As expected, Turek criticizes atheists for expressing moral opinions, for on his view that’s inconsistent with atheism. If without God there can be no objective morality, then on what basis do atheists condemn wrongs? Unless, of course, they are once again "stealing from God."
Having established the truth of theism to his satisfaction, Turek next attempts to demonstrate the truth of the Christian religion. He thinks this can be done provided one shows that the answer to four questions — “Does truth exist?”, “Does God exist?”, “Are miracles possible?” and “Is the New Testament historically reliable?” — is yes. And he believes he’s already accomplished the task with regard to the first two. Nevertheless, he summarizes his argument up to this point in the book, which gives him the opportunity to introduce further mistakes. For example, in his defense of objective truth, he makes several false statements, such as that “Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a five-hundred-page book filled with talk about God to tell us that all talk about God is meaningless.” (Note to Turek: It is not a good idea to present falsehoods whenever making a case for truth.)
Having made his case for the truth of Christianity, in the last chapter Turek presents the standard explanation for why people fail to accept it, namely, rebellion against authority. We just don’t want anyone telling us what to do. Turek says that this is true of everyone, including Christians. He even admits that “quite often I don’t want to acknowledge that there is a God and I am not Him.” He doesn’t explain why, in that case, people like him do accept Jesus. Presumably, he thinks that everyone rebels, only that atheists are worse.
In addition (as is usually the case with such claims), Turek ignores the adherents of other religions. Are some people Hindus or Muslims because they rebel against the real God? Obviously not. Yet that would have to be the case in order for the argument to be correct.
The rebellion explanation of nonbelief leads to a common justification of hell, namely that it exists for the sake of those who choose to go there. If some individuals “don’t want Jesus now, why would God force them into His presence for all eternity?” But unfortunately for Turek, there is a strong tension between this idea and the claim that hell is punishment for sin, and he has a difficult time avoiding that tension. Immediately after claiming that hell is there because God respects our freedom of choice, he says that it is needed because without it, “murderers, rapists, and child abusers... will never get justice.” But of course that's a different justification for it. And if evildoers are in hell only because they would rather be there, then wouldn’t it be a greater punishment to send them to heaven instead? And are we really to believe that God won’t do anything so harsh as to force them to do something against their will, even though they deserve serious punishment? In addition, of course, such people can convert on their deathbeds. But in that case, how will they ever receive the punishment they deserve?
In chapter five, Turek repeats some of the points he made on morality. Nonbelievers are being inconsistent, he says, when they complain about evil, since on the atheist view there is no evil. His argument for the latter is simple, and can be restated this way:
1. Evil only exists as a lack of something – it is a deficiency of good.
2. So evil only exists if good exists.
3. But good only exists if God exists.
4. Therefore, evil only exists if God does.
I’ve already criticized the third premise a couple of posts back. The other premise this argument depends on is the first one. But this premise Turek simply asserts. Like many theists, he seems to think it’s just obvious. I personally don’t think it is obvious at all — and certainly not any more so than the opposite claim, that good is the lack of evil.
The idea that the mind is somehow independent of the natural order is, as I’ve previously mentioned, at the root of all theistic thought. In most cases, this is something that appears to be assumed subconsciously. Turek, however, states it explicitly when he claims that there are two types of cause: “natural and nonnatural (i.e., intelligent).” This is already bad enough. After all, why think that minds aren’t natural entities? But what he then does with this nonsensical claim is far worse: he uses it to make a truly absurd argument against methodological naturalism.
Turek reasons that, since atheists accept methodological naturalism — and thus only believe in natural causes — they have no way of accounting for the existence of anything that is the result of intelligence. After all, intelligence isn’t natural, so how could they? It follows that on the atheist’s view, “geologists would have to conclude that natural forces (not intelligent sculptors) caused the faces on Mt. Rushmore,” and “detectives would have to conclude that Ron [Goldman] and Nicole [Brown Simpson] were not actually murdered, but died by some natural means.”
This is my second post on Frank Turek’s book, Stealing from God and the first one on his chapter on causality. Since he covers a lot of ground in this chapter, I’ll only deal with his major points.
As we saw last time, Turek conflates atheism with materialism. He therefore claims that atheists must say everything is physical. This of course includes every cause — and from that it follows either that the cause of the physical universe is itself physical, or that the universe doesn’t have a cause.
The first one can’t be true, however, since there would in that case have to be something physical before there was anything physical. And the second can’t be either, he says, since it makes no sense for the entire universe to just appear causelessly out of nothing. The only option that makes sense is the one atheists reject, namely, that the universe has a non-physical cause.
A while back, I was told by a religious critic that I really needed to read Frank Turek’s Stealing from God. Well, I’ve finally accepted the challenge (even if it isn’t much of a challenge) — and thought it might be interesting to write a series of posts as a sort of running commentary on it.
Turek, though he doesn’t come right out and say so, is a presuppositionalist — he believes that, in order to make any meaningful claims, atheists have to appropriate concepts that only make sense if there is a God. That is why we “steal” from God — and why on his view atheism is self-defeating.
But even though presuppositionalism strikes me as rather desperate, I have to admit that the idea behind Turek’s book is pretty clever. In six chapters, he considers six areas in which the atheist supposedly steals from the Christian worldview: causality, reason, information and intentionality, morality, evil, and science. These six form (well, almost) the acronym CRIMES – the crimes against theism.
The problem is that Turek is a very bad judge of the evidence, and that that’s the case is obvious right from the start. In the introduction, he claims that atheists “must make a positive case that only material things exist” — something that would come as a surprise to such atheistic critics of materialism as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel. Worse, he then lists eleven things that, according to atheism, must be “caused by materials and consists only of materials”:
In chapter three of Stealing from God, Turek asks us to imagine walking along a beach and seeing the words “John loves Mary” scribbled in the sand. We would never think that a crab making random marks on the ground was responsible. And the reason we wouldn’t, he says, is because “John loves Mary” contains information: That’s how we know that someone with a mind was responsible. But, Turek goes on, DNA also contains information. In fact, it contains far more information than “John loves Mary.” Therefore, we should conclude that a mind was responsible for it as well.
So far, we’ve covered causality, reason, and information in Turek’s C.R.I.M.E.S. acronym. But there is another “i” he mentions: intentionality (by which he simply means the characteristic of having intentions, rather than what that term means in the philosophy of mind). Acting intentionally is acting with purpose, or toward some goal. Most of this section of the book, however, is concerned with a more fundamental idea: That there are goals or purposes in all of nature. This is an idea that Turek learned from Edward Feser (a philosopher already familiar to many here at DC), who in turn got it from Aquinas. In fact, it’s the basis of Aquinas’s fifth way of proving the existence of God.
The second main point Turek makes in his chapter on causality is that without God, there would be no laws of nature — and therefore no cause and effect:
“Have you ever asked yourself, why are there laws at all?… Why is reality governed by cause and effect? Why are the laws of nature so uniform, precise, and predictable?”
He says that “Either they arose from a preexisting supernatural intelligence or they did not.” (And he adds that “even Lawrence Krauss recognizes this” — which shouldn’t be surprising, given that those are the only two logical possibilities!) And of the two, the first of course appears to him far more likely: “After all, experience tells us that laws always come from lawgivers.”
In chapter two, Turek elaborates on a point he initially raises earlier in the book, namely that given atheism, we cannot trust any of our reasoning. In a godless universe, he claims, “we are mere meat machines without free will,” and thus “have no justification to believe anything we think, including any thought that atheism is true.”
What he’s essentially arguing, then, is that the absence of free will is incompatible with reasoning — which means he’s now conflating atheism not just with materialism, but with determinism as well.
At any rate, the idea behind the argument is that reasoning only occurs when we freely accept conclusions. If the conclusions we reach are the result of deterministic laws of cause and effect, then we have no choice but to accept them — and in that case, how can we know that we’ve reached the correct conclusion? As Turek puts it, given atheism, you have “no control over what you are doing or what you are thinking.”
There’s a lot more to chapter two than the argument we considered last time. Turek raises several additional problems that the materialist supposedly faces, since, as he erroneously believes, “the category of immaterial reality is not available to the atheist.” Much of what he says just shows that he doesn’t have a good grasp of the subject. For instance, after pointing out that practically all the cells that were in our bodies fifteen years ago have since been replaced, he asks, “if the mind and the brain are the same, how could you remember anything earlier than fifteen years ago?” I doubt many materialists will lose any sleep pondering that one. The main issue he addresses, however, is that of the existence of logic itself.
Turek claims that the laws of logic are immaterial and therefore “would not exist if the purely material world of atheism were correct.” Thus, if there are logical laws, there must be a God.
This is a favorite tactic of presuppositionalists. The point is to immediately put a stop to any atheistic argument. If logic depends on God, then any reasoning the atheist uses presupposes that God exists and is therefore self-defeating.
Frank Turek...believes that, in order to make any meaningful claims, atheists have to appropriate concepts that only make sense if there is a God. That is why we “steal” from God — and why on his view atheism is self-defeating.
But even though presuppositionalism strikes me as rather desperate, I have to admit that the idea behind Turek’s book is pretty clever. In six chapters, he considers six areas in which the atheist supposedly steals from the Christian worldview: causality, reason, information and intentionality, morality, evil, and science. These six form (well, almost) the acronym C.R.I.M.E.S. – the crimes against theism.
If you want to read a blow by blow rebuttal of these atheist "CRIMES" then read what Kiekeben said (first published here on DC). LINK. Pass it on. Refer to it when these claims come up. Refer to it often.
What can one say about a chapter informing us that “morality isn’t made of molecules,” and that attempts to stump nonbelievers by asking such questions as: "What does justice weigh?", "What is the chemical composition of courage?", and (my personal favorite) "Did Hitler just have ‘bad’ molecules”? It’s hard to know where to start. But I’ll begin by addressing the underlying argument Turek uses tying morality to God.
Unsurprisingly, Turek maintains that in a godless universe, there can be no objective moral principles. Now, I happen to agree with that — but then I also think that there cannot be objective morality in a universe with a god. God’s got nothing to do with it.
Turek is — again unsurprisingly — also a proponent of the modified divine command theory. This is the new and supposedly improved version introduced as a way to avoid a problem with the older theory. Only it doesn’t.
[See the Tag below for my introduction to these series of posts]. When I looked again at the book files that the late John Beversluis sent me in 2008, he included a Preface, an Introduction, and not six but seven chapters. Here for the first time are his Preface and Introduction. What he wrote is as good as I remembered! It's also more timely today than it was thirteen years ago.
A former Christian named ToonForever described why he no longer believes:
I decided that in order to avoid prejudicing myself toward my doubts, something I always accused T of doing when she left the faith, I would find a well-recommended apologetics book and give God the first and best chance of answering my questions and calming my fears.
I already knew what book I would choose for the Con side of the conversation. I wanted to read the book that made me the most afraid, because that would be the greatest challenge. If I could get through that with my faith intact, I could set aside my doubts and at least approach the meditation question with the confidence that would come from overcoming what to me was the sternest challenge I could find. So I downloaded Loftus’ Why I Became an Atheist (Revised & Expanded).
I got a blank steno pad and started reading Geisler.
“God won’t force you into Heaven against your will. If you don’t want him now here, you’re not going to want him in eternity.” — Frank Turek
The above is an increasingly common idea among Christians: God is merely giving you the freedom to choose. The point, of course, is to avoid the criticism that God punishes nonbelievers by sending them to hell. Instead, God simply let’s some of us spend eternity apart from him. As C. S. Lewis put it, "the gates of hell are locked on the inside."
But as usual, the religious want to have it both ways. For, if hell is simply what the rest of us prefer, then why bother with trying to save our souls? If I’m simply not going to want to be with God, as Turek says, that means I’ll be happier in hell — so why try to convince me to go to heaven instead?
I'm reviewing Mark Mittelberg's book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. So far his book has been flying under the atheist radar. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it. [See the "Mark Mittelberg" tag below for others].
The Six Paths of Faith are as follows, of which I'll deal with the second one below:
1) The Relativistic Path: "Truth is Whatever Works for You"
2) The Traditional Faith Path: "Truth is What You've Always Been Taught"
3) The Authoritarian Faith Path: "Truth Is What You've Always Been Told You Must Believe"
4) The Intuitive Faith Path" "Truth Is What You Feel In Your Heart"
5) The Mystical Faith Path" "Truth Is What You Think God Told You"
6) The Evidential Faith Path: "Truth Is What Logic and Evidence Point To"