Excursus on Natural Theology (Part 25): Atheistic Arguments
October 20, 2023Atheistic Arguments
During our excursus on natural theology we’ve looked at various arguments for God’s existence. But we need to consider arguments against God’s existence as well. It is not enough simply that there be good arguments to believe that God exists. We want to know where the balance of the evidence lies. Are there equally good arguments for atheism on the other side of the scale that counterbalance these arguments or perhaps tip the balance in the other direction? During this section we want to look at arguments against God’s existence.
As a matter of fact, there really aren’t very many arguments against God’s existence, quite frankly. I find that the atheist’s main complaint is just that there isn’t any evidence for God’s existence. He complains that there is no reason to believe that God exists, and so he is content to simply remain in unbelief. But, you see, if you’ve got these arguments that we’ve just surveyed over the last several months memorized and ready to share, then that objection won’t apply to you. Honesty, I find that unbelievers are not very used to running into Christians who are able to offer good arguments for the hope that is in them. When the unbeliever says to you, “There is no evidence that God exists,” you can stop him dead in the tracks by looking at him with a surprised expression on your face and saying, “Is that what you think? I can think of at least six arguments for God’s existence.” At that point he’s got to say, “Yeah, like what?” Then you are off and running, and you can share your arguments with him. So rather than a conversation stopper, his challenge actually becomes a conversation starter to begin to share reasons to believe in God.
I think you’ll find that unbelievers are generally speaking so ill-equipped to deal with these issues that in response to the arguments for God’s existence they tend to just repeat, “There’s no evidence that God exists.” One blogger characterized my debate with the British atheist Lewis Wolpert in Central Hall, London, in the following way:
Wolpert: There’s no evidence for God’s existence.
Craig: There is evidence for God’s existence. And here it is . . . one, two, three, four.
Wolpert: There’s no evidence for God’s existence.
Craig: There is evidence for God’s existence. And here it is . . . one, two, three, four.
Wolpert: There’s no evidence for God’s existence.
Sadly, this characterization was not too far off the mark. Sometimes it seems like non-believers are just deaf. They’ve simply been taught to repeat the slogan, “There’s no evidence for God’s existence,” apparently thinking that by saying it over and over again that somehow makes it true. I think that for many people it is just an excuse for intellectual laziness and a lack of engagement. It is just a way of saying, “I am not convinced by your arguments.”
But if the unbeliever is not convinced, then I think the appropriate response to him is to say politely, “Well, you apparently don’t find my arguments convincing. So you must think that some of my premises are false. So which premise of the argument do you reject and why?” Force him to engage with the argument. One atheist that I was talking to said at that point, “I reject all of them!” I said, “Surely you don’t reject all of them. Do you reject the premise that ‘the universe exists’” (which is one of the premises of the Leibnizian argument), “or that ‘the fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design?’” (which just lists the alternatives). He recognized at that point his remark had been careless, and then we began to have a good conversation. Try to get the unbeliever to engage with your specific premises.
In response to your question, “Which premise do you reject and why?” the unbeliever is apt to say something like, “I think that religion is just all in your head” or “Religion has done more harm than good to society than anything else.” Don’t allow him to get you distracted to get you off track. Say, “I understand that is how you feel. But you said there is no evidence for God’s existence. Now I’ve shared an argument. So what I want to know is which premise do you reject and why?” Stay focused on the arguments and the premises and don’t be distracted. Try to get him to engage. Eventually you may get to the point where you can say to him, “I don’t think that you really are rejecting God because of lack of evidence. I sense a deeper emotional rejection of God that is going on. What is the real reason that you reject God?” At that point you’ve moved beyond mere apologetics into real counseling and personal engagement with the unbeliever.
My point is that having a few arguments memorized is a tremendous tool in dealing with unbelievers, and it will completely pull the rug out from under the unbeliever’s main reason for his unbelief, namely, the claim that there is no evidence for God’s existence. In fact I have found in personal witnessing experiences that just having a list of the arguments to share with the unbeliever may often be enough. If he says there is no evidence for God’s existence, you can say, “I can think of six reasons to think God exists. God is the best explanation why anything at all exists rather than nothing. God is the best explanation of the beginning of the universe. God is the best explanation of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. God is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values and duties in the world. And the very possibility of God’s existence implies that God exists.” Very often just sharing that list with the unbeliever will be so overwhelming that it will be enough to answer his objection that there is no evidence for God’s existence. Of course, if he wants to hear more then you can go into the arguments individually. But the point is that if you are prepared you will be able to easily meet the main objection that unbelievers offer to the existence of God, namely this slogan “There is no evidence for God’s existence.”
EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBJECTIONS TO THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
I’d like to turn next to epistemological objections to the existence of God. I will just go through these fairly quickly because I don’t think that these are very substantive objections on the contemporary scene.
The first epistemological objection is verificationism. Verificationism was a philosophy that was very dominant in the United States and Britain during the 1930s and 40s. Basically what the verificationist said is that any statement, in order to be meaningful, must be capable of being empirically verified. If a statement cannot be verified through the five senses in some way, then it is a meaningless statement.
Notice that this is a criterion of meaning. It is not a truth test. The verificationists weren’t saying in order to be a good scientific theory or in order to be a good explanation you need to have some evidence that would verify your explanation or your theory. I think few scientists would disagree that a good theory would be one that enjoys empirical verification. But the verificationists were much more radical than that. They are offering a criterion of meaning. They are saying that if a statement cannot be empirically verified then it is literally meaningless.
In saying that these statements are meaningless, they didn’t mean that the statement is just like gargling, just gibberish. Rather what they meant was that statements which are not verifiable don’t make any factual assertion. They don’t make any factual claim. They may be meaningful in a grammatical sense. You can understand the claim. It is not just gibberish. But these claims don’t make any factual assertion. To give an analogy, questions and commands are meaningful in the sense that we understand them grammatically. If someone asks you, “Is Publix open today?” you understand the meaning of that question. Or if someone says to you, “Shut the door,” you understand the meaning of that command. But those questions and commands don’t make any factual assertions. Questions are not true or false. Commands are not true or false. So they are meaningful in a grammatical sense, but questions and commands are not the sort of things that are true or false. They are not factual assertions. In the same way the verificationist said that statements about God don’t make any factual assertion, and therefore they are neither true nor false. Don’t misunderstand me. They are not claiming that statements about God are disguised questions or disguised commands. I am just using questions and commands as illustrations of statements that are grammatically meaningful but make no factual assertion. In the same way they would say that statements about God, though grammatically meaningful, express no fact. They make no factual claim, and therefore they are neither true nor false.
Even atheism, on this view, is meaningless because atheism says, “God does not exist,” and according to verification that is a meaningless statement. It makes no factual claim just as the statement “God does exist” makes no factual claim. On verificationism, statements about God don’t even have the dignity of being false! They are neither true nor false. They just don’t make any sort of factual claim.
Verificationism succumbed to criticism during the second half of the 20th century. In fact, it has been said (I think rightly so) that the most important philosophical development of the second half of the 20th century was the collapse of the verificationism which had so dominated the first half of the 20th century. There were basically two criticisms that led to the demise of verificationism.
First, the principle was too restrictive to be plausible. If the verification principle were true that only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful, this would force you to trash not only theological statements but vast, vast ranges of human discourse, so that much of what we say and act on would turn out to be meaningless. Metaphysical truths about the existence of the external world, aesthetic truths about beauty and ugliness, mathematical and logical truths cannot be verified by empirical means. As it turned out, even scientific truths are often not verifiable, so that the verification principle would undermine science itself, which was the sacred cow of the verificationists.
If you want an example of this, consider the principle in the Special Theory of Relativity that light has a constant one-way velocity. It is a postulate of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity that the one-way velocity of light is constant. But that is non-verifiable. All we can measure is the round-trip velocity of light, as light goes out, is reflected back, and then returns to the source. We can measure that round-trip velocity of light. It is always constant. But Einstein’s theory presupposes that the one-way velocity of light from A to B is constant, and that is non-verifiable. Theoretically light could go out at one speed and come back at another speed and at varying speeds, just so long as the round-trip velocity is constant. So the theory is based upon a postulate which is non-verifiable. This is common in science. So verificationism would actually destroy science, which was, as I say, for the verificationist the sacred cow to which they paid homage.
Secondly, though, not only was the criterion too restrictive, but it turned out to be self-refuting. Just ask yourself: is the statement “Only statements that are empirically verifiable are meaningful” empirically verifiable? No! It is just an arbitrary definition, and therefore one that we are at liberty to reject. By its own light, the verification principle, being non-verifiable, is meaningless! It makes no factual claim whatsoever and therefore it has no claim upon us. Therefore, during the second half of the 20th century verificationism simply collapsed. This resulted in a renaissance of metaphysics and ethics and of all of the traditional questions of philosophy, including the renaissance in Christian philosophy that is ongoing in the Anglo-American world.
Sadly, however, I find that this kind of verificationism still has a long lingering shadow, especially over older scientists who were educated during the verificationist era. That is often sadly passed on to their students. So you will often find this kind of verificationist mentality on the Internet and among people, especially in the sciences, who think that theology or claims about God are just meaningless because they are not empirically verifiable. I can’t emphasize too strongly that this kind of verificationism is universally rejected today by philosophers, both epistemologists and philosophers of science, because of the reasons that I mentioned.
If you run into this, you need to simply share with your unbelieving friend the reasons why verificationism is untenable and that he is adopting a position that is obsolete and universally rejected among philosophers of knowledge and of science.
In light of this, many atheists have argued for the presumption of atheism instead. That is to say, atheism is a kind of default position; that unless and until you have evidence for God’s existence, then you should believe that God does not exist. Atheism is a sort of default position. It is that argument that we will take up next time.