Atheism's Inherent Contradiction, or Christianity's Inherent Failure?

There seems to be something of a cottage industry among Christian apologists trying to manufacture some sort of contradiction in atheism. Lacking any solid means for definitely proving that their god exist, some seem to feel that the best course of action is to demonstrate that not believing in their god is logically incoherent — thus making a case for their theism and perhaps their religion in a negative manner. Unfortunately, they consistently fail through a series of obvious and inexplicable errors.

If they were serious in their effort to either understand atheism or to explain their theism, there's no good reason for such errors to be committed — but not only are they committed, but the same ones keep being committed over and over. They don't learn from the mistakes of the past and don't invest any great effort in studying the subject itself, so what does this say about their reasoning skills, education, or intellectual honesty?

Describing it as "the unanswerable, inherent contradiction of atheism," Tullian Tchividjian quotes John Frame:

Certainly it is not obvious that the biblical God doesn’t exist. How could anybody establish the non-existence of God? Absolute negatives are notoriously hard to prove. You would need omniscience to know that there is no God anywhere in the universe. And, of course, if you were omniscient, then you would be God, and the contrary would be proven.

Source: New City Church

At least John Frame doesn't commit the common mistake of insisting that absolute negatives are impossible to prove — I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw that false claim made — but that isn't enough to save his argument because he commits two critical errors. The first and likely most obvious to readers of this site is his misrepresentation of atheism: you don't need to be omniscient to be an atheist because being an atheist doesn't mean claiming that there "is no God anywhere in the universe." Atheism is the label for simply not believing in any gods, whether you think you can disprove their existence or not.

The second and more interesting mistake is one that others may make in attempts to "prove" that atheism is self-contradictory, but not in such an obvious manner: if John Frame is correct that it's self-contradictory to not believe in his god ("the biblical God"), that isn't a problem for atheists alone. Jews don't believe in his "biblical God" because they reject the New Testament. Muslims don't believe in his "biblical God" because they think much in the Bible is incorrect. Beyond that, other religions are even further afield: Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and so forth certainly don't believe in the "biblical God."

Are all these believers also caught in a self-contradiction? That's absurd — at least, in the way implied by John Frame. I obviously don't agree with them, don't believe what they believe, and think that many of their doctrines are contradictory. However, I don't think that there is any self-contradiction involved in their failure to believe in some god other than John Frame's god. That's what's absurd — in fact, I think it might be too absurd, incoherent, and ridiculous for words to adequately describe. It's beyond arrogant, self-righteous, smug, and self-involved.

Tullian Tchividjian isn't some random college-aged blogger. Tchividjian is "a grandson of Billy and Ruth Graham," founder of the New City Church, "a visiting professor of theology at Reformed Theological Seminary," and a "graduate of Columbia International University (philosophy) and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando." Yet, despite all that heavy-duty background, he was completely unable to recognize the very simple errors. He knows so little about atheism that he can't even tell when someone is misrepresenting it and engaging in a Straw Man fallacy, nor can he recognize that the "logic" of the "argument" should entail that there is an "unanswerable, inherent contradiction" for everyone who doesn't happen to believe in his god.

John Frame is, if anything, abysmally worse. He's received degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He's regarded as a leading Calvinist theologian and principle defender of presuppositional apologetics. He, too, utterly fails at the most rudimentary tasks of correctly defining atheism and recognizing that he's constructed an "argument" which, if valid, entails the conclusion that it's self-contradictory for anyone to not believe in his god — which, as noted above, is complete rubbish since it's plain that most people who have ever existed have not believed in his god. Since his conclusion is at odds with reality, the only sensible course of action is to accept that the argument is flawed.

As I said, though, Frame is abysmally worse: rather than reconsider the argument, he runs with it and actually argues that non-Christian thought "is characterized by irrationalism because inevitably the finite and fallen human mind cannot fully capture all of reality into a man-made system." That's right, only Christians are rational — the entirely course of human thought and reason outside of Christianity is ultimate irrational and inferior to that which has occurred in the context of Christianity. He really does seem to believe that there is an "unanswerable, inherent contradiction" in not being a Christian just like himself — and I wouldn't put it past Tullian Tchividjian to agree.

So where does Christianity's "inherent failure" come into all of this? Neither Tchividjian nor Frame are able to demonstrate any contradiction in atheism or non-Christian belief systems generally — they try, but only get anywhere at all by misrepresenting others and/or by simply assuming what they are supposed to prove. That, however, is a symptom of the failure rather than the failure itself. Where we can find the fundamental failure is in the fact that Christianity has so blinded people like this that they have lost the ability to measure their own beliefs against reality.

Utterly convinced of the correctness of their own religion, they have moved to measure reality against their theological assumptions — and when reality falls short, it is simply denied. When necessary, fallacious and question-begging arguments are employed in order to pretend that reality can be twisted to match theology. Otherwise, the messiness and ambiguities of reality are ignored in favor of the neat categories and structures of their human-constructed theological system in which everything has it's place — and everything will be put in that place, whether it really fits or not.

Perhaps I shouldn't necessarily regard this as being Christianity's failure, per se, as opposed to simply a failure in some forms of Christianity. When I look at how blinded people become by theological castles constructed of little more than smoke and mirrors, I think first and foremost of Kirkegaard's critiques of philosophical system-mongering — and Kirkegaard was a Christian, after all. Then again, it cannot be denied that the seeds for this sort of blind-man's theological bluff are contained deep within Christianity because it's a religion which is predicated on absolute obedience to a transcendent being which has allegedly created a system of morals and expectations from which there can be no deviation or compromise. In many ways, Christians like Tullian Tchividjian and John Frame are simply being consistent with what Christianity demands.