From Mark Twain's Autiobiography, Volume II, Saturday, June 23, 1906
Concerning the character of the real God.
Let us now consider the real God, the genuine God, the great God, the sublime and supreme God, the authentic Creator of the real universe, whose remotenesses are visited by comets only—comets unto which incredibly distant Neptune is merely an outpost, a Sandy Hook to homeward bound spectres of the deeps of space that have not glimpsed it before for generations—a universe not made with hands and suited to an astronomical nursery, but spread abroad through the illimitable reaches of space by the fiat of the real God just mentioned; that God of unthinkable grandeur and majesty, by comparison with whom all the other gods whose myriads infest the feeble imaginations of men are as a swarm of gnats scattered and lost in the infinitudes of the empty sky.
When we think of such a God as this, we cannot associate with Him anything trivial, anything lacking dignity, anything lacking grandeur. We cannot conceive of His passing by Sirius to choose our potato for a footstool. We cannot conceive of His interesting Himself in the affairs of the microscopic human race and enjoying its Sunday flatteries, and experiencing pangs of jealousy when the flatteries grow lax or fail, any more than we can conceive of the Emperor of China being interested in a bottle of microbes and pathetically anxious to stand well with them and harvest their impertinent compliments. If we could conceive of the Emperor of China taking an intemperate interest in his bottle of microbes, we should have to draw the line there; we could not, by any stretch of imagination, conceive of his selecting from these innumerable millions a quarter of a thimbleful of Jew microbes—the least attractive of the whole swarm—and making pets of them and nominating them as his chosen germs, and carrying his infatuation for them so far as to resolve to keep and coddle them alone, and damn all the rest.
According to Paul, arguably Christianity’s foremost spokesman, belief in the resurrection is the sine qua non of Christian belief and the basis of Christian hope:
But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.[1]
I've changed my mind a lot of times. I should be so lucky to have gotten everything correct from the time I was a young adult. I wonder if it's even possible for people never to change their minds if they have any longevity in life at all. Let's imagine for a second that at the age of 20 years old I held the same opinions as I do now, which is to say I was correct about everything I had an opinion about. Now don't get me wrong here. While I think I'm correct about everything I have an opinion about--to the appropriate degrees of probability--I also know with a very high degree of certainty I must be wrong about some of them. I just cannot see that I'm wrong right now. Back to being 20 years old. Even if at the age of 20 I agreed with my older current self about everything, I know I'd change some of my opinions as I grew older. So I don't think changing one's mind is any indicator of ignorance or instability or gullibility or anything like that. It can mean this is just what thinking people do, given time, thought and the experiences of life.
What have I changed my mind about? Too many things to say here, for sure. I've changed my opinions about lots of people as I got to know them better, about foods I like, about drinks I like, about which sports I like, about the sports teams I root for, about music I listen to, about art, politics, and religion.
When it comes to religion I began as a Catholic. In my earlier years I went through a paradigm shift of sorts. At the age of 17 I became a "Born Again" Pentecostal who was also taught to believe Dispensationalism and Calvinism. Then I started going to a Church of Christ and had to unlearn what I was converted to. I learned to reject Pentecostalism, Dispensationalism and Calvinist theology. Then I was taught that adult baptism by immersion was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, and that Arminianism and amillennial eschatology were biblically correct. Friends, all of this religious change took place in just 2-3 years of my young adult life. Soon I was set in my ways and stayed that way for two decades on major issues, although with more and more education I changed my mind slowly and gradually on lots of other minor ones.
From 1990 to 2005 I went though a second paradigm shift of sorts. I went from being a conservative to a moderate to a liberal to a deist to an agnostic and finally to an atheist, a weak or agnostic atheist.
Recently in the last 2-3 years to date, I have gone though third paradigm shift of sorts. I am now a strong atheist who has come to the conclusion there is no need to take the obfuscations of Christian philosophers seriously because all philosophical apologetics is special pleading, all of it. Philosophy itself is used to obfuscate the Bible and the theology based on it not to clarify them, because if they were truly clarified believers would see clearly the Christian emperor has no clothes on. Clarifying the Bible and the theology based on it rather than obfuscating them would strip away the blinders from the eyes of believers. Then believers could see the evidence-based truth. They would see their faith is a delusion on a par with Mormonism, Hinduism, Orthodox Judaism and even Scientology, as well as seeing they’ve been indoctrinated and/or brainwashed to believe.
I have changed my mind about faith because I’ve become better informed about it. I should not believe anything. Belief isn’t something any reasonable person should do when it comes to gaining knowledge about matters of fact like the nature of nature, its workings and its origins. Faith adds nothing to the probabilities. It has no method and solves no problems. If faith is trust we should not trust faith. It’s a cognitive bias keeping believers away from understanding the truth rather than strictly going with the probabilities based upon the objective evidence.
I have also changed my mind about the Courtier’s Reply. I now agree it's an appropriate and reasonable response to believers who claim to have evidence for their faith. I say this as someone trained in the philosophy of religion who has changed his mind about his own field of study. Furthermore, while I previously desired a respectful discussion with believers, I no longer think it's of the up-most importance. I have embraced the need for and the value of ridicule.
I get attacked for my present views. People do so, even atheists, not realizing I have been where they are now. I just want them to know I was once where they are now. They may attack me but they cannot claim I'm ignorant, just as Christians may attack me not realizing I was once where they are now. I might be wrong. But again, I'm not ignorant. You should take the fact that I've changed my mind as evidence I'm open-minded enough to consider different views. I have a lot to teach my atheist critics precisely because I have changed my views. For at one time I rejected the views of Dawkins and the subsequent Courtier's Reply as philosophically naive, but I now value them. My atheist critics are playing a pretend game when they take the obfuscations of Christian pseudo-philosophers seriously. They do so because they enjoy an intellectually challenging game, much like chess. While it may be fun and interesting to play the game called "Christian" and want to win at it, by playing the game they grant intellectual respectability to that which is bizarre and absurd.
Here are the concluding thoughts from chapter 2 of my book
Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End:
Anselm of Canterbury’s key theological contributions for philosophical theology highlight what reasonable people see as the need for philosophy of religion to end. He holds a preeminent place among the best philosophical theologians the church ever produced. And yet, as we’ve seen, even among one the best of the best there’s nothing here but rhetoric without substance based on his faith, and the social climate of his day. His best contributions didn’t solve anything. Almost no one accepts his atonement theory today. His idiosyncratic perfect being conception was based on nothing more than special pleading on behalf of his parochial western concept of god. His ontological argument does not work either. Further, we’ve found that when Anselm’s perfect being is compared to the biblical god Yahweh and his supposed son, it doesn’t make any sense nor can it be reconciled. So the only reason to study Anselm seems to be one of historical curiosity. Anselm’s key contributions did not advance anything since we are no closer at getting to objective knowledge about anything than we would be if he never wrote a thing. When it came to the history of philosophy he made no contributions that furthered understanding, the very thing he sought to do.
Karl Barth, considered one of the greatest theologians of the last century who rejected natural theology with a big fat “Nein”, argued Anselm’s ontological argument was based in a faith seeking understanding, not one that leads to any logical conclusion that his God existed. Anselm did not seek to “prove” the truth of the Christian faith, Barth argued, but to understand it.[i] Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence in chapter 2 of the Proslogion, comes after asking God for help in understand his faith in chapter 1. There he prays, “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, – that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Then just before developing the argument in chapter 2 Anselm prays, “Lord, do you, who do give understanding to faith, give me, so far as you know it to be profitable, to understand that you are as we believe; and that you are that which we believe.” So while there is disagreement about what he was doing, Anselm at least tacitly acknowledges his argument comes from faith rather than leading to faith. And that’s exactly what we find. The ontological argument depends on his Christian faith which seeks to understand what he already believes about his parochial god. There’s a recognized informal fallacy here. It’s called special pleading.
Philosophers of religion who have dealt with Anselm’s argument and developed their own versions of it, such as Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne and Alvin Plantinga should take note. They don’t know their own theology. Or, perhaps more correctly and importantly, they fail to realize that they’re doing the same thing Anselm honestly admitted doing, special pleading.
What we’re led to conclude is that the problem of philosophical theology stems from faith. If faith is trust then there is no reason to trust faith. Anything based on faith has lower probabilities to it by definition. Christian pseudo-philosophers do no more than build intellectual castles in the sky without any solid grounding to them. There doesn’t seem to be any good principled reason for not getting fed up with the pretend game of faith with its ever receding theology.
[i] Karl Barth, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), p.14.
Believers will always argue in the same fashion in order to stay as believers. No matter what we say they always seem to have an answer. What they never produce is any hard cold objective evidence, convincing evidence, for their faith claims. Ever. They are not only impervious to reason. They are impervious to the evidence. They see evidence where it doesn’t exist because they take the lack of evidence as evidence for their faith. When it comes to prayer they count the hits and discount the misses.
There is only so much a person can take when dealing with people who have lost touch with reality. Must we always maintain a patient attitude when we already know their arguments? Must we always respond in a dispassionate manner to people who are persuaded against reason to believe something delusional? We know this about them based on everything we know (i.e., our background knowledge). They are pretending to know that which they don’t know when they pretend to know with some degree of certainty their faith is true. If it’s faith, how then can something be known with any degree of probability at all, much less certainty? No one says we must have a sure faith that there is solid ground in front of us before going out for a walk. No one says we must have a sure faith before grabbing the handle of a door to open it. No one says we must have a sure faith before we eat the food put in front of us by a loved one. Faith by definition always concerns itself with that which is unsure. Something unsure involves lower probabilities. So faith is always about that which has lower probabilities to it. So again, how can something based on faith be known with any degree of certainty? It can’t, and only deluded minds think otherwise, minds that are impervious to reason and evidence. We can only hope they can function in life. It can be quite surprising they can.
Anselm’s argument:
(1) On the assumption that that than which nothing greater can be conceived is only in a mind, something greater can be conceived, because
(2) Something greater can be thought to exist in reality as well.
(3) The assumption is therefore contradictory: either there is no such thing even in the intellect, or it exists also in reality;
(4) But it does exist in the mind of the fool, or doubter;
(5) Therefore that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in reality as well as in the mind.