And We’re Back At Square One! or, My Response To “The Big Guns”

So atheist-turned-believer Lee Strobel apparently offered to answer questions from the thread over at FriendlyAtheist, and I think Hemant (the site owner) has a really cool thing going by having this little dialog.

However, if you want to stump atheists with tough questions, the first thing you don't do is dust off the same batch of washed-up ontological arguments and let them go extra rounds. Although we can agree on lots of other issues, Greta wrote a recent post whose subtitle was Greta Answers Some Theologians. I gotta admit, when I first saw the title in her email notice, I immediately wondered with awe and even a bit of fear: Uh-Oh! Who'd she talk to? I imagined her giving Ted Haggard or somebody similar a proper railing! At the very least I'd envisioned an actual dialog with a theologian, much like what Hemant and Strobel have done.

Her introduction noted that atheists often get criticized for attacking caricatured arguments, akin to shooting fish in a barrel. I agree that this can be true at times, in fact many or even most of the time, but of course not always, and I'll add that such tends to happen wherever competing ideas are at work. Politicians attack caricatured arguments of other politicians, as do lawyers, educators, and legislators. In the interest of not attacking caricatured arguments, Greta briefly tackled questions from people she apparently esteems "Big Gun" theologians, but exactly what the credentials were for accepting somebody as a big gun theologian were never discussed. Some of these folks were just run-of-the-mill apologists with light to medium sway on a couple of publishing companies. Regardless, I'm with her in being disappointed at not hearing anything new.

To make a skateboarding analogy, if I tell you I can ollie over ten skateboards, wouldn't you be flatly unimpressed if I stacked up ten fingerboards and proceeded to ollie over them? That's exactly how I feel when hearing more banter about the same old rehashed ontological arguments. 

And even some of these responses received less than sufficient address. For example, in response to Lee Strobel paraphrasing Alvin Plantinga, we get:

If God were real and created our minds to "deliver true beliefs about the world"… why would we even be having this conversation? Wouldn't we all perceive him, in exactly the same way? Why would anybody disagree about religion? In fact, why would anybody disagree about anything? Either God created us with perfect minds — which is patently untrue — or God is deceiving us… which undercuts your whole argument.

One of many problems with this overly simplistic response is that its implicit definition of God excludes the God of the Bible. Now, I do not mean to argue that human beings have perfect minds, in the sense that we always deduce exactly what is true. This is quite obviously not the case. That it is not the case doesn't preclude that it once was the case, either, and another problem is that Greta's response declares a foundational Bible truth to be 'patently untrue'. The Bible argues that a time existed when the human mind was perfect, in the sense of its potential to ascertain true beliefs. Such is precisely what was forfeited in that little story with the tree of knowledge of good and evil, with good being what is true, righteous or right and evil being what is non-true, sinful or wrong, and it doesn't take more than a basic reading of the first few chapters in Genesis to find that out.

A reasonable scientific equivalent of denying this fact from a biblical discussion about the nature of the human mind would be to deny pneumococcus had any involvement in Griffith's discovery of the transforming principle. Furthermore, even if we grant the false dichotomy as logically acceptable, the reasonable believer could still respond that God's desire for us to ascertain true beliefs in no way precludes the existence of false beliefs. Contrary, the very fact that God wants us to ascertain true beliefs at all seems to entail that non-true beliefs exist.

So the problem is that her argument concludes with a textbook example of the either/or fallacy, reducing the range of possibility to only two options when there are clearly other viable options to consider. For example, if God exists, other beings might exist, and couldn't one of these other beings be deceiving us? Perhaps we were intended to have perfect minds, as the Bible suggests? In scripture is not Satan referred to as the father of lies? We could go on.

So anyone with even basic knowledge of the Bible might perceive a similar logical disconnect here, and I'm left wondering: What concept of God is this author arguing against? This is not unlike listening to a YEC refute gradualism.

As another example of something I had a gripe with, we get the following as an aside response to those who point to theologians in these types of discussions:

Why am I obligated to spend a decade studying your faith before rejecting it, when you reject thousands of other faiths with barely a second thought?

Well, if nothing else, how about to prevent simple intellectual oversights like the one we just discovered? When being approached critically, religion is still a scholarly subject, you know. Although asking an atheist to spend a decade studying religion is not extreme in my opinion, we should expect atheists to at least know the basics of what they're criticizing, right? You don't refute someone else's idea of God by refuting what you think their idea of God is. I mean we all know the drill. An atheist comes out with an argument criticizing religion or some particular religious doctrine, and a believer responds by saying the atheist has mischaracterized said religion or said religious doctrine, then the atheist then mocks the believer for claiming the atheist is not sophisticated enough, and then people start crying about the Courtier's Reply… But the reality of the issue is, skeptics and critics who neglect basic Bible facts are to religion what people like Ann Coulter are to science. Do you really wanna go there?

Secondly, while the stereotype of the believer who is ignorant of other faiths and philosophies certainly has some grounding in truth, it remains a stereotype like any other. Is this stereotype relevant to the discussion in any way? Does the author mean to imply that the people she responds to haven't given other faiths a second of consideration? Now I'm no atheist, but if you came to my house, you'd notice books about all sorts of different religions and philosophies on my shelves, and this undermines the author's broad-stroke generalization of non-atheists or theists not giving other religions even a second of thought. In fact, it's a caricatured argument.

By alienating me in this way, the author minimizes the effect her piece could have had on me, and I'm left wondering: What type of non-atheist is the author criticizing here?

On a neutral note, here's essentially where we agree, albeit in reverse scope:

The fact that I've seen so many theistic arguments, and they've always been the same few bad arguments over and over again, has done more to bolster my opinion that religion is mistaken than anything any atheist has ever said.

And the fact that I've seen so many atheist responses to theistic arguments further bolsters my opinion that the best atheism has produced so far is Bertrand Russell, incidentally one of my favorite writers. And similarly, the atheist responses I typically hear are usually the same bad responses over and over again. Eighty years later and we have Dawkins recasting hasty paraphrases of Russell, biting off more than he can chew, and quote-mining John Adams while bashing creationists for doing the same to Darwin, and people are turning to atheism in small droves because of this? These are the atheist equivalents of Rick Warren conversions.

As if this little exercise is somehow not shooting fish in a barrel, ending just a wee bit smugly with,

Sorry, theologians. I remain unconvinced. I am more than a little shocked at how unfamiliar these apologists seem to be with some of the most basic pieces of current scientific knowledge. And frankly, I'm a bit disappointed in how weak and unoriginal these arguments are. I'd expected this to be more of a challenge.

Perhaps, but not all of these people are theologians, none of them were allowed to respond, and to be honest, I'm equally shocked at how unfamiliar the response we examined was with basic Bible knowledge, and equally disappointed at how weak and unoriginal some of the other responses to these washed-up ontological arguments were, so what's the difference?

And we're back at square one.

Now I'm not saying this author doesn't write persuasively on other topics, or that she does any or all of this all or even most of the time, but presenting the same stock arguments and simply re-addressing them is still shooting fish in a barrel! They're not new-and-improved ontological arguments simply because they're recast by Lee Strobel.

As it is, we get another polemical tit-for-tat, and this whole atheism-vs-theism game proceeds as just another grand theatrical display we might find in politics, sports, art, or any other area where human ambition exists and money, power and influence are to be gained.

NOTE: They're hootin' and hollerin' about this one over on DA, too.