The Atheist Divorce

Evangelist, Ray Comfort has a great sense of humor, as is demonstrated in the title of his book, God Doesn't Believe in Atheists. As it turns out, a study done by the University of Helsinki, of Finland, suggests he's right.

"We examined whether atheists exhibit evidence of emotional arousal when they dare God to cause harm to themselves and their intimates. In Study 1, the participants (16 atheists, 13 religious individuals) read aloud 36 statements of three different types: God, offensive, and neutral. In Study 2 (N D 19 atheists), 10 new stimulus statements were included in which atheists wished for negative events to occur. The atheists did not think the God statements were as unpleasant as the religious participants did in their verbal reports. However, the skin conductance level showed that asking God to do awful things was equally stressful to atheists as it was to religious people and that atheists were more affected by God statements than by wish or offensive statements. The results imply that atheists’ attitudes toward God are ambivalent in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response." 

Do not presume to think that this means the researchers will be "finding" God or reconsidering methodological natural evolution (as expressed by Phillip Johnson in, Reason in the Balance, to distinguish the secular ideology that relegates God to the church house, forever banishing him from the scientific study of the origins of life and the beginning of the universe), after all, this is not Moody Bible Institute or Dallas Theological Seminary that were talking about here. 

According to the researchers: 

"There is a strong tendency in the current work on supernatural beliefs to suggest that religiosity is natural. Belief in a supernatural, intentional agent is assumed to be a cognitive default, a byproduct of evolutionary adaptations for social cognition that are present in all humans. Accordingly, Bering has argued that atheism is only skin deep: whether or not people consider themselves to be atheists, their verbal self-description may have little bearing on their implicit supernatural beliefs."

Belief in God is "natural," it is a "cognitive default," it's "implicit." The fact that the researchers presuppose naturalism just makes the claims of the study all the more interesting to me. On occasion I play the "devil's advocate" with antagonistic pseudo-evangelical atheists, by pointing out the fact that if evolution is true, than religion and religious belief is the product of evolution, and is therefore completely normal and even natural. Then I go on to argue that any attempt to discourage belief in God is an attempt to counter evolution. My final thrust is to point out that they are acting inconsistent with their views regarding natural evolution. It's a matter of cognitive dissonance. Taken into account with the study, this also implies that for the new militant atheists, their antagonism toward belief arises out of emotion, rather than bald faced facts and/or good will, as many like to use as a pretense. 

Often times this leads to the issue of whether or not religion and/or religious belief (i.e. belief in God) is a beneficial "adaptation," which generally ensues into a dialogue about the impact that Christ has made in people's lives and how that plays out in the real world. For this pragmatic argument to work, we who profess faith must pay more than mere lip service to our King. We must demonstrate his love to the world, practically and honestly, and that includes antagonists. The fact is, many, too many, believers have fallen to the way side, abandoning the faith because of a lack of grace and love in the lives of fellow believers, especially close friends and mentors. We cannot merely use the parable of the sower to excuse our own negligence. In the end, it will be your life rather than scientific data that will draw people to Christ (John 17:18; John 20:21). 

Marjaana Lindeman , Bethany Heywood , Tapani Riekki & Tommi Makkonen (2014) Atheists Become Emotionally Aroused When Daring God to Do Terrible Things, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 24:2, 124-132, DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.771991 

The Argument from Reason by C.S. Lewis

Here in this first short video clip, philosophers, Victor Reppert, Jay Richards, and Angus Menuge explain C.S. Lewis's Argument from Reason. Reppert wrote, C.S. Lewis' Dangerous idea, his blog can be found here. There is a very interesting interview with Menuge on Apologetics 315 (audio, transcript) and here's an article by Richards. 

Dr. William Lane Craig discusses C.S. Lewis and his argument from reason:

The Argument from Reason is what I call an argument from human experience or human nature. The basis for this argument may include any number of human experiences. Francis Schaeffer, who is noted for 'taking the roof off,' surveys the implications of naturalism/materialism in his trilogy, The God Who is There, He is There and He is Not Silent and Escape from Reason. His main criticism against atheism is the inconsistency of atheist philosophers and how it lacks the basis for almost everything that we associate with being human, moral ethic, meaning, rationalism, love, beauty, art, justice, etc.

The Argument from Reason (AFR) is closely associated with the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG). In Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey explains that AFR leans on common sense realism, but other philosophers such as Cornelius Van Til opt for a more Bible based premise, of which human reasoning is viewed as unreliable. It was implemented by Greg Bahnsen in his famous debate with atheist, Gordon Stein.

Wikipedia's entry on the Transcendental Argument:

They are also distinct from standard deductive and inductive forms of reasoning. Where a standard deductive argument looks for what we can deduce from the fact of X, and a standard inductive argument looks for what we can infer from experience of X, a transcendental argument looks for the necessary prior conditions to both the fact and experience of X. Thus, "I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, VII). 

The transcendental argument attempts to prove that God is the precondition of all human knowledge and experience, by demonstrating the impossibility of the contrary; in other words, that logic, reason, or morality cannot exist without God. The argument proceeds as follows:

1. If there is no god (most often the entity God, defined as the God of the Christian Bible, Yahweh), knowledge is not possible.
2. Knowledge is possible (or some other statement pertaining to logic or morality).
3. Therefore a god exists.

Notice the quote by Kant. As you can see, the argument goes back a long time; Alvin Plantinga pointed out that Charles Darwin himself recognized the dilemma he was placing himself in. Plantinga has developed his own argument, the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), in which he demonstrates that "the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable." Wikipedia now has a full page entry devoted to the argument (here). There is also a lecture that Plantinga gave that is available in mp3.

Glenn Peoples devotes several podcasts explaining Plantinga's philosophy of Properly Basic Beliefs, Presuppositional Apologetics and EAAN (1, 2, 3 & 4), they are well worth listening to. Plantinga's argument is subtle and can be confusing to people, including atheist, Daniel Dennet, who thought he was trying to disprove naturalism and evolution with his argument. EAAN is actually quite modest, in that it only questions the underlying assumption of our ability to think rationally if our thoughts are in fact derived from natural evolution. It is a defeater for believing in the philosophy of naturalism and evolution together, but not necessarily some form of evolution such as theistic evolution.

Angus Menuge has put together what he calls the Ontological Argument from Reason. He develops a three step argument for theism providing the only basis for knowledge. First Menuge offers the following requirements for reasoning and argues that all are incompatible with materialism:

A) A conscious self that is united at a time.
B) A conscious self that persists over time.
C) Subjectivity.
D) Teleology.
E) Intentionality.
F) Libertarian free will.

The second step is the Summary of the Ontological Argument from Reason:

(P1) Reasoning requires a unified, enduring self with irreducible subjectivity, teleology, and intentionality, and with libertarian free will.

(P2) None of these resources belongs in a materialistic world.

(C) Reasoning cannot be located in a materialist world: if materialism is true, there is no such thing as reasoning.

His conclusive statement sets up the reasons for holding to Christian theism:

1) Reason cannot be located in a materialist world.

2) If reason did emerge from matter, it could not be relied on.

3) If we are made in God’s image, yet live in a fallen world, we can account for reason, its reliability, and its limitations.

(Menuge also presents a logical argument for #3 in his power point presentation and goes into more detail about his premises.)

Wintery Knight put together a pdf version of a paper Menuge gave at the Evangelical Philosophical Society (paper, debate with P Z Myers).

Here's another helpful resource page that I discovered while putting this article together: Reasons for God.

Science as Religion

Science as the sole bedrock of truth, carries with it certain presumptions. Scientism is the view that science is the single source of knowledge and understanding of reality. Empiricism, verification and falsification have their benefits, as does the other trademarks of science, but they are in no way capable, either individually or together, of offering an exhaustive comprehension of reality. Modern science is made to work under the constraints of methodological naturalism and thereby confined to a particular metaphysical point of view; when viewed as the single arbiter of truth, it can no longer be taken as a scientific discipline, it becomes religion.

Brains and Pop Cans

The following is an excerpt from Joe Boot's essay, "Broader Cultural and Philosophical Challenges."

It is important to note that reason and logic are components of a worldview, not a total synoptic view of reality. Consequently, intelligibility rests on the origin of logic and reasoning within that worldview, which skeptics either reduce to chance or admit they simply cannot tell us.…to form a logical argument to presuppose logic as an ultimate foundation is to use a piece of reasoning to validate the whole, which simply begs the question. Once again, faith is found to be indispensable to reason. We cannot prove, without God, that our minds convey any truth at all. The Christian proof itself is indirect by showing that the exclusion of the transcendent God is unintelligible and absurd as it destroys all meaning, collapsing all reality into pure metaphysics. Michael Robinson writes:

If there is no God, we are just molecules in motion, and we have no sense and no mind; we are just the random firing of chemicals in the brain. If our minds are composed only of physical matter, then our thoughts are, as Douglas Wilson wittily quipped in his debate with atheist Dan Barker, just “brain gas.” …If our minds are just the result of chemical reactions, then in the debate over pop cans, God’s existence can rightly be settled by shaking the two pop cans simultaneously. Labeling one can “atheism” and the other “theism”; after shaking the cans, the one that fizzes the most wins the debate. If our minds are simply the fluctuations of proteins, neurotransmitters, and other brain biochemicals, then an intellectual debate is equivalent to the chemical reactions that occur when one shakes up a can of soda.

Joe Boot's essay, Broader Cultural and Philosophical Challenges, is included in Beyond Opinion, ..Ravi.. Zacharias, Author and General Editor, p. 170-171.

Michael Robinson, God Does Exist.

John Lennox Takes on Stephen Hawking

As Stephen Hawking recently made another splash in the news, putting his weight in with the anti-theistic cheering crowd, Dr. John Lennox examined the content of the dead-end argument, pointing out that he is certainly wrong. "

According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.'"

John Lennox explains how Hawking makes a categorical error by confusing the "law" with the "agency." "...physical laws can never provide a complete explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely a description of what happens under certain conditions."

In other words, it only brings us back to the original question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

On Lennox's websight a very interesting post was made by Byrom, "Hawking is claiming that something can come into being from nothing (or worse that the universe can create itself). God, however, is not claimed to have had a beginning to his existence, nor created himself. God is eternal and uncaused."

Byrom continues, "With God, one simply commits oneself to X existing. With Hawking’s universe, one is committing to X not existing, but then creating itself (which would require it to exist before it existed - logically absurd)."

As an Oxford professor with three PhDs, John Lennox takes on the new atheists in his excellent book that I highly recommend, "God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?" It would make a great gift for a college student or anyone else who might be experiencing pressure from the secular elite. In his book, he examines the numerous categorical errors that take place in "THE BIG DEBATE." Of course he had personal experience when he debated the infamous Richard Dawkins.

For the entire article by John Lennox: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1308599/Stephen-Hawking-wrong-You-explain-universe-God.html

http://johnlennox.org/index.php/en/resource/stephen_hawking_and_god/

Dallas Willard on Natural Evolution

"Evolution, whether cosmic or biological, cannot — logically cannot! — be a theory of ultimate origins of existence or order, precisely because its operations always presuppose the prior existence of certain entities with specific potential behaviors, as well as of an environment of some specific kind that operates upon those entities in some specifically ordered (law-governed) fashion, to determine which ones are allowed to survive and reproduce. Let us quite generally state: any sort of evolution of order of any kind will always presuppose pre-existing order and pre-existing entities governed by it. It follows as a simple matter of logic that not all order evolved. Given the physical world — and however much of evolution it may or may not contain — there is or was some order in it which did not evolve. However it may have originated (if it originated), that order did not evolve, for it was the condition of any evolution at all occurring. We come here upon a logically insurpassable limit to what evolution, however it may be understood, can accomplish."

Special thanks to Apologetics 315 for posting this. http://apologetics315.blogspot.com/2009/04/sunday-quote-dallas-willard-on.html