CRI Presuppositions

I don’t know why, but on Twitter I follow the Christian Research Institute. I think this is because I like being given opposing viewpoints to dissect in the middle of the afternoon.

This afternoon, CRI Twittered a link to an article written by a Ph.d candidate in philosophy, the central message of which is that atheism is presumptuous.

The irony of this is that the author himself bases his analysis of atheism as “presumptuous” based on… presumptuousness. Observe:

“Atheist Antony Flew has said that the “onus of proof must lie upon the theist.”1 Unless compelling reasons for God’s existence can be given, there is the “presumption of atheism.” Another atheist, Michael Scriven, considers the lack of evidence for God’s existence and the lack of evidence for Santa Claus on the same level.2 However, the presumption of atheism actually turns out to be presumptuousness. The Christian must remember that the atheist also shares the burden of proof, which I will attempt to demonstrate below.

“First, even if the theist could not muster good arguments for God’s existence, atheism still would not be shown to be true.3 The outspoken atheist Kai Nielsen recognizes this: “To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false…. All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists.”4

Nielsen is absolutely correct. Doing this (concluding that the conclusion of an argument is false because the argument is invalid or unsound) is what is known as an argumentum ad logicam. Just because an argument is invalid does not mean that the conclusion of the argument is false. For example:

P: All dogs have four legs

1.Poseidon (a pet of mine) has four legs

C: Poseidon is a dog.

In fact, Poseidon is a dog. This argument is invalid, but the conclusion of this argument is still true.

But, here lies the problem. What exactly does the author mean by “atheism”? I take atheism to mean something like, “Coming to the conclusion that the evidence for god is insufficient” or “lack of theism” or, “lack of belief in god”.

In this way, “atheism” is the position that “there are no good arguments for god’s existence”. “arguments”, I hope,  refers not only to philosophical arguments but arguments based around empirical evidence as well.

It is true that god may exist, even though there is no evidence for god and the arguments for god’s existence fail. I doubt it, and that is my position as an atheist. The author of this piece seems to be defining atheism as the hard position that gods do not exist. This is not a viewpoint that most atheists share.

“Second, the “presumption of atheism” demonstrates a rigging of the rules of philosophical debate in order to play into the hands of the atheist, who himself makes a truth claim. Alvin Plantinga correctly argues that the atheist does not treat the statements “God exists” and “God does not exist” in the same manner.5 The atheist assumes that if one has no evidence for God’s existence, then one is obligated to believe that God does not exist — whether or not one has evidence against God’s existence. What the atheist fails to see is that atheism is just as much a claim to know something (“God does not exist”) as theism (“God exists”). Therefore, the atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.

Plantinga does not correctly argue this. Some atheists might not treat the claims “god exists” and “god does not exist” in the same manner, but of all of the atheist literature I have read (I’ve read Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchins, Carrier, and more. I’ve listened to countless atheist podcasts and have read countless arguments, blog posts and had countless conversations with atheists) no one has ever made the claim that “god does not exist” is NOT a truth claim. Plantinga and the author of this piece are creating a straw man atheist and then knocking him swiftly down.

“God does not exist” is a truth claim, and one that needs to be substantiated with evidence. Of course, this is pretty difficult given that most theists use unfalsifiable claims to prove that their god exists. Using only falsifiable claims, proving that there is no god is easy. In an argument about the truth of a proposition, we can safely ignore unfalsifiable claims, as they cannot contribute to evidence. The problem is that theist generally must rely on unfalsifiable claims to prove the existence of their god, unless their god is a doorknob.

Most of the atheists I know have a problem with the truth claims of religion. Not because they are religious claims, but because they are truth claims that are made without substantiation or proof. The atheists I know assume that if there is no evidence for god, then there is no evidence for god.

“Third, in the absence of evidence for God’s existence, agnosticism, not atheism, is the logical presumption. Even if arguments for God’s existence do not persuade, atheism should not be presumed because atheism is not neutral; pure agnosticism is. Atheism is justified only if there is sufficient evidence against God’s existence.

This depends on how you define agnosticism and atheism. These two terms need to be defined clearly before we can make claims such as the one above, and I don’t think I agree with the definitions the author seems to be implying. It would be dishonest of me to make up a definition of Christianity that 99% of Christians disagreed with.

Let’s assume that I make the claim that clover cures lung cancer. The proper position with regard to this claim is lack of belief that clover cures lung cancer. That is, “I do not believe clover cures lung cancer.” The author claims that this is illogical, and that the logical position is, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”. Which, I suppose is fair, assuming this is the first time anyone has proposed that clover cures lung cancer and no experiments or observations have thus far taken place.

Let’s say we perform experiment after experiment trying to prove that clover cures lung cancer. Over and over – no matter how many people we use, no matter which formula of clover we use, no matter if it is ingested, infused, smoked, snorted, or bathed in – we show through experimentation that clover has no effect on lung cancer whatsoever, and in some cases (such as when it was smoked), clover makes lung cancer worse. Let’s say we perform these experiments for 100 years, in city after city, using billions of research dollars.

After all of that, is the proper position, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”? No. The proper position is, “there is no evidence that clover cures lung cancer”.  Even, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is not a far stretch. According to the authors, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is illogical. Acloverists are presumptuous. Acloverists are making a positive claim.
“Fourth, to place belief in Santa Claus or mermaids and belief in God on the same level is mistaken. The issue is not that we have no good evidence for these mythical entities; rather, we have strong evidence that they do not exist. Absence of evidence is not at all the same as evidence of absence, which some atheists fail to see.

What strong evidence against Santa and mermaids might this be, exactly? If I were having a conversation with this author, I’d really like to hear his reasons for denying Santa and mermaids. Is it because… Santa is impossible? Is it because we’ve never observed a mermaid? Because there is… an absence… of… evidence?

/>Absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence (See my friend Saint Gasoline’s recent post on this. He presents a very well-rounded argument that is too long for me to reprint here). Once again, think of the clover example above. Is it right to say that absence of evidence that clover cures lung cancer is not evidence that clover does not cure lung cancer?

“Moreover, the theist can muster credible reasons for belief in God. For example, one can argue that the contingency of the universe — in light of Big Bang cosmology, the expanding universe, and the second law of thermodynamics (which implies that the universe has been “wound up” and will eventually die a heat death) — demonstrates that the cosmos has not always been here. It could not have popped into existence uncaused, out of absolutely nothing, because we know that whatever begins to exist has a cause. A powerful First Cause like the God of theism plausibly answers the question of the universe’s origin. Also, the fine-tunedness of the universe — with complexly balanced conditions that seem tailored for life — points to the existence of an intelligent Designer.

These are not credible reasons. I’ve covered these in previous posts so I won’t rehash them again, but suffice to say that these arguments come from a oversimplification or misunderstanding about the nature of the universe. Even if the First Cause argument were credible, the huge leap to Christianity (as the author expects) does not follow.

“The existence of objective morality provides further evidence for belief in God. If widow-burning or genocide is really wrong and not just cultural, then it is difficult to account for this universally binding morality, with its sense of “oughtness,” on strictly naturalistic terms. (Most people can be convinced that the difference between Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa is not simply cultural.) These and other reasons demonstrate that the believer is being quite rational — not presumptuous — in embracing belief in God.

The moral argument is one of the weakest arguments around. Populations survive based on a balance between behavior that increases survival and behaviors that decrease survival. If murder or selfishness were a culturally accepted standard of behavior, then what would happen to a population that embraced that behavior? Morality is objective (as in, it is not a product of mere internal opinion but is something outside of the individual and informed by reason) and not just cultural. It is easy to account for “oughtness” using naturalistic terms. Saying that morality is “either objective, universal and given to us by god” or “cultural” and then moving on to disprove that it is cultural does not prove that morality was handed to us by god because this is a false dichotomy.

Funny how you can prove position A is presumptuous by being presumptuous in strawmanning position A into a presumptuous position, isn’t it?