Who knew that being an Oxford professor was such a lousy proxy for being intelligent? Christians do seem to adore John Lennox, the Oxford apologist for Jesus, yet every time I’ve read anything by him, it’s been embarrassingly silly and stupid. You want an example? Here’s ten. Lennox was asked to give rebuttals to ten common atheist arguments, and he blew it each time with a series of inane responses.
1) You don’t believe in Zeus, Thor and all the other gods. I just go one god more than you, and reject the Christian God.
The problem with this idea is that ‘gods’ such as Zeus and Thor are not comparable with the biblical understanding of God.
“There is a vast distinction between all of the Ancient near eastern gods and the God of the Bible,” said Prof Lennox. “They are products of the primeval mass and energy of the universe. The God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth”.
You say.
The difference between my dad and your dad is that my dad can beat yours up. That ancient priests played an absurd game of oneupmanship in which they inflated their god to have dominion over the other priests’ god does not confer any special truth on the last one bragged about.
Unless…my god of the Metaverse created your god to create this universe. Give me all your money.
2) Science has explained everything, and it doesn’t include God.
Science cannot answer certain kinds of questions, such as ‘what is ethical?’ and ‘what is beautiful?’ Even when it comes to questions about the natural world, which science does explore and can sometimes answer, there are different types of explanations for different things.
“God no more competes with science as an explanation of the universe than Henry Ford competes with the law of internal combustion as an explanation of the motor car,” says Prof Lennox.
OK, your god supposedly explains beauty and ethics. Do beauty and ethics explain how internal combustion works? Do beauty and ethics explain how the universe works? You claim that there are different kinds of questions, and imply that it is a category error to use one kind of principle to answer inappropriate kinds of questions, but then why do you practice a kind of epistemic imperialism yourself, using religion to explain how matter and energy were created and operate?
Also, does religion explain beauty and ethics? I agree that science is a poor strategy to answer some questions, but religion seems a poor method for answering any question.
3) Science is opposed to God.
There are certain conceptions of a ‘god’ that might be opposed to science, but not the Christian God. There might be certain kinds of ‘gods’ that are invented to explain things we don’t understand, but they’re not Christian.
“If we’re being offered a choice between science and god… it is not a biblical concept of god,” said Prof Lennox. “The biblical God is not a god of the gaps, but a God of the whole show. The bits we do understand [through science] and the bits we don’t.
“Among many leading thinkers, their idea of god is thoroughly pagan. If you define god to be a god of the gaps, then you have got to offer a choice between science and god.”
I don’t care much for so-called atheist assertion. Science isn’t opposed to gods — show me empirical evidence for a deity, and it would have to be incorporated into our scientific explanations. The real problem is that religion is in conflict with science.
A perfect example: Lennox claims Christianity is fully compatible with science. But miracles and resurrecting prophets with magic powers is not compatible with natural explanations. Every religion seems to claim it is scientific while making extravagant claims that conflict with how we know the world works.
4) You can’t prove that there is a God.
This kind of statement ignores that there are different kinds of ‘proof’.
“Can you prove that there is a God?” asked Prof Lennox. “In the mathematical sense no, but proving anything is very difficult. The word proof has two meanings. There’s the rigorous meaning in maths that is very difficult to do and rare. But then there’s the other meaning – beyond reasonable doubt”.
That’s the kind of ‘proof’ we can present: arguments to bring someone beyond reasonable doubt. For example, rational arguments such as those from philosophers Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, the personal experience of Christians, and the witness of the gospel accounts in the Bible.
I agree in principle — science doesn’t deal in proofs, either. But we do expect some standards of evidence, and the whole point of science is to add some testable rigor to claims from personal experience. The ‘logic’ of Plantinga and Craig is about as good as the ‘logic’ of Lennox, which is not very. If we blithely accept personal experience, then we should believe in UFOs and Bigfoot, but we mostly don’t — we have higher expectations of what it takes to demonstrate the truth of a remarkable claim. And if we’re just going to accept accounts written in some book someone claims is holy, then shouldn’t we also believe the accounts of the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita and the Book of Mormon? There are Muslims and Hindus and Mormons who claim to have moved beyond reasonable doubt by those arguments.
Which is more likely? That all those religious claims are literally true because believers have been applying rigorous standards of evidence, or that most human beings are not particularly picky about accepting poor evidence that supports their biases?
5) Faith is believing without any evidence.
Christian belief has never been about having no evidence: the gospels were written to provide evidence, as the beginning of Luke’s attests. The end of John’s gospel says, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”
But believing without evidence is a common notion of ‘faith’ at present. “This definition is in the dictionary and believed by many,” said Prof Lennox. “So, when we talk about faith in Christ, they think that’s because there’s no evidence. [John’s gospel shows that] Christianity is an evidence-based faith.”
Again, an account in a holy book is not evidence. See #4; it’s clear that John Lennox is not particularly rigorous in thinking critically about his faith.
Really: pointing to some long dead guy who wrote a credulous story about magic powers is not good evidence that magic powers exist.
6) Faith is a delusion. I’d no more believe in God than I would in the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
These ideas have been made famous by people such as Prof Richard Dawkins. The only thing they are good for is mockery.
“Statements by scientists are not always statements of science,” said Prof Lennox. “Stephen Hawking said, “religion is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark”. I said, “atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the light”.
“Neither of those statements proves anything at all. They’re all reversible. What lies behind all these delusion claims is the Freudian idea of wish fulfilment [that we believe what we hope to be true.] This works brilliantly providing there is no god. But if there is a god, then atheism is wish fulfilment.”
That doesn’t answer the argument! Why believe in Jesus but not the Flying Spaghetti Monster? I’m not particularly interested in either existing, so telling me I’m indulging in “wish fulfillment” is irrelevant. On the other hand, John Lennox clearly wants to believe in personal immortality, justice in the afterlife, and a being who answers prayers in this one, so who’s the one here with beliefs that are explained away as wish fulfillment?
7) Christianity claims to be true, but there loads of denominations and they all disagree with each other, so it must be false.
Why does the existence of denominations imply Christianity is false? It might imply that Christians have very different personalities and cultures – or even that Christians aren’t good at getting on with each other – but not that Christianity isn’t true.
“There are all kinds of different kinds of teams in football, but they all play football,” said Prof Lennox.
Um, but my personality and culture ought to be irrelevant to the objective nature of the universe (they do affect how I interpret the world, of course.) The differences highlight the fact that religious dogmatists lack any way of assessing the truth of their claims.
For instance, it seems to me that it should matter very much to believers to get the right formula for getting into heaven, rather than hell, when they die. So is it by works or by faith? That is a denominational difference that I think is ridiculous and pointless, but Christians can think it’s critical. It’s a bit of a cheat for Lennox to wave away denominational differences, when it’s his people who fight and sometimes kill each other over those differences.
We could also point out that Islam claims Jesus was a prophet, but human, while Christianity claims Jesus was a god/son of a god (they are very confused on the difference). Is that disagreement just like the difference between Australian and American rules football?
8) The Bible is immoral.
If you want to question the morality of the Bible, what basis does that morality have? There can be a serious contradiction within atheist criticisms. Dawkins wrote: “In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
If this is true, then why does he question the morality of anything? “Dawkins says faith is evil,” said Prof Lennox. “But at the same time he abolishes the categories of good and evil. That doesn’t make sense.”
No. The universe does not care about how people interact with each other, but people do. A humanist morality is based on principles of human relationships that increase happiness and justice — we can say that a belief system that favors irrationality and ignorance does harm to people, and is therefore wrong. What we can’t say is that the Andromeda galaxy is very concerned about where you put your penis.
Lennox is dodging the question again, too. Was the genocide of the Amalekites a moral act? Is hating your parents and severing your ties with the world, as Jesus urged, a moral act? If Lennox is suggesting that the Bible is a moral guide, then I would not want him for a neighbor.
9) Surely you don’t take the Bible literally?
Some atheists (and a few Christians) have a very black and white idea of how to interpret the Bible. You either have to take it ‘literally’ or chuck it away, they think. That ignores the reality of language and how it reflects truth.
“Jesus said ‘I’m the door’,” said Prof Lennox. “Is Jesus a door like a door over there? No. He is not a literal door, but he is a real door into a real experience of God. Metaphor stands for reality. The word ‘literal’ is useless.”
Oh, I agree so much that in this context, ‘literal’ is useless. I go cross-eyed every time a fundamentalist tells me he believes in a literal interpretation of the word of his god.
But still, Lennox has to draw the line somewhere, and his dodgy evasion of that point is telling, but consistent. OK, Jesus is not a literal door. But is Jesus a literal son of a god? What if I said that was just a metaphor? Let’s go further. God is just a metaphor for a primitive understanding of the natural laws of the universe. It doesn’t literally exist — all these efforts to justify faith in an old holy book are misplaced, since it’s all just a metaphor.
But then, of course, there’s a new problem. There’s a lot of detail in those holy books. My standard response to the metaphor argument is “Metaphor for what?” If the slaughter of the Amalekites wasn’t actually a literal murder of the residents of Canaan, what is it?
10) What is the evidence for God?
You can debate the existence of God until the cows come home. It can be very interesting, especially when you go into the detail and explore the subject in depth. But for an atheist, they might be missing the point or avoiding the real issue. Prof Lennox advises to ask them the most important question:“Suppose I could give [evidence for God], would you be prepared right now, to repent and trust Christ?”
Sure, if it was good evidence. If I gave you evidence for Santa Claus, would you believe in him?
Note that once again, Lennox has not actually, you know, given evidence for god. He has given us a good dose of irony by evading the question while accusing atheists of missing the point or avoiding the real issue
, though, so there is that.
You know, people like Lennox are the reason I’m an atheist. I was born a member of the dominant religious cult in my area, so I was the beneficiary of awesome amounts of privilege — I was not oppressed by religion. The devout people I knew were mostly nice, and I grew up with family and friends who were religious and also good, so I have no grounds for personal animus. I didn’t know any atheists, so it’s not as if I were fed anti-religious doctrine.
No, what happened is that I read the holy book, attended confirmation classes that told me what my religion was about, by religious believers, and I was offended at the damned stupidity of their claims and arguments. It was reading the kind of patent nonsense Lennox offers, bullshit that was supposed to strengthen my faith, but was such transparently idiotic reasoning, that there was no way I could accept it.
I was 13. And I honestly held back then, because how could a young adolescent be so certain that the grownups were all wrong? I didn’t actually admit to myself that I was a flaming atheist until I got to college, and even then I didn’t make a big deal of it…but as I got older, the idiocy became more obvious, and it became less plausible that it was just my youthful naivete blinding me (and now, of course, that excuse is just plain gone altogether). There was also a rising sense of injustice. How could these loons be respected? How can a goofy, lazy, preposterous apologist like Lennox have a prestigious position at one of the most highly ranked universities in the world?
I have come to an explanation. There’s a sterling example of it in the news right now, the story of David Cameron and his youthful indiscretions with a dead pig. It’s an excellent summary of the class system in the UK.
The wound of that hypocrisy was already festering before Lord Ashcroft punished him this week for breaking the rules of the ritual: that you will obey the people who made you, or you will be humiliated. This wasn’t, as some have said, young men being silly. Not if the secrets being kept are designed by powerful men to keep other powerful men under control. That kind of arrangement is the antithesis of democracy.
And it is also the antithesis to the meritocracy they proclaim. Not just because it’s rich boys getting an easy ride to the top – we already knew that – but because David Cameron’s nasty little scandal speaks to a suspicion many people already have: that in British society, you don’t get to become Prime Minister because you’re talented or because you work hard. You don’t even get there just because you’re rich. You get there by traumatizing the homeless and skull-fucking a dead pig, and that ritual gives you power because you have demonstrated utter, pathetic submission to your fellow oligarchs.
I have one criticism of the essay — it’s a bit parochial to think that this is a British phenomenon. It’s exactly the same here in America. We like to pretend we’re classless, but it just adds a touch of hypocrisy to our otherwise fully oligarchical system. So, yeah, we Americans understood exactly why the British were laughing at Cameron.
This situation is even more universal. Here’s a metaphor for John Lennox, since he loves that excuse so much.
God is a dead pig’s snout. The believers are the people parading about with the rotting meat of a benighted history latched onto their crotches, praising each other for their piety in defending the righteousness of their dead decorations, and also uniting against anyone who might criticize the stupidity of the custom.
After all, if they can get away with pointing and laughing at John Lennox, maybe they’ll laugh at me next, and it’s easier to follow the mob than to extract my genitals from this dead pig I’m wearing.
The football team analogy is stupid. Each team needs at least several other teams, or there can’t be any football. On the other hands, the Catholic kings of France, after a time of accomodation, made great efforts to get rid of Protestants, killing a lot of them and getting many others to flee abroad. They didn’t need the other denomination as opponents in a common game. They saw it as a threat to their power and just tried to eradicate it. (They didn’t totally succeed.)
Also :
“Suppose I could give [evidence for God], would you be prepared right now, to repent and trust Christ?”
Well, then you’d have to give me evidence, not only that a god exists, but that he/she wants me to repent of something or other, and to trust Christ, whatever this might mean.
Well, if Oxford is a school for the best and brightest who then go on to lead the nation, then I think that we have found the reason for the sun setting on the great British Empire. This is certainly woo of the highest order.
I attended state supported colleges and universities in Alabama, Florida, and Virginia and rarely faced this level of ignorance except in Mississippi where my folks sent me to a Southern Baptist college for my freshman year. That did not work out well as I was asked to leave when I discovered that I had a taste for ethanol products to include gin which is one of the finer things provided the world by the British.
Jesus, what drivel.
The mention of beauty is strange. Beauty is subjective. To some people the deserts of southern North America are beautiful, to other they’re dull, barren wastelands. In some cultures curvy women are considered beautiful, in others they’re considered overweight. Do they think God has a preference on whether you paint your room sky blue or lime green?
Now, hopefully, everyone can see why seven years at Oxford left me with an abiding hatred of religious pseudo-intelletuals and conceited posh boys with aspirations to run the country. Spare a thought for the poor students and academics there who don’t fit into these groups!
Well, it’s not really a reflection on Oxford as a whole. Harvard also has a divinity school, which is a historical legacy. They can’t get rid of it, but its existence doesn’t really compromise the physics department. I do agree however, that the concept of a “theologian” as some sort of scholar is really obsolete, and the universities should disgorge these legacies if they could find a way to do it.
Also, does religion explain beauty and ethics?
When one begins to enquire about the supposed “explanations” religion offers, the “answers” are really giggle-worthy. How does religion explain beauty? How does that work>? If theists claim (as some do) that there are holes in evolution, those are mere pinholes compared to the gigantic undifferentiated “show your work” of religion. Start digging into religion’s theory of ensoulment: how does that work? How does this unmeasurable unquantifiable something connect to the very tangible and real body and affect it in the here and now without its connection being detected in the here and now? If god somehow gives us our sense of ethics, how does that work and how is it that people disagree about right and wrong?
Show your work, faithful. Because, basically, religious “explanations” for pretty much everything amount to no explanation at all.
Sheesh, nothing but the old presuppositional god –> bible –> god ring around the logical fallacy.
Break the ring, and evidence either your god or your bible, preferably both using independent evidence. Shouldn’t be hard to do. *snicker*
I have a serious problem with #10.
A decade ago I understood George W. Bush existed and had quite a lot of power. I was also forced into awareness that there was a quite large Cult of Woo surrounding him and his actions. I was not interested in joining it and indeed had quite the opposite opinion of him, his acts and the end results they were moving us towards. In theory he could have had several sorts of gun put to my head and I would have said whatever he wanted to hear but it would certainly not have improved how I really thought of him.
If the Christian deity existed he would fare no better. I would not automatically join his cult of woo. I would not automatically trust this person I’d at best just met but had heard awful things about most of my life from his BFF’s. If their stories were true he certainly could and would hold several sorts of gun to my head but this would not change my view of him for the better.
Mere existence is an awfully low bar for trust and subservience. That alone gives away the gig for me. My cat can manage to inspire more loyalty and trust than that. I think a deity that does a even a thousandth of what they say can and should do better.
I want Dawkins and Lennnox in a 3 hour debate. That would be a wonderful use of each others’ time.
PZ, agree with your sentiments but I don’t think you quite get the problem with class in Britain. It’s not just about oligarchy and privilege, it’s much closer to a caste system. In England, you can be destitute and still be upper class, and conversely a working class person can become exceedingly rich and still have doors closed to them simply because of their birth status.
British society has been slowly dismantling its class structures over the last few centuries but still has a long way to go (observe the very existence of its House of Lords). On the other hand, I can see that the US plutocrats are working to build a class system for their descendants, but they have a long way to go. When the US has a legislative house of review equivalent to the Senate where the representatives are directly appointed by inheritance, then you’ll have a class-based society.
Ah, but you’re supposed to show your faith, not your work.
Oh, I hate this “question”, it’s an attempt at a trick question which fails miserably. If I was presented with solid evidence that a god existed, yes, I’d acknowledge that a god existed. That’s it. There would be no repenting, no falling to the knees and sobbing into said god’s lap. I don’t know why Christians think this is such a nifty aha!, because it sucks. I’m familiar enough with El Shaddai from reading those not so holy books, and if it were real, I would not want one thing to do with it.
I would respond very differently. It’s fine to ridicule them for doing and believing ridiculous things, but in this case you’re not offering a relevant argument.
Let’s grant that Zeus and Thor are thought to be different, in exactly the way Lennox identifies, from his flavor of Christian god (supposedly the god of the Bible, as if that’s really the only source of his beliefs). The latter is not the only deity which isn’t supposed to be the product of “the primeval mass and energy of the universe” and is supposed to have “created the heavens and the earth.” There are numerous other deities which are supposed to be exactly like that. So, the same basic question remains: why do they disbelieve in all other gods which do meet these criteria, in favor of the one they’ve chosen to believe in?
It may for various reasons be misleading to use examples like Zeus and Thor (to point out the epistemic inadequacies and inconsistencies of theism) when the subject is gods that are different in one way or another. I guess it could be relevant if it were sufficient for believers like Lennox, but apparently it’s not the only thing that matters to them. Even if some do believe in all gods like that and no others (then of course they’re polytheists), I still don’t see how a property like creating everything else means such people have no epistemic problems simply establishing that there is such a thing.
Believing the evidence would not imply I should repent and trust Santa Claus (or Christ). He might exist and be a total asshole or untrustworthy. He might exist, yet I would have no reason to repent for anything, because mere existence does not constitute some kind of special authority (or even relevance) over any good or bad thing I have ever done to anyone else. You would have to demonstrate a whole lot more, to convince me that I’ve done anything as a nonbeliever that warrants repentance, that he’s done anything to warrant my trust, or any other thing like that. You’re generally granting theists way too much here, which opens the door for divine command theory and all sorts of terrible crap.
As all too often, PZ, you make me want to abandon decent British reticence and, um, shout approbatory things or something. I may have to have a cup of tea.
FSM but I wish I could put this a thousandth as cogently when actually talking to people.
I wish I’d crossed paths with you, Cartomancer – I wonder if we would have got on? Probably well enough to compare notes and maybe quietly assassinate a few characters over a pint, anyway! (Though mind you, I was even more of an idiot then that I am now; as ever I’m seeing it all with the benefit of hindsight).
I wouldn’t trust the little bugger as far as I could kick him.
“4) You can’t prove that there is a God.
This kind of statement ignores that there are different kinds of ‘proof’.”
… and you’re welcome to use any of them then, since the statement doesn’t take any of them off the table. Yet, with all those kinds to choose from, you still can’t do it. Own goal.
All this stuff from Lennox is old hat. Philosophy 101 stuff.
What’s more interesting to me is how atheists interact with people of faith in situations where the people with faith are not in the dominant group. I’ve gone over this before, and I think it’s one of those things we have to be aware of to avoid becoming Dawkinses.
The logical problems with any religion are obvious, but Lennox gets it wrong (and many atheists do too) when they say that religion is supposed to provide an explanation for how the world works. That isn’t the point at all.
To give an example, throughout much of the Torah (aka the Old Testament) there are all these restrictions on behavior and dress. None of these is designed to show you are a good person in the ethical sense — and Torah says so explicitly. The point is to show your tribal allegiance. The whole story about the word “Shibboleth” is a (darkly humorous) example, but there are others.
In fact a great big honking chunk of Torah is all about allegiance and obedience. And note that God doesn’t care whether you believe in Him or not. In every case he just smites you and has done with it. Belief was irrelevant. In that sense the Torah is more science-based than the successor religions.
Point is, much of what religion does is provide social cohesion. To treat it as anything but that misses the point rather badly, I think. And this is where a lot of Dawkins-ites and western Christians get it wrong. The view of religion is at best simplistic.
In fact I should note that for modern Jews, even the ultra-Orthodox, evolution (for example) is a non-issue. I mean about as relevant to the Yeshivas in Brooklyn as the price of Dhii butter in Tibet.
Modern Christians interpretation of the Bible is in many ways much more literal than that of their predecessors hundreds of years ago. The kind of fundamentalism is very modern — I’d say 20th century, really, since William Jennings Bryan is the guy who made it famous.
Anyhow, the point is that Lennox actually misses completely the more substantive philosophical discussion he could have. For instance: if heaven exists, how can murder be unethical? (You’d be giving the person [presumably a believer] you killed infinite reward/benefit). If hell exists why have jails? (The criminal would get an infinite punishment so all you have to do is wait for them to die–they will eventually). If the Christian (evangelical) position that repenting gets you to heaven is correct, then wouldn’t it be better to keep a convicted murderer alive as long as possible, and torture them, if you wanted to punish them? What kind of social cohesion does Christianity provide, and how can one make it reach good ends rather than (ahem) the Holocaust or Yugoslavia (three of the four sides were three different kinds of Christian).
Lennox sidesteps all of that.
There’s that curious use of the plural in Genesis:
Actually it can, just FYI everyone:
http://www.academia.edu/708210/Moral_Facts_Naturally_Exist_and_Science_Could_Find_Them_
Category error. The questions which are analogous to the above would be “is God ethical?” and “is God beautiful?” Those both assume God in advance in order to ask those kinds of questions.
The question “does God exist?” does not concern ethics or aesthetics, but facts. It’s a factual question about the makeup and nature of reality and an objective, evidence-based approach is exactly what sloppy, biased human beings ought to use if we want to avoid granting ourselves too much leeway and minimize the capacity to just confirm whatever we want to — techniques elevated to high status in religious faith, coincidently.
The “different type of explanation ” Lennox wants to introduce here is no doubt the hoary old distinction between reciting the physical chain of causation involved in putting the tea kettle on, and explaining the psychological desires which prompted that network of material causes. “It’s not complete unless you know I wanted tea!”
But you aren’t justified in introducing psychological reasons and goals just as a matter of course. “Why did the volcano explode?” isn’t going to need a “different type of explanation ” outside of science because we have to figure out who offended the mountain.
Category error and Begging the Question. Classic dodges, both of them.
Lying ass. The God of the Bible is the God who created everything in six days. The God of the Bible is the God of Noah’s ark. The God of the Bible is the God of four-legged insects. These things are not compatible with science. Lennox is free to make up a different God who is bigger than all of that. but attempting to pass it off as the same God who appears in Teh Bible is entirely dishonest.
Reginald Selkirk @21,
You do not understand, those are metaphors. And theologians are paid the big bucks to determine which are the metaphors, and which are the verses to be taken literally (I assume the secret decoder ring is given from one generation to the next).
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @9
I see this debate already happened, don’t know the length though.
Which God? Suppose you could give evidence, but that evidence pointed to God = Odin. Why then would I trust Christ?
Jesse #17 wrote:
I think the main point you’re missing is that, even if you’re correct, the religious believers themselves don’t realize that. All of them, Lennox included, have placed the truth of God’s existence and the integrity of their beliefs front and center. If this is a simplistic view of religion, it’s the simple hill they’ve built and are prepared to die on.
Grant them that much respect. The cohesion we need to encourage is not the ties that bind one particular tribe together, but the ones which hold both us and them.
Adds nuance to the image of the Skull and Bones Society.
jesse:
Of course that’s not the point of some religious beliefs and practices. It is much of the point whenever you claim (or imply) something exists. That is in fact what they’re doing, carelessly, whether or not they’re really more interested in something else. Thus, valid criticisms can come in that form.
This isn’t merely a view of religion, for fuck’s sake. If you claim X exists, there are certain epistemic and metaphysical responsibilities you have to take on board. Actually defending that sort of existence claim, in anything like a coherent way, requires that you show your work.
Let’s look at it from a different angle. A huge fucking number of different and non-religious things provide social cohesion. Going to a music concert provides social cohesion. Nobody, anywhere, at any time, has offered a good reason to think that’s somehow a problem. We’re just not interested in doing that, which is fortunate because it isn’t actually a problem. But it wouldn’t, by virtue of providing social cohesion, make all other problems disappear. My discipline isn’t criticized on the grounds that music doesn’t exist, that the perception of music happens (like all other such experiences) to individual subjects independently, or that epistemologically we’re on any kind of shaky ground for believing that music exists or that it does what it’s commonly understood to do. The basic foundation of the whole enterprise is not in question, by anybody who tries to understand the first thing about it. There are sounds, stuff vibrates, and whatever sort physical thing or process it may actually be, it is obviously something we can control in order to have an artform. That is not so, in the case of religion. If somebody tells me they really love the religious equivalent of Coltrane (in fact he made sacred music, but I mean some specific flavor of theistic beliefs/practices) or that it provides a kind of social cohesion for them that other religions don’t (they may assume), the foundational problems are still genuine problems for religion, whereas they are not problems at all for things like music. We don’t have any practical religious equivalent of an artform or a technology or an application, where prayers would actually constitute some kind of control over (or useful appeal to) the supernatural entities which supposedly exist and have some effect in the world. People have tried, and it doesn’t work.
cartomancer @4: Precisely. How did you last seven years? I barely survived three, and one of those terms I spent more nights in London than in Oxford.
chrislawson @10: Yup. And I emigrated to California. Where I found a less obvious and more penetrable class system, but still an improvement (for me).
opposablethumbs @14: We seem to have quite the alumni meet-up.
Oxford does try to recruit, ahem, bright people but some of us seem to be allergic to the indoctrination.
OK, but why (rhetorical; I know why) do the people who make this argument always assume that their kind of personal experience trumps my kind of personal experience? Which is to say that I assume they would argue that they’ve felt God’s presence or witnessed miracles or whatever else they think “proves” the existence of God. But, I’ve never had any experiences or feelings that even slightly indicate to me that anything supernatural might be going on. All of my personal experience is mundane in the extreme. For some reason, however, their personal experience is evidence and mine isn’t. Interesting.
#27
It helped that I was at the most left-wing of the colleges, and thanks to crippling social anxieties I rarely talked to or interacted with the other students as an undergrad. I spent a lot of time at the Bodleian and the Sackler, and buggered off home to Somerset for the holidays as soon as I could. As a postgrad it is a very different experience. One’s peers tend to be much more diverse and academically-focused, and the PPE straight-to-Westminster brigade have been thinned from the herd. I also got on with my supervisors, which was a boon.
I also spent many evenings decrying the excesses of the hooray henries in the company of a Marxist Irish Historian, a hard-drinking Welsh Classicist and a Canadian international lawyer. It was an effective release valve of sorts.
“atheism is wish fulfillment”
“would you be prepared right now, to repent and trust Christ?”
It’s always amusing to me when Christians act as if atheists “choose” to be atheists because Christianity is supposedly so damn hard, and we’d rather run off and sin freely, etc. etc.
I’ll grant you that there are some particular sects of Christianity that would pose some difficulties, but it would be trivially easy for most atheists to be Christians if we really secretly believed there was a god, or were willing to pretend there was. And, as PZ points out, many of us were Christians at one point, either sincerely or going through the motions.
Really, part of the reason Christianity has been so successful at selling itself is that most versions of it are not very demanding, because:
(1) Given the impossibility of literally interpreting the Bible in a coherent way, all Christians are behaving like “cafeteria Catholics,” interpreting the parts they like or find easy to comply with or that comport with their secular-based sense of morality. There are plenty of Christians whose basic moral framework isn’t that different from mine, and conversely plenty of atheists whose morality appears to be quite different. So it’s not like I have to be an atheist because I want to keep having sex and drinking beer and eating bacon donuts and not hating gay people.
(2) The “we’re all sinners” and “Jesus redeems sinners” doctrines means that even when you do violate some principle of the flavor of Christianity you’ve chosen, it’s easy to rationalize it away.
(3) In many countries, Christianity is still dominant, so there are actual social advantages to identifying as a Christian.
Number one is special pleading “My god is different than those other gods because he’s the True god”.
@Sastra and consciousness razor–
Let me put it this way — I think we tend to look at these things in the context of Abrahamic religions and specifically ones that dominate here in the US / Europe. That’s Christianity, basically.
But other religious traditions don’t seem to have the same problems. I do not know a single Seneca, for instance, who takes the corn-husk man stories literally (yes, I have spoken to a number). Nor any Hopis who will tell you that if you go out into the desert a coyote will literally walk up to your house and throw juniper berries through a window to hit on your daughter or marry a spider or whatever.
Yet those are most definitely religions. And they claim the existence of spirit animals and the like. Those traditiona also however, provide some of the glue that held these communities together even in the face of genocidal policy. But they don’t seem to run into the same kinds of problems that Lennox does getting hung up on the existence of supernatural beings. The whole epistemological approach is different.
Only Christians of a particularly fundamentalist sort seem to get so uptight about God’s existence, and whether something “disproves” it. Most people I know of any faith just aren’t going to think about it that way. They just don’t. Ask yourself this: how often when you go to a church dinner does anyone talk theology? Not bloody often.
Yes, non religious things provide social cohesion. Sports teams for instance. But there is not one logical or rational reason to care that the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. Not one. Nor the Cubs. It’s not about logic. Or reason. You could get into a whole debate about whether Mr. Met exists but that’s completely irrelevant to what fans are actually doing and why. (For the record I like baseball but I won’t pretend that my liking has the slightest thing to do with being rational or objective, nor that it matters a whit to the physical world around me).
That’s why I feel like discussions like Lennox’s are simple, the kind of stuff any first-year can refute, or come up with. And it isn’t even that interesting. We’ve all seen it before. But none of it captures why people do religion at all. The “deficit model” — which says people just don’t know any better, is not only demonstrably wrong (see the studies on why people believe what they do about climate change or vaccines) but I feel like it utterly ignores how people actually behave and doesn’t offer a lot of insight in itself.
God doesn’t exist. So what? People still go to church, and I submit that the existence or non existence of god all by itself hasn’t got a lot to do with why. (I mean how many people do you know say “I joined this church because I read Thomas Aquinas and CS Lewis and made a reasoned theologically based decision?”)
What? They’re all false. No god in any religion exists. It is the same problem.
The problem, the very same problem, is that “spirit animals and the like” do not exist. That is a real problem, whether or not anybody benefits from the social cohesion offered by this or that religion, just like it’s still a problem if that’s offered by anything else which isn’t a religion.
They’re careless and irresponsible about whether their beliefs are true or even if they make any sense at all. How does that help us? It doesn’t follow that, because this person doesn’t give a fuck about what they’re doing, therefore, they’re not actually doing that. Nor does it mean that it isn’t a problem, or minimally that it’s something that can be criticized as literally false (which they don’t in fact tend to find agreeable), on the basis that this person doesn’t give a fuck. They don’t even recognize the problem or attempt to do anything to solve it. So what? Makes no difference to me. It does not mean we shouldn’t engage in that kind of criticism.
Doesn’t he mean all the other Ancient near eastern gods? Some of which were certainly credited with creating the heavens and the Earth, like Marduk, who, in the Enuma Elish literally cut Tiamat in half (“like a flat fish”) in order to form precisely the earth and the sky. This is an instance of the trope of the chaos battle, ubiquitous in the ANE over three thousand years and taken up wholesale in Genesis 1, composed a millennium and a half after the Enuma Elish under clear Babylonian influence.
And Lennox must know this. So whence his “vast difference”?
CJO @34
You’re missing the really important part. Lennox doesn’t believe in Wotan, Baal or Quetzalcoatl so obviously these gods don’t exist, whereas he does believe in Jesus so just as obviously Jesus does exist.
Also importantly, he only gives two shits (maybe just one) about what he believes and doesn’t believe, since what is best in life is religion as a set of social practices and institutions. (That’s at least real, however bad it may generally be, so they don’t need to defend it and can assume it’s good.) The point is, nobody ever cared about Marduk or got anything out of associated religious practices, because Lennox doesn’t and other Christians don’t, so you shouldn’t ask about Marduk. A solid principle if I ever saw one: “you don’t get to ask this.” Really, you should know better by now, not to ask religious person any question about religion at all. They’re hopelessly dishonest and clueless about it, just like the ideal person ought to be.
Jesse #32 wrote:
I’m not so sure about that. Kennewick Man, and all. Plus, it seems to me that many indigenous people are less focused on what people outside the group believe because they don’t want to convince others, not because they’re less concerned with what’s true. The Amish don’t convert, but that doesn’t place their religious beliefs into the same category as homemade bread.
How many people do you know say “I joined this church to make friends and I don’t give a crap whether any of it is true?” If they think it, they know they shouldn’t. Or they know they need to keep that private or there go the friends. And yet — to use consciousness razor’s example in a different context– someone at a concert who admitted they loved the concert experience more than the music probably wouldn’t be thought out of place..
petesh
cartomancer
Sounds pretty good to me :-)
Coincidental salutations, quite possibly across a gulf of multiple decades.
Probably because I happened to be brought up with no religion anywhere in sight, I’ve always struggled with really understanding how people do it. At school I used to assume that everyone was just really attached to tradition and loved having people in fancy dress for special occasions, (a bit like having a royal family and insisting everyone should curtsy and bow to them, even though they serve no practical purpose and are clearly ordinary mortals). It came as quite a shock to eventually realise that a lot of people – even some teachers! Grown-ups! Smart ones! – weren’t just going through the motions for tradition’s sake.
@29 & 38: I went up in 67, so I smoked more than I drank, but otherwise the experiences seem similar. I got kind of snowed at the interview, all those wonderful building, all that personal attention and freedom to roam intellectually. I fairly soon realized I should probably have gone somewhere else; but then there remains the cachet, and I was far too lazy to change things. I just beamed my way through to a second and moved on …
I would like to echo the sentiments of commenters like Caine @ 12 and consciousness razor @ 13 – even if by some incredibly unlikely means concrete evidence of the existence of a deity was provided, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wold be the christian deity, and much more importantly we still have the issue of the Epicurean problem of evil yet to be addressed. If we discovered the existence of god tomorrow, he/she/it/they would have one hell of a lot to answer for, not least of which being their atrocious attempts at designing life. I mean, the urino-genital tract? What kind of idiot thinks that is a good idea? And then there is cancer, flesh eating diseases, Ebola, tuberculous, rabies, malaria, cholera and the countless other forms of pestilence that have haunted humanity throughout our existence as a species – what kind of arsehole designs all of those just for kicks?
Then there is the endless litany of cruelty and crimes – up to and including genocide – committed in the name of god that this hypothetical deity did nothing to stop (despite, one would imagine, being readily able to do so, being omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent and all). No one is asking for lightning bolts to the noggin for bad guys in the style of Zeus or Thor here, just a little nudge then and there to make sure that terrible atrocities never come to pass. The counter argument is always ‘free will’, but what about the free will of the victims? Why should they suffer and die in the name of non-interference? And what about things like diseases and natural disasters – how is free will served by a child born to a short existence of nothing but indescribable agony? Or an entire community wiped out by a tsunami?
If I discovered that god did exist, I would have a lot of pointed questions for the arsehat. He/she/it/they would be the one(s) with a lot of explaining to do, and the one(s) in need of humanity’s forgiveness, not the other way around.
well the thing is if there was a god that existed in real space-time we are surly not the center of its attention nor its love by all the evidence I have learned of so far. The function and message of religion is to make us important to this god that is the most powerful perfect being imaginable, to make us the purpose of “creation” it is kind of a benign form of paranoia and no amount of ridiculous rationalizations make it any different nor more believable.
It is faith not reason that leads one to believe and I just do not have that ability, I do not think I have had it for a very long time.
uncle frogy
#10, chrislawson
Something like 5 or 6 in every 7 of the folk who sit in the house of lords are effectively political appointees; the house of lords act of 1999 booted out most of the hereditary peers. There are 92 left, if wikipedia is to be believed, and 26 “lords spiritual” from the church of england, out of a total of 775 members. Whilst an appointed house isn’t necessarily a good thing in itself, it doesn’t currently seem to be any worse than an elected house of rich, professional politicians like the US Senate.
Abolishing the remaining hereditary positions in the house would not make the UK a classless society, in the same way that not having hereditary positions in the US does not make the US a classless society either. It is much more about “he’s one of us!” rather than “he’s related to me!”.
Pass that money on up to me since my god of the Supra Metaverse created your god of the Metaverse. It is gods all the way up and turtles all the way down.
I think theology and philosophy of religion are for those who are too dim witted for real philosophy.
#39 Yes, I wish I could have gone up in (say) mid to late twenties or later, rather than as a teenager – though I do realise that’s quite a common litany wrt looking back on being a student!
So, Thanos wins so long as he has the Infinity Gauntlet then? Give Marvel all of your money…
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think these are really “ten common atheist arguments”. I, for one, would never claim #2, #3, or #7 in any of my arguments. Virtually all of them seem more like straw men deliberately phrased so that the responses might resonate the already-believers. Of course, for the non-believers, all of the responses are – what’s that specific word that science has for this? – crap.
Oh, and for #5 – if the bible is proof for the existence of God, then a comic book is proof for the existence of Batman.
Yeah, you just have to love an argument that relies on the bible for evidence of … what it says in the bible.
Irish comedian Dara O’Briain has a lot of nice stuff about religion (riffing occasionally on the catholic-protestant divide re the bible, among many other things) where he concludes one little section with “… you know, it’s just something written in the bible. It’s not – [searches for word] – it’s not gospel“
I’ve heard it proposed that a lot of that never happened, but that claiming ownership by conquest was a thing whereas “Hey, we are part of the native population of the area and may have gotten into a few scrapes defending or expanding out territory” is not much of a claim. (And if god told you to do it, that makes it OK, or it explains why you really had to do it, in attempt to appease colonized populations and anyone else who wasn’t really down with all that.) Since they did not create much of an empire with respect to other empires of the time, it’s better to say they conquered the whole of the territory as returning expatriates. Most cultures have dudebro gods who are invoked to fire up people for murdering other people and taking their stuff, and the bigger the story, the better, whether some of it actually happened or not.