How Much Do Believers Trust in a God?

I can remember it like it was yesterday, my father debating with a Christian from another sect about what it means to be a follower of Christ. 

He loved challenging believers from other churches, largely because he didn’t think they were real Christians. Most were far to “worldly’ to qualify in his opinion. This time, the point being made was about trusting in a god. So, he dared them to go home, get out their insurance policy, hold it up to the heavens and then say, “God, I trust you.”

What Does the Word Atheism Mean? Who or What is an Atheist?

Another discussion on Facebook. This time with Spencer Hawkins about the word atheism.

Christians Can Figure It Out: the Bible Isn’t God’s Word

Part 1 of 6: The Bible is not self-authenticating

Those intrepid Gideons claim that they are dedicated to “making the Word of God available to everyone.” The American Bible Society doesn’t hesitate to call its product “God’s Word.” Behind this positioning is a PR campaign that has endured for centuries, fueled, of course, by that famous text, 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

In this text, the words “inspired by God” translate God-breathed. So, “God’s Word” isn’t far off the mark, in terms of nailing the concept.

Why Do Christians Believe? Reviewing Mittelberg's "Confident Faith" Part 4

Mark Mittelberg

Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Evangelism, in partnership with Houston Baptist University. He wrote the book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. Yet, it appears his book has been flying under the atheist radar—so far. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it. I found Mark’s book recently in a Goodwill store for $1. That was a lucky find. Thank Good...will.

Mittelberg begins his book in Part 1, "Six Paths of Faith", by speaking about approaches, or methods readers adopt to embrace their respective faiths (remember, *cough* he says we all have faith). "This is crucial" he says, "because the method (or methods) you use in deciding what to believe has a huge bearing on what those beliefs will actually be, as well as how confident you'll be in holding on to them." (p. 9) "Most people never consider this" he goes on to say. "They just arbitrarily adopt an approach--or adopt one that's been handed to them--and uncritically employ it to choose a set of beliefs that may or may not really add up." (p. 10)

Podcast Interview with David Madison, PhD Biblical Studies

About his book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief

The interview was conducted by Clint Heacock for his MindShift podcast. It is divided into two segments.

Segment One, click here, the episode dated 19-1-2018

Segment Two, click here, the episode dated 26-1-2018

The Amazon link to the book, click here.


David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His book,Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, was published by Tellectual Press in 2016.

The Clergy Project: Offering Support to Clergy Who No Longer Believe

Shedding light: An interview about a documentary

I have been a member of The Clergy Project for several years. I had become an atheist by the time I finished my PhD in Biblical Studies at Boston University, a few decades ago. I also had nine years as a Methodist pastor under my belt.
There was no such support network back then, but these days clergy who no longer believe do have a way to reach out to others who have been through (or are still going through) the ordeal of finding a new identity, and a new way of making a living. This is usually a profound crisis—but it no longer has to be a lonely one. To read the interview, click here.

To find out more about The Clergy Project, click here

A List of Books for Your Skeptical Children and What It Tells Us About Christianity

Here is a good list of books you should read or give to your children. We know believers indoctrinate their children by teaching them what to believe, just as my nephew and his wife do in raising their kids to root for the Green Bay Packers. To see a better approach take a good look at these books. You'll notice they teach kids how to think critically with a skeptical disposition that requires hard objective evidence before accepting miraculous claims in any supposed sacred book. I dare believers to get a few of these books for their children.

Reformed Epistemology and the Psychic Abilities of an Emperor Having No Clothes

Cameron Bertuzzi recently posted a Master List of Free Resources on Reformed Epistemology, which can be seen here. Isn't this crazy? Here folks, is what faith does to otherwise rational adults. They are pretending to know things even a child can see are false. It reminds me of psychics and the story of the emperor who had no clothes on.

Alvin Plantinga is revered in some circles for coming up with the most robust defense of Reformed Epistemology (RE). Roughly his argument is that believers do not need an argument to believe (!!) nor do they need any objective evidence:

If I Ever Hear God's Voice, I'll Shit My Britches

Let me begin by saying that I’ve never heard the voice of any god, demon or angel. 

Never! Trust me, I’ve never even gotten a phone call from one. I’m just as relieved to tell the you the truth, because if I ever did hear the voice of a god, any god, I’d shit my britches. On the one hand, it would be the most earth shattering conversation I’ve ever had, assuming that god would let me ask a few questions. But even if I’m rendered speechless from wonder, I can tell you that my life would never be the same again. And, if I actually got to see god, I probably wouldn't be able to recover from the experience. 

Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?

Christians cannot even agree on what to think of their god's involvement in a game of football. But if s/he sits as a bystander they have denuded this world of their god's involvement. I suspect they have come to this conclusion, despite many biblical passages to the contrary, because of the problem of intense ubiquitous suffering. Richard Mouw's god is undeserving of worship when all is said and done. Gone is his god's sovereignty. LINK.

For my part, since underdogs are a dime a dozen I'm hoping to watch the best that ever played the game, play the game. This kind of opportunity only comes once in a lifetime. ;-) #gopats

Wonder and Awe Aplenty—No God(s) Required, Thank You

An awesome god is too much trouble

My oldest brother, twelve years my senior, was a musical prodigy. Thus my earliest childhood memories include listening to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Our phonograph record collection—and I remember the introduction of long-playing vinyl stereo records—was opera, symphony, violin and piano concertos. This was my comfort music, in rural Indiana, mind you, in the 1950s. The “heavy” music of Richard Wagner’s massive operas—well, that’s all easy listening to me.

I am especially grateful that my brother introduced me to the monumental symphonies of Gustaf Mahler—on those ancient stereo records; I have them all on my iPhone now. From Mahler’s genius came thousands of pages of composition, and well more than a century later, highly skilled musicians create his sound-visions, brilliantly, all over again, evoking feeling of tenderness, sadness and exuberance. He had an utterly unique musical language that has enchanted me for decades. Our lives are enriched beyond measure by human creativity, which can be such a powerful source of awe and wonder.

Julian Baggini Concerning Philosophy of Religion "What the Hell Are You Doing?"

Julian Baggini's 2005 review of Michael Martin's anthology, The Impossibility of God, was needed and brilliant! It should be required reading for discussion by everyone interested in philosophy of religion. LINK. It might be subtitled, "What the hell are you doing?"

Baggini, as an atheist philosopher, starts off saying he "found the book faintly dispiriting, futile even. Rather than finding myself standing on the metaphorical touchline cheering my team as it chalked up point after point, it seemed to me that everyone on the pitch was engaged in a useless game that no-one was ever going to win. This was a bravura performance, but who was it for?" His main point is: "I just don't believe that detailed and sophisticated arguments make any significant difference to the beliefs of the religious or atheists."

The book is useless for the unintellectual, he says, who won't read it much less understand it. "The fight against unthinking religion must be fought in terms unthinking believers can relate to. Discovering Angelina Jolie is an atheist is much more likely to make the unintellectual doubt their belief than the arguments of Patrick Grim" (an author in the book). A current example is The Big Bang Theory sit-com. It's doing a fantastic job of influencing the young away from faith via example and ridicule. As many of us have argued, ridicule does indeed have an impact upon the masses. Baggini surprisingly also says Martin's book is useless for the intellectual, both the believer and the atheist, for "when we get to this level of detail and sophistication, the war has become phoney. Converts are won at the more general level." [My emphasis].

Do We Have Free Will? Part 3: Divine Foreknowledge

So far, I’ve written about two arguments for determinism which, though not completely conclusive, present serious challenges to belief in free will. The same cannot be said of this next type of determinism. There actually is no reason for accepting it, since there is no reason for believing its premises. Nevertheless, it is a serious internal problem for Christianity. It shows that the beliefs of most Christians aren’t — as shocking as this may seem — entirely coherent.

Where, Oh, Where Have All the Virgins Gone?

I have a confession to make. 

I was raised in a religious cult. Uh-oh, here we go again you may be thinking, another cult victim writing about her experiences. I understand how the stories may begin to blur in our collective minds. There really are so many of them. It shouldn’t surprise us though. After all, perhaps more than any other country in modern times, America is home to the Christian cult or what I like to refer to as the cross-eyed cousins of Christianity. You know what I’m talking about. An endless array of bizarre belief systems that have either sprung up from a single individual, usually a male, and then attracted a following or a splinter group that felt the need to redeem a church with stricter interpretations of the scriptures. These wacky doodle groups abound in the US like no other country in the western world. There’s nothing mainstream about them AT ALL. My father was one of those lone wolves who believed he had been called out from among them to be separate. The voices in his head literally told him that he was the last prophet of the last day and age. Lucky me. I was ten when he converted and it was a rough ride until I was old enough to finally leave home.

Telling Off God, the Supreme Procrastinator

A review of Fernando Alcántar’s book, To the Cross and Back

“Well, you never were a real Christian.” I sometimes hear this from pious folks who can’t process my transition from Methodist pastor to atheist. They know that their ‘walk with the Lord’—their personal relationship with Jesus—is so authentic. They’re pretty sure I never had that.

And they’re right. I believed in God and I knew that Jesus was his son, but it was alien, under my mother’s devout tutelage, to speak of ‘having a walk with the Lord.’ Nor did it occur to her—no matter how sincere our prayers—that Jesus could somehow be a pal or friend. Perhaps my atheism is easier to explain since I failed to make that personal connection with Jesus; atheism is impossible once that has happened. Because Jesus is so real.

The Outsider Perspective Helps Believers in Two Ways

I am arguing for a test to help believers examine their own faith fairly and honestly, without any special pleading or double standards. I am not specifically arguing any particular faith is false, hence no rebutting defeater. Nor am I specifically arguing on behalf of a different religious faith, hence no undercutting defeater either. How, for instance, does a fair test for religious truth argue for or against anything? This should be seen in the first few pages of my book.

I do think the test leads to unbelief, but that's a separate discussion. I can't even help most believers agree to this fair test, much less help them to abandon their faith.

The outsider test is designed to help believers see the need for requiring sufficient objective evidence. Believers can play lip service to this requirement by saying they accept it. But what is meant isn't always readily apparent. So the test also helps them see what is meant by sufficient objective evidence. That's it. In other words, the outsider test helps believers twice-over. It's both a test and a teaching tool. The test helps believers to accept the requirement for sufficient objective evidence (all by itself a hard task!). But it goes on to teach believers what it means by forcing them to consider how they reasonably examine the other religious faiths they reject. It teaches them to apply the same single standard across the board to their own religious faith.

If someone already accepts the requirement for sufficient objective evidence that person doesn't need the outsider test. To the degree then, that belief is involved--especially the kind that blinds people from seeing the need to require sufficient objective evidence--to that same degree the belief should be subjected to an outsider's perspective. And there is no better way to know who needs the outsider perspective than the believer who adamantly refuses to require sufficient objective evidence for their beliefs.

In other words, to the degree believers reject the outsider perspective is to the same degree they are the ones who need it the most.

A Facebook Discussion On Who Has the Burden of Proof

Here's an insightful discussion with a young would-be apologist named Cameron Bertuzzi. It took place after I posted QualiaSoup's fantastic video on "Who has the burden of proof?" Note how many times Cameron says my criteria for knowing which religion is true, if there is one, are self-refuting. And what is my criterion? The criterion of sufficient objective evidence. The delusion is very strong with him to think this is a reasonable answer. Faith has a blinding effect on believers. It's plain and simple. It's clear and obvious. To see this portrayed in the best possible way watch the video I share below. It offers three tests for how well you can count. My bet is you will be wrong.

Introducing our discussion I had said: "I've long been a fan of QualiaSoup. This video is on who has the burden of proof. He nails it! Believers who make extraordinary bizarre supernatural claims do, that's who."

Who Has the Burden of Proof?

I've long been a fan of QualiaSoup. This video is on who has the burden of proof. Believers who make extraordinary bizarre supernatural claims do, that's who. He nails it!

Do We Have Free Will? Part 2: Relativity

As I mentioned last time, there are both causal and non-causal varieties of determinism. Most people think of determinism only in terms of the former: events are determined, they might say, if they are the result of prior states along with strict laws of cause and effect (so that given those prior states and laws, the events could not have failed to occur). But historically there have also been arguments for determinism that have nothing to do with causation, such as logical determinism and the type of theological determinism based on God’s foreknowledge (as opposed to God’s foreordination).

I’ll return to theological determinism next time. Today, I want to talk about a much less well-known kind of non-causal determinism.

According to the theory of relativity, there is no absolute “now,” or present moment. What for you are two simultaneous events won’t necessarily be simultaneous for someone else. So, for instance, take what is going on in a galaxy far, far away at the moment you are reading this. There are events occurring there that, from your perspective, are occurring right now. You can’t know about them yet, of course. If the galaxy is, say, 2.5 million light years away, then you have to wait 2.5 million years for its light to reach us. But if you look at it then, you will see what was happening there at the time you were reading this (approximately). However, you can’t say that those events that for you are occurring right now are occurring right now in any absolute sense — because for someone else right now who is travelling relative to you, what is going on in that galaxy will be some other set of events. But that means the universe as a whole cannot be absolutely divided at each moment into past, present and future.

How Much Faith Must the Faithful Have?

Exactly how much faith must the faithful have? If I had a dollar for every time a believer smiled serenely at my pesky questions and then replied with the ultimate slap in my logical face: 

“God requires that we have faith,” 

I’d have accrued a sizable little nest egg by now. It’s the deal breaker reply for me and the believer. Stop the train! Let me get off right now. There’s nothing else that I can say. The ardent believer really BELIEVES that they won the argument with a non-argument. God’s tricky like that, apparently. If I insist on proof that she’s there, she gets offended. 

Why can’t I just believe? 

What’s wrong with ME, not what’s wrong with the expectation that I’m required to just have faith that some kind of god is out there, minding my personal business no less. 

Why Faith? Reviewing Mittelberg's Book "Confident Faith" Part 3

Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Evangelism, in partnership with Houston Baptist University. He wrote the book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. Yet, it appears his book has been flying under the atheist radar—so far. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it.

The third important matter that comes to mind is to wonder what Mittelberg was thinking when he defined faith? He defines faith as "beliefs and actions that are based on something considered to be trustworthy--even in the absence of proof" (p. 2). According to Mittelberg then, if your conclusions (i.e., beliefs) and actions are located above the threshold of what is trustworthy, you have a reasonable faith. If they are located below that threshold, you have an unreasonable faith. His main polemical point is that everyone has faith. For if we base our conclusions on anything less than absolute proof we do so on faith.

Mittelberg brashly tells readers Richard Dawkins has faith because on his 1-7 spectrum of atheist probability Dawkins is only a 6.9! Dawkins's conclusion, he says, "is a belief that he holds in the absence of real proof...one that goes beyond what can be known with certainty." (p. 4) "Dawkins doesn't know there is no God...Rather he takes it on faith there is actually no God" (p. 4, italics from Mittelberg). Dawkins "exhibits what might best be described as a religious faith" Mittelberg says, because he can only say God "almost certainly does not exist" (p. 141, italics from Mittelberg).

Quote of the Day By Sir_Russ On the Outsider Perspective

The outsider perspective has the capacity to protect people from the consequences of ignorance, whether it's mine or the profound institutional immorality and ignorance of the Christian informed-by-God church. Everyone needs to be protected from the God-informed Christian church's ignorance, superstition and barbarism, and that can only happen by embracing outsider perspectives like those of secularism and science.

Why Apologetics Books? Reviewing Mittelberg's "Confident Faith" Part 2

Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Evangelism, in partnership with Houston Baptist University. He wrote the book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. Yet, it appears his book has been flying under the atheist radar—so far. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it.

Mark begins by telling us what he aims to do. Is this an investigative book giving the pros and cons of Christianity, letting reader decide? No, of course not. It's a polemical book. Does it aim to convince nonbelievers and people of different faiths? Again, no, not primarily anyway. As the subtitle says, it aims to build "a firm foundation for your belief (i.e., your Christian belief)." I know publishers have a big influence on the titles of books. Yet Mark says he's writing mainly for Christians, and only secondarily for others. He says, "if you're a Christian, how certain are you that your faith is based on reliable information--that it's really true? This book will help you answer that question. And if you believe something other than Christianity, how can you test your beliefs if they square with reality? We'll address that issue too." (p. xi)

Apologist Steve Hays On the Outsider Perspective and the Historian

I copied this debate we had on Facebook. I can't get the pages sized the same, oh well. I typed much of it on the fly using my phone, so I could have done a bit better if I had a computer. I think I did very well. There's new stuff here. It would be well worth your time to read it to better learn how to answer believers.

Getting the Gospels Off on the Wrong Foot

The strange Jesus in Mark’s story

The Christian church has managed to pull off one of the biggest con jobs in history. It got away with it, I suppose, because lay people did not have access to reading the gospels for the first 1,500 years of Christian history. The laity trusted their priests that Christ the Redeemer was all that mattered; hence the down-and-dirty details in the gospels went unnoticed. As Richard Carrier has put it, “What Jesus did on earth was irrelevant to what he could do for you now that he was exalted in heaven, and it was the heavenly Jesus that was sold to the masses, not some dead carpenter from Galilee.” (The End of Christianity, 2011, ed. John Loftus)

That was the con. Part of which, also, has been the relentless marketing of the good, holy Jesus. For the lay consumers, he has been represented in stained glass, countless works of fine and mediocre art, romanticized and sanitized Bible storybooks, novels, choral works, and hymns. These days people ask, “What would Jesus Do?” assuming that he is the ultimate moral arbiter.

What If You Had to Dance the Polka to Get to Heaven?

“Honey, please, don’t worry about grandma. She’s in heaven with the angels now. Grandpa is with her and Aunt Rosie and even little Fido. Grandma is happy and someday we’ll see her again.” 

Such beautiful words that on the surface seem harmless enough. 

Of course, to tell anyone, especially our children, such a fantastical story is a big fat lie. I can understand why people love this story. It’s comforting even to an adult to believe that those who have passed on are reunited with family and waiting happily for us to join them some day. Who wouldn’t love for that to be true, especially when you consider how terrifying life can be. We’d all like to believe that we have something better to look forward to someday.

An Introduction to Mark Mittelberg's Book "Confident Faith" Part 1

Mark Mittelberg

Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Evangelism, in partnership with Houston Baptist University. He wrote the book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. Yet, it appears his book has been flying under the atheist radar—so far. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it.

I found Mark’s book recently in a Goodwill store for $1. That was a lucky find. I didn’t know of his book until then. Thank Good...will. I have met him before, at a debate I had with David Wood. What I didn’t know was how similar our backgrounds are. We both studied at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and we both earned a masters degrees in the philosophy of religion there (him a M.A.; me a Th.M.). We also studied under the late Stuart Hackett while there, as did Paul Copan, as did William Lane Craig before us, who has admitted his debt to Hackett. LINK. Upon Stu’s death I wrote a post remembering him titled, Remembering and Honoring Professor Stuart C. Hackett. Hackett was Mark's "primary philosophical mentor" (Confident Faith, p. 271, note #2). William Lane Craig was mine. Perhaps Craig was gone by the time Mark attended, I don't know.

Do We Have Free Will? Part 1: Physical Determinism

The most common Christian view holds that human beings are free in the usual libertarian sense of the term — meaning that we can choose from among different courses of action (this is what I’ll mean here by “free will”). Eve and Adam chose to eat the fruit, but they could have chosen to obey Yahweh instead; you chose to read at least this far, but could have stopped after the first sentence; and so on. There are serious problems with such a view, however, and I thought it might be interesting to cover the main ones in a brief series of posts. (Plus, I don’t think I could have chosen otherwise anyway!)

Are We Robots Or Not? Does Free Will Matter?

Are we biological robots? In an age where evolutionary science and technology reign are we just performing tasks according to our particular inputs, do we have free will? If not, should we hold on to the language of free will? Is free will important? I was happy to be the moderator of a panel of experts who discussed this issue at the Atheist Alliance of America's annual convention 2017, held at DragonCon. Participants were Mark W Gura, Derek Colanduno, together with Annelies Beaty, Timothy Edward Dawson, PhD., and Asher Haig, PhD. in Artificial Intelligence and Psychoanalysis. Asher is also the CEO and Lead Engineer at Strong.AI.

Quote of the Day by Guy P. Harrison

Guy P. Harrison put the problem of the brain this way. If a skeptic disputes a psychic’s readings, then “the believer’s brain is likely to instinctively go into siege mode. The drawbridge is raised, crocodiles are released into the mote, and defenders man the walls.” He goes on to explain, “The worst part of all this is that the believer usually doesn’t recognize how biased and close-minded he is being. He likely feels that he is completely rational and fair. It doesn’t happen just with fans of psychics. We are all vulnerable to this distorted way of thinking.” [Think: Why You Should Question Everything, 2013), p. 67.] This process happens whenever the brain feels threatened by contrary data. The brain feels physically attacked when confronted with ideas that challenge it, and will do what it takes to deflect that attack. To see more, and learn what's required to overcome this strong tendency of the brain to keep us from the truth, see the tag mind of the believer.