Category: apologetics

CNN piece suggests that cosmic inflation finding is evidence for God

March 22, 2014 • 1:10 pm

As expected, the finding of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the Big Bang has prompted —along with scientific exultation—the usual blathering of theologians and believers, who can’t resist connecting this new finding with God. I didn’t post about that because those blatherings were a). predictable and b). adequately covered by other websites.

But there is one that is extraordinarily silly—because it’s from CNN (the Cable News Network), a respected news source, and doubly silly because it’s written by a scientist, Leslie Wickman. CNN describes her this way:

Leslie Wickman is director of the Center for Research in Science at Azusa Pacific University. Wickman has also been an engineer for Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, where she worked on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station programs. The views expressed in this column belong to Wickman. [JAC: I’m glad they’re not CNN’s, but they chose to publish her!]

And, in an “opinion” piece on CNN, Wickman asks: “Does the Big Bang breakthrough offer proof of God?” The answer, surprisingly, is “yes”—in contrast to the usual saw that any column whose title is a question will answer that question in the negative.

Here are her reasons:

The prevalent theory of cosmic origins prior to the Big Bang theory was the “Steady State,” which argued that the universe has always existed, without a beginning that necessitated a cause.

However, this new evidence strongly suggests that there was a beginning to our universe.

If the universe did indeed have a beginning, by the simple logic of cause and effect, there had to be an agent – separate and apart from the effect – that caused it.

That sounds a lot like Genesis 1:1 to me: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.”

So this latest discovery is good news for us believers, as it adds scientific support to the idea that the universe was caused – or created – by something or someone outside it and not dependent on it.

Well, we already knew, from other data that has been around a long time, that the universe had a beginning. The new data says something about what happened right after it began, and adds weight to the notion of cosmic inflation.

Besides getting that wrong, she also botches “the logic of cause and effects”, raising the old canard of the Cosmological Argument. Well, that logic doesn’t apply to quantum mechanics, does it, Dr. Wickman? Or is there a cause for making a particle pop into existence, or for an atom to decay? Can you tell us what that cause is? And if that cause is an “agent”, how do you know that that agent was the Abrahamic God? Couldn’t it have been Baal, or Brahma, or any of the thousands of Gods who have come and gone on the world scene? Or even, maybe, a space alien from another universe?

Further, if there is a simple law of cause and effect that implies an agent, well, then, what agent caused God? Or did He pop into existence like a particle, totally uncaused? Is God the only thing in the universe that doesn’t need a cause? If so, please tell us why. After all, Dr. Wickman, you’re a scientist as well as a theist, so how do you know that God doesn’t need a cause? And what was he doing hanging around before there was a universe?

Then her words fall together in a familiar pattern, like sled dogs lining up before being harnessed:

We also need to remember that God reveals himself both through scripture and creation. The challenge is in seeing how they fit together. A better understanding of each can inform our understanding of the other.

It’s not just about cracking open the Bible and reading whatever we find there from a 21st-century American perspective. We have to study the context, the culture, the genre, the authorship and the original audience to understand the intent.

The creation message in Genesis tells us that God created a special place for humans to live and thrive and be in communion with him; that God wants a relationship with us, and makes provisions for us to have fellowship with him, even after we turn away from him.

So, we know that Genesis was never intended to be a detailed scientific handbook, describing how God created the universe. It imparts a theological, not a scientific, message.

There it is: “Genesis was never intended to be a detailed scientific handbook, describing how God created the universe.” Well, Dr. Wickman, how do you know that? In fact, there’s every indication that it was intended to be a literal and historical account of how the world and its creatures came to be, and that’s how theologians interpreted it for millennia. It’s only now—now that we have the luxury of scientific knowledge—that we can see that Genesis was a form of proto-science: it was the best guess by its authors about how stuff got here, but it was stone, dead, wrong.  You may now, to save the story, imbue it with whatever metaphorical meaning you want (I’m anxious to hear what “original sin” means, Dr. Wickman), but Genesis certainly imparted a message about history, and that is a “scientific” message as well as a theological one.  (My translation of  the familar trope “the Bible is not a science textbook” is automatically “the Bible isn’t correct”.)

Wickman goes on praising the Lord and declaring the glory of his handiwork, but it’s all embarrassing, for her, her university, and her scientific colleagues. She trots out, for instance, the fine-tuning argument, apparently not aware that the scientific findings that inspired her article lend credence to the idea of multiverses, which in turn could dispel the notion that our universe is “fine-tuned” for life:

These physical laws established by God to govern interactions between matter and energy result in a finely tuned universe that provides the ideal conditions for life on our planet.

As we observe the complexity of the cosmos, from subatomic particles to dark matter and dark energy, we quickly conclude that there must be a more satisfying explanation than random chance. Properly practiced, science can be an act of worship in looking at God’s revelation of himself in nature.

And the final entity that should be embarrassed is CNN—for blessing this unholy matrimony of science and religious drivel. I wish I could have a Marshall MacLuhan moment now, but with Sean Carroll instead of MacLuhan.

h/t: Steve

Today’s Adam and Eve post now at The New Republic

March 4, 2014 • 3:09 pm

This morning’s post on Bryan College and its new-Adam-and-Eve policy has, after a bit of rewriting, just appeared on The New Republic website. It’s now called “A Tennessee college is forcing its faculty to swear that they believe Adam and Eve existed.”  Feel free to go over there to participate if any action develops.

Coming soon: some new apologetics

March 3, 2014 • 9:40 am

I’ve decided, thanks to a reader’s suggestion, that the strategy of suggesting that one book after another gives the “best argument” for God (if you find one deficient, another one pops up), should be called The Argument from Whack-A-Mole.

The last mole was David Bentley Hart’s book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which Sophisticated Theologians™ everywhere touted at the Best Argument for God. My copy has not yet arrived, but based on readers’ comments I’m not sure I’ll be headed for the pews after I read it.  In point of fact, I’m unlikely to be convinced by any argument for God that doesn’t adduce some kind of “evidence” beyond revelation.

But a new mole has appeared—even before the last one was whacked. Reader Cameron informs me of this book, by the author of the popular Fermat’s Last Theorem, that will appear April 15 (tax day in the U.S.):

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Here’s the Amazon blurb:

The renowned science writer, mathematician, and bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem masterfully refutes the overreaching claims the “New Atheists,” providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there’s still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive.

A highly publicized coterie of scientists and thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss, have vehemently contended that breakthroughs in modern science have disproven the existence of God, asserting that we must accept that the creation of the universe came out of nothing, that religion is evil, that evolution fully explains the dazzling complexity of life, and more. In this much-needed book, science journalist Amir Aczel profoundly disagrees and conclusively demonstrates that science has not, as yet, provided any definitive proof refuting the existence of God.

Why Science Does Not Disprove God is his brilliant and incisive analyses of the theories and findings of such titans as Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth, and Charles Darwin, all of whose major breakthroughs leave open the possibility— and even the strong likelihood—of a Creator. Bolstering his argument, Aczel lucidly discourses on arcane aspects of physics to reveal how quantum theory, the anthropic principle, the fine-tuned dance of protons and quarks, the existence of anti-matter and the theory of parallel universes, also fail to disprove God.

Do we really need to read all these books, which are appearing at an alarming rate? Is there really going to be new arguments for God in them? It appears that Aczel’s book, based on the statement  that it shows “that there’s still much space for the Divine in the universe,” is merely a reiteration of God-of-the-Gaps arguments. To quote Ingersoll, what we understand is science; what we don’t understand is God.

Of course science can’t completely disprove God in either a logical or absolutist sense: that’s not the way science works. And of course we’ll never understand everything. Dick Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor) told me the other day that the human race would go extinct before we finally learned how our brains work, and he may be right. So if you want to find God in consciousness, for instance, then there’s plenty of time to do that. But it’s a losing strategy, and one that doesn’t even convince many theologians.

But we have disproven God in the same sense we’ve disproven Santa Claus, the Loch Ness monster, and Bigfoot. Extensive observation of the world looking for evidence of the divine has not, as with these other cases, turned up any evidence. That is “proof” in the vernacular (though not mathematical) sense. It’s “proof” in the sense that Anthony Grayling uses it: “Would you bet your house on the truth of a proposition?” If so, consider it proven.

I will read David Bentley Hart’s book, but this one I may skip. All such books should be required to contain a “warning label” saying something like “Note: this book contains NEW evidence for God of the following sort. . . .”  If you don’t see that, don’t buy it. Otherwise, we could see a spate of books showing that science hasn’t “definitively disproven” ESP, Nessie, or homeopathy.

Or maybe we should turn the tables, asking theologians if they’ve read the complete essays of Mencken, Ingersoll, and the atheist writings of Mark Twain, Spinoza, and other authors represented in Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist (buy it if you haven’t yet).  Then we’ll tell them that they can’t talk to us about God until they’ve read all that stuff.

The bland leading the blind: a conversation on atheism between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga

February 24, 2014 • 1:28 pm

A few readers have called my attention to a one-on-one email interview of Alvin Plantinga by Gary Gutting at the “Opinionator” section of the February 9 New York Times. This is (God help us) the first of a series of interviews that Gutting will conduct about religion, and his topic for the first, published last Sunday, was “Is atheism irrational?”

I’m not going to dissect it in extenso, for it’s not worth it, and I’ve had it up to here with Plantinga. Just let me say that this column puzzles me in two ways. First, why is the Times giving Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, so much space to rabbit on about religion? And why do they let him interview one of his colleagues, the notorious Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame? Might there be a touch of good Christian nepotism in that? And where is the atheist “Opinionatory” columnist to counterbalance all the slow-pitch softballs that Gutting gets to throw at the faithful?

Second, why is Alvin Plantinga famous, or even have a job? The arguments he makes are so palpably foolish that any freshman philosopher can see through them. Yet thousands of Christians regard him as a guru.

If you want to see a thorough takedown of this column, go read the Barefoot Bum‘s post, “Alvin Plantinga on atheism.” I’ll just quote a number of silly things that Plantinga says.  The bullet points give direct quotes from Alvin the Apologist:

  • “But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.”

JAC:  To most of us, I think atheism is simply the refusal to believe in gods, not the absolute denial that there are any.

  • “I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.”
  • “The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.”

JAC: Remember that the God that gives us the sensus divinitatis is the Christian God. Obviously, others whose sensi (sp?) tell them of other gods, like Allah or Brahma, are getting a garbled message, as did every religionist before the supposed birth of Jesus.  And (Plantinga discusses this elsewhere) what about the atheists? Well, says Dr. Alvin, our sensus divinitatis is broken. In fact, it’s broken in more than half the world’s inhabitants. God didn’t do a very good job when he installed that sensus! As for the second quote, I leave it to the readers, for I am feeling a pain in my lower mesentery.

Gutting then asks Plantinga to give some of those other strong philosophical arguments for God:

  • “One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.”

The Bayesian “probability argument” given by Plantinga at the end is specious, for it requires an a priori assessment of the likelihood of the Christian God, which I believe Plantinga sets at 50% (this his flawed default figure for probabilities of things we don’t have any evidence for). But at any rate we all know the counterarguments to the fine-tuning argument for God; Google “Sean Carroll fine tuning” if you haven’t heard them.

There are many other moments of unintended hilarity (for some reason the Times allows Gutting far more space than, say, someone sensible like Paul Krugman), but I’ll leave you with Plantinga’s take on theodicy: why is there evil in the world? His answer is full of LOLz, for he explains that the best of all possible worlds must have evil in it. Where is Voltaire when we need him?

  • G.G.: “But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?”A.P.: “I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.” [JAC: yes, and maybe the Cubs will win the World Series.]Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

    I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.”

Ergo, Auschwitz: “The World Would Have Been Worse Without It”. Oh, I forgot—those were mostly Jews.  You know, the ones who didn’t have the “right relationship to God”.

Alvin1
AL-vin!!!!

Paul Bloom debunks the “Moral Law argument for God”

January 31, 2014 • 12:28 pm

I’ve just finished reading Paul Bloom’s short book, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, which was published last November by Crown Publishing. Bloom, who works at Yale, is a well-known psychologist, specializing in the development of morality—especially in infants. I recommend his book, especially if you’re interested in how much of human morality is hard-wired versus learned (and, of course, both factors can and certainly are involved).

One of the reasons I liked the book is because it deals frankly with the contention of some religious people that the “innate moral sense” of humans, especially our altruism—which is unique in the animal kingdom—could not be a result of either evolution or culture, and therefore must have been bequeathed us by God.  This is in fact a common argument of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and a man who should know better.  It’s also been made by Dinesh d’Souza. Both are quoted in a very nice new article by Bloom in The New Republic, “Did God Make These Babies Moral? Intelligent Design’s oldest attack on evolution is as popular as ever.” If you don’t have the time or dosh to read Bloom’s book, the article is a good summary of its findings. It is a Professor Ceiling Cat Recommendation.

Before we get to Bloom’s findings, what is the “moral law argument”? It’s simply this: human altruism can’t be explained by any kind of evolution. What I mean is pure altruism, whereby an animal helps another animal not only unrelated to it, but not part of its social group, and helps in such a way that it sacrifices its own reproductive potential without getting anything back.  It’s unrequited altruism. That kind of behavior simply can’t evolve, at least by natural selection, because it reduces the fitness of the performer.

And indeed, I am aware of no cases of pure altruism in the animal kingdom—outside of our own species. I suppose people could argue whether humans really do show pure altruism. We could argue, for instance, that doing selfless acts actually enhances your reputation and hence your reproduction. Still, the case of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save his comarades, or of volunteer firefighters who risk their lives without pay, or, indeed, religionists like Father Damien in Hawaii who contracted leprosy and died while ministering to confined lepers—those cases look to me like pure altruism.

If this kind of behavior cannot result from natural selection, then, says Collins and d’Souza, God must have given it to us. Surprisingly, religionists find this argument pretty convincing. But they’re leaving out the one factor that Bloom claims is responsible for altruism: culture. In other words, he says, we’re taught to be altruistic.

And the evidence supports him.  The evidence is this—a list of traits that very young infants show, presumably before they have a chance to be socialized (they can’t speak or understand much at the ages when they’re tested):

  • moral judgment: some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions.
  • empathy and compassion: suffering at the pain of those around us and wishing to make this pain go away.
  • a rudimentary sense of fairness: a tendency to favor those who divide resources equally, and, by the second year of life, an exquisite sensitivity to situations in which one is getting less than someone else.
  • a rudimentary sense of justice: a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.

Those traits are all seen in rudimentary forms in other species—not just primates but in animals like dogs. Given that, it’s entirely possible that these traits are largely evolved in humans, with their expression perhaps enhanced by culture—our being socialized into being altruistic.

What other creatures don’t show, as Bloom recounts in this piece and in his book, is concern for others at their own expense. The empathy that seems inherent in “human nature” is directed only towards those the infants are familiar with, like family. It is not directed at strangers. In fact, infants are spiteful little things, and do not like even equality with strangers. They will, for example, prefer to have one cookie while another infant nearby gets none, over the alternative where both infants get two cookies. In other words, infants sacrifice their own well-being just to affirm their superiority in the acquisition of goods.  Several other studies show the same thing.  Infants are empathic but not altruistic.

Bloom argues, then, that the altruism comes from education, an argument also made by Peter Singer in his superb book The Expanding Circle. I quote Bloom:

And so there is no support for the view that a transcendent moral kindness is part of our nature. Now, I don’t doubt that many adults, in the here and now, are capable of agape.

. . . When you bring together these observations about adults with the findings from babies and young children, the conclusion is clear: We have an enhanced morality but it is the product of culture, not biology. Indeed, there might be little difference in the moral life of a human baby and a chimpanzee; we are creatures of Charles Darwin, not C.S. Lewis.

So much for the Moral Law as proof of God.  Notice that we haven’t disproven that God gave us altruism, but we have a plausible alternative theory that is more parsimonious, particularly in view of the data from other mammals. Remember that God was invoked by Collins and d’Souza because they couldn’t think of an alternative scientific explanation.

I have only one quibble with Bloom’s article, and it’s inconsequential. He argues that it is indeed possible to get direct evidence that God gave us altruism. We could, for instance, find some “altruism gene” that shows signs of being inserted into our genome by God. Now I don’t know what such a gene would look like, and Bloom doesn’t tell us, but presumably it would be found only in humans and bear no signs of relationship to genes in other species. In other words, its DNA sequence would be sui generis. Alternatively, says Bloom, humans could have parts of the brain that act to produce altruistic acts—parts that other species don’t have.

We haven’t seen any evidence for such genes or brain parts, of course, but were I a theologian I would defend the God Hypothesis by raising two objections.  The first is that well, maybe God didn’t give us altruism by giving us “unselfish genes” or “altruistic brain modules,” but simply rewired our brains in a way that facilitates altruism. We wouldn’t know that from the kinds of observations Bloom suggests.  But, ultimately, we may understand those pathways, and dollars to donuts they’ll show that the altruistic rejiggering is caused by environmental influences: learning.

The other argument a face-saving theologian could make is that well, babies don’t need to be altruistic, and God arranged it so that our divinely-bestowed altruism would show up only when we were old enough to use it: as, say, five- or six-year-olds.  But that doesn’t explain why the other “moral” traits listed above, like empathy and a sense of fairness, do show up at very young ages, like two, also before they’re needed.  And presumably you could test that, too, although the tests are verboten: isolate children from all moral instruction and see if they spontaneously become altruistic, without any teaching, later than they evince other inherent signs of morality.

But we already have enough data to suggest that the God Hypothesis is wrong, and the data show that if altruism is innate, it doesn’t appear until children are taught to be altruistic, while other moral virtues—the one seen in nascent form in our relatives—show up largely without instruction.

At any rate, I highly recommend Bloom’s piece (and his book, if you have time)—it’s a good palliative for one of the most popular arguments of what I call the New Natural Theology: the argument that we’re nice to strangers because God made us that way.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ evidence

January 15, 2014 • 8:06 am

As we all know, for most believers religion, to be fully embraced as a way of life, must be based—at least in principle and in part—on evidence. But the absence of that evidence has given rise to the discipline of theology, which is based on the insupportable premise of rationality without reason. The Jesus and Mo author conveys, in four panels, arguments I’ve been making for years. Religion is a pseudoscience: it makes existence claims—statements about reality—but, when those are challenged, reverts to exactly the same tactics as do advocates of Bigfoot, alien abduction, and homeopathy. The “evidence” reverts to revelation and scripture, and religionists make sure that it’s not capable of being falsified.

But I digress: here’s a shorter take, in which Jesus has found (to use the parlance of Alvin “I haz a sensus divinitatis” Plantinga) a “defeater” for arguments against the Resurrection:

2014-01-15

 

Unequivocal evidence for God? I don’t think so.

January 13, 2014 • 3:56 am

Here we ago again: it’s my last day in Poland and I’m compelled by the Universe to take on yet another set of arguments for God—arguments set out in a piece that reader Steve sent me with the comment: “weapons grade horseshit.”

And indeed, this is equine excreta of the WMD class, set out in an article by Damon Linker in The Week magazine: “Memo to atheists: God’s not dead yet” (subtitle: “A new book exposes a major fallacy in atheist thinking.”)

We’ve met Linker before on this site, and if you look at his articles at This Week, you’ll see they include a variety of religious apologetics and conservative pieces, including this especially noxious specimen: “How growing support for gay rights restricts religious freedom.” Have a look at that bit of tone-trolling. (Linker’s website notes that his specialty is “faith and politics.”)

So why is God still alive and kicking? What is “the major fallacy in atheist thinking”? Once again, it’s the claim that we atheists have not encountered the “strongest case for God,” so we have failed miserably. Our attacks on God, we hear, are on the most puerile, straw-mannish sort of God: the Bearded Man in the Sky. Apparently everyone knows that’s wrong—except for the vast majority of religionists who still accept it!

Linker begins with the (to him) dispiriting rise in the proportion of “nones”—Americans without religious affiliation:

For those who have led the charge against the forces of faith — Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Grayling, and numerous other wannabes — this change is a welcome sign that the American people have at long last begun to dispel their atavistic ignorance and reconcile themselves to the scientific account of the universe, which is utterly incompatible with any form of theism.

One of the many virtues of theologian David Bentley Hart’s stunning new book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, is that it demolishes this facile, self-satisfied position, exposing how completely it relies on a straw man account of God for its cogency. Atheism may well be true; a society of secularists might get along just fine without any form of piety. But until those unbelievers confront the strongest cases for God, they will have failed truly and honestly to rout their infamous enemy.

Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.  Ergo, atheists are going after the wrong brand of faith.

Some critics of atheism have drawn an analogy to particle physics, saying that only a tiny fraction of physics-friendly laypeople really understand what physicists are saying about stuff like cosmic inflation or string theory. Therefore, if only a few professional physicists know what they’re talking about, then only the Sophisticated Theologians™ know what they’re talking about.

But this analogy fails, for theologians aren’t any better armed to perceive the “truth” about God than is any reasonably intelligent layperson. There is no possible training that can give you more expertise in discerning the True Nature of the Divine. Further, even the Sophisticated Theologians™ disagree among themselves about what we know and what we don’t—disagreement you won’t find among physicists.

So what are these Best Arguments For God that, says Linker, Hart’s new book demonstrates? You’re going to laugh, but there are just two, both lame. We atheists needn’t start worrying yet.

1. Many religions share the same conceptions of God.

Without meaning to downplay the very real differences among and within the world’s religions, Hart nonetheless maintains that underlying those differences is a commonly shared cluster of claims about God that can be found in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and various forms of ancient paganism. (He also finds continuities with a number of Buddhist concepts, though he doesn’t press the case.)

As if this “commonly shared cluster of claims” proves that God exists! There is, first of all, the possibility of cultural inheritance among people: the idea of a supernatural agent that could have been handed down from our common ancestors.  Further, the idea of “agency,” which people like Pascal Boyer see as an evolved tendency in our species, could also have given rise to this claim, even though there was no supernatural agent.

But Linker doesn’t emphasize those very profound differences between concepts of God, or that some “religions” barely have such a concept (Buddhists, for example, vary among sects).  Hindus believe in multiple gods. The ancient Greeks did, too—and some of their gods were far from omnibenevolent, even nasty or mischievous. How much disparity between “gods” can there be before Linker and Hart would accept that those differences cannot support the “reality” of a God? As usual, theologians can rationalize anything as evidence for their god, but will not tell us what observations could falsify its existence.

2. God isn’t a person in the sky, but a Ground of Being.  But haven’t we heard that from Tillich? Here’s what Linker (via Hart) sees as the Killer Argument for God:

The first of these shared claims is that God transcends the universe. Without exception, our clamorous and combative atheists treat God as if he were the biggest, most powerful object or thing in, or perhaps alongside, the universe (a Flying Spaghetti Monster, perhaps). Then they use the findings of science to show that there is no evidence for such an immensely powerful object or thing. And ipso facto, there is no God.

But, of course, the major world religions don’t view God in this way at all. They treat God, instead, as the transcendent source, the ground, or the end of the natural world. And that is an enormous — actually, an infinite — difference.

Scientists are heroically proficient at detecting the laws that govern the natural world. They interrogate phenomena, trace effects back to their contingent causes, and then those causes back to even prior causes, developing and testing theories that seek to explain the temporal sequence. In the case of cosmology, that sequence extends all the way back to origins of the universe — to the first contingent cause of every subsequent cause over the past 13.82 billion years or so.

God concerns something else entirely. He is certainly not one of the many contingent causes within the natural world. But neither is he the first contingent cause, setting off the Big Bang from some blast-resistant fallout shelter lodged, somehow, outside of and prior to the universe as we know it.

On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

This can be a difficult concept to grasp, but Hart does an exceptionally good job of explaining it — as he does the way this classical idea of God makes sense of the experience and unity of consciousness, as well as the ecstatic longing for the good and the beautiful that lies at the heart of moral experience.

Where does one begin? (Perhaps one shouldn’t.) Are we to take as “religious belief” the claims of only the most sophisticated theologians (who don’t include, by the way, people like William Lane Craig), or of the majority of believers? Most “regular” believers adhere to an anthropomorphic God: one who has emotions, the ability to do things, concerns for our well being, a special love for H. sapiens and a code of ethics that we should follow. People like Hart and Linker say that we should ignore such beliefs, even though it is precisely those beliefs that produce the major harms of religion. Dispel the religiosity of normal people and replace it with that of Sopisticated Theology™, and much of religion’s malevolence will vanish. And that is precisely what many of the New Atheists are trying to do.  I wouldn’t much mind living in a world whose only believers were Kierkegaards, Shelby Spongs, or Tillichs, but that isn’t the way religion plays out on our planet.

Further, on what basis are we to trust that those who say that God is a “ground of being”, the “unconditioned cause of reality” rather than just a disembodied human-like entity? How do theologians know that? After all, they’re working not from an esoteric knowledge of stuff like particle physics, but from materials accessible to every reasonably sentient being: revelation and scripture.

I don’t see where, for instance, the Bible tells us that “God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.” That is simply fancy language for “I don’t know what God is, but I’m going to use some fancy words to impress you and to make God impervious to disproof.” That, I suppose, is why people like Tillich are so popular: they confect an idea of God (based, of course, on nothing other than what they’d like to believe) that comports with what intelligent believers realize: we have no evidence for any kind of God.  Then they refine this idea so that nothing can disprove it, but that virtually every observation confirms it. It’s God as a pseudoscience, like UFO abduction. It is a hallmark of crank science and pseudoscience that believers see “proof” everywhere, but will not consider counterevidence.

Here’s, according to Linker and Hart, is the theological vaccination that immunizes religion against disproof:

The deeper reason why theism can’t be rejected, according to Hart, is that every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) “that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”

Well, we already know that, throughout history, there were many religions whose idea of god was not of a loving, omnipotent being. But, more important, there are very good non-goddy reasons for people to have notions of truth, goodness, and beauty. These including both evolution and secular reason. E.O. Wilson suggests, for instance, that we find “beautiful” those places most congenial for us to inhabit; “beauty” in people can correlate with their ability to reproduce; beauty in music and art can appeal to our evolved emotions; and “goodness” can derive from both evolved feelings of morality as well as our ability to reason about what behaviors are salubrious versus harmful.

If you’re going to see confirmation of God in “truth, goodness, and beauty,” then do you see disconfirmation of god in those who don’t pursue truth, or who, like theologians, ignore truth in preference to what they want to be true? What about those who long for ugliness or misery, like the Taliban or Nazis? Those people, too, were “united in a concept of God”.  They believed in God, yet they didn’t seek the good. Did God “ground” the Holocaust?

It all comes down to this: ask theologians what evidence could you find in people’s beliefs, or in their behavior, that would make those theologians reject their notion of God, whether it be the anthropomorphic God of most believers or the “ground of being” God of Tillich and Hart?

And ask theologians to explain what they mean when they emit things like this bafflegab:

God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

If that is their conclusion about what God is, what would disprove it? If they say it can’t be disproved, then ask them how they know it’s true? What does it mean to say that God “grounds the existence of every contingent thing”, and what would the universe look like if God wasn’t there to ground it?

What we see in the indented paragraph above is simply a group of fine-sounding but meaningless words, which, after all, is what theologians are paid to produce.  I could make up an equally fine-sounding paragraph showing that God is malevolent, apathetic, or the source of evil in this world, and with just as much justification.

Regarding theology, one can’t adduce these words of Christopher Hitchens too often: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” The words of Hart, at least as interpreted by Linker, constitute a blatant and assured assertion without a shred of evidence. There is no reason for us to accept the idea of God as a “ground of being,” especially since its proponents can’t even tell us what it means.

If this is the “strongest case for God” that theologians can produce, then we need pay them no heed. In fact, this is not a new argument for God at all, for there are no new ones. All have failed, and we atheists know it. The only people who don’t are the theologians like Hart and their acolytes like Linker, who keep searching desperately for new buttresses to prop up what they want to be true.