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 entire 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.
I can’t even offer all the comment I would like on this post, because it’s just too unbelievable for words. Just to say that I’m dumbfounded at the credentials of these two men. I don’t even know what to say to that. I guess it just shows that there are some exceptions to the “lack of belief in god”/”higher education” corollary.
???
God has chosen the foolish of the world to confound the wise, or something like that. It’s the “sacrificium intellectus.” The fact is, a genuine Christian, if Paul the Apostle was right, is *supposed* to talk like an idiot. That’s the only way to prove that you’re an authentic believer.
And to think that all these critics of Dawkins complain that he doesn’t discuss “sophisticated, rational theology.” Haven’t they read their New Testament?
I always find the “athiests would need to be omniscient to know there is no god anywhere in the universe” argument hilarious. As if Christians simply believed that there was a barely defined “something” somewhere in the universe!!
This is a laughable argument. It’s not about absolute certainty but reasonable certainty. A lack of conclusive disproof doesn’t make belief and non-belief equally reasonable.
I’m continually baffled as to why this is such a hard thing for theists to grasp.
Your article is interesting but I don’t see any substance. Please write some more.Can you be more specific about what evidence there is to why a creator does not exist. Thank You !
I just got a feeling of deja vu.
Wow. Like tracieh, where to begin?
It does dumbfound me to read about people like Tchividjian and Frame who apparently, for all their education, have made no real attempt at understanding disbelief at all.
My disbelief does not make the claim that I know for a certainty that no such thing as a god exists. Only that in light of zero evidence in support of such existence coupled with a preponderance of sound and valid arguments against such existence it is only reasonable to conclude that gods, like unicorns, like everything supranatural, do not exist because they cannot possibly exist. Their existence is a logical impossiblity. For them to be able to exist means that all our knowledge of how this universe actually works can be turned on its head at a whim; magic can be invoked as an explanation for natural phenomena. But we have absolutely no experience in all our human existence that magic has ever been real or ever could be. Not that we have knowledge of every aspect of the laws of the natural world; rather that for what we do know now and for what we learn anew as scientific discoveries reveal, there is simply no good reason to believe in even the possibility of the supranatural being true.
Thus, disbelief in the god idea is the default rational position to hold, and the natural extension thereof is the reasonable statement “there is no such thing as a god”.
But I’m more than willing to be instructed as to how anything I’ve just said is self-contradictory.
they fallow the old rule
To Think = Blasphemy
1. This article isn’t about that subject, and unambiguously so as well. Why were you looking for that, then?
2. Unless and until believers can provide good reasons to believe in supernatural beings, there’s is necessarily no good reasons to bother believing. Feel free to define what you mean by “creator” and maybe someone will consider the idea worthy of debate.
I’m amazed some people don’t realize the obvious problem with the “athiests would need to be omniscient to know there is no god anywhere in the universe” argument. Regardless of what X is, not believing X exists is VERY different from KNOWING X doesn’t exist. Even if one defines atheism as believing there is no god (the definition that seems to be used by the majority) one can BELIEVE something without KNOWING it. Why isn’t this obvious to people like the men discussed in this article?
Simon/411314/Gary:
So far as the claim “athiests would need to be omniscient to know there is no god anywhere in the universe,” when theists tell me they believe in leprechauns and fairies, I’ll at least have to admit they’re not utterly disingenuous and hypocritical. Although I still won’t take the arugment any more seriously.
I’ve always found the “atheists would need to be omniscient to know there is no god anywhere in the universe” to be a red herring. After all, if an atheist was omniscient and could see all that was in the universe, finding no god, all the theist would say is that their god is outside of the universe.
so in other words u proved god doesn’t exist?
That this argument is very poor, due to either not having bothered to think things through, or as Jeremy states and Tracieh implies, deliberate ruse, is fairly obvious. As Karlheinz Deschner says (my translation) in his “anti-catechism” – Christians suffer from two defects: an excess of ignorance and a lack of honesty. (Sadly his work has not been translated into English. His ten volume “Criminal History of Christianity” I highly recommended to any who understand German or Spanish, the language I read him in).
The point of my original post was that, even if we pretend it is a valid argument, how can this be used in support of Christian or any other specific dogma?
Or to put it another way, Christians claim their god to be omnipresent, but at the same time, that one would need to know every nook and cranny of the universe in order to be justified in saying that said god does not exist.
They can’t have it both ways. By their own definition, if their god is not in my back pocket, it does not exit. If there is a vague “something” in some lost corner of the universe, it can’t possibly be the god they’ve been telling us about.
You can often prove a negative. It all depends on the supposed characteristics of whatever is being claimed to exist.
Simon:
I agree, and something you stated reminded me of something further:
>They can’t have it both ways…
If an atheist cannot say there is no god based on the fact he/she is not omnniscent, then the Xian cannot say that all the Hindu gods do not exist, all the Greek gods do not exist, Allah does not exist and/or is not Yahweh, all the Roman gods do not exist, all the Egyptian gods do not exist, and so on for as long as people make up gods.
I used leprechauns and fairies–but it works just as well with gods–the Xian god or anyone else’s.
This is why I also agree it is a “red herring.” The Xian doesn’t accept it as a valid reason to believe in Shiva–so how does he expect that I should accept it as a valid reason to believe in Yahweh?
Why should the Xian expect other people to accept an argument from him/her, that he/she doesn’t accept as valid him/herself?
>Why should the Xian expect other people to accept an argument from him/her, that he/she doesn’t accept as valid him/herself?
And to continue in this vein, it is highly unlikely that the person using this argument beleives in their god for this reason. So if it doesn’t convince them, why should it convince anyone else?
>And to continue in this vein, it is highly unlikely that the person using this argument beleives in their god for this reason. So if it doesn’t convince them, why should it convince anyone else?
This is true, but I also try to bear in mind–even though I forget–that the point to the argument is not to say, “thus you should believe in god.” It’s to say, “Thus you cannot say my god doesn’t exist.”
I give them that much. BUT even THAT they won’t give to other religions. If I say, “Does Shiva exist?” They will state “no”–and with certainty.
Tracieh said
While this is true I have noticed that some, though not all, will adjust by claiming that they do believe these other “gods” exist, but are not actually gods but demons and the like instead that try to tempt people away from their god, who is supposedly the “Real One”. The same goes for extraterrestrials, faeries and so forth. I guess, in their minds, it’s just demons all the way down.
I think Christians who disbelieve in other religions’ gods do so not because they lack sufficient evidence, but because rejection of such other gods is implicit in Christian doctrine.
The Christians I know have differing beliefs about other religions. Some believe other religions are the work of the devil, trying to distract people away from the one true God. Other, more cheritable Christians have said believers of other religions are trying to make a connection with God, they simply have some of the details wrong. The latter types will then give reasons why the teachings of the Bible are superior to the teachings of other religions.
One beed not be omniscient to see that no arguments for God suucceed.Theist need to overcome ignositicm to show substance and meaning to God and to show that they can overcome the presumption of naturalism.
Christinsanity, Moses’s Folly, Mohammed’s Lunacy, Buddha’s Wrong Path, Eddy’s Christian Obfuscation, Smith’s Forgery, the Dao Non-Way- faith, the I just say so of credulity! What do you say ,Austin?
I would find it easier to accept a god that is very small, weak, unconcerned & inactive since that is the god I can almost see around me.