On Defining Atheism

I was recently sent a book to review, by Franz Kiekeben, called The Truth About God which is a whistlestop tour, I think, through atheism and counter-apologetics to arrive at the conclusion not that God is improbable, but that God is impossible. I will be interested to see where that goes.

Why I mention this is that I am pleased the author started off the book by briefly sketching out the different ways of seeing atheism and stating that there is a modern trend to defining atheism as a lack of belief in God. This is something upon which I have commented in various places before, and something which I feel quite strongly about.

"The Truth about God" by Franz Kiekeben, is a Good Book!

The Truth about Godby Franz Kiekeben speaks simply yet intelligently to readers who want a good primer for understanding why atheists don't believe. He expertly introduces them to a range of important issues in an easily understandable manner, and that's not an easy task to do. As such, this book fills a very needed gap. It's not so technical that it loses the average reader, nor is it so simple that it becomes simplistic. Well done!

Originally from Portugal, Kiekeben studied philosophy at the University of South Florida (where he was awarded the Undergraduate Prize by the Florida Philosophical Association), and at the Ohio State University, where he then lectured for seven years. He has written for Skeptic Magazine, published academic articles on determinism and on time travel, and blogs on atheism and related subjects at www.franzkiekeben.com.

Do Atheists Steal Key Concepts From the Christian Faith?

This is the claim of Frank Turek, who made it into a list of the top ten Christian apologists. Franz Kiekeben, who writes here for DC, informs us that

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.

Christianity Doesn’t Survive This Fatal Knockout Blow

One of several, actually

Even a casual reading of the Ten Commandments (either Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5) should make anyone skeptical that a supposedly good, competent god had anything to do with it. Here was this god’s big opportunity—alone with Moses on the mountaintop—to let humanity know the best moral principles to follow. Many ethicists have noticed three crucial items that are missing: (1) Thou shalt not engage in warfare; (2) Thou shalt not enslave other human beings; (3) Thou shalt not mistreat or undervalue other human beings because of the color of their skin. These omissions are surely an indication of defective, indeed bad theology.  

 

Slavery and racism have brought so much pain and suffering to the world. But war has been, by far, the greatest destroyer, especially as weapons have become more and more advanced—very smart people have been hired by military leaders to create devastating killing machines. This prompts us to doubt, on another level entirely, that a good god was involved in the creation of humans.

Is There Evidence That There Are No Gods?

I was recently involved in an online discussion in which a reason I hadn't previously seen was offered for preferring negative to positive atheism. (By negative atheism, I mean the mere lack of belief in any gods, and by positive atheism, the belief that there are no gods. And the fact that one usually needs to explain this is one reason I prefer the traditional terminology.)

There are better and worse reasons for being only a negative atheist. But the one that was argued by my opponent in the discussion was pretty weak — and if it is accepted by others who call themselves atheists, they really should be aware of that.

Briefly, my opponent's argument was that one should only believe when there is evidence; that there is no evidence that there are no gods; and therefore that to positively disbelieve in such beings is completely unjustified.

On Finding Jesus

I'm here today to announce my conversion to Christianity. For several years now, I've been blogging at Debunking Christianity, and before that at my own site, arguing against what up until recently I saw as irrational beliefs. But last night, God spoke to me, and I am now saved. Praise the Lord!

Faith and Equivocation

Whenever someone is defending faith, or is arguing that faith and reason are compatible, they should be asked which of three common meanings of the term they are thinking of. If the exact meaning of the word isn't made clear, it is almost a given that their claims will deteriorate into a mess of equivocation.

When challenged to provide evidence for the existence of God, most theists reply that their belief is based on faith. This makes it clear that, in this context, “faith” means belief without evidence. This meaning of the word also applies to the claim that faith is needed when the evidence isn't conclusive. Or in other words, when the believer says that reason can only take one so far, and one must make the decision to believe.

“The Bible Is a Self-Destructing Artifact”

The resurrection can be found in the rubble

The appeal of holy books, according to John C. Wathey, is that

“…it does not matter what they say. As long as they are perceived as imparting divinely inspired instructions and wisdom, they will evoke in readers the infantile solace and comforting emotions of a small child receiving help and instruction from a parent—the less comprehensible, the better.” (p. 133, The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing)

Of course, preachers and priests draw attention to Bible texts that make the faith look good. These texts are read from the pulpit, set to sacred music, and embedded in stained glass—and the Bible itself, in splendid binding, is adored on the altar. None of which means that it is comprehensible—in fact, far too much of defies comprehension, which doesn’t take too much digging to discover. But the laity commonly settle for devotional study of the Bible, hence they are in a category Randel Helms has called “inattentive readers,” those who would be

Abortion: Everything You Need To Know

Directly below are a few links to what our authors have written about abortion.

--Why I Write and Write and Write About the Religious Right, by Teresa Roberts. Commenting on Bob Nononi, a Republican politician from Idaho, who said in a public forum that maybe we should consider the death penalty for women who get an abortion, she unloads the harms of the religious right in general. "Right under our very noses, we are becoming a theocracy and people by in large are refusing to believe it’s happening...The religious right is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines as their cross-eyed cousins once did, talking in tongues, handling snakes, beating their kids and oppressing their women. Watching the rest of Americans live their own lives as they please infuriates them. They're here to tell you that they're no longer a joking matter. They're serious. Dead serious. Furthermore, they're winning which is making them bolder by the minute."

--Why is the Religious Right Obsessed With Abortion?, by Teresa Roberts. She argues: "Abortion has evolved into a single driving issue of such monumental proportions in part because society has become far more secularized than we realize. The shift away from a moral code dictated by churches and enforced by government has caused a great deal of discomfort for individuals and institutions that once wielded so much power over our lives. They are now struggling to reclaim what they perceive as their god given right to determine and enforce the new moral code that defines modern culture. They feel the shifting tide as they continue to lose their tight grip on the reins of society. It has turned them into crusaders, not just for the protection of the unborn but for a return to the glory days when the church had the final and last say over what would be tolerated and what would not."

--Birds of a Fundy Feather, by minister-turned-atheist Joe Holman. In commenting on Eric Rudolph, the famous abortion clinic bomber, Holman argues: "The Christian fundamentalist mindset is dangerous. It devalues life and appreciates one that exists only in fantasy. It enslaves the rational mind, empowering an otherwise conscionable individual to do inhumane things with feelings of integral justification, or at the very least, creates support and sympathy for those who so act."

--Apologist Edward Feser gets into the debate by comparing George Tiller, an abortionist doctor, to Jeffrey Dahmer who killed, dismembered and ate 17 men and boys. Feser says, "Tiller was almost certainly a more evil man than Dahmer was." LINK, with a follow-up LINK.

--In a tongue-in-cheek essay, Why Conservative Christians Should Love Abortion, Franz Kiekeben takes seriously William Lane Craig's arguments that slaughtered innocent children go to heaven, and draws the conclusion that so do aborted fetuses. Hence, "Christian conservatives should be encouraging women to get pregnant for the sole purpose of aborting their fetuses — and doing this as often as they can! They should stop protesting abortion clinics and instead hand out fliers informing women of the religious benefits associated with the practice, and encouraging them to do the godly thing."

--God Loves Abortion, by Jonathan Pearce. "Given the statistics that fetuses die from natural, spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages; abortions that God has the power to stop, and seemingly designed in to the system in the first place, then.... either God is not omnibenevolent; or God does not exist; or embryos are not so sacred and arguments over what defines personhood are called for; or that millions of fetal deaths a year, unknown to humanity, are necessary for a greater good."

--About fifteen years ago I participated in a written debate with an atheist over abortion, which can be found at DC here. I think I laid out a reasonable case for a women's right to abortion.

It's the End of the World, Again

"In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments."

Those are the words of psychic Sylvia Browne in her 2008 book End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World, which rose to the number two position on Amazon's non-fiction chart after Kim Kardashian tweeted about this. For the naive, the accuracy of Browne's prediction seems impressive. But of course it really isn't.

To begin with, the fact that she stated something that turned out more-or-less right is easy to explain: That there will be a widespread virus, and that it will cause “pneumonia-like” symptoms (why not simply “pneumonia”?) are both fairly safe guesses as to what could happen in a given year — even though one is of course still likely to be wrong when making such a prediction. In this case, Browne just got lucky. But she also made far more incorrect than correct predictions. Kardashian's tweet includes the above picture of the relevant page in Browne's book, and there one can also read that another epidemic would take place in 2010, this one involving a flesh-eating disease transmitted by mites that came from exotic birds. You probably don't remember that epidemic, since it never happened.

The Weakness of Christian Explanations of Evil

Here are a couple of the “reasonable Christian responses” (as he calls them) that apologist John M. DePoe offers for the existence of natural evils (True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism, ed. Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, pp. 218-219):

(1) There cannot be free will in any meaningful sense unless the world is governed by laws that make it behave in a sufficiently regular manner. These laws, however, “are also the cause of various phenomena, like hurricanes, tornadoes, and diseases.” It follows that one cannot avoid the existence of such natural disasters without eliminating our ability to exercise free will.

(2) Natural evils aren’t intrinsically evil; they are only bad when they harm moral agents. It follows that “if people had not chosen to settle in an area prone to tornado activity or on a fault line, there would be no associated evil event.”

Stealing from God: Reason, Part 2

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.

Stealing from God: Evil

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.

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 1

In Seven Types of Atheism, political philosopher John Gray, who’s an atheist himself, takes the so-called new atheists to task for their “notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses.” Treating religion this way, as if it were a kind of “primitive science,” is a mistake, he says. Rather, we must understand it as allegory and myth, as a way of imparting truths about the human condition. “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” As evidence, he mentions St. Augustine’s fourth-century view that the Bible need not be taken literally, as well as Philo of Alexandria’s first-century description of Genesis as “an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events.”

Doesn't It Take Just as Much Faith to Be an Atheist?

[The following is an excerpt from my small book, Atheism: Q & A, the Kindle version of which is, for promotional purposes, free December 4 through December 8. The book consists of short entries (like this one) that answer common criticisms of atheism. The paperback isn't free, but it is inexpensive — and might make a nice Winter Solstice gift for anyone who holds misconceptions about your views.]


The complaint that it takes just as much faith to be an atheist is a strange one. After all, it seems to imply that there’s something wrong with believing on faith — even though in every other context faith is regarded by believers as a virtue. Maybe all that is meant, however, is that everyone is in the same boat, ultimately basing their views on something other than reason and evidence, and that the atheist therefore has no right to single out the religious for criticism.

But is this really true? Does atheism rest on no firmer foundation than religion?

On the Naturalistic Fallacy

In addition to denying the is/ought gap (see my previous post), those who attempt to argue for the existence of a scientific morality often deny the so-called naturalistic fallacy. This is the fallacy of defining moral concepts in non-moral terms, as Sam Harris does when he says that “good” just means “that which increases the overall well-being of conscious creatures.” Other examples of the fallacy include defining the good as happiness, or as what helps promote human flourishing, or (to use a supernaturalistic example) as what God commands. And the reason this is a fallacy is that, no matter what one picks as the definition of “good,” someone can ask whether that thing is actually good without thereby making any kind of mistake.

Aquinas’s Abject Failure

There are quite a few things wrong with the first cause argument, but the worst thing about it — Aquinas’s attempt to show that the chain of efficient causation cannot extend back to infinity — is ignored by most critics. The claim that there cannot be an infinite causal regress is often disputed, of course, but Aquinas’s bizarre reasoning to the contrary is usually passed over — maybe for fear it would just be confusing to readers. Whatever the case may be, I think it’s worthwhile to be aware of it, especially given that Aquinas’s old argument is still touted by many.

The part I’m referring to is the following:

Doubt and the "Evil" of Nonbelief

Many believers admit to having doubts. In fact, probably most do. It is so common a phenomenon that whole books have been written about it, and in The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel interviews the author of one of them, Lynn Anderson.

Strobel asks him, “Can a person be a Christian and nevertheless have reservations or doubts?” Anderson’s answer is a definite yes: “where there’s absolutely no doubt, there’s probably no healthy faith,” he tells Strobel, adding that he rejects “the ‘true believer’ mentality — people with bright smiles and glassy eyes” who never have any questions about their religious views. Strobel also mentions other thinkers who claim that “having doubts isn’t evidence of the absence of faith; on the contrary, they consider them to be the very essence of faith itself.” Neither Anderson nor Strobel, then, see religious doubt as a problem.

In another chapter of The Case for Faith, however, Strobel asks Ravi Zacharias how it could possibly be fair for a serial killer like David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz — who like so many former criminals has now “found” Christ — to go to heaven, while someone like Mahatma Gandhi is presumably suffering in hell.

Stealing from God: Morality, Part 1

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.

Can Atheists Criticize God on Moral Grounds?

“In the minds of Christian apologists, atheists cannot rationally criticize the Christian god for immoral behavior if an objective moral standard does not exist. I haven't seen a good atheist comeback on this issue. Does anyone have a good, concise, bullet-proof comeback?” — Gary M.

The underlying argument here is that one cannot justifiably criticize something on moral grounds unless one accepts an objective moral standard; that only God provides such a standard; and that therefore atheists cannot consistently claim that the biblical God is immoral — not even when he commands genocide.