Myth: Atheists Have Just Never Heard an Intelligent Defense of Christianity
Thursday July 24, 2008
Christians who are completely caught up in their religious beliefs sometimes have trouble understanding why someone else would fail to agree with them. They regard their religion, doctrines, and traditions as so obviously true that it's inconceivable that a person could take a serious look at them without ultimately accepting them. Assuming that the atheist isn't an idiot or being perverse, then the most viable conclusion to draw from their disbelief is that they are ignorant of the facts.
Read Article: Myth: Atheists Have Just Never Heard an Intelligent Defense of Christianity
Comments
Since I regard gods, spirits, demons, ghosts to be inhabitants of a supernatural realm, I require that the debater must first demonstrate the existance of a supernatural realm. Once he has satisfied me on that issue, we may proceed from there to Islam, Christianity, or whaever.
In a way I would have to agree with the headline statement for the argument here. It is true, Athiests have generally never heard an intelligent defence of - well not just christianity, but of theism in general.
That is not to say athiests have not come across intelligent people trying to defend theism. But it DOES indicate that all defenses heard a riddled with logical and philosophical holes enough that you could drive a fleet of trucks through them.
An intelligent person can provide flawed and illogical arguments and defenses.
Just as a less than intelligent person could provide an intelligent argument.
To say that athiests have not been presented with an intelligent argument of theism does not speak to the defenders or presenters of the arguments - but to the position being defended.
But the concept that an intelligent defence of theism is not available or possible seems to be beyond the grasp of supporters of theism. either beyond their vision - or out of their scope of desire.
Theistic arguments suffer from a wealth of wishful thinking and desire for a particular answer, without particular consideration or thought to reality or logic.
Again - this does not speak to the intelligence of the defenders, but does indicate their priority is not for logic and rationality, but for desire and wishful thinking.
To Tom T
I read your post. First, I want to say that I didn’t have the opportunity to be educated beyond grade 8, so I am not able to be so eloquent in these complex debates. But, no matter how intelligent is the argument of the theist, the bottom line is always this: Man, ya gotta have FAITH!
Please define what you mean by “faith” and why I have to have it.
Hi, Austin
I will try. I have religious friends who tell me that I am lacking because I do not have faith. example: The “resurection”. My position is that when a biological organism dies, it cannot be restored to life. If someone can DEMONSTRATE to me that this is an incorrect positiuon, my mind is open. It is at this point where my religious friends tell me that I must have faith. I hope this clears it up. Ron
“Faith” means to believe in something unconditionally, regardless of the absence of evidence supporting it, or despite evidence against it. Basically, it means “don’t think, just believe”.
Hey, Austin, I think you might have misinterpreted Ron’s post. It’s not that we need it, it’s that it’s the core of any argument for any sort of theism, regardless of any other points that may be raised.
Triphesas, Thank you! Ron
Sorry, Ron, I misunderstood your intention in that post…
Most arguments for formal religion involves false analogies. They are intellectually dishonest. Buddhism is an exception because is has a large element of exploratory practice, although I have known some evangelizing Buddhists.
If you look at each of the arguments for God (even in varying degrees of complexity) in isolation, it seems clear that objections can be raised, potential problems pointed out and so on.
But when you take them all together it becomes more problematic to say that these arguments have no validity at all.
To take a little slice of the overall picture and point out flaws and problems is a bit like taking a square inch of a Van Gogh, removing it from the canvas and saying, “I can paint better than that.”
Something isn’t right here.
If you look at each of the arguments for God (even in varying degrees of complexity) in isolation, it seems clear that objections can be raised, potential problems pointed out and so on.
And when you take them all together it becomes easier to say that these arguments have no validity at all.
To take a little slice of the overall picture and point out flaws and problems is a bit like taking a square inch of a Van Gogh, removing it from the canvas and saying, “I can paint better than that.”
There. I fixed it for you.
Missed some!
To take a little slice of the overall picture and point out flaws and problems is a bit like taking a square inch of a crayon drawing, removing it from the paper and saying, “I can paint better than that.”
There! That’s better.
I work at a research institute in Texas. Based on the bumper stickers I see around me, I apparently have a lot of Xian colleagues. It boggles my mind how intelligent people with advanced degrees who perform pioneering scientific investigations five days of the week don’t have a problem in engaging in superstituous rituals the sixth or seventh day.
It amazes me even more when these people are trying to persuade me to join them in their irrational beliefs based on arguments that have a snowball’s chance in hell of standing up to the scruteny of the scientific method that they are using in their daily work.
Maybe I’m in the minority as far as atheists are concerned, but I hold a M.A. in Biblical Studies from a very prominant seminary and graduated at the top of my class. I suppose the degree was one of the catalysts that got me critically thinking about the text of the Bible (my emphasis was in exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures), and it didn’t take long before that same academic rigor for the language/text of the Bible was also applied to the supposed rationality of the religion as a whole. So the idea that we (or just me) don’t believe because we haven’t heard an intelligent defense of it isn’t entirely true. I’ve heard them all and know them all better than believers do, and yet I choose not to believe.
mobathome,
Misquoting someone dishonestly instead of fashioning a coherent response doesn’t say anything about my point, it only says that ethical discourse means nothing to you.
David J.,
I have a friend who used to be a professor at Yale that had what sounds to be a similar experience to yours.
If you would be willing to respond, what do you think about the people you studied and worked with who may still believe? I’m troubled by the number of people I know who are very bright and somehow able to get past the problems to have real faith.
I just don’t know what to do with them and would interested in your opinion if you were willing to share.
humble, what is most interesting to me is the number of times my friends experience cognitive dissonance without even flinching because they’re so used to it. Within the academic arm of the discipline of biblical studies (and, by extension, theological studies), there is an unwritten - even unspoken - fidelity to “orthodoxy” insomuch that if one’s research discovers something that may directly challenge it, it’s usually ignored. But that’s minor. It’s just a big “given” that if you’re in the discipline, you generally don’t dwell on the existence of god, at least within Biblical Studies; a sad premise, really. The “philosophy of religion” crowd deals with it, but honestly I never took those courses (seemed boring) in that my education was more focused on the historical-critical and linguistic aspects of the text of scripture. I had some archaeology too, which is where A LOT of cognitive dissonance occurs, mainly because much of the text of the bible doesn’t line up with the historical events that archaeologists have discovered (ie, no hard evidence of 400 years of Egyptian slavery, etc.).
As far as what I do for my friends now, I don’t do anything. They know I’m out, so to speak, but I told them that if they ever have any doubts, they can contact me. For me, the move to atheism was mostly in solitude. They pity me more than I pity them though. It would be nice to pull some of them out, but it’s tough to get people to look at their own situations as an outsider - the human ego is just too powerful, and exerts much of its energies at averting the admission that it is in error.
Yale has had some interesting characters in the field through the years. The only one I ever studied was Brevard Childs, who was only reluctantly progressive. His field was Old Testament canonicity if I recall.
humble says:
mobathome,
Misquoting someone dishonestly…
Prove that that is what I did, or stand to shown either be a fool or unethical.
David J.,
Thanks for responding.
mobathome,
In a spirit of furthering the conversation, allow me to fix your quote too.
you wrote:[Prove that that is what I did, or stand to shown either be a fool or unethical.]
I think what you meant was, “Prove that this is what I did, or stand to be shown either a fool or unethical.”
I suspect what you wrote was a typo, but taken as it was written, it was a bit incoherent.
The difference between my fix and yours is the difference between honest and ethical discourse and the opposite.
I follow your commentary ‘religiously’ and appreciate it - having an extensive library of articles about atheism; my interest is two-fold, 1. being born and reared a Mormon I was intent on finding a better answer and I did in atheism ( Plato’s great error of a real world independent of the apparent world has been a disaster for western metaphysics ) 2. a recovering chronic alcoholic - and it is possible without a “higher power”. Anyway this is a letter written to the NYTimes some time ago, perhaps you would be interested. thanks
New York Times
Magazine Editor
Re: NYT Magazine: Sunday, March 11, “Darwin’s God”
Sir,
‘Call it God, call it superstition, call it dead’ hard-wired perhaps.
Ours is the only specie to have evolved to the degree of development whereby we have the cognizance of our own death, and the elaboration of language through which explanations as such are imagined and created. The sub-consciousness then seeks to defer death through explanations of a transcendence to our Being. Bounded by history, people struggle to save presence by attempting to create or find a saving presence. This quest furthers the effort to deny death.
The results become the myths, legends, rites and rituals, and religions offering affirmation of the ‘real world’. The ‘ultimate good’ of Plato then becomes the great error of Western metaphysics; transcendence: a real world exists as well as the apparent world. The conscious reenactment of the myth, rite, or ritual is intended to incite unconscious mechanisms, which will bring about physiological changes. When humans have no external authority, they take on the burden of control that no longer comes from a divinity. Philosophy is then the history of man’s submission and the reasons he has to legitimize them.
The consciousness in defining the transcendental does no more so than immanence being defined by a subject or an object. It is not immanence to life, but immanence that is in nothing is itself a life. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, is our most demanding task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence in this time.
There is no ‘true world’; every belief, every new idea is necessarily false and a nihilistic thought. Our strength will be to what extent we can admit to ourselves, the apparent necessity for lies. Nihilism, as the denial of the true world, a world of being, becomes a divine way of thinking. Humanistic nihilism becomes the nothingness of consciousness, and consciousness becomies the foundation for everything. The shift in metaphysics is then a reversal of values, the reversal of high and low. The humanistic atheist inverts traditional values, the ‘lover of God’ becomes ‘lover of man’. The goal of humanistic atheism is to progress toward a form of human perfection.
God exists, but only as a concept.
Hume suggests God as well as the self is a fiction required by our nature. The problem of religion is then not whether God exists, but whether we need the idea of God in order to exist, or as Pascal asks, who has the better mode of existence, the believer or the non-believer.
Deleuze clarifies the term ‘immanence’ as used to describe metaphysical systems, in which God is identical with and this internal to or ‘immanent’ within reality. The term comes to mean any manner of thinking that dispenses with an external or transcendent viewpoint. Immanence means that the mind is part of reality and unfolds as an activity within the force field of reality as a whole.
We are offered current understanding of the immanence of life by Geertz, who defines religions as specific systems of symbols, “which act to establish pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”. He also suggests that nature and culture are not unrelated because it is precisely the indeterminacy of the genetic code that makes the cultural code necessary. Summarizing, the cultural analogy of the gene is called a ‘meme’, a “unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as
naturally selected by virtue of the genotype or phenotype. Genotype designates the “genetic constitution of an individual organism, as distinguished from its physical appearance.” Phenotype specifies the “genetically determined and observable appearance of an organism, especially as considered with respect to all possible genetically influenced expressions of one specific character.” The evolutionary process is directed to the perpetuation of the genetic code rather than to the promotion of individual organisms.
In Boyer’s “Naturalness of Religious Ideas: - - those ideas are called ‘natural’ in two senses. One is the religious ideas which depend on non-cultural restrictions, such as the human genome or the capacities of the human mind or the properties of the world we live in. There is the also the ‘naturalness’ of the subjective; certain religious postulates are perfectly obvious and self evident ideas to those who profess them. - - and that the content and organization of religious ideas depend, important ways, on noncultural properties of the human mind-brain, and secondly, despite “socialization,” they are perceived as intuitively unnatural by human subjects.
If points made by Dawkins are seen in Geertz’s terms, the Absolute, ‘becomes’ through particular ideas of individual subjects, non personal ‘memes’ replicate themselves as seeming to be personal.
Spirit realizes itself first by externalizing itself in space, as nature, and in time, as history, and then returning to itself through human self-consciousness.
Beings: human and divine, are but one – they become present to the self in and through acts of representation in which the being re-presents itself to itself.
“There is not a world (actual) that is then represented in images (virtual) by the privileged mind of man (the subject); life is just this actual-actual interaction of imaging: each flow of life becomes other in response to what it is not.
Humanistic (nihilistic) atheistic thinking is a divine way of thinking.
Tom Zabriskie
P.O.B. 1554
New York, NY 1001
tzabriskie_arch@hotmail.com
“Life is what we do while making other plans” John Lennon.
humble says: The difference between my fix and yours is the difference between honest and ethical discourse and the opposite.
You have only shown that I can type ungrammatical English, and that you can repair some errors. You still have not proven that I was “misquoting someone dishonestly.”
Humble, changing your posts while calling attention to the changes may be mocking you, but it is not dishonest. The only dishonest way to quote someone is to change their quote and present it as if it were unchanged. I hope that this clarification is helpful.
Dean,
There’s something not quite right here. Let me fix it for you.
changing your posts while calling attention to the changes may be mocking you, and is quite dishonest. This dishonest way of quoting someone by changing their quote and presenting it as if it were a corrected typo is fair game and helpful for the discussion.
This is childish and ridiculous, my point stands.
humble says: This is childish and ridiculous, my point stands.
So you claim that “childish and ridiculous” is the same as “dishonest”? Get a dictionary!
I’m totally in the dark here. How can there be any intelligent defense of Christianity when it is based on ancient myths inscribed by ignorant peasants? These stories were written, by the way, many years if not centuries after the supposed events happened.
Put that together with the fact that the whole Jesus myth was based on even more ancient myths, and not historical facts. Furthermore, there are no actual contemporary mentions, even small ones, of any such individual by any historians of the time.
Even more so, all images of said Jesus are only artistic interpretations of what the artists, themselves IMAGINED the appearance of Jesus and Mary etc., MAY have been. More absolute fiction and mythological conclusions.
These are only a smattering of many such reasons to conclude that there could never be an “intelligent defense” of Christianity. To have an intelligent discussion one must weigh the facts, not suppositions.
And to add to Sojourner’s puzzlement, how can there be an intelligent argument defending Christianity when this supposed omnipotent God told 2 different creation stories in the first 2 chapters of the first book. I’m a writer and while I don’t claim to be exceptional and certainly not omnipotent I can usually get five or six chapters into a book before I start forgetting what’s already happened.
The books in the bible are written by men who knew what men of that time knew and nothing more — God stopped the sun - (stop the presses!) there are several scriptures that show the men who were writing them thought the earth was flat. If creationist believers were to actually read the entire story they’d find the only creature in the whole tale who told the truth was the snake/Satan. And that God cursed all of us because two newly created humans who had no sense of right or wrong, they were morally like babies, ate from a tree he later put protection around but not before cursing man, woman, and even the poor snakes — who had nothing to do with it– it was Satan in a snake suit. Damn good thing he didn’t disguise himself as an elephant. Forcing them to wiggle on their bellies forever because someone impersonated them would mean they wouldn’t be getting around much. And all this because Satan explained the real reason God would be ticked off, which still wouldn’t have meant much to Eve if she were unaware of what good, evil and naked meant.(And why would nakedness be a symbolic choice to show their suddenly corrupt, sinful thought processes. Prudes and bluenoses writing the bible explains so much about why every single thing a person does today is a sin, even the things nobody in teh bible says is.) So to explain it as pleasantly as possible, God had a tizz because a baby did what it was told not to do, ( He also mentions they will become like ‘us’ which more than suggests that there were other Gods flitting around - Zeus and the like no doubt) condemns the entire human race to be born yet for the actions of a person who had no idea what they were doing wrong - indeed didn’t even know the concept of wrong, a punishment which i think anyone would agree far exceeded the crime, and which started in motion the entire convoluted ridiculous process of salvation by atonement through blood,whereby he sent himself down as his son - i start to get very confused here –to die a truly horrific death to save mankind from having to go through that horrific death, which all started because the doofus had a fit over nothing. And just to show he was a real jerk, he freaked out on all the snakes yet to be born by cursing them. And this is a creature people are tellihg me I want to hang out with for eternity. Uh, no thanks. I’ll take the long nap. I mean the whole thing starts like a combination of Keystone Cops and one of the most diabolical villains in literature, Dickens wouldn’t have tried to invent this guy, and gets worse from there. No Christian thought to write down anything jfc said or did until 20, 30 years later - and no secular writer thought things like lepers being cured, miracles happening on a regular basis, a man walking on water in front of witnesses, who after being killed then rose from the dead while the sun went black at noon, graves opened and dead prophets walked the earth — i’m assuming looking like something out of the Mummy or worse. Which is mentioned once or twice and then never referred to again in the 2 gospels that do tell us of it. And I, for one, would like to hear the rest of that story — like how did they convince these ancients to get back in the casket? And who got stuck with the job of telling them? And then Jesus ascends up to heaven accompanied by trumpets and angels and what not and NOBODY said, damn, where’s a pencil, I need to jot a few lines about this?
And contrary to what Christians will say in defense of there being no outside corroboration of JFC, the first 4 centuries are very well documented. We don’t know who the fasted man was or the greatest fighter or the most voluptuous women were perhaps, but we damn well would have heard about these goings-on.
The person who can intelligently explain the inerrancy of the bible and make a case of any kind for Christianity that is based on this book of myths,insane plot twists and outright lunacy, hasn’t been born yet.
Mike:
Not our “pastor” Mike, I presume?
I love your exposition of the whole idea. Great job!
Tom,
I don’t intend to detract from a fine article but as a biologist I want to point out that the singular of “species” is still “species”.
A specie is not a biological term.
How can an arguement for a deity be cogent when in the book there is the story of
Moses leading the people for 40 years in the desert looking for the promised land. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence for this!!!!
How can 500,000 people wander for 40 years in the desert find enough food, no evidence of toilet facilities or camp fires?
There are so many examples of the tales that are taught as truth with no proof.
In our system one does not have to prove the negative only the positive. If you are tried for a crime the state must prove that you are guilty, you don’t have to provr your innocence.
“How can 500,000 people wander for 40 years in the desert find enough food, no evidence of toilet facilities or camp fires?”
It’s a miracle!