to parody the Darwinists. They do it so well themselves.

Who knows what West thinks the “parody” would be here. Apparently, you can accuse “Darwinists” of promoting Nazism all day long, and everything’s just peachy, but if one of THEM dares to do the same to YOU, why, gosh, that’s just so over the top, it’s, it’s…well, I mean really. Even if that’s not actually what they really said.

We could look at the Boteach video (which starts off ranting about the British monarchy being a lie), but in fact it’s not really all that important who called whom the “H” word first. That’s just bickering; if you want more of that, watch trash talk TV. The more important issue is the link West cites above, attempting to blame evolutionary science for the Holocaust. It’s a link to a summary page on Evolution News and Views, listing a number of articles by DI fellows attempting to revive the Nazi propaganda that anti-Jewish genocide is scientifically justified.

The Discovery Institute is not the first, of course, to try and re-affirm the Nazi idea that the Holocaust had a scientific justification. Various racist and neo-Nazi groups have been perpetuating this myth ever since the Nazi defeat in the mid 1940’s. It’s a surprisingly popular misconception that scientists have been fighting against for decades, if not centuries. And one would certainly be tempted to hope that, given the horrific stories that have come out of the concentration camps, one of the most fundamental lessons we would have learned was that the Nazis were wrong.

Sadly, West and other DI propagandists seem not to have learned that. They do not want to admit that the Nazi’s were wrong about the true social implications of biological findings. Instead, they are reviving and recirculating the same claims as Hitler and others were making—claims that did indeed lead directly to the Holocaust.

What’s particularly evil about this is that many DI fellows, such as Paul Nelson and Michael Behe, have conceded that Darwin was right about common descent. Darwin’s observations about the existence of natural variation and of natural selection, are observations so widely and consistently confirmed that even die-hard creationists like Nelson and Behe have to concede them.

To claim that these observations provide a scientific justification for genocide, as the Nazis did and as the DI is doing today, is not only wrong factually, but wrong morally. The common gripe most DI members have with evolution is not that we don’t see natural selection happening, but (they claim) natural selection can’t be enough to do everything on its own. Which is fine, that’s a debate for another time, but why are they reviving and recirculating Hitler’s propaganda about the implications of natural selection? They know (and have no excuse for pretending not to know) that natural selection is real; why then are they repeating Hitler’s false and wicked claim that genocide is thereby justified?

If ID supporters don’t want to be compared to Nazis, they need to cease this attempt to convince people that Hitler was right about science, and they ought to apologize profusely for the efforts they have made so far. If they’re going to pick up the baton that Hitler dropped, and attempt to carry it forward, then they deserve whatever comparisons people make. To paraphrase one of Michael Behe’s favorite sayings, if it goose-steps like a Nazi duck….

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 8 )

At this point in Chapter 8, Geisler and Turek think they’ve proven that the universe must have a theistic cause, and that this deity must be infinite, omnipotent, personal, intelligent, purposeful and moral. Having ostensibly eliminated atheism (as they suppose), the next step is to rule out polytheism so that they can restrict the field to Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Unfortunately, Trinitarianism is just polytheism with incoherent definitions, so they can’t disprove polytheism without shooting down traditional Christianity as well. Geisler and Turek don’t notice this, of course, but we certainly shall.

[W]hy does the existence of a theistic God disprove polytheism? It disproves polytheism because God is infinite, and there cannot be more than one infinite Being. To distinguish one being from another, they must differ in some way. If they differ in some way, then one lacks something that the other one has. If one being lacks something that the other one has, then the lacking being is not infinite because an infinite being, by definition, lacks nothing. So there can only be one infinite Being.

Two problems are immediately apparent: 1) Geisler and Turek are assuming that the deity has to be infinite, which they never actually proved, and 2) polytheists don’t claim that there are multiple infinite deities. G&T attempt to deal with the second difficulty, but don’t quite succeed in addressing the problem because of the first difficulty.

Now one could argue that finite beings (or “gods”) exist that are more powerful than human beings. In fact, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all teach the existence of angels and demons. But that’s not polytheism, which denies that there is a supreme, infinite, eternal Being to whom all creatures owe their existence and to whom all creatures are ultimately accountable. Since theism is true, polytheism is just as false as atheism, pantheism, and all other non-theistic worldviews.

In other words, the reason polytheism is wrong is because it’s not monotheism. Astounding, isn’t it? Let’s recap: G&T argued on the first page of Chapter 8 that God created the universe, therefore God must exist outside the universe, therefore God must be infinite. Polytheists, however, hold that the cosmos was created by deities who, while being greater than the universe, are not necessarily infinite. It is quite conceivable that the universe could have been created by a Being only slightly greater than the creation (and in fact, it’s also possible that our cosmos is self-emergent and self-creating, making the Creator equal to, and not greater than, the Creation).

Geisler and Turek “address” this possibility by the simple expedient of assuming that their conclusion must be the correct one, essentially co-opting the term “theism” to mean only and exclusively monotheism, and thus implicitly rejecting pantheism, polytheism and, unintentionally, Trinitarianism.

Let’s go back to the first paragraph above, where G&T argue that there can only be one infinite Being. If this is true, then Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot each be infinite, since that would be three infinite Persons. As Geisler and Turek inform us, the only way there can be a difference between Father and Son, for instance, is if the Son has something the Father lacks, which would mean the Father was not infinite, because an infinite being must lack nothing. Likewise for Father and Spirit and Spirit and Son. By the argument above, none of the three Persons of the Trinity can be infinite.

If, however, none of the three Persons of the Godhead is infinite, how then is God infinite? Three finite Persons do not combine to create one infinite God, and therefore the Trinity is also excluded from being “theism,” as G&T define it above. The same test which disproves polytheism also disproves the Trinity in the same way. The only way out is to either concede that God does not need to be infinite, or to admit that more than one deity can be infinite at the same time. Either way, fixing the argument so that it does not disqualify the Trinity also fixes it so that it no longer disqualifies polytheism.

In fact, by the argument above, the only deity which can possibly qualify as infinite is a pantheistic deity like Alethea, our patron goddess. Any deity which creates something that is not part of itself is creating an entity which has one or more qualities that the deity lacks, such as “createdness.” According to Geisler and Turek, an infinite being lacks nothing, and therefore can only be infinite if each of His/Her/Its creations is also a part of Him/Her/It, so that all of its qualities are also God’s qualities. (Interestingly, Geisler and Turek never try to argue that pantheism is wrong, though of course this is probably due to the lack of evidence against pantheism than to any pantheistic sympathies on G&T’s part.)

Geisler and Turek want us to think that their religion is the “box top” to the jigsaw puzzle of life, the only view of things that lets all the pieces fall into place in a meaningful and coherent way. Yeah.

No, we’re not talking about naturalism as in the scientific study of nature. We’re back to reviewing schooloffish’s post “DOES YOUR WORLD VIEW PASS THE TEST,” and we’re ready to have a look at his critique of the naturalistic (presumably as opposed to supernaturalistic) world view. First, let’s look at the three tests he uses to evaluate a world view.

When testing a world view, you need to take into account three things. Even if you are not familiar with all the aspects of a world view, if any one of these three test proves to be false, then the entire world view must - necessarily - be false. These tests are:

1. Is the world view contradictory within it’s own view?
2. Does the world view actually align with reality?
3. What do expects and eye witness have to say about the world view?

As we mentioned before, the relativistic world view (aka postmodernism) fails the first test, so we’ll skip over that analysis and go straight to the part about naturalism.

Naturalism by name believes that what one sees or observes is true… The problem is that science (the poster child for naturalism) is based nearly entirely on hypothesis or educated assumptions.

Well, no, I’m afraid that’s not true. Science is based first and foremost on observation. Observation is what leads the scientist to formulate a hypothesis, and observation is what the scientist uses to test the hypothesis. Consistency in observations is what lets us distinguish what’s true from what’s not. But let’s move on.

Many of these hypothesis CAN be tested, but many cannot. We can’t test consciousness, intuition, or morality for instance. We know that these things exist, but we simply don’t know why or how and since things like consciousness can only be attested to by the individually conscious person, no independent test can be produced to test such a thing. Another way of stating this is. The test of intimate knowledge. Only the person feeling or thinking something has intimate knowledge of the truth and no test can allow others into my intimate knowledge of something. This doesn’t mean that the information is NOT true just that it can’t be tested. For instance we can test memory but we can’t testconsciousness or the existence of a soul.

On the contrary, we most definitely can test consciousness, in fact, my wife is a nurse, and part of her job involves taking a (scientific) assessment of the patient’s level of consciousness, especially if there’s any suspicion of compromised brain function. But perhaps schooloffish means that there exists no scientific test for the existence of subjective thoughts and experiences? There are two answers to this: 1) scientists can and do observe the consequences of subjective thoughts (behavior, brain waves, etc), and 2) purely subjective experiences are part of subjective reality, so it’s really not science’s domain anyway (except in the case of psychiatry and psychology). Science is primarily concerned with objective reality; the existence of subjective realities does nothing to disqualify it in its proper realm.

And of course, there’s a very good reason why we cannot scientifically verify the existence of a “soul”…

Science would have us believe that the world happened by chance with no help from an invisible GOD. After all, we can’t see GOD and therefore he can’t exist.

No, I’m sorry, but this is wrong again, on both counts. Describing the origin of the world as happening “by chance” leaves out a vital dimension of the natural world, namely the natural laws which constrain and direct chance, and make some possibilities more likely than others. If I hold a golf ball in my hand and then release it, there are an infinite number of directions it could go—up, down, horizontally, north, west, south, east, or any number of countless variations in between. If we fail to consider natural laws like the law of gravity, we might think the odds of a golf ball falling down would be a gazillion to one. But the ball does not move “by chance,” it moves according to natural laws, just as the origin of the universe has done.

Schooloffish is also mistaken when he portrays naturalism as insisting that “we can’t see God and therefore he can’t exist.” Science is more than willing to believe in invisible realities, provided they are consistent with the observable and verifiable world. The number pi, for example, is invisible, inaudible, intangible, and so on, yet it is quite real, as is c, the limit on the speed of light in a vacuum. God’s invisibility is not what prevents science from finding Him, but rather the absence of any significant, verifiable, divine interaction with observable reality.

The general theory of evolution is all about change over time from one species to another. However, is this what we actually observe the world to be? Of course not.

This, unfortunately, is also incorrect. Evolution is about changes in the relative proportions of alleles over time, under the influence of natural variation and natural selection. The result of this process is, eventually, the occasional divergence of a gene pool into distinct species, i.e. new species arising via descent with modifications from common ancestors. Those who are truly willing to engage the evidence do indeed observe that the world consistently reflects the operation of evolutionary forces, both in the emergence of new species and in the residual consequences of past evolutionary events.

In fact, Christians ought to be deeply ashamed at the slur against God’s inventive genius if they should find that Creation were missing the astonishingly elegant, innovative, and powerful evolutionary systems that ordinary mortals (with PhD’s) have worked out by their studies of Nature. Evolution is too intelligent of a design for a wise and insightful Creator to have forgotten or refused to implement—in fact, given the existing laws of biochemistry, He would have had to take special steps to prevent evolutionary adaptations and improvements from blessing life on earth with the ability to cope and recover in a hostile environment.

We’ll take a break here, but so far it doesn’t look like schooloffish has come sufficiently close to the truth about naturalism to be able to critique it properly. We’ll see if he can do any better next time.

Over the centuries, believers have evolved a number of techniques for coping with God’s continuous and universal failure to show up in real life. One of the most common ploys is to try and deflect blame from God by blaming people instead. Here’s Vox Day, from Chapter 8 of TIA, to give us an example.

While Dawkins incessantly complains about the lack of evidence for God, he never quite gets around to explaining precisely what proof, presumably scientific, would be sufficient for him. He poses no potentially falsifiable experiment that would suffice to prove or disprove God’s existence nor does he even consider the question of whether any such experiment would conceivably be possible.

Notice the subtle shift from Dawkins’s request for evidence of God, to Vox’s insinuation that Dawkins is insisting on an arbitrary, unspecified, and unreasonably stringent proof of God. God consistently and universally fails to behave as though He believed the things men say about Him, but instead of blaming God’s behavior on God, Vox wants to claim that it is men who are behaving badly, by making impossible demands.

Now, I can’t speak for Dawkins, but there are a couple of obvious reasons why he might not bother to spell out what sort of evidence he’s looking for. One reason is that it doesn’t matter what evidence you might seek if there isn’t any to find! Vox began this book, which is supposed to provide factual proof that atheists are wrong, with an explicit admission that he is not going to be offering any evidence of God’s existence. And yet that would be the most direct and obvious way to prove that atheists were wrong, wouldn’t it? If Vox really had any genuine evidence, wouldn’t he do better to begin by presenting it?

Dawkins points out that there is no evidence of God’s existence, not because he’s being unclear as to what sort of evidence he would accept, but because Vox has nothing to offer. It’s not as though Dawkins said, “There is no evidence,” and Vox said, “Here is some evidence” and Dawkins said, “I reject it because it’s not the right kind of evidence.” Dawkins is saying “There is no evidence,” and Vox is trying to complain that Dawkins isn’t being fair.

The second reason Dawkins doesn’t need to spell out what sort of evidence he’s looking for is because it’s fairly obvious: if what men say about God were true, God ought to be behaving as though it were true. That means, among other things, that He ought to show up to spend time with us in that personal kind of tangible, two-way interaction He allegedly wanted badly enough to die for. He ought to be behaving as though He believed in the Gospel Himself. Yet He doesn’t even show up in His own churches on Sunday mornings! Why should I bother showing up if He doesn’t?

Vox makes the common mistake of assuming that scientific evidence must necessarily consist of some kind of beaker and test-tube lab experiment, as though science were only done in labs. Science is the practical application of the principle that truth is consistent with itself. Scientific evidence for God need only consist of God behaving in a way that was self-consistent, consistent with the Gospel, and consistent with what we actually find in the real world.

Notice, however, that human superstition—ascribing things to God even though you can’t show any real connection between Him and whatever you’re trying to explain—is not evidence. Autosuggestion and subjective feelings about the idea of God are not evidence. Human imagination about God is not evidence. Unverifiable hearsay is not evidence. Fallacious arguments—e.g. you can’t prove He’s not real, therefore He is real—are not evidence. And neither are self-contradictory and mutually-contradictory arguments. Evidence is that which is verifiably consistent with itself and with the real world.

Genuine evidence would be quite simple: God showing up in the real world, behaving as though He really could do all the things the Bible says He can do, and as though He really did want all the things the Bible says He wants. The Bible portrays God as being willing and able to have an intimate, personal, eternal relationship with each of us, face-to-face, having removed the barriers raised by our own sinfulness, by virtue of His atoning death on the Cross.

Well ok, if that’s what He wants and that’s what He’s succeeded in doing, then we should see Him here with us enjoying the rewards of all His careful planning, sacrifice, and hard work. It’s not that God is failing to do what we want, He fails to do what men claim He wants. Believers are therefore necessarily wrong about God’s ability or God’s willingness to act like He believes the Gospel. Quite possibly, they’re wrong about both.

Vox tries to make Dawkins look ridiculous and unreasonable for noticing the inconsistency between what men say about God, and what we actually observe. But God’s behavior is not Dawkins’s fault. Christians need to come to grips with the fact that God’s behavior is God’s responsibility, and God’s alone. Either that, or they need to admit that God is just a sock puppet, saying whatever words men put in His mouth and performing only those actions which men’s hands do on His behalf. Then it would be appropriate to blame men for God’s choice of actions. But in that case, the guilty ones would be the believers. Neither Dawkins, nor any other unbeliever, is setting God’s agenda for Him.