Total buffoon
OK, Christians, have a go at me. Tell me your very best argument for the existence of a god. I just got an email that, instead of giving me an argument, listed the Top 20 Christian Apologists, as if I’m supposed to be impressed and cowed into silence.
Only problem is that I already know of most of these people, and most of their arguments, and they’re all terrible. Am I supposed to believe god exist because William Lane Craig, a confident debater with a brain the size of a pea, says, Everything that begins to exist has a cause; The universe began to exist; Therefore, the universe has a cause
? That doesn’t even mention god, so who cares? I’m going to declare that the cause was hydrogen, because I’m not a physicist, and all I need to start nucleosynthesis and eventually chemistry is hydrogen. Is hydrogen god?
Anyway, here’s the list I was sent. It’s as fine a list of fools, grifters, and incompetents as you will find anywhere outside the Trump administration.
- Norm Geisler: normangeisler.com
- William Lane Craig: Reasonable Faith.org
- J. Warner Wallace: ColdCaseChristianity.com
- John Lennox: John Lennox.org
- Greg Koukl: STR.org
- Paul Copan: PaulCopan.com
- Ed Feser: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
- Lee Strobel: Lee Strobel.com
- Josh McDowell: Josh.org
- Discovery Institute (Dembski, Meyer, Richards, Luskin, Wells): www.Discovery.org
- C.S. Lewis: CSLewis.org
- Gary Habermas: GaryHabermas.com
- Timothy McGrew: http://historicalapologetics.org/
- Dr. Michael Brown: AskDrBRown.org
- Richard Howe: Richardghowe.com
- Tim Keller: TimothyKeller.com
- J. Budziszewski: Undergroundthomist.org
- Hank Hanegraaff: Equip.org
- Hugh Ross: Reasons.org
- R. C. Sproul: Ligonier
I actually find myself quite angry that Christians think these are their best. Give up your religion if the very best argument you can find for it is a bunch of word salad and lies from a Lee Strobel or Norm Geisler or <ick> the Discovery Institute. Try and do better.
They’ve had 2000 years to refine their arguments and gather evidence and the best they can come up with is presuppositionalist circular reasoning. If there is a god, he’s content to sit back, chuckling, while his followers draw their best efforts in poop on the refrigerator.
You just gave me an idea for a new religion, HYDOGEN IS GOD!!!! I’m gonna make some bucks on this.
The number one atom! Even Atheists will be unable to deny Hydrogen is God. Hmmm, I wonder if that makes Helium Jesus.
One big difference between a scientist and a dogmatist like Craig is that when a scientist’s arguments are savagely shredded, they stop making them and fix them or go into another career and disappear. Many people have pointed out the problem with Craig’s kalâm argument, yet he still pops up like a well-programmed robot to make the same argument he knows is wrong because it has been shredded over and over again. It would be as if the room temperature fusion guys refused to go away and were still popping up to publish a turd in some cat-box journal before slinking off for another couple of months.
Pseudo-scientists and religious zealots are, basically, terribly unoriginal. Though you can be sure one of them is trying to get ChatGPT to reframe kalâm so they can charge the redoubt one more time.
Religion doesn’t depend or spread based on good arguments. Until the enlightenment logical arguments was just a side hobby for more philosophical people. With the enlightenment it became an important symbol that Christianity had arguments to put against the enlightenment arguments against religion.
These arguments still did not matter much for bringing people to religion. Religions grow through emotional connections and when they can recruit government officials willing to impose the religion on the population.
A Gish list.
The comment section at the link is somewhat amusing. Let them fight.
Did anyone tell them that C.S. Lewis is dead? I know he wrote multiple books proselytizing his religious beliefs, but the Narnia series is his best work.
Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that he is mostly remembered for magical wardrobes and Mr. Tumnus.
from Airheads movie:
[Chazz and Rex are testing Chris]
Chazz: Who’d win in a wrestling match, Lemmy or God?
Chris Moore: Lemmy.
[Rex imitates a game show buzzer]
Chris Moore: … God?
Rex: Wrong, dickhead, trick question. Lemmy IS God.
Apologists have incentives to never learn from the intellectual landscape.
If that’s a ranked list, and William Lane Craig is at #2, at the very worst there might be at most one apologist worth perhaps an otherwise unoccupied moment of your time.
@ 10
Ah yes, William Lane Craig, a man who thinks that you can judge how true something is by the height of a stack of books.
I’m foine with Hydrogen as ‘god’. It’s a (yuge!) part of my life….
And yet it’s another word that looks really weird when you type it out.
And everyone on that list is male. All the women are busy in the kitchen, I guess.
@7: CS Lewis jumped out of his coffin for me, too. But then the whole Christian religion is focused on a dead person, right? And one of dubious parentage at that.
Not only a Gish list, but a cheating list counting the Discovery Institute as one entry. Although from the point of view of reasoning the whole list is as one.
I notice the list does not include Dumb Idiot Ken Ham’s “ministry” or other similar “ministries.” those sites should be right on top of the list along with Focus on the Family and “Dr. Dino.”
#1 is Norman Geisler, who is also dead, and whose arguments sound like Craig’s, only twistier and even more pedantic.
Whenever William Lane Craig is mentioned without a photo, I have a moment of disappointment before I remember that it was William Daniels, who played Dr. Marc Craig in St. Elsewhere, Dr. Craig Thomas in Grey’s Anatomy (and KITT in Knight Rider), and who is probably a sane and honest guy. He’s been married to Bonnie Bartlett for 73 years!
The noun “God ” exists, “ergo” God exists.
Where is my Templeton Prize?
Did anyone tell them that C.S. Lewis is dead?
Not only that, but toward the end of his life Lewis was at least starting to admit that he’d been hearing new information that was casting his beliefs into reasonable doubt. Not sure if any of that is on the Lewis website…
I can give a proof of the existence of dog.
(helps to have one around)
@John Morales #21
You’re barking up the wrong tree. : )
Not only is C.S. Lewis still dead, but the Disclaimery Institute clowns don’t even get individual listings.
Thomas Aquinas is often touted as the best Christian theologian. He lived in the 13th century. Meanwhile, I know more physics than Isaac Newton, because scientific knowledge is cumulative.
Reginald Selkirk @23:
I’m sure you know more about physics than he did, because progress. But could you derive Kepler’s laws right now, without looking stuff up? If not, you don’t know more physics than he did.
When there aren’t any good arguments for the position you are dogmatically committed to defending, you run with whatever you’ve got.
Or, @25, you try to shift the burden by making critics specify in advance what sort of evidence we’re looking for.
Easy.
I remember when the main complaint about Richard Dawkins, long ago, was that he was debating push overs, not the vaulted “great” theologians. If this list is them I am disappoint.
He didn’t mention Dave Scot in the Discovery Institute’s list of esteemed names. Did he die, retire, or just give up like Sal “Wormtongue” Cordova?
larpar @ 6 that amused me too. Ken Ham’s supporters were, um, rather vexed that anyone might talk ill of their bloody idiot hero. HOW DARE YOU DOUBT THE TRUTHINESS OF EVERY WORD OF THE BIBLE grr argh etc.
And that dreary first mover argument, dear me. There must be a first mover for the universe and that first mover is god! What? No you can’t apply that logic to who started god, don’t be silly.
It’s like their arguments don’t rimshot evolve.
@2: Helium is obviously the Holy Ghost/Spirit, because it’s so aloof and won’t mix with the other elements. Jesus, naturally, must be carbon, because he at least potentially loves (and forms stable compounds and/or crystals with) everyone. Well, except the noble gasses, but that’s their fault.
We just won’t mention any demons… especially not Maxwell’s Demon. Who, come to think of it, does just as much work in reality as any of the 20 wastes of space on that list.
24 names on the list, so they got that wrong too.
That list is from 2014 and is the list of apologists Frank Turek says he learned the most from, which explains why everyone on that list is either old or dead.
It also explains why Turek has become the poster child for sloppy right-wing fundamentalist populist Christian apologetics. After all, what could he have possibly learned from someone like J Warner Wallace except the importance of having a gimmick to base a series of popular apologetics books around (e.g. “Cold Case Christianity”)?
I dunno, I’ve found the threat of being thrown in prison and/or executed for blasphemy to be a remarkably persuasive argument. If I was making that list, I would put violent conquest at #1, overpopulating your heathen opposition at #2, and blasphemy laws with teeth at #3, among lesser (yet still great) apologetic tactics like dismantling your country’s education and public health systems.
Yeah, and I was an atheist altar-boy.
There’s a huge difference between complying lest one be tormented and tortured and suffer thereby, and believing that shit.
Behaviour ain’t belief, it’s compliance to extortion.
(Your epistemology is as weak as your politics, I note)
Title question : Why do their arguments suck so bad?
Probable answer : Because they do?
Surely Hydrogen consists of three isotopes. Hence the Trinity
Perhaps add Dr. Gaven Kerr (Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia (2015), Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation (2019), “God, Creation, and the Act of Existence” on YouTube) to your list of classic apologists for theism that you cannot yet appreciate.
Norman Geisler, said at the Arkansas monkey trial of 1982 that UFOs ARE AGENTS OF SATAN! Thank you, PZ for reminding me of this. One of many reasons why the judge ruled that teaching “creation science” was just religion, and not to be allowed in public schools. Creation science was creationism’s main response to SCOTUS rejection of Scopes-era bans of evolution. If they could NO LONGER keep evolutuion out, they wanted “equal time” for their nonsense. That’s only fair, right?
@35. beholder : “..among lesser (yet still great) apologetic tactics like dismantling your country’s education and public health systems.”
Something that YOU Beholder helped make happen in the USA thanks to your de facto support of Trump by undermining the ONLY actual alternative in the USA’s wretched binary 2 party political system. You will NOT be allowed to run away from or forget that. You are culp[able for it along with the rest of the Purity Disunity faux leftists.
Are you happy with the results of your criminal willful ignorance and de facto treason here?
You had two choices – Trump or Kamala -not only in who to vote for but also in who to actively support and who to criticise and attack – and we all knew what each choice meant.
You chose poorly – and with deadly consequences that have already gotten innocent people killed.
The arguments are weak because that’s all the load they need to bear — it’s probably, I wit, akin to RoI.
I jumped on here to note that they were all males, but one other person beat me to it.
R.C. Sproul-also dead.
As is often the case with broadcasters like Sproul, being dead isn’t stopping repeats of his preaching from being broadcast across the country on a daily basis. Easy money for the heirs, I guess.
The arguments are weak because their position has nothing better.
@submoron
H4 through H7 have been synthesised. They don’t stick around long
@Reginald Selkirk #23 – I noticed too that Aquinas is not on the list.
I’ve never quite understood the need of the religious to prove their beliefs. If they were proven, they wouldn’t be beliefs anymore, would they? They would be knowledge.
C.T. Haun@39,
Aquinas’s “proofs” don’t even convince by any means all Christian thinkers (e.g. Descartes and Kant both rejected them). Until Christian thinkers can reach a consensus on which “proofs” of God’s existence are sound, why should the rest of us take any of them seriously?
Frankly, I’ve never understood why Aquinas is so popular among scholars either. His reasoning is full of phallacies.
I don’t count myself as a Christian, I’ve been an atheist since 2006, close to the time I first started reading Pharyngula (thanks PZ). However, like a burn victim I still keep returning to better understand why I was brought up fundamentalist evangelical and what ingredients lead to such a narrow and harmful way of looking at the world, which is why I’ve never stopped reading apologetics and philosophy of religion. So I’ll have a crack at it, the single best argument for “God” i’ve come across during my time. It doesn’t convince me, but its the best I’ve seen:
Methodological materialism – the underpinning of science and empiricism if you will, has been an extraordinarily useful basis for producing theories of great predictive power.
Yet metaphysical materialism – in essence, a commitment to the belief that the basic ‘stuff’ of the universe is necessarily ‘matter’ – does NOT have the clear commitment of the significant majority of trained expert philosophers who study this question; from what i’ve read it is closer to 50/50 for or against.
This arises basically as a consequence of Decartes notion that if we choose to doubt everything, including and up to the existence of the material/external world, the one thing we can still count on is that there is some entity that is ‘doubting’, that is, there must be minds, or at least oen mind. It is through minds that we receive sensory information about the external world- the mind in this view is necessary, the external world is probable, even overwhelmingly so, but not (quite) necessary.
Here here I invoke Feynman’s ‘science is a game, and the object of the game is not to fool yourself, and the first rule is you are the easiest person to fool’.
So then, from above if we approach the universe bending over backwards to try to ensure we don’t fool ourselves, we seem to need a commitment to the fact that minds must exist (at least one), and find an extremely probable but not 100% certain commitment to the fact that matter must exist.
Given that, our philosophers of metaphysics can (and do!) have a meaningful good faith argument with each other over whether the open question of whether the basic ‘stuff’ of the universe is, in fact, matter or mind.
If minds are prior to sensory experience, and sensory experience is needed to establish external world or say anything meaningful about that external world, then the basic stuff of the universe really could be ‘mind’ rather than matter.
That doesn’t bring us to a ‘therefore (a) God exists’, but to a defensible conclusion that it is not matter but a mind (at least one, perhaps ‘God’ via some wide definition) that may be the basic stuff necessary for existence to be possible.
Like I said, it doesn’t convince me. I’m probably not expert enough to formulate it well. I do find it more compelling than anything I’ve read among the cynical and dishonest folk that make up that list of popular Christian apologists above.
@Stevor #37 Why do their arguments suck so bad?
I would say it is because there is a whole ‘Christian book/media’ industry that sells books and debates and material to believers for the purposes of reassuring Christians in their belief. If you look honestly at popular books from McDowell, Strobel, Keller, Gumbel, C.S. Lewis etc none of these are really designed to treat the possibility that ‘there is no God’ in an honest way. Instead, they mainly exist simply to reassure believers that ‘there must be some solid intellectual basis for the faith’, because there’s all these people churning this stuff out.
The fact that these books and arguments aren’t at all convincing to nonbelievers doesn’t bother them. The fact that these books set out explicitly (eg Strobel) to cherry pick Christian ‘experts’ to make the case for faith, while taking the most unrefined, lazy armchair objections they can to represent the ‘questions’ the Christians are answering gives the game away. The most recent I read was Keller and most chapters begin with the most tedious formulations incredibly watery criticisms of Christianity that I’ve never seen in my life, and then the chapter that follows tries to address it. Examples are chapters based on “There can’t be just one true religion”, or “Christianity is a Straitjacket” or “The Church is responsible for so much injustice”.
It’s the exact opposite of a genuine attempt to see objectors arguments in the best or clearest light and address them. The target audience is Christians wanting reassurance, not people looking to make their reasoning the most robust it can be, and the economics of Christian bookstores and Christian media is the upstream cause of why this bunkum keeps getting produced.