True Reason

True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism Edited by Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer

Copyright © 2012 by Campus Crusade for Christ, Inc. Published by Patheos Press, 383 Inverness Parkway, Suite 260, Englewood, Colorado 80112 patheos.com All Rights Reserved True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism Tom Gilson and Carson Weitnauer, Editors

Table of Contents Chapter One: The Party of Reason -- Tom Gilson Chapter Two: The Irony of Atheism -- Carson Weitnauer Chapter Three: Dawkins’ Delusion -- William Lane Craig Chapter Four: Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason -- Chuck Edwards Chapter Five: Unreason at the Head of Project Reason -- Tom Gilson Chapter Six: John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith” -- David Marshall Chapter Seven: The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism -- David Wood Chapter Eight: By It, We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics -- Samuel J. Young Chapter Nine: Reason in a Christian Context -- Peter Grice Chapter Ten: The Marriage of Faith and Reason -- David Marshall Chapter Eleven: Are Science and Christianity at Odds? -- Sean McDowell Chapter Twelve: God and Science Do Mix -- Tom Gilson Chapter Thirteen: Historical Evidences for the Gospels -- Randall Hardman Chapter Fourteen: The Problem of Evil and Reasonable Christian Responses -John M. DePoe Chapter Fifteen: Christianity and Slavery -- Glenn Sunshine Chapter Sixteen: Did God Command the Genocide of the Canaanites? -Matthew Flannagan Epilogue About the Authors Acknowledgments Endnotes

Chapter One: The Party of Reason Tom Gilson The New Atheists have branded themselves the party of Reason. Richard Dawkins leads his Foundation for Reason and Science. Sam Harris is the founder of Project Reason. The Council for Secular Humanism publishes Free Inquiry: Celebrating Reason and Humanity. The American Atheists define atheism as “the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason . . .” On March 24, 2012, Dawkins will headline a rally in Washington, D.C., “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history.” They’re calling it the Reason Rally. We say, really? It has been our observation that reason is not their strength: that their books, articles, and debates are riddled with fallacy, appeals to emotion, and mishandling of evidence. We believe that their claim to reason is much more a matter of public relations than it is of competence in reasoned discourse. We believe furthermore that there is good reason to believe that Christianity as a whole is more reasonable than atheism. Admittedly that is a bold statement. We who have collaborated to write this book have all had considerable experience in communications with atheists, and we know with what derisive astonishment we can expect it to be met. Of course we do not say that all Christians practice sound reason. There are better and worse thinkers in any large group of people. Our point is that Christianity as a whole supports sound reason, and that this can be demonstrated both by argument and by example, such as we offer in this book. We also argue that parallel examples and arguments are lacking among the popular and popularizing New Atheists. My own first encounter with the New Atheism was in reading Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker. The term New Atheist had yet to be coined, and I certainly had no idea then that before long Dawkins would be regarded as their chief spokesman and spiritual leader (so to speak). I picked up the book because I was intrigued by its subtitle: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. I had never seen an argument of that sort made successfully, and I couldn’t imagine how it could be done. I had heard positive things about this book, though, so I dove into with genuinely high hopes that I would encounter a real challenge.

My hopes grew as I read. Sure, there were places where Dawkins’ reasoning seemed quite a stretch, such as when he tried to illustrate evolution’s unintelligent capacities by comparing it to an intelligently designed computer program. Still on the whole he revealed himself to be a master of his scientific subject matter and a gifted writer, as he told the story of evolution’s climb up “Mount Improbable”: how evolution could explain the astonishing complexity of the biological world. He made a few early, brief, forays into discussion of design in this book, but not to the extent of developing a decisive argument against it. So I kept reading, anticipating what he might have to say to cap it all off, to fulfill the promise of the subtitle and tell us just why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. Finally, after 300 pages he got there, near the end of the last chapter. Evolution, he said, makes God superfluous, thus there is no design in the universe. There is a way nature could have come about without design, therefore it came about without design. What a letdown! I practically sputtered out loud. “Dawkins, you rascal, you’ve had me thinking for 300 pages that you were going to deliver an argument against design— and this is all you’ve got?!” I was genuinely disappointed. The Blind Watchmaker up to that point had presented the longest and one of the most fascinating arguments for a first premise I had ever read: A. All of biological nature came about through evolution. All the way through, I knew the conclusion he was heading toward: C. Therefore the universe has no design. The book title had led me to believe that Dawkins had some premise B that would tie those two together—but he didn’t. Without that missing second premise, the whole book ended up being a build-up to nothing. Later the eminent philosopher Alvin Plantinga would offer his own wry assessment. At its best, he said, the argument would show, “given a couple of assumptions,” that it is not astronomically improbable that the living world was produced by unguided evolution and hence without design. But the argument form

p is not astronomically improbable therefore p is a bit unprepossessing. I announce to my wife, “I’m getting a $50,000 raise for next year!” Naturally she asks me why I think so. “Because the arguments against its being astronomically improbable fail! For all we know, it’s not astronomically improbable!” (Well, maybe it is pretty improbable, but you get [1] the idea.) This was my introduction, as I have said, to what was to become the New Atheism. It set a pattern that I and the other contributors to this volume have seen played out over and over again: failures of reasoned thinking. This failure comes in multiple shapes and forms. Sometimes it is in the form of logical fallacies, as in The Blind Watchmaker. Sometimes it’s mischaracterizations of Christian belief. In The God Delusion, Dawkins takes it for granted, contrary to any developed Christian theology, that God must be an example of “organized complexity” whose origins stand in need of explaining. Or consider how Christopher Hitchens treats historical fact: The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this. His illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been "Christians," since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would [2] ever found a church on their master's announcements. No reputable scholar doubts the existence of Jesus. Few would agree with Hitchens’ radical rejection of the historical record. (See Randy Hardman’s related essay in chapter thirteen for more.) Hitchens also writes, [Maimonides] fell into the same error as do the Christians, in assuming that the four Gospels were in any sense a historical record. Their multiple authors—none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion—cannot [3] agree on anything of importance.

Set aside for a moment his misunderstanding of New Testament historicity. Scholars and would-be scholars may debate that. One must still wonder whether he genuinely thinks Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, very prominent in all four Gospels, are unimportant. It’s just silly that Hitchens continues to be lauded for promoting what can only be described as both false and prejudicial. The point is that there is a wide variety of rational errors in the New Atheist literature. Sometimes it’s misinformation with respect to the evidences for belief, and sometimes it’s appeals to emotion rather than to evidence and reason. Whatever form it takes, each example is one more piece of evidence that the New Atheists are not as rational as they claim to be. Yet “reason” is stamped on virtually all of their products. Again we say, really? Views of Reason But perhaps we are viewing reason wrongly; and perhaps also at the same time we are thinking of faith in the wrong manner. Maybe the two really are opposed, as Sam Harris says in The End of Faith: The truth is that religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern. . . . Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse—constraints like [4] reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. If Harris is right to say that faith can never be reasonable, then of course the discussion is over. That seems rather illegitimate as an argument, however: shall we define faith out of rational existence, or shall we make our decisions about faith on the basis of standards of evidence and logic? If the former, that’s both premature and terribly ironic, for it leads to a conclusion divorced from all evidence, which is exactly what the New Atheists complain that faith does (falsely; see the ninth and tenth chapters in this volume). But if we let ourselves be guided by proper standards of evidence and logic, then we are bound to look for objective signs of the truth or falsity of our views—both Christian and atheist—accepting Harris’s “constraints” of reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. There is a hint here, at any rate, of how a leading New Atheist would define reason. Does he have more to say? One looks in vain for anything like a pithy and authoritative definition in The End of Faith, but that’s of little consequence; his views are not hard to discern. To be reasonable is to let your beliefs comport with evidence.

He makes that case repeatedly, and in this he reflects what seems to be what the New Atheists mean by reasonability: to confine one’s beliefs to that which can be demonstrated by objective, empirical, preferably scientific evidence. This is the first part of what they mean by reason. That’s fine as far as it goes, although it cuts too fine a line, as many thinkers have noted (see for example Sean McDowell’s work on faith and science in chapter eleven). If I take it to be true that I am only to believe what can be empirically demonstrated to be true, how can I demonstrate that that is true? Its truth can’t be empirically demonstrated. As a canon of reason, “only believe what can be demonstrated by objective, empirical, preferably scientific evidence” is appropriate for those matters for which it is appropriate, but clearly it does not fit all questions of truth. There is a second dominant theme in New Atheists’ use reason, which is to act reasonably. Sam Harris writes, for example, The Nazis disparaged the “Jewish physics” of Einstein, and the communists rejected the “capitalist biology” of Mendel and Darwin. But these were not rational criticisms—as witnessed by the fact that these dissenting scientists were [5] often imprisoned or killed. I think all of us, atheist and believer alike, support acting reasonably, although just what that looks like to one will differ from how it looks to another. If there is a God, it is reasonable to worship and to obey him. If there is no God, then it’s unreasonable. Therefore the decision, “was that a reasonable thing to do?” is a lower-order decision compared to “what can reasonably be regarded as true?” These two themes—first, confining belief to what can be supported empirically, and second, reasonability—are prominent among the New Atheists, in my observation at least. There is another aspect of reason that I do not hear them promoting. It is the skill and practice of what we might call reason proper: the appropriate use of reason and logic (along with evidences) in the forming of one’s conclusions. It is the ability to draw proper deductive inferences from premises, or proper inductive inferences from evidences, or properly credible explanations of observations and phenomena. It is the ability to proceed from evidences and/or premises to an appropriate conclusion. The lack of this ability (or the failure in its practice) is shown when one commits formal or informal logical fallacies, makes appeals to emotion rather than sound

reasoning, or uses evidence selectively. This reason proper is, as I said, prior to the other forms of reason; for unless one knows how to draw a valid conclusion from evidences or premises, one cannot know what beliefs to hold to in light of evidences—even scientific evidences. No one who is deficient in this level of reasoning can credibly claim to represent reason. In my reading of New Atheist literature, there is very little said about reason proper. It could be that I have missed it. Even if they talked about it everywhere, though, still we would want to know, how well do they practice it? The first few chapters of this book will offer evidence that some of their most highly respected leaders do it very poorly. True Reason Just to make that claim, however, would be an empty act of our own, no matter how well we demonstrated it. As Christians we are convinced that reason is from God. I do not mean that we do as the New Atheists seem to do, and raise the flag of Reason over our troops as if it were our one main thing. We see life as more multi-dimensional than that. The greatest commandment, said Jesus Christ (Mk. 12:28-31), is to love the Lord our God with our whole selves: heart, soul, and strength, as well as mind. There is mystery in Christianity. There is worship. There is a lived-out life of action in Christ’s name. We embrace the imagination, the power of narrative, the importance of beauty and the arts, and the value of community. Still, wrapped up in all this there is a deep and essential reasonableness to the faith. Christianity is a friend to reason. This claim, like the prior one that the New Atheism does not practice reason well, is bound to astonish some readers. Again, we only ask that you examine the evidence, some of which we offer in this book. Christianity has a tradition of strength in philosophy, the sciences, literature, and the arts, such as the New Atheists have ignored or swept aside. I do not mean that we can boast a heritage of unbroken success, for we have had our seasons of anti-intellectualism, and our moments (sometimes long ones) of embarrassment. We do not defend that, even among ourselves. We want it to be noted that we are not looking at New Atheisms’ weakest representatives, but its leaders, and specifically those who stand at the head of groups that claim reason in their titles. It would be unfair to judge the New Atheism’s reasonability by anything other than its reasoning leadership. Likewise it would be unfair to judge Christianity by anything but its reasoning leadership. Book Overview

This, then, is the argument of this book: the New Atheists’ ownership claim on the brand of reason is empty. It doesn’t fit their system of thought, and they don’t practice it at all well, either. Reason belongs to Christianity. We want to claim the word back where it rightfully belongs. True Reason divides into three sections: Atheism and Reason, Christianity and Reason, and Christianity’s Reasonability. I. Atheism and Reason The book’s opening section provides evidence that atheism (in its New Atheist form, especially) fails to live up to its claimed connection with reason. Carson Weitnauer leads off this section with an exploration of the ironic gap between how atheists claim to love reason and their actual irrationality, examining along the way some very interesting atheist testimonials for unbelief. Chapters three and four, by noted Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and Chuck Edwards, respectively, take a stereoscopic look at Richard Dawkins, providing objective evidence of frequent failures of logic and reasoning—and even a surprising disregard for science—in his anti-religious writings. In chapter five I show why one might reasonably wonder how Sam Harris came to be associated with Project Reason, and whether that connection is appropriate. In chapter six David Marshall examines John Loftus’s “Outsider Test for Faith,” and finds it to be a fine test for truth, but one that leads to a conclusion opposite of the one Loftus thinks it does. Chapter seven, by David Wood, takes a broad view of naturalistic atheism as a worldview, showing that it fails to explain many of the most important truths of nature and human experience. II. Christianity and Reason Our second section presents a wide range of arguments for the rationality of the Christian worldview. Samuel Youngs provides counterpoint in chapter eight, arguing strongly for Christianity’s explanatory adequacy regarding a wide range of human experience. The following two chapters attempt to straighten out common misconceptions concerning Christianity, reason, and faith. In chapter nine, Peter Grice demonstrates reason’s compatibility with biblical truth, and in chapter ten David Marshall continues that theme, speaking of the tight biblical and historic relationship between faith and

reason. Sean McDowell writes in chapter eleven of Christianity’s close conceptual and historic connections with science, which I follow in chapter twelve with a response to the common objection that God and science do not mix. In view of the reasonable expectation that Christianity submit itself to historical investigation, Randy Hardman’s chapter thirteen offers detailed evidences for the reliability of the New Testament documents. (Because of its 1st-century subject matter, this chapter runs more on the technical side than others in this volume.) Finally for this section, John DePoe explains in chapter fourteen that there is no contradiction in the existence of a good God and of evil in the world. III. Christianity’s Reasonableness There is reason, and there is reasonableness; and Christianity has often been charged with failures of reasonableness. To answer each specific such charge would be beyond the scope of this book, but we have selected two representative topics to showcase and to correct some of the most common New Atheist misunderstandings of Christianity. In chapter fifteen, Glenn Sunshine takes a biblical and historical look at slavery, and finds that the repeated charges that the Bible supports slavery are quite wrong, and that with a few sad exceptions, Christianity has been the major force in history for the abolition of slavery. Chapter sixteen presents Matthew Flannagan’s biblical and (again) historical rebuttal of another misinformed objection: that God in the Old Testament supported and endorsed genocide. (Like chapter thirteen, this chapter is also somewhat technical, as appropriate to the subject matter.) Conclusion Finally, Carson Weitnauer closes the book with a review of all that we have covered, and a look toward its personal implications, both for us and for our communities.

Chapter Two: The Irony of Atheism Carson Weitnauer One of the great ironies of the contemporary atheistic movement comes from its ubiquitous use of rhetoric, branding, and emotional triggers to advocate for reason. The leading atheists trumpet their devotion to reason in all their public communications, typically featuring the word in bold type across the names of their books, websites, organizations, and events. For instance, Sam Harris, co-founder and chairman of Project Reason, has said that, “The only angels we need invoke are those of our

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better nature: reason, honesty, and love.” Christopher Hitchens tells us in God Is Not Great: “We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of

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ideas for their own sake.” In the BBC (Channel 4) documentary The Enemies of Reason, Richard Dawkins, the founder of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, claims that

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“Reason has built the modern world.” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer have gone so far as to argue that atheists should really be called “brights,” in light of their insistence on a reasoned approach to all knowledge. Throughout their books, talks, and websites, the New Atheists consistently promote their allegiance to the glory of reason. This is not a novel development; the ‘new’ atheists are hardly the first atheists to claim the brand of reason for themselves. In Aristophanes’ play The Knights, written in 424 B.C., Demosthenes asks

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Nicias, “Do you then believe there are gods? . . . What proof have you?” There is in actual fact a well-established tradition that connects the skepticism of religion with a love for reason. Some of these connections are more dubious than others. For instance, during the French Revolution, a “Cult of Reason” was formed, which besides ransacking churches for their silver and gold, also ‘converted’ these churches into Temples of Reason. In the government-sanctioned “Festival of Reason” that accompanied this movement, a young woman was presented as the Goddess of Reason. At other times the connection has been presented hyperbolically, without reference to serious historical or sociological research. To provide just two examples, Nietzsche once wrote that “all founders of religions and their likes . . . feel a thirst for things which are contrary to reason and do

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not put too many difficulties in the way of satisfying it” (emphasis added). Even more recently, H.L. Mencken said, “Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.”

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For the New Atheists, as for some of the ‘old,’ their ardent love for reason is apparently what motivates their visceral disgust of religion. As Sam Harris has said, “Religious faith is the one

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species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.” Richard Dawkins has even gone so far as to say that molesting children “may be less harmful in the long run” than giving children a religious education.

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(See further on this in Chuck Edwards’ essay, chapter

four.) As if that wasn’t clear enough, Christopher Hitchens shared his thoughts on religion in a letter to the American Atheists in 2011: Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

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Despite such attacks, as Christians we are delighted that those who consider themselves our opponents are such ardent appreciators of reason. After all, Jesus famously proclaimed that the most important commandment includes loving God “with all of your mind” (Mk. 12:30). So, ironically, we believe that atheists are honoring God unawares when they reason well! And it is because of our own intentional desire to honor God that we want to demonstrate why Christianity provides the most reasonable framework for the existence and use of reason. The contrasts are clear: atheists claim that religion is the main barrier to reason. Christians believe our capacity to reason comes from being created in the image of an all-knowing God, and that the active use of reason is an important way to honor Him. Atheists brand themselves as a community united by reason. Christians marvel at how this group rallies together even as their most prominent leader, Richard Dawkins, argues that evolution favors the selfish gene, not the reasonable group. Atheists work hard to eradicate religion for the sake of a brighter future. Christians are amazed that atheists so blissfully ignore the scientific fact that, if religion is a false consolation, the future always ends in death. Leading atheist Sam Harris says that “faith is a conversation stopper.” Christians reply that Sam Harris has also said that none of us are “the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.” The reductionistic, deterministic, and materialistic worldview of many atheists seems, to reasonable Christians, to exclude the existence of transcendent, immaterial things like propositions, the rules of logic, and, most important of all, the very existence of minds. These aren’t straw men, but rather, a description of how many atheists see the stakes as well. Consider the famous Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s speech on atheism from 1962: We must look to materialistic philosophy which alone enables men to understand reality and to know how to deal with it . . . Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena. There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor

can there be any. Nature simply exists. But there are those who deny this, who assert that only mind or idea or spirit is primary. This question of the relation of the human mind to material being is one of the fundamental questions dealt with by all philosophers, however satisfactorily. The Atheist must slice through all obfuscation to bedrock, to the basic idea that those who regard nature as primary and thought as a property (or function) of matter belong to the camp of materialism, and that those who maintain that spirit or idea or mind existed before nature or created nature or uphold nature belong to the camp of idealism. All conventional religions are based on idealism.

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That is the question: do we have minds, or are we neurological processors akin to robots? And which worldview can better account for the existence and use of reason? In short, this book directly challenges the goals of organized atheist communities. Our hope is their fear: a revitalization of faith and thinking Christianity. Their identity as reasoning individuals depends upon the truth of our worldview. Their communal ideals of honesty, freedom, love, and justice are borrowed from the Bible. The very existence of reasoning Christians responding to atheist rhetoric undermines their fallacious, straw man depiction of religious people. Again, consider Christopher Hitchens’ depiction of religion: Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.

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This is a low bar indeed. To demonstrate that Christianity offers a coherent, reasoned explanation for the most important features of life, as this book does, is enough to show the hollowness of these descriptions. It is, in fact, remarkable to read such churlish remarks against a worldview that has thrived for millennia, in hundreds of cultural contexts, and now serves as a reasonable and welcome guide to life for billions of people in today’s world. Our book argues that the existence of reason depends upon the existence of God, and furthermore, provides abundant proof that atheists are as guilty of irrationality as anyone religious. This book may come across as threatening or psychologically challenging to the “brights” who believe themselves to be uniquely and supremely rational individuals. The stress of encountering such arguments can easily generate misunderstanding. For a parallel example, consider the moral argument for the existence of God. The moral argument seeks to establish that if God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. However, since objective moral values and duties do in fact exist, therefore, God exists. In response to this argument, atheists have sometimes complained that they are falsely being characterized as immoral.

But that is a misunderstanding of the argument. The moral argument isn’t about atheists. It is about atheism. To rationally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a worldview is an entirely different project from attacking someone’s character (to do so is, in fact, to commit the logical fallacy known as an ‘ad hominem’). For the record, we do affirm that atheists are morally aware people, are morally responsible for their actions, and may be as moral or more so than any given believer in God. In the same way, in this book, we are claiming that atheists are reasoning people, though inconsistently, and at the same time, that atheism lacks a foundation for the existence and use of reason. In Boston, where I work as a campus minister to students at Harvard and other campuses, I’ve found that this distinction is somehow consistently confusing. The experiential reality of being able to reason, and reason well in many areas of life, is sometimes simply assumed to be compatible with atheism. The thinking is, “On the one hand, I am an atheist, on the other hand, I love reason and use reason all the time. What’s the problem? Actually, how could there even be a problem?” If that describes you, and if you wonder why Christians go to so much trouble to respond to the atheist worldview, imagine for the sake of argument that the Christian faith really is true: there is a God, we are made in His image, and our capacity to reason is a gift from our loving Creator—a gift that could not have existed without both God's existence and God's benevolence. In this world, the situation of the reason-loving atheist would be a paradox: able to reason by the grace of God, but using his or her reasoning ability to deny God’s existence. From the Christian perspective, the atheist’s situation is akin to climbing the world’s tallest building in order to more ably broadcast the message that a belief in architects is a primitive fantasy. One of the most interesting themes of atheist literature is unbelievers’ testimonials about how they came to “unbelieve.” To give just four examples, Aldous Huxley in the 1930s, Thomas Nagel in the 1990s, and Michael Shermer and Richard Lewontin in the past few years, have all offered nonrational explanations for their beliefs. For instance, in 1937, Aldous Huxley acknowledged that: For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotical revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.... Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

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(Emphasis added.)

Five decades later, in 1997, Thomas Nagel honestly admitted to an irrational motivation for unbelief

in his book The Last Word: I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world. (Emphasis added.)

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And Michael Shermer, executive director of The Skeptics Society, has explained his deconversion story in a similar way: Socially, when I moved from theism to atheism, and science as a worldview, I guess, to be honest, I just liked the people in science, and the scientists, and their books, and just the lifestyle, and the way of living. I liked that better than the religious books, the religious people I was hanging out with—just socially. It just felt more comfortable for me. In reality I think most of us arrive at most of our beliefs for non-rational reasons, and then we justify

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them with these reasons after the fact.

(Emphasis added).

Richard Lewontin, who served as the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard, has made similar comments: We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the

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regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

(Emphasis added.)

For Huxley, “most” of his contemporaries rejected Christianity not because it was false, but in order to justify their political and sexual desires. Nagel believes that what is “responsible for much of the

scientism and reductionism of our time” is a fairly widespread “cosmic authority problem.” Shermer suggests that “most of us arrive at most of our beliefs for non-rational reasons, and then we justify them with reasons after the fact.” Lewontin admits that science doesn’t determine atheism, but rather, the “a priori adherence to material causes” mandates an explanatory cap that limits the results of atheists’ scientific research. In addition to this, when it comes to their defined philosophical positions, many of the leading atheists of our day have staked out commitments which seem to defy any reconciliation with the human ability to reason. For instance, Sam Harris denies that we are able to choose how we reason or what we come to believe: Yes, choices, efforts, intentions, reasoning, and other mental processes influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a stream of causes which precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter, but I cannot

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choose what I choose.

Like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins also acknowledges the non-rational factors that motivate atheistic beliefs. For instance, he has written that “human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.” In addition, he suggests that humanism—not God—is the best fit for our psychological needs: Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God—imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant—and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in

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the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?

However, we can actually go beyond atheist testimonials and the statements they’ve made which attribute their atheism or reasoning ability to deterministic forces outside of their control and psychological wish-fulfillment. In January of 2011 CNN ran a story about a study on atheists, led by psychologist Julie Exline at Case Western Reserve University, that found: In studies on college students, atheists and agnostics reported more anger at God during their lifetimes than believers. A separate study also found this pattern among bereaved individuals.

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What’s interesting about this study, of course, is that these individuals don’t necessarily even believe that God exists, yet they report greater levels of an angry emotional investment in God’s hypothetical character than people who actually believe that God is real. The correlation is certainly confirmed by the anecdotal evidence from Richard Dawkins’ writing. Recollect with me one of the most wellknown passages from his bestseller The God Delusion:

Yahweh: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,

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filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Yes, atheists’ belief systems are certainly “coloured by desire”!

From the outside looking in, it appears that many atheists, out of an overwhelming desire to crush religion and win a cultural battle on behalf of secularism, have convinced themselves that they are an exceptional group of human beings who are uniquely governed by reason. Freed from the perceived handcuffs of faith and dogma, they believe they have been singularly liberated to exercise rational thought and the tools of science on behalf of human progress. Unfortunately, these loud, public, and often repeated declarations of their great love for reason have also blinded them to some obvious realities. The truth is that atheists, like people across different religious traditions, are prone to believe things on faith, assume without argument the coherence of their belief system, blindly follow their leaders, accept what they want to be true, and dismiss contrary evidence. These are practical fallacies, if you will, or fallacious approaches to deciding one’s beliefs. I have highlighted in this chapter how this characterizes much of atheism today. As this book continues, we will also argue that atheism itself lacks the intellectual foundation to ground the ontological reality and daily use of reason. To those who consider themselves to be reasonable people by virtue of the fact that they are not religious, few things are more paradoxical than Christians who think that religious truth provides the necessary foundation for reason. We are prepared for you to respond to our arguments with scorn and invective, as the quotes that opened this chapter illustrated. But regardless of your response, our desire is respectfully and thoughtfully to continue the conversation about what is reasonable and what is true. You claim to love reason. We invite you to move out of the ironies of atheism and into the coherent rationality of the Christian worldview.

Chapter Three: Dawkins’ Delusion William Lane Craig Used by permission Excerpt taken from Contending with Christianity's Critics Edited by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig © 2009 B&H Publishing Group Richard Dawkins has emerged as the enfant terrible of the movement known as the New Atheism. His best-selling book The God Delusion has become the literary centerpiece of that movement. In it Dawkins aims to show that belief in God is a delusion, that is to say, “a false belief or impression,”

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or worse, “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” On pages 157-8 of his book, Dawkins summarizes what he calls “the central argument of my book.” Note it well. If this argument fails, then Dawkins’ book is hollow at its core. And, in fact, the argument is embarrassingly weak. It goes as follows: 1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises. 2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. 3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. 4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. 5. We don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics. 6. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist. This argument is jarring because the atheistic conclusion that “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist” seems to come suddenly out of left field. You don’t need to be a philosopher to realize that that conclusion doesn’t follow from the six previous statements. Indeed, if we take these six statements as premises of an argument intended to logically imply the conclusion “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist,” then the argument is patently invalid. No logical rules of inference would permit you to draw this conclusion from the six premises.

A more charitable interpretation would be to take these six statements, not as premises, but as summary statements of six steps in Dawkins’ cumulative argument for his conclusion that God does not exist. But even on this charitable construal, the conclusion “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist” simply doesn’t follow from these six steps, even if we concede that each of them is true and justified. The only delusion demonstrated here is Dawkins’ conviction that this is “a very serious argument against God’s existence.”

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So what does follow from the six steps of Dawkins’ argument? At most, all that follows is that we should not infer God’s existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God’s existence and even with our justifiably believing in God’s existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the ontological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn’t based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in him simply by faith. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God’s existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Indeed, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for the existence of God without thereby committing themselves to atheism. So Dawkins’ argument for atheism is a failure even if we concede, for the sake of argument, all its steps. But, in fact, several of these steps are plausibly false in any case. Take just step 3, for example. Dawkins’ claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: Who designed the designer? This objection is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point concerning inference to the best explanation as practiced in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and hatchet heads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent, extra-terrestrial agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these extra-terrestrial agents were or how they got there. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, one needn’t be able to explain the explanation. In fact, so requiring would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn’t be able to explain the designer. Second, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe, the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations—for example, how simplicity is to be weighted in comparison with other criteria like explanatory power,

explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth. If a less simple hypothesis exceeds its rivals in explanatory scope and power, for example, then it may well be the preferred explanation, despite the sacrifice in simplicity. But leave those questions aside. Dawkins’ fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is an entity comparable in complexity to the universe. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable physical quantities and constants

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(mentioned in the fifth step of Dawkins’ argument), a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas (it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus), but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind’s ideas,

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which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that’s worth. Other steps in Dawkins’ argument are also problematic; but I think enough has been said to show that his argument does nothing to undermine a design inference based on the universe’s complexity, not to speak of its serving as a justification of atheism. Several years ago my atheist colleague Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking’s argument against God in A Brief History of Time as “the worst atheistic argument in the history of

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Western thought.” With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins’ accession to the throne.

Chapter Four: Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason Chuck Edwards

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“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when [31] they put it down.” With this challenge, Richard Dawkins lays down the gauntlet in his best-selling book The God Delusion, declaring that only an atheist can claim the intellectual high ground of logic, science, and reason, and that those who believe in God are not only irrational, but delusional. Dawkins is no intellectual lightweight. He was the inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford and is founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He has authored a number of best-selling books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The Greatest Show on Earth. While his earlier books focused on science, and in particular the evidence for Darwinian evolution, in his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, Dawkins directs a frontal attack on religion, expounding the thesis that belief in a supernatural creator qualifies as a delusion: “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” The God Delusion was on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list for at least 51 weeks. To date, the English version has sold over 2 million copies. The book received many positive reviews. For example, The Economist praised “Dawkins's incisive logic and rapier wit,” concluding that "Everyone should read [32] it.” [33]

But other reviewers and subsequent books have taken Dawkins to task. In The American Spectator, for example, Richard Kirk wrote, “Far from being a serious philosophical book, this illedited and garrulous

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diatribe contains just about anything that crosses the author's mind” with

“page after sarcastic page of attacks against any foe Dawkins considers an easy target.”

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Who is right? Is The God Delusion full of “incisive logic” or is it a “garrulous diatribe”? This question is crucial, since Dawkins claims his purpose in writing is to convert religious believers to his brand of atheism. Are Dawkins’ arguments persuasive? More to the point, does he accomplish his goal of showing the irrationality, indeed, delusion, of belief in God?

The purpose of this chapter is to respond to a few issues that are most relevant to the question of whether belief in God is reasonable and whether atheists have the upper hand when it comes to rational thought regarding religion in general and Christianity in particular. The focus will be on further issues Dawkins brings up in The God Delusion, beyond those that William Lane Craig addressed in the previous chapter. Calling God Names The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

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Thus Dawkins begins Chapter Two, his discussion of “The God Hypothesis.” Imagine if a heavyweight prizefighter, at the starting bell, took off both gloves and started punching his opponent below the belt. In his opening round Dawkins does just that: with his first remark, Dawkins takes a below-the-belt swipe at God and religion. However, this swing at God turns out to be full of logical blunders and, thus, misses its mark completely. A little analysis reveals the flaws and fallacies. First, by attacking God in this way, Dawkins uses a tactic suspiciously similar to a fallacy called “poisoning the well.” It’s a rhetorical ploy often used in place of reasoned argument, with the intent to bias the reader emotionally against the opposing position. Dawkins uses practically every negative descriptor known to modern man in his portrayal of God. This produces a strong gut reaction: who would want anything to do with a God like that? Again, this is hitting below the belt; appealing to emotions rather than to reason. Knocking Down Straw Men But that is not all. Dawkins’ opening statement is a classic straw man (or, if you will, a straw God) argument. That is, like a scarecrow made only of straw, Dawkins’ description of God is easily knocked down, but it turns out to be a weakly constructed fake, an inaccurate description, a distortion of his opponents’ position. Dawkins admits a few paragraphs later, “It is unfair to attack such an easy target,” but the problem here is that Dawkins is aiming at the wrong target. Contrary to Dawkins’ claims, Jewish and Christian theologians throughout the centuries have never described God the way he imagines. In addition, he ignores the most basic understanding of the passages of the Bible from which he draws his outlandish claims. He demonstrates his misreading of the Bible, for example, in Chapter 7 of The God Delusion. Dawkins recalls a story from Judges 1921 of a man who allowed his concubine to be raped and murdered, then cut her to pieces and sent them to the twelve tribes of Israel as a rallying cry to battle. Dawkins writes, “Let’s charitably put it

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down again to the ubiquitous weirdness of the Bible.” One critic of Dawkins countered, “Why not put it down to the ubiquitous weirdness of people? One might as well blame Darwin for finches

dying in the Galapagos. Dawkins seems under the strange assumption that the author approves of [this episode].”

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When it comes to understanding the Bible, Dawkins’ arrogant bias against it and ignorance on how to read it are palpable. In the instance just mentioned, he fails to read the rest of the story, where he would have found that the last verse of Judges sums up the entire book with this editorial comment:

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“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.” In context, this sentence summarized the message of the entire book: people left to their own devices often go wrong. So by pulling this isolated episode out of its historical and literary context, Dawkins demonstrates that he has not done his homework and, in fact, has no idea what he is talking about. Dawkins may feel satisfied making snide remarks, but when they are so lacking in substance as this, they mean nothing. Dawkins misses more than just the historical/literary context of the Bible. He also fails to appreciate how the Bible has shaped civilization down through the ages, even from passages such as these. On this point author David Marshall (a co-contributor to this volume) writes, Judges describes the classic tradeoff between tribal freedom and the violence it allows, and the systematic oppression of a controlled agrarian society. The Old Testament is ambivalent about “progress” from one to the other. As we’ll see, that ambivalence ultimately helped Western civilization keep the best of both worlds. Here roads diverge: one leads to the Aztecs and their bloody pyramids, the other to Oxford. Whatever the virtues of the former, or vices of the latter, only a fool would deny that there are huge differences between the destinations. Dawkins is too busy looking down his nose at the ancient Hebrews to have an inkling what

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they did for him.

Dawkins cites several other examples from the Bible that he finds “strange,” “disgraceful,” and “appalling.” In each case, Marshall points to the context and historical significance of these passages,

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showing that Dawkins does not understand what he is talking about.

Dawkins’ triumphalism over having vanquished the God of the Old Testament is misplaced. He acknowledges none of the rebuttals to negative characterizations of God and the Bible. He does not give us accurate information, simply a series of bold-faced but uninformed assertions at that. Not only does Dawkins fail to land a blow on his theistic opponent, he demonstrates a profound ignorance of what he’s fighting over. But this is only the opening round. Dawkins has only begun his fight to demolish God. He next turns his attention to refuting the traditional philosophical arguments in favor of God’s existence. Dismissing Proofs for God’s Existence In Chapter 3, Dawkins turns to classic arguments for the existence of God developed by the medieval Christian philosophers Anselm (late 11 th century) and Thomas Aquinas (13 th century). For example, Aquinas’ cosmological argument relies on the principle of cause and effect to establish the existence

of a necessary Being (God) who is the cause of the physical universe. But Dawkins dismisses this argument by claiming it makes an “entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the

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regress.” In Dawkins mind, if we assume that everything has a cause, then what caused God? “Smack-down argument, I win!” he says in so many words. Dawkins’ offhand dismissal of the cosmological argument makes many philosophers cringe. Noted Christian philosopher and recently retired professor at the University of Notre Dame, Alvin Plantinga, stated, . . . Despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments

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would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

Even atheist philosopher Michael Ruse declared, “Dawkins is a man truly out of his depth. Does he honestly think that no philosopher or theologian has ever thought of or worried about the infinite regress of the cosmological argument?” Ruse goes on to write, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.”

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Ruse is right to feel embarrassed. Not only does Dawkins not understand the cosmological argument, he fails to mention, or does not even know, there are actually three different forms of it. Aquinas offered one form, but Gottfried Leibniz (d. 1716) proposed another, and Arabic philosophers developed a third form during the Middle Ages. This last form, known as the kalam cosmological argument, is considered by many current Christian theologians to be the strongest of the three. It has been defended over the years by many Christian philosophers. Simply put, the kalam cosmological argument proposes:

1) 2) 3)

Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Defenders of this form of the argument offer two philosophical reasons for the first premise, and both philosophical and scientific reasons for the second. On that basis, since the form of the argument is valid, the concluding third statement is true. Regarding the conclusion, William Lane Craig states, “philosophical analysis reveals that such a cause [of the universe] must have several of the principal

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theistic attributes.” Therefore, not only must God exist, but he must have many of the qualities generally ascribed to God in the Bible, i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, rationality, personhood, etc. Sophomoric Smugness What is so breathtaking about Dawkins’ smug dismissal of the cosmological argument is that he does

not attempt to respond to any of the specific points that Craig and others bring up. He doesn’t even acknowledge them; it’s as if he is completely ignorant of them. Craig is not an obscure author with whom Dawkins would not be familiar. He has defended this argument in three books dating back to 1979, written numerous articles over the years, and he has publically debated the issue with many skeptics, including the well-known atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. (More recently, since publication of The God Delusion, Craig toured England and challenged Dawkins to a debate. Atheistic philosophers in Dawkins’ own Oxford urged him to accept, but Dawkins demurred.) Instead of dealing with the serious points that Christian philosophers bring to the discussion, as others have, Dawkins simply asks, “Where did God come from?” With this, Dawkins shows he is totally unfamiliar with the wealth of literature on the subject and the strongest arguments currently employed. If he had done his homework, he would have realized his question misses the point entirely. The first point of the kalam cosmological argument is that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. God, by definition, never began to exist. God is the “Uncaused Cause.” So the question “Where did God come from?” is irrelevant! One might counter, why postulate God as having always existed? Isn’t it simpler to assume that the universe has always existed? Craig notes two reasons this is not reasonable to assume. First, logically it is impossible (for reasons that are beyond the scope of this chapter to explain) to cross an infinite span of time. But if the universe has existed since eternity past, we must cross an infinite amount of time to reach the current moment. Since that’s impossible, it follows that the physical space-time universe could not have existed since eternity past. Second, scientific evidence for the “Big Bang” and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics indicates that space-time-matter had a beginning.

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To simplify the matter, we can say that “something” must be eternal. That something could be either a material thing or immaterial thing. Since we have good evidence that matter (i.e., the universe) has not always existed, then the remaining alternative is that something immaterial is eternal and must have brought the material universe into existence. An immaterial, powerful, creative, intelligent, personal being has the qualities we refer to as God (using Dawkins’ own definition of the “God

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Hypothesis,” by the way

).

Dawkins brings up several other arguments that have been used to argue for God’s existence, and in each case dismisses them by arguing from a weak form of the proof. Over and over again, he builds straw men to knock down. So much for Dawkins’ “incisive logic.” In The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out to prove why there is “almost certainly no God.” In analyzing these opening chapters, however, we have found a flurry of unsubstantiated claims, straw man arguments, non-sequiturs, and question begging. Not a very good start for a book that claims to have banished God to the dustbin of ignorance and superstition. And not a very good representation of a professor who founded a self-named Foundation for Reason and Science (italics added). Since Dawkins is not trained in philosophy or theology, one might excuse him for bumbling the major philosophical arguments for the existence of God and misunderstanding the nature and intent of the

Bible. But when it comes to the area of science, particularly biology, is he any more cogent? The answer to that question might surprise you. Dawkins’ “Sheer Luck” Scenario In chapter 4 of The God Delusion, Dawkins is more in his element, that of biology. And this is the chapter that Dawkins claims to make his strongest argument for why God does not exist, giving it the title, “Why There Almost Certainly is no God.” Dawkins writes, “This chapter has contained the central argument of my book . . .” In Chapter Three of this book William Lane Craig deals with Dawkins’ six points of his central argument and shows them to be logically lacking. My purpose here is to point out additional ways in which Dawkins practices sloppy logic, poor reasoning, and worldview bias. In this chapter, Dawkins is fond of using the analogy of climbing a mountain—Mount Improbable, he calls it, drawing from an earlier book—to illustrate how natural selection works to arrive at improbable things like eyes and wings. He adds in a generous dose of genetic mutations as the raw material for moving, step by step up the mountain, from simple to more complex structures. This is all standard Darwinian evolutionary biology. But mutations presuppose that the genetic code of life is already present to begin with. So the real question is not, can the genetic code be rearranged or changed? We know it can, at least to some extent. (We also know that most mutations are harmful to the species, or neutral, with a few being adaptively positive.) But the real question is: what is the origin of this unique molecular coding in the first place? Here we discover a major flaw with Dawkins’ mountain analogy—how does the first living cell arrive at the foot of the mountain to begin the ascent to more complex life? Or, put differently, what is the origin of the first life? You will be amazed at Dawkins’ reasoning, or, rather, lack thereof. Getting to Mount Improbable How does Dawkins account for the origin of life? Dawkins’ explanation is an “initial stroke of

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luck”! (I’m not kidding, those are his actual words.) But that’s not all. In addition to the origin of life, Dawkins acknowledges there are a number of other unique, “one off” events in the history of life. He mentions the origin of the eukaryotic cell (a complex cell with a membrane-bound nucleus), consciousness, plus other unspecified events. In each case, Dawkins admits the need for a “stroke of luck,” “sheer luck,” “some luck,” and “major infusions of luck.” To be fair, Dawkins couches each of these lucky scenarios in the context of the “anthropic principle,” which I will deal with shortly. The point here is that appeal to luck is an incredible admission from one of today’s most vocal atheists and defender of rationality. Here Dawkins is reduced to basing his theory on “major infusions of luck” and “momentous, difficult and statistically improbable” steps! This is an unabashed appeal to chance. It is a scientific “explanation” that lacks any semblance of explanation. Yet, earlier in his book, Dawkins chastises people who claim that evolution is based on chance, writing that these people know nothing about the process of natural selection. But when it comes to the major events that make life possible, Dawkins is at a total loss to produce any scientific

explanation other than appealing to chance, or, as he puts it, “sheer luck.”

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Dawkins is unfazed by this inconsistency. He attempts to provide a way out of this impasse by the following assertion: However improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened [without God’s help] on Earth because we are here.

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This is a classic instance of “begging the question,” also known as circular reasoning. Dawkins assumes that nature is all there is, he knows therefore life must have come from natural causes. How does he know life came from natural causes? Because he assumes nature is all there is! This illustrates Dawkins’ dogmatic adherence to atheistic naturalism no matter how counter-intuitive or incredibly improbable the process might be. But apart from Dawkins’ naturalistic dogmatism, the question is how non-living matter could conceivably have morphed into the first living, reproducing cell. Dawkins answers that question by

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appealing to a lucky break and “by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities.” What he means is that if there are enough planets in the universe, eventually some of them are bound to produce life. As it turns out, this proposal of multiple earth-like (or life-friendly) planets sprinkled throughout the universe is another unfounded assumption on his part, and Dawkins fails to be persuasive in any scientific sense. That’s because the actual likelihood of other life-supporting planets has been investigated and found absurdly improbable. In their book, The Privileged Planet, authors Guillermo

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Gonzalez and Jay Richards describe groundbreaking research into how the Earth is uniquely situated to sustain complex life. These “just right” conditions include the optimal distance from the right kind of star, plate tectonics, a nearby moon of the right size to stabilize the earth’s rotational axis, the shielding presence (from asteroid bombardment) of larger planets nearby, the right amount of oxygen and water . . . just to name a few. Mathematically speaking, Gonzalez and Richards suggest the probability of a planet having all of the necessary conditions to sustain complex life is 10 to the negative fifteenth power, or one thousandth of a trillionth. Dawkins’ last bastion of hope for a naturalistic explanation of all these factors coming together in one place requires massive infusions of luck! (Note to self: don’t take these odds to Vegas!) The Anthropic Principle to the Rescue? Dawkins is unfazed by (or perhaps ignorant of) the improbabilities. He estimates that a conservative

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number of available planets in the universe to sustain life is a billion billion. Based on this assumption, he writes, “Suppose it [the spontaneous arising of life] was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. . . . life will still have arisen on a billion planets—of which Earth, of

course, is one.”

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Dawkins concludes that given these odds, and since we are here, the highly improbable has obviously happened. This is a version of the anthropic principle, which, simply stated, says that the reason we can be confident a planet suited for life is not impossible, regardless of how improbable it may be, is because we’re here. He turns the anthropic principle into a reason to support his thesis that God is not needed for the origin of life. He writes, “The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.”

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But is the anthropic principle really an alternative to the design hypothesis? Dawkins seems to think so. But notice the following observation by Oxford mathematician John Lennox: All the anthropic principle does is to tell us that for life to exist, certain necessary conditions must be fulfilled. But what it does not tell us is why those necessary conditions are fulfilled, nor how, granted they are fulfilled, life arose. Dawkins is making the elementary mistake of thinking that necessary conditions are sufficient. But they are not: in order to get a first class degree at Oxford it is necessary to get into the University; but, as many students know, it is certainly not sufficient. The anthropic principle, far from giving an explanation for the origin

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of life, is an observation that gives rise to the need for such an explanation.

Imagine standing before a firing squad of fifty expert marksmen and after hearing their rifles fire in unison, you realize that you are still alive; they all missed! Would your first thought be, “Well, of course they all missed; I’m still here!” No, you would naturally wonder why they all missed, and

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common sense would lead you to conclude that there must be a reason for what just took place. This scenario illustrates how Dawkins misunderstands the point of the anthropic principle by overlooking the obvious question, “Why are things arranged this way?” What we find, then, is that Dawkins is wrong to use the anthropic principle as an alternative to design for explaining the origin of life. But not only that, he is unable to give a scientific explanation for life’s origin. Instead, he states, “. . . The origin of life is . . . [a] major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck . . .” section.

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He’s only left with lucky guesses. We will see why in the next

Thinking Impossible Things! Dawkins wants us to believe that given multitudinous opportunities and a whole universe full of luck, presto-chango, anything can happen, right? Well, only if the “anything” is in the realm of possibilities. On the other hand, some things will never happen no matter how many tries or how much luck you have. That’s because some things are simply not possible. For example, drawing a square circle is not within the realm of possibility because, by definition, a square has four sides of equal length and a circle does not. That is one kind of impossibility. Another

type of impossibility is based on what we know from well-established science, like the principle that it is impossible for an unaided human to survive in the vacuum of space. It is this second kind of impossibility that Dawkins fails to fully appreciate. Dawkins’ anthropic

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induced origin-of-life assumption turns a blind eye to the well-established law of biogenesis. To understand the significance of this law, we need to go back over 350 years to when people thought that life generated itself spontaneously. For example, it was once believed that live worms popped out of the mud. But through careful observations, scientists refuted that idea. One of the first was Italian physician Francesco Redi, who demonstrated as far back as 1668 that spontaneous generation was a false notion. Redi showed, for example, that maggots do not generate spontaneously on meat, but instead come from eggs left by flies. Later, in 1860, one year after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, French chemist Louis Pasteur further confirmed Redi’s initial observations. Through a series of experiments, Pasteur proved conclusively that microorganisms appear from airborne sources and not spontaneously. This laid to rest the controversy over spontaneous generation. The law of biogenesis was confirmed. The law of biogenesis states that life only comes from pre-existing life. In other words, You don't get something living from something non-living. This is one of the most fundamental laws of biology. It has never been refuted. All of our experience and experiments confirm this law to be true. Worms come from other worms, not from inorganic mud. Green mold on bread comes from pre-existing mold spores in the air. Human babies come from living human parents. Since the law of biogenesis is confirmed scientifically, why does Dawkins insist that life originated from non-living matter? Isn’t that a contradiction of well-established scientific law? This is the fallacy of wishful thinking, not the rigors of scientific inquiry. Good-bye rational, scientific observation; hello dogmatic naturalism. Primordial Soup, Anyone? In order to get around the contradiction with the law of biogenesis, naturalistic/atheistic scientists like Dawkins rely on a story line that assumes things were different “back then.” Of course conditions on the early earth would have been different, but does that mean it’s possible to start with inorganic elements and arrive at something alive? Verification for this idea is sought in various "origin of life" scenarios, including “primordial soup” experiments and “RNA world” conditions. Yet, these laboratory experiments and models have never produced anything close to a living cell. In fact, there are a number of known major problems with these experiments that would keep any molecule from

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becoming a living, reproducing cell. Scientists working in origin-of-life studies admit that they have yet to propose a theory for the first life that does not run up hard against these barriers. These roadblocks are well-known laws of chemistry understood by all chemists. But Dawkins must get life from non-living matter, so he makes whatever assumptions he must make. It seems Dawkins is not dealing with improbabilities, but impossibilities. Even dump-truck loads of luck and billions of planets on which to experiment won’t help Dawkins out of this predicament.

The problem that Dawkins faces is there is no natural process known to man that can produce something living from something non-living. Atheists are fond of accusing Christians of “God of the Gaps” argumentation, where God is simply inserted to fill in our lack of knowledge. But it is clear that the issue here is not our lack of knowledge; to the contrary, it is what we do know from chemistry and biology that leads us to the conclusion that getting something living from something non-living is impossible. In fact, the entire trajectory of the past 60-plus years of research into the composition and inner workings of single-celled bacteria is toward greater and greater specified and complex interaction of multitudes of proteins and, thus, research is moving further from a reductionistic/naturalistic solution. For this reason, Dawkins is reduced to appealing to “lucky” scenarios: Luck of the Gaps, actually. But even all the luck in the entire universe won’t change the laws of nature. Some will object to the above reasoning by reminding us that science progresses and discovers new laws, overturning what was once thought to be true. So, for example, what if future laboratory experiments produce life? Does that override the law of biogenesis? Would it change the game in favor of atheism? Actually, it does not. Even if “life” is someday produced in the lab, it would only demonstrate that scientists are finally able to get the right ingredients and conditions “fine-tuned” to reproduce what may have originally happened. That by itself does nothing to negate the idea that God exists or is superfluous as the Creator of life. In fact, it would strengthen the “anthropic principle” and the need for an intelligent “fine-tuner,” as mentioned above. The reason Dawkins continues to maintain his position on the question of life’s origin is because he has locked himself into a naturalistic universe. This decision comes from his worldview. Dawkins’ theology excludes any supernatural God and his philosophy assumes nature is the totality of reality and the scientific method the only way of gaining knowledge. From this a priori foundation, he attempts to build an explanation for first life. Therefore, we conclude Dawkins’ explanation is not scientifically based, but instead, an assumption made necessary by his religiously held belief in atheism/naturalism/scientism.

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Does Religion Cause Child Abuse?

Throughout Chapter 9 of The God Delusion, Dawkins turns his attention to religious training. He maintains that teaching religion to children is child abuse. This is not just an arresting figure of speech or an exaggeration to make a point; Dawkins soberly compares religious upbringing to sexual abuse, and finds religion the worse of the two. Surprisingly for the scientist that he is, he supports this with no systematic data; just a few pages of anecdotes from people who suffered at the hands of ill-advised religious education. Stories like that, sadly, can be found; but what do they represent? If religious training is thought to be child abuse, an obvious hypothesis follows: Children with religious upbringings should show some of the symptoms that are

typical of abused children. These symptoms are well known. They include fear, panic attacks, eating disorders, depression, low self-confidence, irritability, difficulty relating with others, substance abuse, and so on. Not every abuse victim experiences most or all of these, but outcomes like these are typical. If a religious upbringing equals abuse, there ought to be signs that something like this happens to children of religious families. There is empirical data to test such a hypothesis. It was published well before Dawkins’ book, so he had ample opportunity at the time to know what science had to say. Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led a massive, authoritative study called the National Study of Youth and Religion. The results were published in the 2005 book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers (with co-author Melinda Lundquist Denton), published by Oxford University Press (yes, that’s Dawkins’ university). It is a goldstandard study, the best of its kind to date. This study sorted its 3,290 participants into levels of religious involvement: the Devoted, the Regulars, the Sporadic, and the Disengaged. Because America’s predominant religious groupings are Christian, the “Devoted” and “Regulars” were predominantly Christian—Protestant and Catholic. Therefore these results can fairly be taken as relating specifically to Christianity. (Results for other religions are difficult to determine from the data.) What effect, then, did a religious upbringing have, as compared to a non-religious one? The closer teenagers were to “Devoted” rather than “Disengaged,” the less they engaged in these negative behaviors: Habits: Smoking, drinking, marijuana use, TV watching, pornography use, “action” video game use, R-rated movies; At school: Poor grades, cutting classes, getting suspended or expelled; Attitude: Bad temper, rebellious toward parents; Sex: Early physical involvement, including number of partners and age of first sexual contact. Those more “Devoted” on the scale showed higher rates of these positive outcomes:

Emotional well-being: Satisfaction with physical appearance, planning for the future, thinking about the meaning of life, feeling cared for, freedom from depression, not feeling alone and misunderstood, not feeling “invisible,” not often feeling guilty, having a sense of meaning to life, getting along well with siblings; Relationships with adults: Closeness with parents, number of adults connected to, feeling understood by parents, sensing that parents pay attention, feeling they get the “right amount of freedom” from parents; Moral reasoning and honesty: Belief in stable, absolute morality; not pursuing a “get-ahead” mentality; not just pleasure-seeking; less lying to parents and cheating in school; Compassion: Caring about the needs of the poor, caring about the elderly, caring about racial justice; Community: Participation in groups, financial giving, volunteer work (including with people of different races and cultures), helping homeless people, taking leadership in organizations. The findings are overwhelming. On page after page, chart after chart, on every one of the ninety-one variables studied, the closer teens were to the “Devoted” end of the scale, the healthier their lives were. These are the results of Dawkins’ “child abuse.” This is what he complains is so bad for children. H. Allen Orr wrote, “[Dawkins] has a preordained set of conclusions at which he’s determined to arrive. Consequently, [he] uses any argument, however feeble, that [62] seems to get him there.” In other words, he sees just what he wants to see. Isn’t it ironic? That’s what he accuses believers of doing, but he is manifestly guilty of this himself. What can we conclude? This study suggests (though its methods cannot prove) that growing up Christian is a very good thing. Concerning Dawkins and his book, we can easily see that his attack is entirely inconsistent with scientific knowledge on the subject. So it appears we can also draw a conclusion concerning Richard Dawkins himself. He is the founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. We have already seen how severely his illogic in The God Delusion undermines the Reason

side of his self-proclaimed identity. His training, though, is as a scientist; and his last professorial position was (as noted earlier) Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He insists that science is the standard for all knowledge. And yet here we have him claiming that raising children to hold religious beliefs is child abuse. He doggedly maintains that position in the teeth of all that science has to say about the subject. He is, to be blunt, as thoroughly prejudiced and anti-scientific as he could be on this topic (not to mention the scientific questions attached to his “sheer luck” scenario for the origin of life). What is the Public to Understand of Science if this is their example? Perhaps that it is a tool to be employed when it suits one’s purpose, and to be ignored otherwise. One has to wonder whether Dawkins’ Foundation ought to be named the Foundation for Reason and Science That Supports His Atheism But Ignores Reason and Science That Supports Any Other Belief. It’s cumbersome, to be sure. But it’s considerably more accurate. Resources Among the books rebutting many other topics found in The God Delusion are: The Truth Behind the New Atheism (2007), by David Marshall The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007), by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (2008), by John F. Haught The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (2008), by David Berlinski For a unique learning experience, purchase the iPod tutor: the argument against richard dawkins’ the God delusion, a project of the Intelligent Community Initiative. This audio tutor, consisting of a User Guide and over 200 companion audio tracks, carefully dissects Dawkins’ arguments and exposes its numerous logical fallacies and factual errors, and demonstrates that Dawkins’ primary argument is itself a faith-based construction.

Chapter Five: Unreason at the Head of Project Reason Tom Gilson The outcome was predictable enough, in retrospect. On one side of the debate floor stood the cofounder and chairman of Project Reason, a non-profit organization “dedicated to reason,” which “draws on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.” This was the man who would later write, It seems to me that many nonbelievers have forgotten—or never knew—what it is like to suffer an unhappy collision with scientific rationality. We are open to good evidence and sound argument as a matter of principle, and are generally willing to follow wherever they

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may lead.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the floor stood a man often (and accurately) described as a theologian: a religious man, in other words. The one man’s first book was on reason in opposition to religion: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. The other’s first published book was on ancient history, and of course religion: The Son Rises: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.

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So the outcome could hardly have been in doubt; and from one perspective, it proceeded as might have been expected. One debater brought forth a series of logical arguments based on precise definitions, carefully delineated lines of thought, and technically sophisticated modal and syllogistic logic. He put forth one logical argument that he boldly described as a completely unanswerable “knock-down” defeater for the other person’s position, and indeed, if his reasoning proved sound, the other’s central claims would end up being demolished. His opponent, astonishingly, ignored most of his arguments completely, as if he hadn’t even heard them. If he did, then it seemed he failed to recognize how much damage they had done his position— not in a rhetorical manner, but by the strength of their logic. He offered nothing whatever in response to the “knock-down” argument. Instead he simply held forth on his own views, with no regard for how utterly they had just been undermined. Or maybe he did recognize how thoroughly his position was being dismantled, and decided it would be imprudent to acknowledge his opponent’s advantage. For he took an entirely different tack: one based largely on rhetoric and emotion instead of reason. For twelve long minutes he hammered on all that could be considered disreputable, not so much in his opponent’s position, but among the worst of those who agreed with his opponent. Though his argument was not entirely lacking in rational appeal, it was peppered with enough identifiable fallacies and distortions to seriously undermine any claim he might have made to reasonability. He employed red herrings, equivocations, and straw man versions of his opponent’s claims. His opponent called him on many of these errors, but to no avail.

It’s a good thing at least one person was there representing reason. The contrast seemed all too predictable, but for one thing: the one who focused on a reasoned approach to discourse was the theologian and philosopher, William Lane Craig. The one who appealed to emotion, whose arguments were choked with fallacies, was the man representing Project Reason, Sam Harris. In the introduction to this book I proposed that the New Atheists have misappropriated the term “reason.” This April 7, 2011 debate was a paradigmatic case of that, illustrating weaknesses in Harris’s rational discourse that can also be readily found throughout his published works. Of course

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my critique of the debate demands substantiation, which I will now attempt to offer. In this chapter I will show that Sam Harris, despite his self-promotion as defender of reason, resorted to classic fallacies including semantic tricks, equivocation, begging the question, poisoning the well, and more. To show that this wasn’t just a bad night for him, I will also look at parallel examples from his published work. I must of course begin at the beginning. William Lane Craig’s Reasoned Approach Craig gave the opening speech. The question to be debated was, “Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural?” From the beginning Craig agreed with Harris that objective morality exists. He proposed a definition for objective morality, and then moved on to clarify the terms of the debate. The issue at hand, he said, was which of two worldviews provides a more adequate foundation for objective morality: theism (belief in one good Creator God), or naturalism (roughly, the view that nothing exists but matter and energy, and their interactions according to necessity or chance). Crucially, Craig made it clear that this question could be addressed independently of whether naturalism or theism was true. For purposes of the debate topic, he argued, the relevant questions were, if naturalism is true, can it ground objective morality? And, if theism is true, can it ground objective morality? These were questions that could be discussed without resolving their conditionals, their if clauses. So for Craig, the debate was not about the truth of theism, but about the implications for ethics that would follow from the truth of either theism or naturalism. Harris did not object to this point. Craig briefly explained how a morally perfect God, if he exists, could be the foundation for objective moral values and duties. He then suggested a number of difficulties naturalism has in providing a foundation for objective moral values and duties. I will not attempt to build Craig’s case all over again, for that is not necessary for my purpose in this essay. (For his full argument, I refer you to the debate itself.) Neither is it germane to my purpose to show whether Craig’s arguments prevailed. I propose instead to demonstrate the rational manner in which Craig approached the issues, and to contrast that with the approach Harris took. Craig opened the door for Harris to respond, rebut, and even refute him on rational grounds, if such rebuttal or refutations were possible. Harris did not take that opportunity, as we shall see; instead he responded, to a disturbing extent, with appeals to emotion, fallacious logic, and rhetorical maneuvering.

A Logic-Oriented Approach Craig argued (the numbering is mine, not his):

1) If humans are products of nature and nothing else, and if nature intrinsically lacks moral values and duties, then it follows that humans have no objective moral values and duties. 2) To regard humans as having moral significance while animals do not is, on naturalism, to assign a groundless, speciesist, (borrowing Peter Singer’s term), and probably false ontological distinction between animals and humans. 3) To hold, as Harris does, that objective morality is grounded in the well-being of sentient creatures, is to re-define goodness, not to explain its grounding. As Craig said, To ask, “Why is maximizing creatures’ well-being good?” is on his definition the same as asking, “Why does maximizing creatures’ well-being maximize creatures’ well-being?” It’s just a tautology. It’s just talking in circles! So, Dr. Harris has quote-unquote “solved” the Value Problem just by re-defining his terms. It’s nothing but wordplay . . . His so-called “solution” is just a semantical trick of an arbitrary and idiosyncratic redefinition of the terms “good” and “evil” in non-moral vocabulary.

4) Harris claimed, “If we have a moral duty to do anything, we have a duty to avoid the worst possible misery.” Unfortunately the dependent clause here is the very issue at stake in this debate. Do we have a moral duty to do anything? This is the conclusion Harris needs to establish, and it begs the question to begin with it. 5) Ought implies can, but Harris’s denial of human free will implies cannot. That is, if humans cannot actually make choices as human agents, then it follows we cannot make morally significant choices. Therefore there can be no moral duties. 6) Harris identifies moral goodness with sentient creatures’ well-being, but that is impossible. This point bears further attention. Rather than trying to summarize, I will quote Craig on it. On the next-to-last page of his book, Dr. Harris makes the telling admission that if people like rapists, liars, and thieves could be just as happy as good people, then his “moral landscape” would no longer be a moral landscape. Rather, it would just be a continuum of well-being whose peaks are occupied by good and bad people, or evil people, alike. Now what’s interesting about this is that earlier in the book, Dr. Harris explained that about

three million Americans are psychopathic. That is to say, they don’t care about the mental states of others. They enjoy inflicting pain on other people. But that implies that there’s a possible world, which we can conceive, in which the continuum of human well-being is not a moral landscape. The peaks of well-being could be occupied by evil people. But that entails that in the actual world, the continuum of well-being and the moral landscape are not identical either. For identity is a necessary relation. There is no possible world in which some entity A is not identical to A. So if there’s any possible world in which A is not identical to B, then it follows that A is not in fact identical to B. Now since it’s possible that human well-being and moral goodness are not identical, it follows necessarily that human well-being and goodness are not the same, as Dr. Harris has asserted in his book. Craig may have left some debate listeners behind with his language of “possible worlds” and “identity is a necessary relation.” It is a technical point of logical reasoning, to be sure. But the debate audience could hardly have missed what Craig said next, when he asserted emphatically that if he was arguing correctly, the logical foundation undergirding Harris’s position utterly collapses. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this challenge. This was the argument that Craig identified as an absolute “knock-down” of Harris’s position. That’s because Harris rests his grounding for morality entirely on morality goodness’s being identical with the well-being of sentient creatures. Craig argued that this identity is logically impossible. If Craig were right, then Harris’s moral theory would be finished, overthrown from its very foundations. Right or Wrong: A Rationally-Ordered Question Were Craig’s claims correct? If so, then Harris’s position would be in deep jeopardy. Points 5 and 6 in particular seem fatal. Craig claimed that denying free will, as Harris does, makes moral duties literally impossible (5); and that Harris’s “moral landscape” cannot be identified with the well-being of sentient creatures (6), as Harris insists it must be. To put it bluntly, if Craig’s reasoning for either point 5 or 6 (especially 6) was on the mark, then everything Dr. Harris writes and teaches about human morality is wrong. Everything. But let us pause and set this discussion in context of the overall point I’m making in this chapter. Some readers may think Craig’s logic succeeds, and some may think it fails. For present purposes, what counts is that the success or failure of Craig’s logic is precisely the right question. Craig’s success (if he succeeded) would be in the realm of logical reasoning: his ability to demonstrate that his conclusions followed validly from accurate or reliable premises. His failure (if he failed) would be a failure to do just that. He mounted his battled on the field of logical reasoning. There he would stand or fall. The Debate: Sam Harris’s Failure of Rationality So it could have been—and it seems that for the founder of Project Reason it should have been—the perfect opportunity to show this theologian he had picked the wrong field to fight on. It could have been Harris’s shining opportunity to show what reason really means. All he needed to do was to meet Craig with his own reasoned response.

So what rational, logical, reasoned arguments did Harris use to respond? One struggles to find any reasoned answer at all! He paid Craig’s deadliest arguments—points 5 and 6, the ones that would prove Harris’s moral theories irrecoverably wrong—no attention whatsoever. These (especially 6) were “knock-down blows” aimed square at the heart of Harris’s argument. Harris didn’t deflect them. He didn’t counter-punch. He didn’t even duck! Unlike in a boxing match, of course, Harris didn’t literally fall to the mat. Another sports analogy may be more fitting. Let’s think of Harris as the founder of Project Baseball, and Craig as having hit a long fly ball with three men on base. Unless Harris catches it deep in the outfield, Craig’s team wins the game. So what does Harris do? He places a football on the ground and attempts a field goal. It’s a ridiculous image, but not, I think, an unfair one. Craig came to the debate ready to reason. Harris came and played a different game altogether. When he did join in the reasoning game, he did it poorly. To Define Irrationality I’m sure Harris doesn’t see it that way. In his books, articles, and speeches, he insists that religion is by nature irrational; therefore Craig, as a believer in God, is by definition irrational. By contrast, Harris, as a skeptic, stands as a representative of reason. Harris’s image of rationality needs a closer look, however. A complete analysis of the term is beyond the scope of this chapter, but clearly it cannot just be a matter of holding one set of beliefs and rejecting another. In fact, it cannot even be defined simply as holding true beliefs and rejecting false ones. Suppose George believes the earth is round. That’s true, but is it rational? We can’t answer the question until we know why George believes the earth is round. If he believes it (as most of us do) because trustworthy authorities agree on the matter, that’s rational. But maybe George believes it because he likes basketball, basketballs are round, and therefore the earth is round. That’s irrational. Suppose on the other hand Antonius in 7th-century Italy believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. He was wrong, but was he irrational? I don’t think so. Based on the best evidence at hand, and the overwhelming consensus among authorities on the subject, he drew an appropriately rational conclusion. I do not mean that he came to the right conclusion, but that there is nothing to indicate a flaw in his reasoning processes. He simply lacked important evidence. What then does the state of being irrational look like? Irrational is an imprecise word, a loaded word, with almost medical implications. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam Harris thought religious faith was pathological, but to debate that question could hardly be fruitful; it’s little better than namecalling anyway. There is, however, an aspect of rationality that is freely available and appropriate for examination and discussion: competence in rational discourse. One who is competent in rational discourse bases his beliefs, and his arguments on their behalf, on adequate evidence and sound logical processes. He is open to changing his beliefs when shown that his evidence or his reasoning is wrong or inadequate. We ought to be able to expect such competence from any strong proponent of reason.

One who is incompetent in rational discourse can be identified by his supporting his beliefs with poor evidence and/or fallacious logic, by calling upon feelings to support his conclusion in place of evidence and logic, or by resorting to empty rhetorical methods of persuasion. The incompetent person (in this sense) will often refuse to acknowledge flaws in his use of evidence or reason, and will also refuse to adjust his beliefs when shown that they are based in fallacies. To be incompetent in rational discourse does not mean that one never presents a sound argument; it rather it means that one mixes the unsound with the sound in excessive degree, or without apparent awareness of the difference. In this debate, Sam Harris displayed that kind of incompetence. Incompetence on Display That is a strong claim that requires backing. Unfortunately there are many examples to be found in Harris’s debate with Craig.

1) Harris stated, “I hope it’ll be clear to you, at the end of this hour, that religion is not an answer to this problem. Belief in God is not only unnecessary for a universal morality, it is itself a source of moral blindness.” Craig had not argued that either religion or belief could supply the grounding necessary for morality. He said that only God himself could. Therefore religion and belief were strictly irrelevant to Craig’s argument. If he thought Craig had erred in pointing to God, rather than belief in God, as the relevant issue, he never took the opportunity to say so. Instead he treated them throughout the debate as if they functioned as some kind of rebuttal to Craig’s position.

2) Harris assumed the existence of objective moral values and duties, and used that assumption as a question-begging basis for his argument that science must provide a foundation for these objective moral facts. He built a key portion of his case on assertions such as the following: What I’m saying is, the minimum standard of moral goodness is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. If we should do anything in this universe, if we ought to do anything, if we have a moral duty to do anything, it’s to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone. Combining this assumption with his belief that naturalism was true, he came to the conclusion that naturalism provides adequate grounding for objective morality. But the assumption he was making, as Craig pointed out (Point 4 in Craig’s case, above) was the very thing he needed to demonstrate. He was arguing in a circle. Harris ignored Craig on this point of correction.

3) Harris begged the question again when he assumed there is no God behind the existence of human minds:

Questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, depend upon mind. They depend upon the possibility of experience. Minds are natural phenomena. They depend upon the laws of nature in some way. Morality and human values, therefore, can be understood through science. How do we know that minds are natural phenomena unless we know that naturalism is true? Imagine if Craig had done the same thing: “Questions of right and wrong depend on the mind, minds are made by God, therefore, morality comes from God.” That would obviously be begging the question. Craig avoided basic logical fallacies like this, whereas Harris never seemed to realize he was making such mistakes.

4) In a most interesting moment of the debate, Harris committed not one but two offenses against sound reason: poisoning the well, and the fallacy of non sequitur. “Poisoning the well” is not so much a logical fallacy as it is an illegitimate rhetorical maneuver to prejudice the audience against one’s opponent. Non sequitur, Latin for “it does not follow,” refers to drawing a conclusion that does not follow from the stated premises. Harris said, Science has always been in the values business. We simply cannot speak of facts without resorting to values. Consider the simplest statement of scientific fact: Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This seems as value-free an utterance as human beings ever make. But what do we do when someone doubts the truth of this proposition? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. The value of understanding the world. The value of evidence. The value of logical consistency. What if someone says, “Well, that’s not how I choose to think about water. Ok, I’m Biblical chemist, and I read in Genesis 1 that God created water before he created light. So I take that to mean that there were no stars. So there were no stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like oxygen; therefore there was no oxygen to put in the water, so either God created, either water has no oxygen, or God created special oxygen to put in the water—but I don’t think he would do that, because that would be Biblically inelegant.” Ok, what can we say to such a person? Ok, all we can do is appeal to scientific values. And if he doesn’t share those values, the conversation is over. Ok, if someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

I think this split between facts and values should look really strange to you on its face. His characterizations of a “biblical chemist” and “biblically inelegant” are deeply disconnected from reality. No thinking Bible-believer thinks the Bible leads science to such conclusions. Thus he poisoned the well against both Craig and Christianity. Who knows? Some listeners to this debate might not have known how false these representations were. Harris, however, certainly knew. (Either that or he was speaking out of an irresponsible ignorance.)

But that’s not all. In this passage he was attempting to support his claim that ethical values can be derived from facts of nature. In favor of that conclusion, he offered the evidence that those who study nature do so under the guidance of certain “scientific values.” The conclusion unfortunately has no logical connection to the evidence: that which guides a field of study does not thereby become a conclusion to be drawn from that field of study. This was a non sequitur, a clearly identifiable flaw in his reasoning.

5) Harris confused denying a negative claim (for example, “I’m not sure this is false”) with asserting a positive one (“I’m sure this is true”). Echoing language he used twice in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (pp. 37 and 91), he told Craig, “It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality.” Later he repeated, “And if science is unscientific . . . if having a value assumption at the core renders science unscientific, what is scientific?” It seemed that he wanted us to conclude from this that it is scientific—it is a conclusion that can be derived from science—to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality, and that it is scientific for science to place value assumptions at its core. But this is confused. To say something is not unscientific is not the same as to say it is scientific. It is not unscientific to say that I like blueberries on my breakfast cereal; it is not scientific to say so either.

6) Harris was careless with his terminology, tripping over a logical fallacy known as equivocation (using the same word twice as if it means the same thing in both contexts, when in fact it does not). Craig carefully identified a specific case of Harris doing so, saying, Now here Dr. Harris, I think, is guilty of misusing terms like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” in equivocal ways. He will often use them in non-moral senses. For example, he’ll say there are objectively good and bad moves in chess. Now that’s clearly not a moral use of the terms “good” and “bad.” You just mean they’re not apt to win or produce a winning strategy. Harris gave no response to that.

7) Harris’s first rebuttal was essentially twelve minutes of appeals to emotion rather than to reason. Worse, this tirade came against a deity he wanted his audience to identify as the Christian God, but which was actually a clumsy caricature of the God Christians worship. For example: We are being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. It’s psychotic because this is completely delusional. There’s no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh. . . .

This to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, ok, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic. This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. Granted that Harris thinks religion is wrong, bad, and evil. Granted that he thinks his conclusion is the only rational one. What we want to know is, what makes his conclusion more rational than Craig’s? A tirade is no answer. Ignoring logical arguments that undermine your position is also no answer. Arguing fallaciously is no answer either. These are, rather, signs of rational incompetence, hardly befitting the chairman and co-founder of Project Reason. I think I have made my point. Craig made a point of employing rational argumentation in his speeches. If he committed any logical fallacies, Harris didn’t notice them, or at least did not remark on them as such. If on the other hand Craig’s reasoning was sound, Harris’s case was (not to put it too finely) thoroughly demolished. What kind of rationally-ordered defense against this did Harris offer? Not much of one; and in a sense, none at all. It’s not that there was no logical reasoning to be found in Harris’s debate performance, but that it was completely lacking where it counted most. He completely ignored the logic of Craig’s most serious challenges to his position. When he did attempt to respond to Craig’s logic, he committed multiple identifiable fallacies of reasoning. Besides that, he engaged in taunting, emotional appeals, and other tactics of pure rhetorical maneuvering. In Print as Well as In Public Of course this was just one evening’s discussion. One might say in Harris’s defense, “Maybe he’s just not skilled as a debater. Maybe he’s much more competent in other contexts.” So what about his published work? The same flaws appear there as well. It must be noted first of all that Craig’s “knock-down” argument, that goodness cannot logically be equated with human well-being, was not directed to some minor, tangential thread. It was aimed squarely at the main thesis upon which Harris’s entire Moral Landscape book depends. If Craig was correct, then virtually the entire book is constructed upon a failed foundation. It seems odd that Harris would have considered a point of such central importance not worth rebutting in debate. His long anti-religious tirade in the debate was in character with his published materials. Consider these two passages in The Moral Landscape, first from page 174: There is now a large and growing literature—spanning dozens of books and hundreds of articles—attacking Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and me (the socalled New Atheists) for our alleged incivility, bias, and ignorance of how “sophisticated”

believers practice their faith. It is often said that we caricature religion, taking its most extreme forms to represent the whole. We do no such thing. We simply do what a paragon of sophisticated faith like Francis Collins does: we take the specific claims of religion seriously. It sounds fine there; but on the next page he writes, Let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: Watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the Library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems quite collegial. We are merely guilty of assuming that our fellow Homo sapiens possess the requisite intelligence and emotional maturity to respond to rational argument, satire, and ridicule on the subject of religion—just as they respond to these discursive pressures on all other subjects. Of course we could be wrong. (Emphasis is in the original.) Here he seems to defend, rather than deny, New Atheist incivility. (Not incidentally, it is quite likely a myth, and therefore further poisoning of the well—attributable to Harris rather than Mooney or Kirshenbaum—that Christians burned the Library of Alexandria.

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)

Indeed, consider his assessment (The Moral Landscape, p. 160) of Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian and currently the head of the National Institutes of Health. He describes Collins’s book The Language of God as a genuinely astonishing book. To read it is to witness nothing less than an intellectual suicide. It is, however, a suicide that has gone almost entirely unacknowledged: The body yielded to the rope; the neck snapped; the breath subsided; and the corpse dangles in ghastly discomposure even now—and yet polite people everywhere continue to celebrate the great man’s health. On one page, Francis Collins is guilty of “intellectual suicide.” A few pages later, he is “a paragon of sophisticated faith.” Let’s remember: Dr. Collins successfully led the Human Genome Project, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, and was appointed as the Director of the National Institute of Health by President Obama. By what rational criterion can Sam Harris describe him as brain dead? For Harris to slander Francis Collins’ intellect and then deny that the New Atheists caricature religion is clearly false. Harris frequently distorts his opponents’ position in print, just as he did in his debate with Craig. In his 2006 Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 6), he writes, Consider: every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian. And yet you do not find their reasons compelling. Do Muslims really believe in Allah because of the historical evidence for Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection? I think they would be most surprised to learn that!

In the same book (p. 16) he writes, The only real restraint God counsels on the subject of slavery is that we not beat our slaves so severely that we injure their eyes or their teeth (Exodus 21). And on page 17, It should be clear from these passages [of Scripture] that, while the abolitionists were morally right, they were on the losing side of a theological argument. For a picture of how desperately distorted this is, see Glenn Sunshine’s essay in this book (chapter fifteen) on Christianity and slavery. Is Harris ignorant of these relevant facts, or does he twist them intentionally? It’s hard to say. In The End of Faith (p. 19), he writes, In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. That’s an odd position for him to take, considering all the historical and philosophical evidences that have been put forth in favor of Christianity. It could be that he thinks those evidences don’t mean what Christians take them to mean—but that’s not what he wrote. Rather he said that he cannot even imagine that such things could count as evidence in any possible world. That’s a sadly closed-minded position. One might suggest that Harris merely means that some Christian propositions are unsupportable by any conceivable evidence. Perhaps he means, for example, that one can hardly imagine any evidence showing up to support the specific belief that God called Abraham out of Ur. To me, though, the overall tone of his book mitigates against such a charitable interpretation. It seems to me he finds it incredible that any evidence whatsoever could speak in favor of any religious belief. This suggests an intellectual rigidity and dogmatism on Harris’s part that seems far removed from the flexibility and imagination of a truly reasonable thinker.

Finally, we find that Harris is not above committing obvious contradictions. He [67] devotes most of pages 102 through 110 in The Moral Landscape to tearing down "the illusion of free will." For example: All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge; this has always suggested that free will is an illusion. . . . Many scientists and philosophers realized long ago that free will could not be squared with our growing understanding of the physical world. . . .

No account of causality leaves rooms for free will. . . . our belief in free will arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of specific prior causes. . . . From a deeper perspective (speaking both subjectively and objectively), thoughts simply arise (what else could they do?) unauthored and yet author to our actions. Yet there is this on page 139: This does not mean, of course, that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. We can choose to focus on certain facts to the exclusion of others, to emphasize the good rather than the bad, etc. And such choices have consequences for how we view the world. . . . It’s hard to imagine how could that make sense in light of his strong denial of free will. He had opportunity to clarify it in his March 2012 Free Will, which he has said [68] would be an extended answer to questions he has been asked on the topic. There was this: People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is [69] illusory. And there was this: Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior—but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over [70] which we exercise no ultimate control. . . . I cannot choose what I choose. If our felt authorship of our thoughts is illusory, if we have no control over our intentions and reasoning, and if we cannot choose what we choose, then certainly it does mean that we have no mental freedom whatsoever. Again, if we cannot choose what we choose, then we cannot “choose to focus . . .” Harris’s claim that we have some mental freedom seems like a futile grasping for something that he wants to be real, though he denies its possibility. Whether that’s the case or not, the contradiction [71] remains unresolved, another instance of illogic in print. Conclusion To be a person of reason means many things. One of them must be the ability to conduct reasoned

discourse: to use only valid logic, to shun fallacies, to correct oneself when shown to be in error, to reject rhetorical maneuvers that muddy the waters of reasoning. None of this describes Sam Harris’s performance in his debate with William Lane Craig. Nor do Harris’s books maintain a consistent standard of reasoning. All this makes it very difficult to see why we should accept his claim to be a competent representative of reason.

Chapter Six: John Loftus and the “Outsider-Insider Test for Faith” David Marshall As author of one of the first books rebutting the New Atheism, over the past several years I’ve spent considerable time dialoguing with atheists, including such quasi-luminaries as Hector Avalos, Richard Carrier, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Victor Stenger. All seem to take it on faith that the New Atheism is eminently reasonable. Aside from atheists who also happened to be philosophers (who tend in my experience to argue more effectively), many have seemed to regard reason much as the young Augustine of Hippo saw chastity: “Lord, make me logical, but not just yet.” One New Atheist I have enjoyed talking with, though, has been former pastor John Loftus, who has written and edited several books attacking Christianity. Loftus sees himself as a sort of missionary to the working classes. Usually shown in his trademark cowboy hat, John wears his heart on his sleeve, being passionately self-promoting in an oddly humble way. Loftus’ signature argument is what he calls the Outsider Test for Faith. In its simplest form, the “OTF” is just the contention that Christians should be as skeptical about the faith in which they were (presumably) raised, as they are about, say, Islam or Inca worship of the Earth Goddess Pachamama. But Loftus expects that if Christians dare view their religion from an objective, outside perspective, they will abandon it in droves. So the OTF is also presented as an argument against Christianity. I have found this somewhat amusing, coming from an atheist from Indiana, who has been surrounded by Middle Americana all his life and never actually lived outside “Christendom” or the secular humanist philosophie that is its rebellious stepchild. By contrast, G. K. Chesterton told the story of a man who sailed a yacht to discover England, under the misconception that it was an island in the South Pacific. This combined, he said, the “fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again.” That has been my experience. I have spent most of my adult life far from the Christian ghetto: in secular universities, communist China, Buddhist Taiwan and Japan, post-Christian England, and swimming in a sea of ancient religious texts. I have also taken up academic interest in the process by which much of the world went from “outside” to “inside,” that is the history of Christian missions. Like Chesterton’s imaginary sailor, the further I left Christendom behind, the more the facts seemed to bring me back to Christ. In this chapter, I will first describe John Loftus’ version of the OTF, then note some of its problems. I’ll argue that the test should not be regarded a mere rhetorical question: it should pay close heed to the grand experiment that has sifted human beliefs, including secular humanism, over the past few millennia. I’ll then argue that Christianity has survived that sifting in four ways, not only from the outside, but also in its ability to find purchase from the inside of cultures and our hearts, transforming the human story from within.

Outsider Test for Faith John summarizes his argument in four points:

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(1) The Religious Diversity Thesis: “Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage." (2) The Religious Dependency Thesis: "Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one's religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree." (3) Therefore, it is “highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false." (4) In practice, one should hence test one’s religion “from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths." The reader may already see flaws in this argument. I think that hidden within it there lies a fundamental misconception of how Christians understand other faiths. Yet I also think Loftus is on to something, the flip side of four good arguments that support the unique truth of the Christian message. Let’s begin with some of the problems. For one thing, "diversity of religious faiths" is genuine, but deeply ambiguous. As G.K. Chesterton also noted, religions around the world commonly include four beliefs: in "God, the gods, philosophy,

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and demons." In years of studying world religions, I have found his observation to be largely true. Peel away labels, and many beliefs seem to be universal or at least very widespread. This could be called the "lack of religious diversity thesis,” and should be kept in balance with its alter ego. Nor is Loftus' second premise as obvious as he makes it sound. Often (as Loftus himself admits) people do adopt religions they were not taught as children. Even Americans born into one religion, as Michael Shermer in effect demonstrated in a broad survey of why Americans believe, often do

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rationally evaluate their beliefs. In most of the world, serious Christian faith is not the default position; even most American Christians go to secular schools, listen to secular music, watch secular movies, and (in extreme cases) read the blogs of John Loftus or PZ Myers. (And let us not pretend that secularism only appeared in Western culture with the internet.) So cultural dependency is real, but not "overwhelming." None of us is purely an insider to “Christian culture.” Also, atheist worldviews seem as “culturally dependent” as any other. Loftus has claimed that "Atheists do indeed take the

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OTF. That's why atheists are atheists in the first place.” But in fact, people also "adopt and defend" skeptical ideologies because of where they were born and how they were educated. In the fall of 2011, I surveyed 124 Chinese intellectuals, mostly in northern China, on their religious

beliefs. Among college students who gave clear answers, about two-thirds avowed atheism. But young Chinese who had already graduated from college were far more likely to identify themselves as believers of some sort or another—especially in Zen, Confucianism, or Christianity—with only onethird clearly choosing the “there is no God” option on the survey. Younger Chinese were predominantly atheistic, yet there was a clear trend away from atheism among intellectuals as they advanced in age and/or education. So evidently Marxist propaganda succeeds in making young Chinese into atheists, at least until they get out of school and experience the real world. Most atheists today live and have been raised in communist countries, where denying religion is the default position. (A broader survey conducted under the direction of Menchen, Johnson, and Stark, et. al., showed that about two-thirds of Chinese claim no religion.) And in western countries, many atheists are raised by unbelievers, while others convert (Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris explicitly say this should be a goal of education) through the influence of “godless professors,” as Dennett calls himself. Finally, even with these caveats, one must ask, does Loftus’ initial conclusion—point three—really follow from the premises that precede it? If we adopt certain beliefs because we have been taught them, does that really mean they are probably false? Obviously not. The general form of Loftus’ argument is: 1) Ideas about X vary among cultures; 2) The beliefs one adopts about X originate in one's culture, and in that sense depend on it; 3) Therefore one's beliefs are probably wrong. This seems to commit the genetic fallacy. This is the idea that the origin of an idea disproves it: "Guino is Italian, so of course he thinks olive oil is healthier than corn oil!" Maybe Guino's cultural bias does incline him to favor olive oil; but that doesn't mean olive oil isn't superior, or even that Guino doesn't hold his view for sound medical reasons. My belief that Earth circles the Sun is "culturally dependent." If I grew up in ancient Carthage, or among the Yali in Papua New Guinea, I would probably not believe it. I believe it not because I’ve proven it for myself, but because teachers told me it was so. Skeptics like Loftus commonly reply, “But you don’t have to take heliocentrism or the health benefits of olive oil on faith; you can prove them scientifically, unlike religion!” But who does? How do you know that electrons circle the nuclei of atoms? That earth contains a core of iron and nickel? Or even that you have two lungs? If we had to personally prove everything by the scientific method—no peaking at Wikipedia! Nothing on the web, or in books, or in classrooms, or even in academic journals, is itself “scientific evidence!”—we’d all toss our hands in the air and remain ignorant savages. Not having to “prove everything scientifically” is one of the great benefits of even the crudest forms of civilization. At a Neolithic town site in the Fertile Crescent, archeologists found seeds from more than a hundred different plant species. These seeds represented a cumulative knowledge of edible plants that had been tested and handed down from generation to generation, and would ultimately pave the way for civilization. This was culturally transmitted knowledge, accepted by each new generation based on human testimony, not “scientific testing.” Did that make it false? Obviously not.

Aristotle, one of the inventors of science, pointed out that aside from direct, scientific proof, it is rational to accept truth by attending to the “undemonstrated dicta and opinions of the skilful, the old, and the wise,” who over many generations serve as gatekeepers of truth in every tribe. Indeed, if his ancestors had not already been doing that for millennia, Greek civilization could not have produced an Aristotle. And if we care deeply about some matter, we may take time to research it more deeply —as many have with the resurrection of Jesus. The True Value of the Outsider Test For Loftus, the OTF is a rhetorical gambit by which to persuade Christians to cast a gimlet eye at the Gospel. John admits this forthrightly: We must offer them a shocking test, one that may help get them out of their dogmatic slumbers like nothing else can do. And they will object as strenuously as they can to the OTF because they know their faith does not pass that test. That’s why Christians argue against it just like Muslim scholars would . . .

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But Christians don’t need to “argue against” the Outsider Test for Faith. I want instead to ask skeptics to open their windows and step out, to sail to the South Seas, to take the history of religions more seriously, not less. Religions have played a three-thousand-year game of “Survivor” on a planetary scale, and Christianity has been voted onto the island of the human soul not once, but billions of times. The first problem for skeptics is empirical, not just theoretical. Why have the promises of a powerless, penniless 1st-century rabbi, preaching from a boat on an inland lake in what is now a mostly dead (and was even then an archaic) language, in a long-extinguished empire, been so spectacularly fulfilled? Converts Are Hard to Make Christianity did not succeed because conversion is easy. It is not! A former Muslim imam studying for his doctorate at Oxford University told me how he became a Christian. He was leader of a prominent mosque in Africa and an Islamic scholar successful enough to have been invited overseas to lecture. But one day, at the mosque, he heard the audible voice of God calling him to believe in Jesus. He left his home, and may never be able to return. I asked him whether he, as a scholar of Islamic Law, would have approved of applying the death penalty to Muslims who converted to Christianity. “Of course!” he replied. Muslims must mete out the death penalty to infidels, because Muhammad himself approved and carried it out. This is especially relevant, since John Loftus first formulated the OTF in reference to Saudi Arabia: So let me propose something I call The Outsider Test: If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would be a Muslim right now, say it isn't so? That is a cold hard fact. Dare you deny it? Since this is so, or at least 99% so, then the proper method to evaluate your religious beliefs is with

a healthy measure of skepticism. Test your beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating.

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Of course most people in Saudi Arabia are Muslim, because converts from Islam are killed. Even non-Saudi Christians, such as workers from the Philippines, are sometimes imprisoned and tortured. “Believe or die!” is not what one can call a “fair test.” When I lived in Japan, our family often soaked in a mountain hot spring. Nearby were a series of pools—“hells,” they call them in Japanese—where Catholic Christians were once boiled alive. Christianity spread rapidly in Japan in the 16th century, an “outsider test” that Japanese authorities put to an end not with friendly persuasion, but with torture and mass murder.

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Skeptics may reply that Christianity also spread that way—a claim I will dispute below. Some Christians, like the Inquisitors, did use force to prevent the spread of other beliefs, true enough. Most social pressure, while undoubtedly effective, is of a more subtle sort. Before she became a Christian, as a Japanese, my wife told me, “I feel I would be betraying my family, my culture, and my country.” Even in a country that has had religious liberty for more than a century, like modern Japan, tradition remains a powerful disincentive against conversion. For this reason, sociologists recognize that people are usually reluctant to convert to other religions. We like to “preserve our religious capital,” as Rodney Stark and Roger Finke put it, stating as a general proposition, “Under normal circumstances, most people will neither convert nor reaffiliate.”

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Like stocks or jewelry, people perceive their cultural traditions as among their most valuable possessions. Ancient peoples also often had powerful incentives to reject Christianity. While Christianity fulfilled much in Greek tradition (as we will see), it also challenged many things: Homer’s gods, the idol industry, gladiatorial fights in the Coliseum, the subservient status of women. Not to mention, some converts were fed to lions. Later, the Gospel was often wed to threatening cultures. Charlemagne cut down the Sacred Ash and killed Saxons who would not convert. Frankish Crusaders “glorified God” by massacring many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Spanish conquistadors exported the Iberian Peninsula’s hostility to the New World. Sometimes power served the desire to convert new believers. More often, however, officious European power created a series of barriers to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans who might think about becoming Christians. Many non-westerners protected their cultures by stigmatizing or even killing believers. “One more Christian, one fewer Chinese” not only expressed the common feeling that to convert meant betraying one’s nation, but also that conversion required a kind of de-

culturalization—drinking English whiskey, eating English beef, and going about “in European clothes, including a hat,”

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in effect spitting on the graves of one’s ancestors.

If Christianity were not also often seen as a friend to non-Western cultures, it would be a miracle for it to have spread as far as it has. It has often been recognized as a friend. And miracles in fact sometimes occurred. “Go Into All the World” The message of Jesus arrived in Athens, the cultural capital of Greco-Roman civilization, in the person of Paul, member of an unpopular ethnic minority. Paul walked about the city and surveyed its religious sites: the city famously overflowed with gods, mostly Greek, but also Egyptian deities and shrines to Roman emperors. Paul began debating followers of Zeno and Epicurus in the city market, where Zeno’s Stoic school had long ago been birthed. He was accused of “marketing foreign gods”; the locals may have found his accent hard to follow. He was invited to Mars Hill to explain himself. This was a forum where, according to legend, after the Trojan War, Apollo had defended the son of Agamemnon against the charge of murder, arguing before Athena, the city’s patron deity. After a brilliant philosophical introduction, Paul spoke of a Jewish preacher, for whose sake (based on astounding claims of a resurrection, which Apollo himself had denied at that earlier trial), he asked his hearers to “turn away” from the foolishness of idols. The city was in no rush to be rid of its rich heritage, the source of pride and profit, and many of his listeners scoffed out loud. Yet some did believe Paul’s message. Beginning from a little wandering band, like Neolithic huntergatherers (“fishers of men”), by the time of Constantine, Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with. By the time of Theodosius, most Greco-Romans claimed to be Christians. And in two more millennia, the message Paul preached had transformed wild northern Europe into the world’s greatest civilization, then spread across the Americas, to hundreds of tribes in African and Australia, and reformed, in deep and needed ways, the ancient civilizations of Asia. Nor has modernity halted its progress. A hundred years ago, there were few Christians in subSaharan Africa; now there are more than 400 million. A century ago, most Latins belonged to a syncretistic "Christo-paganism." Today tens of millions of evangelicals live in South America, and I have heard — my own field is East Asia, so I cannot verify this — that many Catholics have become more orthodox. In the past twenty years, some 60-90 million Chinese, and tens of millions of Indians, have taken the OTF, found that Christianity passed, and converted. Most others have probably not yet really considered Christianity, or been reluctant to convert for non-rational reasons—cultural inertia, vestiges of persecution, love of money or sexual sin, unexamined atheistic propaganda, continued anger over 19th-century "Christian" imperialism. Probably at least a million or more contemporary Muslims have also prayed to Jesus, despite the dangers, and despite rivalry with the (post) “Christian” West and natural attachment to their own traditions. Is not this vast movement of hearts and minds over centuries and continents, a more objective test of the Christian faith than the abstract mental exercise of an Indiana skeptic? Loftus compares choosing a religion to the scene in Cinderella in which the prince looks for the girl

he danced with, out of “45,000” (apparently relying on some forgotten fairyland census) who claim to have lost the glass slipper. “We would need to be skeptical of each claim and demand an empirical shoe fit before we should believe.” Of course one should ask tough questions about religious claims; no Christian philosopher suggests otherwise. Our claim is that we have found a snug “empirical shoe fit” between the claims of the Gospel and the real world. In Cinderella, though, the prince only finds one slipper. Billions of people claim to have found Christ. We should, therefore, narrow Loftus’ test down from tens of thousands, to religions that have already passed the Outsider Test, not in fairyland, but on the proving grounds of real human cultures. Assuming a broad definition of religion, on the surface five faiths seem to have met that challenge: in historical order, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism-Leninism, and Secular Humanism. Islam and Communism spread mostly by violent conquest. Like the Borg of Star Trek fame, what Islam conquered, it mostly assimilated, its conquests being geographically contingent, dependent on the range of camels. If a Muslim converted out of Islam, said Muhammad, he should die. Stalin and Mao were also unkind to infidels. Yet the success of Islam and Marxism-Leninism does show there is credibility in their deepest claims: that God is one (on the one hand), and the call for justice for the poor (on the other). Buddhism and Secular Humanism, by contrast, spread mostly through persuasion. Buddhism is considered a great missionary faith, and it did, in some sense, capture the hearts of East Asians. But the forms of Buddhism that proved most popular owed little to the austere, self-help philosophy of the Indian Buddha. What really caught on was the aesthetic of Chinese and Japanese Zen—“in the chopping of firewood and the hauling of water, therein lies the wonderful Tao”—building on the cheerful wit of the Chinese humorist, Zhuang Zi. Pure Land Buddhism, which frankly sought a savior (“If you think of the power of Avalokitsvara, the ship will not be sunk by waves”), proved even more popular. Even so, by modern times few Chinese were serious Buddhists, because the faith repudiated family and Chinese dining customs (don’t eat meat!); and rather than improving society and creating science, the great scholar Hu Shi complained, it “made Chinese society a tragedy” by encouraging contempt for human life. Secular humanism does encourage science and social progress, because it is watered-down Christianity, a weed that grows in fields plowed by the Gospel. So even on a simple, historical level—the level of choices by billions of passionate, intellectuallyengaged people, not meme-numbed robots—Christianity is one of just a few belief systems that can be said to have passed the OTF, and to have done so most spectacularly. Furthermore, in the face of natural hostility, it has been found credible by many of the “old, wise and skilful” of those civilizations. So really, the glass slipper is on the other foot. The real intellectual challenge is, how do skeptics explain the unique empirical success of the Gospel?

Two New Atheists have offered explanations that defame the rationality of Christian conversion. Richard Carrier suggests in his book, Sense and Goodness Without God, that like Islam (presumably), Christianity “spread by the sword.”

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But in fact, usually it did not. In response to Carrier’s claim, I looked at twelve great regions and periods in which Christianity spread most impressively: ancient Rome, the Nestorian Middle East, China from the early Tang Dynasty to the present, Medieval Europe, Latin Christianity, Modern Europe, North America, Africa, India, Korea, the recent spread of evangelical Christianity in Latin America, and hundreds of tribes worldwide that have adopted Christianity. As Stark shows (The Rise of Christianity), by the time Christianity was legalized by Emperor Constantine in 313 A.D., about 10 percent of Romans had already become Christian, in the face of 300 years of persecution. Had Christianity simply continued to follow the same upward growth path, the Roman Empire would have become mostly Christian by mid-4th century, even without any political advantages. Force was a factor in the success of Christianity during only two of twelve periods: occasionally in Medieval Europe (for example when Charlemagne “converted” the Saxons after defeating them in battle), and the original, superficial conversion of Latin America. Christianity has probably been opposed by force more often than it has been spread that way. So this “explanation” simply doesn’t hold water: the vast majority of converts have believed because they wanted to. In The Religious Virus, Craig James offers a somewhat more subtle explanation. Having evolved in a competitive religious environment, like a successful invasive species—say, rats, mill foil, or blackberries (fruit or phone, take your pick)—Christianity acquired a set of adaptive traits, including the prestige and power of western science, that made it a stronger competitor in local intellectual marketplaces: Christianity was a highly evolved set of memes, filtered and improved by ten thousand or more years of the harshest meme competition in the history of the world. The aboriginal religions of places like the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand never had a chance (169). But the environment in which beliefs flourish or fade is the human mind. Like all forms of what C. S. Lewis called “Bulverism,” patronizing talk about “memes” can just as easily be turned against skeptics: you are not people who think about ideas, accepting some and rejecting others because you find them valid or fallacious, you are unwitting “hosts” to “memes,” like body-snatching pods. Fulfillment James also takes a “zero-sum” understanding of religions for granted, but this is fundamentally mistaken. What is wanted is not one rigid system that merely overwhelms all prior beliefs held by the

“wise, old, and skillful” of every culture—which I think better describes the New Atheist vision of the future—but a universal belief that embraces the insights of many traditions. Loftus makes the same fatal mistake James does in his theology of religions: “At best there can only be one true religion in what we observe to be a sea of hundreds of false ones . . .” (99).As Lewis once pointed out, that is the position an atheist is forced to adopt, but not a Christian. Indeed, as a former pastor, Loftus ought to know better: the first premise of Christianity is that Judaism is true. After all, the Bible has two halves, and the first half is longer. Jesus said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I have come not to abolition, but fulfill" (Mt. 5:17). That makes at least two true religions. This principle can be extended, to some extent, to the deepest truths in other spiritual traditions as well. In general, a good theory is not one that completely displaces prior theories, but one that incorporates what truth can be found in them. Kepler didn't refute the idea that the planets revolve around the sun, but described their motion more economically and accurately. Einstein didn't render Newton's model of gravitation null and void. He showed that it was a special case, still useful for everyday observation. When I tried to explain this to Loftus, he challenged me: Maybe (David) can show us someone who was raised in a tribal religion in Africa who had no outside influence on him from another culture (i.e. no Mormon missionary) who became a right wing Christian Republican? Brushing aside the irrelevant political jibes, the substance of this challenge is easily met. Yale historian Lamin Sanneh notes, “When they came to Africa, missionaries began with a methodical inquiry into the nature and character of God among Africans, and before long it was obvious Africans had a deep sense of the reality of God” (Translating the Message, 158). John Mbiti describes African perceptions of God that agree with what the Bible says about him in rich detail. Missionaries can point to millions of Africans who believed in God, sin, the spirit world, life after death, and sacrifice for sins, before they ever saw a Bible. This is but one reason hundreds of millions of African tribesmen, and people in other cultures, overcame the stigma of believing an “outside,” even an “imperialist” religion: Jesus came to fulfill, not destroy, the most fundamental foundations of African religion. The same was also true in the Pacific Islands that James mentions. Polynesians often believed in God, whom they called Io, and who some say prepared Hawaiians for the Gospel. (Only the upper class was allowed to worship Him, though: the Gospel expanded the franchise.) In the best (and most orthodox) Christian thinking, religion is not a zero-sum game. World religions are not like so many fruits in the market, from which (having just one dollar) you must choose a single item, which is true, and leave the rest, which are totally false. It is a singularly "fundamentalist" way of thinking that insists one must choose one religion and simply dismiss everything in the rest. Loftus here tossed an accusation at me (which always makes me laugh) of lapsing into liberalism:

David has a bit more enlightened view of religion than people held to in previous centuries. Bloodthirsty wars were fought over them, and there's a lot of killing going on today because of them too. I find it utterly ignorant though, for someone like David to think he can stand up in the midst of stadium filled with religionists to tell them all: ‘Hey, I've got the answer. We don't need to choose between Yahweh, Elohim, theos, Allah, and Shang Di, or Xenu, Thor, Odin, and the thousands of dead gods, or that guy who claims he's Jesus living in Texas. No, we share common ground . . .’ I only ask where David's enlightened view comes from and how far is he willing to take it? It doesn't come from the Bible, that's for sure. Actually, I have stood up in biblical churches of many denominations around the world (though no stadiums, yet), and argued that “pagans” in cultures recognize God by many names. And I quote the Bible itself to make my case, because that is, indeed, where I get the idea. In perhaps the most dramatic passage of Acts (17:28), Paul stood on Mars Hill and cited several Greek thinkers: “As some of your own poets have said, ‘In him we live and breathe and have our being . . . ‘ ‘We also are his offspring.’” Paul refers to two Greek words for God here: first theos, which Loftus mentions. One poem he likely refers to is by Aratus, and is written to Zeus. As Paul surely knew, Stoics and other Greek thinkers had been talking about God in a serious way for centuries by this time, as described in Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and Stoic philosopher Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, which Paul may also have been citing. (“Most glorious of the immortals, invoked by many names, ever all-powerful, Zeus, the First Cause of Nature, who rules all things with Law . . . from you we have our being, we whose lot it is to be God’s image, we alone of all mortal creatures that live and move upon the earth . . . “) Even Richard Carrier, in a chapter Loftus edited, recognizes that Greek thinkers were “motivated to pursue scientific inquiry” by their pious belief in “a Creator who had intelligently ordered the cosmos,” study of whose works honored God (The Christian Delusion, 407). A millennium and a half later, Matteo Ricci told the Chinese literati (joining a few quotes here): “After closely studying your ancient scriptures, I found that the great men of old revered Shang Di, the High Sovereign of Heaven and Earth . . . whom we call Deus.” Loftus dismisses evidence of God in other cultures as follows: Similarities show nothing except that concepts of god have gravitated toward monotheism because such a concept is a simpler one. This again is how religions evolve . . . No religion in a world community could hope to have a big enough god anymore unless that god is the only god. As people became more aware of other city-states their god had to encompass their religions too. So god concepts grew bigger as the world got bigger. This is based on a false and outdated theory of anthropology. We now know that God has not, in fact, evolved at all. Peoples in Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas who lived the most primitive

lifestyles were often the most aware of God, understanding Him very much as the Bible does.

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Of course, the residents of Athens and Beijing had not heard of Jesus, which is why Paul and Ricci came, and why it was “Good News” that they brought. But even there, just as the Jews spoke of a Messiah, a Son of David whose influence would go to the end of the world, and a Suffering Servant who would “see the light of life” after suffering to redeem mankind, so locals sometimes recognized that Jesus fulfilled archetypes and prophecies given by Plato, Homer, Confucius, Lao Tzi, and Mencius. The deepest truths in each great tradition find themselves not only fulfilled but strengthened in Jesus, and great errors corrected, while he “takes away the sins of the world” in a collective, social sense as well as for individuals. The Gospel affirms, with Islam, that there is one God, and that he sends prophets to teach us how to live. The Koran even names the greatest of those prophets—Jesus, not Muhammad—the “Messiah” and the “Breath of God.” But what can I say to a girl from Saudi Arabia who tells me, “I’ll only go back to Saudi in a body bag?” Jesus also showed compassion for women that changed the world, and needs to change Islam today. Ancient Hindus recognized the centrality of divine sacrifice. India later descended into caste

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divisions and the burning of widows on funeral pyres, until the Gospel prompted reform. Buddhists recognized the importance of compassion. Lao Tzi wrote of the power of weakness to overcome strength, and of a Sage who incarnates the Way and is “lord of the sacrifice.” Confucian texts spoke of a great God who rules over humanity. Confucius also looked to a future “Holy Man” who would benefit all peoples of the world. His greatest disciple, Mencius, prophesied that such a Sage would appear 500 years after Confucius, just as the Diamond Sutra prophesied a transcendent Buddha 500 years after Siddhartha. Both dates bring us to about the time a Galilean fisherman asked a friend to “Come and see!” a remarkable new rabbi. If you're an atheist, you have to believe that most of what people in every civilization have always believed is wrong. The Gospel, on the other hand, digs deep into the heart of tradition and reveals forgotten and overlooked truth, bringing it out into the open, and invigorating it with new life. The West took hundreds of years to come to faith. With all the trouble jackbooted European imperialists gave the rest of the world, maybe we can give Chinese and Indians time to mull things over, like a mustard seed that grows into a tree and gives shelter to many birds, to which Jesus compared the Kingdom of Heaven. Tens of millions are already responding. The Outsider Who Comes as an Insider The first people to accept the Gospel were Jews who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of hopes that their race had held for centuries. They were, in fact, both "insiders" and "outsiders" in relation to Christianity. Jesus said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I've come to fulfill them." Yet the Gospel was alive to injustice and came to judge human traditions: Jesus also challenged time-honored Hebrew conventions, like a seed planted in the ground, dying, and bringing forth new life from old soil. What about the first Gentile Christians? People like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and

Augustine were clearly "insiders” in relation to Greco-Roman tradition. Yet much that was already present within their own culture—the theism that had grown popular; the heroic example of a sage, Socrates, who willingly died for truth; the moral teachings of the Stoics; the “altar to the Unknown God” that Paul found while exploring Athens; even the figure of Odysseus, like Jesus (said Clement of Alexandria) tied to the mast to pass the sirens and bring his ship home—encouraged Greeks and Roman to trust in Jesus. One of Clement’s students, the brilliant Origen, saw this clearly: If anyone were to come from the study of Grecian opinions and usages to the Gospel, he would not only decide that its doctrines were true, but would by practice establish their truth, and supply whatever seemed wanting, from a Grecian point of view (Contra Celsus, 1, 2). Can you best tell the value of a house from inside, or outside? Both perspectives, of course, are important. You want to check its foundation, look for sags in the roof, check for water marks on the ceiling, or holes in the linoleum. You also observe how the house sits on its site, whether the neighbors are the sort you’d borrow a cup of sugar from, or call the police on at 3 a.m. To appreciate the value of Christianity, it does help to go outside it, either historically (by studying what Christianity fulfilled and changed in the ancient world), or geographically (by getting to know other traditions). So while I think Loftus formulates and uses the Outsider Test for Faith wrongly, I approve of it. I think Christianity is affirmed by this test in four ways, or in four versions of the test: 1) The test of history. In a straightforward sense, Christianity has attracted more believers from more ethnic and cultural groups than any other religion. If the OTF shows anything empirically, it shows that Christianity must possess remarkable reserves of plausibility to have convinced so many people, in so many cultures, to risk so much, to follow Jesus. 2 ) The test of prophecy. In Genesis 12, God tells Moses, “All the peoples of the earth will be blessed through your seed.” From early Genesis to the end of Revelation, the Bible is abuzz with predictions that the Good News will spread to the “ends of the Earth.” Those hundreds of prophecies have demonstrably and remarkably (if you think about how improbable they must have seemed on a remote hill in the Levant, or on a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee) come true. 3) The Insider Test . Christianity affirms truths of which peoples around the world have been aware, for millennia. Christianity provides a larger map of the world that embraces deep insights known to David, Isaiah, Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Epictetus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzi, and informed "outsiders" who become insiders. 4) The Insider-Outsider Test. The Gospel also fulfills specific archetypes and prophecies, beginning with the Jewish Scriptures, but even prophecies among Gentile writers who foresaw such a Savior. The Outsider Test is nothing new, though. Chesterton formulated one version a century ago, with his imaginary trip (back) to England. In conclusion, let me repeat the “Insider-Outsider” version of the test I wrote in Jesus and the Religions of Man, six years before John Loftus came up with his useful

gimmickry: What should a Christian say to an idealist setting out on a journey? Seek the good in every spiritual tradition and cherish it; but don’t be naïve. Allow yourself to become desperate enough to be heretical, and even desperate enough to be orthodox. Give credit where credit is due, but also blame where blame is due. Take ideals seriously enough to live by, even die for. But be careful to whom you open your heart. Follow each star to the place where it leads. Then come and look again in a town called Bethlehem. What is it you are looking for? Look, then, for a god among the gods of humanity. Look for a guru among the gurus of humankind at whose feet to find enlightenment. Wear tennis shoes out upon the holy hills of the Incas. Shake clouds of dust from ancient manuscripts of the sacred libraries of Lhasa and Alexandria. Ponder every sect, tribe and teacher from Tierra Del Fuego to Tibet. Then come, open the New Testament. Look again at the life and teachings of the man who said of the Jewish writings, “You investigate the Scriptures, because you suppose you have eternal life in them, and yet they bear witness to me” (John 5:39).

Chapter Seven: The Explanatory Emptiness of Naturalism David Wood A few thousand years ago, phenomena such as thunder, a solar eclipse, or a man having a seizure would be perceived quite differently from how they are perceived today. In the ancient world, gods and demigods, spirits and monsters, magic and curses were perfectly acceptable means of explaining strange occurrences. If something seemed unnatural, appeal was made to the supernatural. Centuries of scientific investigation have greatly undermined early superstition. Thunder is a sonic shock wave caused by rapidly expanding air following a lightning strike (not the bellowing of a god). A solar eclipse is the alignment of sun, moon, and earth (not the sun being temporarily devoured by a dragon). Epileptic seizures are the result of abnormal neuronal activity in the brain (rather than demonic possession). Science books contain no reference to supernatural forces or entities to explain these phenomena, for the natural world, when properly explored, is all too happy to reveal its causal chains. The success of scientific investigation has led many thinkers to conclude that science will ultimately (if it hasn’t already) make all supernatural explanations obsolete. Whatever gaps remain in our understanding of the world, they are steadily being filled in. Since these ever diminishing gaps form the basis of Natural Theology, arguments for God’s existence will soon have no foundation whatsoever. God has nothing left to do. Thus the past few decades have seen a growing shift from mere Methodological Naturalism (which holds that the sciences should confine themselves to natural explanations) to Metaphysical Naturalism (the claim that the natural world is all that exists). The reasoning that underlies this shift may be summarized in a syllogism:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is probably true. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is probably true. The first premise is the crucial one. It seems to be based on the notion that the explanatory success of science is itself a kind of data favoring one hypothesis (Naturalism) over its competitor (Supernaturalism). To see why such a notion is plausible to many people, consider what we would expect given the truth of each hypothesis. If Naturalism were true, we would expect all effects to have natural causes. The only breaks in our scientific explanations would be due to our ignorance, not to an actual break in any natural causal series. But if Supernaturalism (the claim that non-natural entities exist and can affect the natural world) were true, we might expect significant and regular breaks in chains of natural causes, due to supernatural intervention.

When we investigate the world using the tools of the biologist, or the geologist, or the physicist, we find that natural effects are preceded by natural causes. Science gives us explanations without appealing to the supernatural. Since this is exactly what we would expect if Naturalism were true, we say that the success of science confirms Naturalism over Supernaturalism. Or so the story goes. The problem with the naturalist’s story is that it is grounded in extraordinarily superficial thinking. Contrary to the claims of several popular atheists, science offers no support for Naturalism. Indeed, if Naturalism were true, we could learn nothing at all through the sciences. Hence, I would like to revise our original syllogism as follows:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is false. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is false. Once again, the first premise is the crucial step. To see why it is true, we simply need to consider what is required for scientific investigation to take place. If Naturalism can’t account for these necessary preconditions, then Naturalism can’t account for science, and science turns out to be evidence against Naturalism. Let’s examine eight conditions without which science could not take place. As we will soon see, none of them makes sense in Naturalism. The Cosmological Problem The first thing we need for scientific exploration is a world to examine (and to live in). Without the universe around us, science obviously wouldn’t take place. But think about what happens when we ask ourselves if Naturalism can explain the existence of the universe. First Question: Has the natural world existed for all eternity, or did it have a beginning? We know from cosmology (the expansion of the universe implies an origin in the past), thermodynamics (entropy is increasing, so the universe would have died a heat-death long ago unless it had a finite past), mathematics (an infinite collection of things is impossible, but a beginningless past would entail an infinite collection of events), and philosophy (an endless series of events leads to logical absurdities) that our universe does not have an infinite past. But if the universe hasn’t existed for all eternity, then it must have had a beginning. Second Question: Did the natural world begin to exist as a result of some cause, or did it spring into existence uncaused? The second alternative is obviously absurd, for “nothing” would have no power to bring about anything. (Recent claims to the contrary by Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss fail to recognize that their “nothing” is not really nothing; it is a vacuum field seething with potential and subject to natural laws.) Out of nothing, nothing comes. But this means that the universe must have begun to exist as a result of some cause. Third Question: Was the natural world caused by something apart from it, or was it self-caused?

Here again, the second alternative is absurd. Nothing can cause itself to come into being, for it would need to precede its own existence in order to bring about its own existence. Since this is impossible, the natural world must have been caused by something beyond the natural world. According to Naturalism, however, the natural world is all that exists. Hence, because the universe requires a cause of its existence, and Naturalism rules out such a cause, Naturalism is undermined by the sheer existence of our world. The Fine-Tuning Problem But will just any universe do? Could we make scientific discoveries in any old world? Not at all. In order to do research of any kind, the fundamental structure of the universe has to be finely-tuned for intelligent life. The forces, principles, and constants of physics, certain physical quantities, the ratios between the masses of atomic particles, and the properties of elements and compounds have to be just right, or scientists wouldn’t exist. Consider some of the forces of nature. Without gravity, there would be no planets, stars, or galaxies. Without the strong nuclear force, protons and neutrons wouldn’t hold together in the nucleus of an atom, and hydrogen would be the only element on the periodic table. Without the electromagnetic force, there would be no chemical interactions between atoms, and the molecules necessary for life could not form. Various principles of physics are also essential for life. The Pauli Exclusion Principle keeps electrons from all falling into the lowest orbital. Without it there would be no complex chemistry, and we need complex chemistry for life. The Principle of Quantization keeps electrons from falling into the nucleus. Without it there would be no chemistry at all. But the fact that we have the necessary forces and principles isn’t nearly as surprising as the finetuning of the numbers that physicists plug into the laws of nature. These are the constants of physics. The cosmological constant, the gravitational constant, the strong force constant, the fine structure constant—these numbers could have had a wide range of values, as far as anyone knows, and yet the values they actually have fall into the extremely narrow range that makes biological life possible. With nothing beyond the natural world to select the necessary values for these constants, naturalists have been forced to seek refuge in one of two shelters. First, many naturalists attempt to explain cosmic fine-tuning via the “Multiverse.” If reality actually consists of a vast array of universes (our universe being one among many), perhaps it isn’t surprising that at least one of the universes contains the laws, principles, and constants required for intelligent life. However, this response merely pushes the problem up one level, for the laws governing the Multiverse would themselves need to be finely tuned (and on a much grander scale!). Second, we know that improbable events sometimes occur. Perhaps the universe is finely tuned for

life due to an extraordinary run of luck. We’re here, aren’t we? Surely we must have gotten lucky, or we wouldn’t be here to recognize the astonishing coincidence! Unfortunately for the naturalist, this response won’t work either, for there are limits to what may reasonably be ascribed to luck or chance. Suppose a murderous psychopath locks you in a room, puts a gun to your head, and hands you two dice. He then says, “If you roll double sixes, I’ll let you live. If you roll anything else, you’re dead. Now roll.” So you roll the dice, and double sixes turn up. Here you might conclude that you got lucky, for you had a one in thirty-six chance of surviving: not great, but better than nothing. But your captor tells you to roll again: “Make sure you get double sixes, or you’re dead.” You roll the dice again and you get . . . double sixes. Now you might think that you’ve been very, very lucky (you had a one in 1296 chance of making it this far). But what if this keeps happening? What if the psychopath makes you roll again and again, day after day, year after year, and you keep rolling the numbers necessary for life (in this case, your life). Doesn’t there come a point when luck no longer qualifies as an explanation (perhaps because the dice are obviously loaded?). If so, then “chance” isn’t an explanation for the fine-tuning of the cosmos any more than it could have been for the dice, and Naturalism cannot account for some of the most fundamental characteristics of our universe. The Problem of Biological Complexity So we need a universe, and we need the fundamental structure of the universe to be finely tuned for life. But just as you can have a well-crafted doghouse without actually having a dog, you can have a universe finely tuned for life without actually having life. The third requirement for scientific exploration, then, is complex biology. Without the biological processes going on in our bodies—e.g., the proper functioning of the circulatory system, the endocrine system, the muscular system, the nervous system, and the respiratory system—the world would still exist, but no science would ever take place, for human beings wouldn’t exist. Where on earth did our diverse biological complexity come from? According to naturalists, life arose from nonlife through some mysterious combination of chemical interactions and chance. From there, natural selection acting on random mutation took over, ultimately giving rise to higher-level sentient creatures. But let’s consider what would be necessary for evolution to get started. The earliest life capable of evolving would have to meet three essential requirements. First, it must be capable of reproducing. Reproduction may be relatively unsurprising to us, because we are so familiar with living organisms making copies of themselves. But if we stop for a moment and think about how difficult it would be for us, with all our skill in manufacturing and engineering, to produce an object that has the ability to make more objects like itself, we might begin to see how amazing it is that the earliest life originated with such an ability already in place. Second, although potentially evolving life must be able to reproduce, the reproduction process needs to achieve a very delicate balance between variety and similarity. There must be some variety among

the offspring, for if organisms produced exact copies of themselves, there would be no variation for natural selection to act on. But there must also be a high degree of similarity, for if organisms produced offspring much different from themselves, then beneficial traits would not be passed on to future generations. Thus, for an organism to possess even the bare possibility of evolving, it must reproduce copies almost exactly like itself, but not perfect copies. Third, potentially evolving life must contain a mechanism for passing on genetic information to offspring. Most people know that DNA stores coded information in living things. However, few are aware of how sophisticated DNA is as an information storage system. As biochemist Michael Denton

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has pointed out, a single teaspoon of DNA could store all of the genetic information for every species that has ever lived, and it would still have room for the information contained in every book ever written. This is vastly superior to modern computer hard drives, and such a system would need to be in place for evolution to get off the ground. There’s much more we could say about complex biology, but I have limited my comments to what naturalists need at the beginning of their story about life. (See Chuck Edwards’ essay in the fourth chapter for more on this topic.) How do naturalists explain the origin of life? Their worldview forces them to resort to “luck” yet again. A series of happy coincidences produced the first organism capable of evolving, meeting the three criteria we’ve already noted. However, as we’ve seen, there are limits to what may reasonably be attributed to chance, and the naturalist has nothing in his explanatory tool belt that can deal with complex biological systems. The Problem of Consciousness Of course, we need more than mere biological complexity to study our world. Cats are biologically complex, but cats obviously can’t do what we do. In order to ponder our place in the universe, and to ask difficult questions, and to desire answers, and to find certain explanations satisfying or unsatisfying, we need human consciousness. And it’s important to recognize that human consciousness requires more than a large and convoluted brain. Consciousness requires what we call a “soul.” Naturalists hold that beliefs, awareness, thoughts, emotions, hopes, and decisions are simply brain states (i.e. physical states in the brain). But what sense does this make? Our beliefs are true or false. An arrangement of particles in a brain cannot be true or false (one arrangement of particles being true, and another being false). We have thoughts that are about things. It makes no sense to say that a pattern of molecules is about anything. A scientist who examines my brain might learn all kinds of things about my brain that I don’t know. But he’ll never learn more about my mind than I know. If a scientist wants to know what’s in my brain, he can give me an MRI scan; if he wants to know what’s in my mind, he has to ask me. So even though the mind and the brain are closely linked in human beings, there’s more to the mind than brain matter. If Naturalism is true, human consciousness cannot exist, because the only explanations naturalists can appeal to involve particles, energy, and natural forces. But the human mind is inexplicable in these

terms. Human consciousness is therefore inexplicable in Naturalism. The Problem of Reason When we consider science, however, we’re not interested only in human consciousness, but with a particular activity of the human mind—the mind’s ability to reason. Human beings examine and weigh evidence because we trust our reasoning ability. We wouldn’t perform experiments or draw conclusions if we thought that our cognitive faculties—the processes that produce our beliefs—were unreliable. But naturalists have a problem here. According to naturalists, our ability to reason is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation. Natural selection, of course, favors traits that help organisms survive and reproduce. So if human reasoning evolved naturally, it’s because it helped human beings survive and reproduce. Does this give us any basis for trusting our reasoning ability when it comes to questions of cosmology, or quantum mechanics, or neuroscience? Not at all. At best, our cognitive faculties would be reliable when it comes to finding berries, or using a spear against an enemy, or doing something to attract a mate. Interestingly, Darwin himself noticed this problem. He once admitted:

[W]ith me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

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In other words, our reasoning ability serves the same evolutionary purpose as the traits of other animals (e.g., the claws of a lion, the song of a canary, or the colorful buttocks of a baboon). We wouldn’t trust the traits of animals to lead us to the truth, because they weren’t developed for that purpose. Why, then, would we trust our own convictions, which are the result of the same evolutionary process? There’s no way around this problem for naturalists, for in order to escape the Problem of Reason, they would need to construct an argument. But this argument would presuppose the reliability of human reason, which is precisely the issue under investigation. Hence, if we take Naturalism seriously, we cannot take our reasoning ability seriously, and science falls apart. The Problem of Logic Human reason would be even less reliable if it weren’t governed by certain logical truths, e.g., the Law of Non-Contradiction, the Law of Excluded Middle, various valid argument forms, and so on. When we present arguments (whether in science, philosophy, politics, etc.), we’re presupposing that there are logical absolutes—rules of reasoning that cannot be violated. If I say that God exists, and a naturalist says that God doesn’t exist, we can’t both be right. Why? Because if you say we’re both right, you’re saying that God both exists and doesn’t exist, and this violates the Law of NonContradiction (i.e., “a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same

sense”). But what are logical laws? They obviously aren’t material objects. We don’t learn about them through the senses. We can’t see them, hear them, touch them, taste them, or smell them, and we’ll never find them with a telescope or a microscope. We don’t discover laws of logic the way we discover laws of nature (e.g., the law of gravity). We learn about laws of nature by making observations, performing scientific experiments, and producing generalizations. Logical laws are abstract and conceptual. They’re concepts, which means that they only exist in the mind. However, logical laws don’t depend on human minds. The Law of Non-Contradiction was true before there were any human beings, and if all human beings were to die tomorrow, it will still be true. In fact, the laws of logic would be true in any universe, not just ours. So the laws of logic transcend time, space, matter, and all human minds. They’re invariant, unchanging, and eternal. But according to Naturalism, the natural world is all that exists, which entails that there are no transcendent logical laws. At best, logical laws would describe how human beings tend to think. And since our thinking (on Naturalism) is the product of natural selection acting on random mutation, we would have no reason to treat logical laws as foundational to correct thinking. Thoughtful argumentation would degenerate into an unguided, unstructured series of statements, with no defensible method of connecting them. The Problem of Natural Uniformity Even if we have the ability to reason logically, however, Naturalism leaves science perpetually ungrounded. To see why, consider what would happen if a skeptical questioner decided to challenge the claims of science. He asks the naturalist, “Why should I believe the results of your experiments?” “Our experiments allow us to test our hypotheses,” replies the naturalist. “And how do you know that future experiments won’t give different results?” “Because,” says the naturalist, “the laws of nature don’t change.” “But how do you know they don’t change?” “Well, we’ve been observing Nature’s laws for centuries, and we’ve never seen them change.” “I don’t care if they’ve never changed in the past. I want to know what evidence you have that these laws won’t change tomorrow?”

“Just that they haven’t changed in the past.” “But that’s exactly what I’m asking. How do you know that the future will be like the past? You obviously assume that Nature’s laws are uniform. I just don’t see how you can defend this assumption. You can’t appeal to the past as evidence that the future will follow the same laws, because that’s precisely what we’re questioning. It turns out, then, that you have no basis for believing that the results of your scientific investigation tell us how we should expect the world to behave. All this talk of natural ‘laws’ becomes groundless.” I should point out that I am not questioning the Uniformity of Nature (i.e., the assumption that natural laws don’t change from time to time, or from place to place). We all know that the same set of experiments performed under the same circumstances will give the same results tomorrow that they give today. But we didn’t learn this from science, for science presupposes the Uniformity of Nature. If we attempt to establish the Uniformity of Nature using a method that presupposes such uniformity, we will be reasoning in a circle. Thus, science remains fundamentally unjustified unless an appeal is made to something beyond science. But the naturalist has nowhere to go. Since he cannot defend the Uniformity of Nature, he cannot defend science itself. If we want to retain our confidence in science, then, we must again reject Naturalism. The Problem of Value Uniform laws of nature, however, aren’t enough to ensure the success of science, for the pursuit of knowledge epitomized by science presupposes certain values that are inconsistent with Naturalism. While scientific investigation often has a practical goal (e.g., curing a disease), we also pursue knowledge for its own sake. That is, we try to understand our universe because we believe that it is good to understand our universe, even if the knowledge we gain has no practical value whatsoever. For instance, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and most astronomical research will never make food more plentiful or lead to a higher quality of life for human beings. Indeed, our quest to understand ultimate reality (the sort of study involved in claiming that Naturalism is true) has nothing to do with making our lives more comfortable. Yet, if Naturalism is true, there are no objective values (i.e., values that are valid independent of our opinions or preferences). Of course, in a naturalist’s world, human beings would still be free to value various things, such as life, money, freedom, pleasure, and so on. But in Naturalism, such values are either personal (I like grape soda best), cultural (we like freedom of speech in the West), or a product of evolution (we should work for the good of our species). These values aren’t objective, however. There is no independent standard by which to judge that such values are more valid than their opposites. You may hate grape soda. Some cultures despise free speech. And while human beings clearly want to preserve our species, many competing species seek their own preservation, often at the expense of other species that are seeking their preservation. What makes human beings right when it comes to our values? Assuming Naturalism is true, nothing makes our values right in any objective

sense. So naturalists have yet another problem. If we seek scientific knowledge because we value knowledge as good in itself (not simply for its benefits), and Naturalism holds that nothing is good in itself, then Naturalism will always undermine science. This isn’t to say that scientific exploration will come to an end if everyone adopts the naturalist’s worldview. It’s simply to point out that there will always be an underlying tension between science (which presupposes certain values) and Naturalism (which cannot support such values). To put the matter differently, if we are going to pursue scientific knowledge of the universe and its history, we must be convinced that the results of our investigation matter (i.e., that they are significant in some sense). But if Naturalism is true, the results of scientific exploration matter very little. Our universe is a massive place, and our solar system is a trivial speck by comparison. These little creatures called “humans,” a chance product of matter in motion (yet so important to ourselves), will eventually go extinct, for the sun will run out of energy. True, some research may lead to easier, more comfortable lives for human beings, but our end is unavoidable. While practical sciences such as medicine may increase the length or quality of our lives, our days are numbered, and our understanding of quarks or quasars is entirely irrelevant to our destiny. If we seek knowledge, it is for our temporary amusement, or for the satisfaction of a biologically gratuitous desire. This is hardly the sort of thinking that could drive science and learning. Again, even in Naturalism, we’re free to value knowledge, just as we’re free to value rare coins or stamps. But if naturalists are correct, our belief in the intrinsic goodness of knowledge is a kind of delusion. Once we recognize the delusion, how can we continue pretending that truth is something we ought to pursue, or that our time wouldn’t be better spent eating, drinking, and being merry? Assessment Putting all of this together, we see that Naturalism is bankrupt as a worldview. Naturalism cannot explain the existence of our universe, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, complex biology, human consciousness, the reliability of our cognitive faculties, our access to logical laws, the Uniformity of Nature, or the values we hold. But since science presupposes and depends upon these features of our world, Naturalism provides no foundation for science, and scientific discovery is an enormous problem for Naturalism. What does this mean? It means that if science explains things, Naturalism must be false. Now that we have established the key premise in our argument, there’s no avoiding the conclusion:

1. If science explains things, then Naturalism is false. 2. Science explains things. 3. Therefore, Naturalism is false.

Hence, if science tells us anything, it tells us that Naturalism is a dead option. Anyone looking for a worldview consistent with scientific discovery will have to look elsewhere.

Chapter Eight: By It, We See Everything Else—The Explanatory Value of Christianity for Meaning and Ethics Samuel J. Youngs Seeing the World in Terms of Meaning Paul Tillich, the sometimes-maligned but undeniably brilliant existential philosopher and theologian, once said that religion and philosophy was that sort of thinking which [86] strives to answer “questions of ultimate concern.” His idea was that there are questions, and then there are questions. Some queries are so mundane that it has long been colloquial to label them “small talk” (how’s the weather? how’s work? what’ve you been up to lately?). Then there are those without which we would have no foundation from which to answer anything—not about the weather, not about work, not about anything at all. These are questions of ultimate concern: Where did everything come from? What is our destiny as a race? What is right and wrong? and What is the purpose of existence? This last one is perhaps the more recognizable, for it has become sort of the “cliché” question of ultimate concern. It is most often formulated as, “What is the meaning of life?” Not all clichés are vapid. Some are simply common. In fact, one of the hallmarks of ultimate concerns, according to Tillich, is that they are common to all peoples in some form or another. We all wonder about our origins, our destiny, about morality and meaning. And the question of meaning, of purpose, is what this essay will seek to clarify, explore, and, in its own way, exalt. When pressed on the “question of meaning,” an increasingly vocal regiment of Western thinkers resonates with Richard Dawkins’ dour pronouncement that, if one was to plumb the very depths of the universe itself, there is only to be found “blind, [87] pitiless indifference.” In this stark phrase, “blind” and “pitiless” serve the ironic role of intensifying a noun that itself signifies an utter lack of intensity, of emotion, of intentionality, of care. Indifference. What does a gong care that it is struck? What does the ocean care if human tears fall upon it? What does the wind care if it ravages a family’s ramshackle home? They care nothing. They are indifferent. Such is the universe; the center of meaning, according to Dawkins and his brand, is the absence of meaning. They cannot stop here, if they are to be thorough, nor can we in considering their position. For the “question of meaning” is not a simple grab bag of metaphysical

pronouncements. It is not just a question about prime reality or about the essential nature of this world we find ourselves thrown into. It includes these considerations, but it is not exhausted by them. Important consequences follow from the question of meaning. To phrase it in a manner both simple and cumbersome, meaning means something. What’s more, it means something for us. What I’ve come to see time and again in my experience as a student, teacher, and scholar is that thinking people all eventually tire of the abstract. Big ideas, fundamental conceptual canopies, the sort of thing that Dawkins is getting at when he talks about the rock-bottom indifference of the universe, only hold our gaze for so long. Sooner or later, we’ll rest our head on our hands or sigh heavily or lean across the table and ask, “What does all this mean for me? What do these big ideas have to do with my life?” As Dustin Hoffman incredulously exclaims as he’s nearly run over by a New York taxi, “Hey! I’m walking here!” so do we all sometimes throw up our intellectual arms and cry, “Hey! I’m living here!” We want desperately to know how much traction an idea has; we want to know how much it can really explain or justify; we want to know what ideas mean for the people we love, for the goals we pursue, for the way we think and behave, for anything and for everything. Seeing Naturalism Honestly Though Dawkins certainly has a penchant (and a talent) for weaving punchy rhetoric throughout his written work, his “indifferent universe” stands in the shadow of an even more grandiloquent and somber depiction of our human situation: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, [88] can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built . . . Bertrand Russell, the philosophically astute and markedly brazen forefather of many

contemporary neo-atheists, pulls no punches here. If the universe is without a designer, without an intelligent cause, without a personage behind the great curtain of existence, then all is truly naught but ruins, despair, finitude, and affliction. Russell is not a fan of sugarcoating. He essentially pleads, “Come on; let’s get real. These lives we’re living now, and every life that’s been lived before, are all just churning through the garbage disposal that is our universe.” One can see his point, to an extent. Tennyson immortalized our understanding of nature “red in tooth and claw,” and incisive skeptic David Hume (one of the two great heroes of New Atheist Daniel Dennett, alongside Charles Darwin) long ago decried the notion of a perfectly designed universe, citing the often-calamitous circumstances [89] of earthly existence as evidence for only a shoddy Designer, if any Designer at all. The animal world presents us with terrifying examples of violence and suffering. Natural forces appear at best unaware of the destruction they bring on humanity and at worst utterly intent on bringing it about. These are sobering facts about our world. Rendering them more palatable, as some religious thinkers have been wont to do, is often more an exercise in rhetoric than truth telling. But as aware of the harshness of life as Dawkins and Russell are, they have still, to a significant degree, done us the disservice of missing the point. It could be perceived as arrogant—not to mention ideologically slanted—for me to state which point it is that they have missed. An excerpt from one of the most famous texts in all of philosophy, written by a strident critic of Christianity, the church, and even traditional formulations of morality, may be more germane: Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on [90] us? Friedrich Nietzsche here bespeaks the much-touted “death of God,” an event in the consciousness of post-Enlightenment mankind, a victory for naturalistic thought and anti-religiosity if there ever was one. According to Nietzsche, it propelled humanity

further into a worldview saturated with science and pragmatic notions of morality. Dawkins and Russell would find little to disagree with on that score. But what they do not do, and what Nietzsche here does more candidly than a vast array of naturalistic thinkers, is confront the existential reality of such a situation. What is the world that this scenario presents for our consideration? A world that has, quite literally, spun out of control, spun out-of-bounds, spun off-course, with no means or foundation to arrest its dizzying careen. Even Russell’s sprawling vista of hopelessness is eclipsed by Nietzsche’s insight; for Russell moves on in A Free Man’s Worship to allude to the continuing value of reason and even tries to locate a genuinely ethical outlook. But Nietzsche realizes this cannot be done. An indifferent universe, an “accidental collocation of atoms,” is by definition a world without meaning, a world where the ships of reasoning and consideration have no horizon by which to plot their course; where the beating hearts of compassion have no higher sun to warm their virtue; where the earth and all its peoples are cast adrift in the cold dregs of harrowing vastness. As I said above, what do our conceptions of our universe mean for the lives we lead, for the people we love, for the questions we ask? The response of the naturalist, when faced with honesty, comes across as rather fruitless and depleted. It asks us to accept a universe with indifference at its heart, where no ultimate meaning can be ascribed to anything. What becomes of humanity, of life itself, of interpersonal interactions, in such a situation? It would serve us well to note what Nietzsche did with his fearless peering into a godless world. He built a philosophical system that even Bertrand [91] Russell condemned as a motivator of Nazism and fascism. Nietzsche’s ultimate answer to the meaning of life was simply the acquisition and exercise of power: the one who overpowers, overcomes, dominates is the person who truly understands the meaninglessness which mires us. Because life is seen to possess no center of meaning, the pursuit of self-enhancement and domination can proceed unfettered (as it sadly has, at various points of history). The naturalist/materialist solution to the question of meaning does not go far enough—as in Dawkins and Russell—or it goes to a place where all-too-human desires and drives become the one truly legitimized concern. It is not enough, then, to phlegmatically proclaim a metaphysical position on reality and then continue bemusedly onward as if it mattered little; it is not enough to declare our universe ruinous or indifferent, brush your hands off, and go on making statements that still brim with meaning for which you have denounced any possible source. It is not enough, and the whole notion that it is enough can conceal dominating desires if we are not cautious. Aldous Huxley, surefooted and insightful as

he often was, understood this, and his will be my last word on it: The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find [92] most advantageous to themselves. Seeing Each Other Truly Naturalism falters on the question of meaning. Only a few atheists have understood that if there is no ultimate purpose behind existence, then ultimately none of the alleged purposes in existence have a basis. We must think about this. We must draw it out, with honesty and with constant attention to the powerful articulations of atheists themselves, and see if it resounds with everyday life. Do the articulations of naturalists have explanatory value for the lives we encounter, the things we think, the relationships we value day-in and day-out? It has been the contention of this paper that it simply does not. But only a part of the work has been done. That naturalistic viewpoint has been examined and found lacking in some forms, but I have provided no alternative reasoning. This last section hopes to fill that gap through an examination of two aspects of common human experience: 1) our existential sense of purpose and 2) ethical judgments, which have to be justified by something if they are to be binding or legitimate. Keep in mind the goal of this discussion: To continually be moving beyond big, abstract ideas in order to explore what those ideas mean for the course of our concrete, lived existence. How do we live in light of the ideas that we hold? And, conversely, what does the way we live indicate about the truth of the universe? This is what is meant when I refer to our “existential sense of purpose.” For despite all the machinations of all the thinkers in all the inscrutable tomes of academic discourse, there is much to be said for common sense. This can be thought of as that “sense” of the world that undergirds most of our everyday interactions with one another. Now, you might be thinking, “Why should our everyday, common-sense-based decisions teach us anything about the nature of truth or existence? Isn’t that a reckless assumption?” It’s a fair question, but I am confident in aligning myself with many thinkers who have answered in the negative. Esteemed American philosopher Charles S. Peirce is noted for saying, “The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give

[93] rise.” In short, a conviction’s existence is most clearly indicated by the actions and habits of people who claim to hold that conviction. If we say we believe a certain thing, but our actions do not reflect it, Peirce doubts whether or not we truly believe what we say—which, of course, seems like common sense. The way we live our lives, while not offering conclusive proof for a single system of belief, can thus indicate something about truths that are intrinsic to our human condition. Beliefs held in common among people can tell us something about our nature, about what it means to be human. Despite the esteem often accorded to philosophers, I would venture to say that literary minds often prove to be the more percipient students of human nature, exploring bravely the rarefied tensions which dot our shared psychological, spiritual, and emotional worlds. Aristotle understood the value of art in understanding truth, saying, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” In the world of Christian theism, there is perhaps no literary mind in recent generations which is thought to have plumbed the depths of the human condition more cogently or more insightfully than Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963), Oxford-educated, professor at the same as well as at Cambridge, prolific author, and committed-skeptic-turnedcommitted-Anglican. Lewis gained distinction during wartime for his radio broadcasts, which were intended to inspire hope in the midst of crisis by orienting listeners toward the deeper things of life. These broadcasts, in several ways, form much of Lewis’ answer to the question of meaning. We will here proceed according to the two points I mentioned above. First, concerning our existential sense of purpose, Lewis proclaimed that: The man [who remarks that another person’s behavior is reprehensible in some way] isn’t just saying that the other man’s behavior doesn’t happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies, ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing doesn’t really go against the standard. . . . It looks, in fact, very much as if both [94] parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule . . . What Lewis offers is the kind of ground-level observation we are pursuing. We interact with each other in many ways—and some would argue in every way—as though those interactions have meaning, have significance, have weight. But why should we do this? If the accidental mixing of gases and the meaningless march of

blind natural processes are all that can be said for history’s progression, why would I be inclined to interact with others as though they mean something? Why would I be inclined to be kind to them, apologize to them, sacrifice for them, or give to their charities? Yet we do all of these things, and innumerable smaller and more mundane things, as though our actions mean something. In a recent class I taught, a slide of my presentation included the above-quoted section from Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship . I read it aloud and upon finishing it noticed an acute silence had fallen over the classroom. This is a room that is mixed in spiritual affection—we have Christians, skeptics, and some who are in-between. But despite their disagreements on certain issues, they were uniform in their consternation. That’s depressing, they said. It’s unthinkable. It doesn’t make sense. They felt, with a kind of sharp existential aftershock, much of what Lewis is meaning to convey. We don’t look at each other and exclaim, “Ah! You are an accidental collocation of atoms, who will one day be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins! Your needs and rights mean nothing to me!” Unless we have been on the wrong end of a particularly stressful day, we instead see a fellow, a companion, a human, a sharer in our likeness and in our place in the world—and if our fellow is in distress or need or some state of wreckage, we are very often compelled to aid him or her. If we do not keep this “Law,” as Lewis calls it, which seems to throb so brightly within our humanity itself, we are struck by a sense of failure, of missing something vital. In fact, much of our existential sense of purpose, in Lewis’ estimation, is beset by the troubling knowledge that things ought to be a certain way—kind, gentle, forgiving, discerning—and yet very often they are not. This dual realization, knowing a right and meaningful way of acting and recognizing that we do not often practice it, lies at the root of all our lives, all our relationships. “They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the [95] universe we live in.” [96] Still, what am I saying? After all, Lewis was writing at a time when “sociobiology ” had not yet been conceived as a field of study, although there were markedly imperialist, racist strains of supposed “cultural evolution” that could be found among [97] the most “enlightened” of Enlightenment naturalists. Still, Lewis is not neglectful on this score, remarking that, indeed, some people believe that the Moral Law is an [98] instinct that has developed much like our other instincts. And it is here that Lewis transitions into a more proper discussion of ethics, in particular our compulsion

toward ethical value judgments. Certainly we have instincts. And certainly they run our lives in many ways. But they do not always harmonize with notions of personal preservation or advancement or dominance. Very often, we are moved to give things up for others; we judge between our own desires and the desires of others and willingly sacrifice for them. Lewis rightly notes that “this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, can’t itself be either of [99] them.” The woman who, after a long day of work, buys herself a sandwich to slake her gnawing hunger and upon seeing a homeless man with quivering hand extended gives him the food instead, is not exactly pursuing any Darwinian (Neo- or otherwise) instinctual drives. What’s more, isn’t it interesting that in our examination of any number of studies among chimpanzees which have claimed to detect “pre-moral” sentiments such as [100] altruism and reciprocity, we should have within our human selves inklings and capacities for ranking the chimps’ actions in any ethical way at all? If a naturalist [101] wants to call jumping into the water to save a fellow chimp “moral,” what standard is she using? Where did she get this idea of morality to read back onto said chimps? What’s more, when male chimps attack female chimps who are carrying [102] infants (as has long been documented ), what allows us, as humans, to look at that behavior and value it as less good, less seemingly virtuous or moral than chimps trying to save each other from drowning? Where does the mechanism for choosing and discerning among moral options come from? If this is all the directionless pursuit of species’ survival mechanisms, on what basis, for instance, can we call theocratic misogyny in Saudi Arabia any “better” or any “worse” than the way women are treated anywhere else? Lewis is again instructive on this point: The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both some Real Morality, admitting that there is really such a thing as Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas [103] get nearer to that real Right than others. These everyday occurrences of purposeful choosing, meaningful interaction, and moral valuing cry out for meaning, for an overarching explanation as to why things

are the way that they are. Can a purely naturalistic view give meaning to life on this score? An interesting case in point comes to us from a short essay by surefooted atheist Wayne Anderson, appropriately entitled “Science Can Uncover Life’s [104] Meaning.” As his essay title suggests, he is confident that “science . . . can point [105] to a highly satisfying meaning to life.” But not a full page later, after a short detour through some string theory, we find Anderson suggesting that “matter itself [106] may well be an illusion caused by the wiggles of space-time.” An illusory existence, a trick of physics? Is such a notion much removed from Dawkins’ indifferent universe? But Anderson continues, further annulling his overly optimistic hope for scientifically-imbued meaning: “By themselves scientific discoveries do not [107] give humans a purpose in life.” Instead, Anderson’s conclusion is that humans [108] are to “devise our own purpose.” Now, this is precisely the opposite of what Anderson had promised. A “highly satisfying meaning to life” is not what shimmers in the distance when he shrugs his shoulders and says that what he actually meant was that science can only describe and categorize natural phenomena, and that humans have to make their own way in the search for meaning. The bleakness rears its head again, albeit less aggressively. Anderson even says that his view on the question of meaning is “terrifying,” though [109] possibly also “exhilarating.” One is reminded of a fatal fall from a high place: exciting but terrifying, and ultimately tragic. Philip Yancey has commented on this phenomenon of naturalistic thinking struggling to infuse meaning and morality into life with no basis for doing so, saying, “These new high priests lecture us solemnly about multiculturalism, gender equality, homophobia, and environmental degradation, all the while ignoring the fact that they have systematically destroyed any basis for judging such behavior right or [110] wrong.” Further on, Yancey remarks on the naturalistic pull that lurked throughout the nauseating work of the Marquis de Sade, who infamously declared, “Nothing is forbidden by nature.” A worldview driven solely and slavishly by the discoveries of science will only find itself able to “describe” the world, not explain it, not know it deeply, not understand it. It finds itself without basis or foundation for making moral judgments or lending credence to lives which are saturated with significance, for a significance we mark

every time we are hurt, fall in love, seek higher truth, or rail against injustice. The Christian worldview provides a framework in which the valuable discoveries of science can meld with the exigencies of our lived, concrete existence in the world. For Christianity proclaims that humans are grand things, created with the stamp of the imago Dei, God’s own likeness, on our very being. Rationality, boundless creativity, wisdom, discernment, sacrificial love, authority and strength and the ability to master our environments, these are all distinctive hallmarks of humanity in the world, and theologians and Christian thinkers have suggested that these qualities echo our unique creation. What’s more, though we feel the tug of this honorable place in our desire to do good and righteous things, we are brutally aware of how often we fall short (and tell me, what is the evolutionary purpose for a sense of abiding discontentment with the world on moral grounds?). Christianity speaks to this deeply, with its understanding of a Fall, a fundamental fracture in the heart of the world, that has to be gradually set right by the co-working of God with humanity in the form of his church. This sort of abstraction, this sort of metaphysical thinking, comes underneath our lives—with all their holy terror and noonday brightness of sacrificial compassion and abiding concern—and gives them meaning. Or, more correctly, it brings into focus that meaning which we all know to be there as we go about living our lives with purpose and making ethical judgments as though they really, deeply matter. For as Lewis elsewhere says, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only [111] because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” To return to where we started: Why should life have any meaning at all? Because it finds its source in a great Creator, a Creator who desires humans to cherish one another and fight against those things which reduce meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness. Few civilizations have ever been built on the back of worldview that claimed everything was meaningless at the center. That’s why it’s important that we hear Charles Peirce when he says that our actions, the ways we live, reveal our beliefs. If naturalism is true, could even the naturalists live like it? With Dawkins’ indifferent universe, Russell’s accidental humanity, and Nietzsche’s meaningless world all ringing in our ears, perhaps we’ll realize that none of us could.

Chapter Nine: Reason in a Christian Context Peter Grice The purpose of this chapter is to encounter reason as it is understood within a Christian framework. This will involve thinking carefully about reason, and perhaps differently than you have been accustomed to. I will seek to clarify and characterize reason, survey its intimate association with Christian belief, and demonstrate how Christianity affects reason’s status. Since we are pursuing a coherent, integrated picture, we will be moving at a reasonable pace. We will cover theological, philosophical, and scientific terrain, and our focus will be on the most relevant features and issues. Some areas not discussed in depth here are explored elsewhere in this book. I will be mainly concerned with Christianity as an ancient belief system, as well as interacting with some contemporary discussions, so I intentionally leave the historic body of Christian thought unexplored. Overall, I will attempt to provide enough guidance and detail to assist the reader who may wish to do further research. Here is the general path I will follow. I will begin by framing the discussion through a series of vignettes. We will need to understand our main terms and appreciate some issues that are generally in play. Next, I proceed through a sketch of how Christianity relates to reason in theological terms. This will cover the origin and purpose of reasoning, the nature of faith and evidence, and the critical significance of reason in the Christian life. Finally, I will investigate reason as something to be explained and justified. This involves comparing the status of reason in light of Naturalism and Christianity, and will complete our investigation of reason in a Christian context. What Is Reason?

Thinking clearly about reason is especially hard, since as a broad concept it covers several distinct meanings and applications. Awareness of these is important in conversation and study, since a subtle shift can lead to mistakes. To complicate matters, each aspect of reason has its different interpretations, problems, and associated debates. There are even a few popular abuses of the term “reason,” such as when it signifies skepticism about everything that hasn’t been empirically demonstrated. Despite these challenges, inspecting reason from various angles is a worthwhile pursuit. One might expect to traverse questions of how our reasoning is caused, reflections on the abstract laws or conventions of logic, methods such as induction, deduction and abduction, the perils of assumptions and fallacies, the limits of scientific inquiry, statistical data on the reliability of our reasoning skills, models for rational dialogue, and so on. These diverse areas and more await any student of this rich and satisfying subject. For our purposes, I will be mainly interested in a general definition, and later on, with questions about the nature and legitimacy of our reasoning.

Reason is fundamentally the act of engaging the mind—whether done intuitively or rigorously, poorly or flawlessly. It is a process of (ideally) careful thinking, always involving logic, often drawing upon evidence. Some of its operations include sifting truth from error in making sense of the world, weighing probabilities and practicalities in evaluating courses of action, comparing greater and lesser goods and ills in formulating moral judgments, conceptualizing plans and designs, and constructing objects of technology.

Reason and Rhetoric Reason is worthy of much celebration. However, it is ill-advised to wield reason as a moral trophy, in order to identify and shame supposed enemies. Some of reason’s more vocal champions—among them atheists and secular humanists—are increasingly doing just that, via pejorative labels such as “religious” and “faith.” But is it really, automatically rational to be nonreligious? Of course not. True reason is never so hasty and naïve. Conflating reason with any particular viewpoint, especially while wielding rhetorical or political force, means that the view can no longer be subjected to reason, as it should. Conflating reason with virtue seems equally harmful to the cause, considering that this is a textbook reasoning error. Wouldn’t it be far better to admit that reason and morality are both human proclivities, in various states of use and abuse? Rhetoric adds spice to any interaction, but when it is misused, it actually undermines reason.

Reason and Carelessness The problem of rhetoric is part of a wider concern with contemporary discourse, where terms like “faith” and “God” are being profoundly equivocated. Driven less by bigotry and more by intellectual laziness, such terminological carelessness is often used to erase important distinctions among belief systems. For instance, pluralists tell us that every “faith” is basically the same. The problem with this analysis is that “faith” without an object is a nonsensical concept. Like casting a vote for nobody, or placing your trust in no one in particular, it can’t actually be done. This is not to imply that the object of ones’ faith is necessarily tangible or actually exists: only that there is typically an objective truthclaim implicit in faith itself. Faith is always intended as faith in something. Therefore, it matters a great deal whether one’s faith is in Zeus or Jesus or Allah. These different faith claims can be confirmed or disconfirmed by reality itself, at least in principle. Each claim necessarily excludes the others. Pluralists seeking to fuse Hinduism’s polytheism with Judaism’s insistent monotheism must ignore the objective tension between the contradictory objects of each respective faith claim. Thus to look down on faith claims for being “exclusive” is to simply misunderstand their essential nature. The objective sense of faith claims is a distinctively rational quality. Those who profess rational belief should be eager to acknowledge this, and be troubled by the loss of clarity induced by carelessness concerning the meaning of “faith.”

Reason, Virtue, and Knowledge In seeking a more adequate frame, it is important to disentangle reason and virtue. This is potentially problematic due to different views of virtue, so an illustration will serve to establish the point. The experiments of the Nazi eugenicists were an abuse of an ethical standard, but not a violation of rationality per se. There are many morally good ways to apply reason, but in this case they were applying reason in service of unethical goals. So, it is clear enough that they are two different things. However, considered in the opposite direction, morality seems to require rational activity, since ethical situations must be analyzed in order to weigh a course of action. That is true even for those who think the Nazi program was a justifiable good, that it was morally neutral, or even that it was meaningless, since in all such cases people tend to arrive at an identifiably moral position via some rationale. The missing key is the concept of knowledge. Reason emerges as highly suited to the pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit of the good (this exposes its normative character, to be considered later). If it is appropriate to rank them in order, the good would be highest, involving knowledge and reason, followed by knowledge as it is served by reason, followed by reason itself as the humble, invaluable tool.

What Is Christianity? Despite the confusion of multiple voices from within and without, an authentic expression of “the faith once and for all delivered” (Jude 3) may be retrieved from the Bible. From its pages we learn that Christianity is the belief system and way of living constituted by, and upon, Jesus of Nazareth. The significance of who Jesus is, of what he accomplished and also will complete, is too rich and profound to cover here. Suffice to say, Jesus is esteemed as the Creator and Redeemer; the preexistent Logos

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of God; the holy One above and behind all things.

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His authority is

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accepted; his teaching trusted: Jesus is the focal point of the Christian faith. He is himself God; thus the Christian outlook is all-encompassing. It gives rise to a comprehensive worldview (which can also function as a broad explanatory hypothesis).

Reason and Christianity in General Many aspects of Christianity sustain and require the use of reason. The doctrine of Creation, for instance, teaches us that all reality has been made by God, and that we are made for this cosmos. Together, these beliefs strengthen our motivation to investigate all that God has made for His glory and our benefit. As David Marshall discusses at greater length in this volume, it doesn’t seem possible to read the Bible without noticing how it incorporates things like evidence, reason, justification, explanation, proof, defense, knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Peter admonishes fellow believers to provide their reasons for believing (1 Pet. 3:15). God invites the Israelites to “reason together” about justice (Is. 1:18). Jesus emphasizes loving God through the full faculties of the mind (Mt. 22:37). Paul instructs the church to renew their minds and “think soberly” (Rom. 12:2,3), to “test all things” (1 Thess. 5:21) and supplant childish thinking with mature reasoning (1 Cor. 13:11, 14:20).

Habitually he reasons in the temples and marketplace, and even with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens (Acts 17:22-31). “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge ” come forth in a full revelation of Jesus Christ (Col. 2:2-3). Throughout the Bible, the theme is the same: precisely because God made us in His image, we are to seek after truth with all of the rational capacities we have been given.

Reason and Christian Faith in Particular In Christianity, faith is an active, justified trust in God. It is neither “blind” nor irrational, as the

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popular myths claim. Rather, it simply follows upon sufficient

evidence of trustworthiness:

Faith is commitment to action . . . based upon knowledge of God and God’s ways. The romantic talk of “leaping,” to which we in the Western world have become accustomed, actually amounts to “leaping” without [116] faith. (Emphasis in the original.) To clarify the biblical notion of faith, let’s explore the famous chapter on faith, Hebrews 11. I will be particularly interested in the first verse, which many people misunderstand, and the treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac. In doing so, we will see that biblical faith is not believing apart from the evidence, but is actually a rational response to God’s initiating work in the life of the believer. Hebrews 11:1 reads “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not

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seen.” Many have taken this to mean that faith is an invisible substance that somehow responds to a lack of evidence. In context, however, what it is saying is that our trust in Jesus is the tangible experience we have in the present, and it functions (figuratively) as substantial assurance that God will act in the future. The “things” hoped for and not yet seen, should not be taken as prayer requests as many people assume. They originate with God, not us, and refer to the content of God’s promises. Is this a blind faith? Not at all. The rational grounding for this faith is revealed in the surrounding verses, where we learn that faith comes from a response to God’s revelation. The rest of Hebrews 11 provides dozens of examples of the reasonableness of trusting God for the present and the future. We are particularly reminded of God’s work in creating the universe and His faithful promise-keeping throughout the history of Israel. In our case, since others have trusted God, and God has worked on their behalf, it is a rational decision for us to trust God. Properly understood, Hebrews 11:1 is speaking of the scope of faith extending beyond present visible evidence. But it does not present faith and reason in tension with one another. But what about the account of Abraham and Isaac, mentioned in the middle of this chapter? Ironically, though the New Atheists have criticized his story as the glorification of a religious lunatic willing to

sacrifice his own son, this passage is actually representative of a reasonable response to God. Søren Kierkegaard famously anguished over the sheer terror Abraham must have felt at being asked to do

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the unthinkable. He concluded that under certain circumstances reason inevitably breaks down, so that faith must be cast over such a logical breach. This interpretation was later characterized as a

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blind “leap of faith,” a position which came to be known as fideism. This tendency to antagonize faith and reason, though historically rare in Christian thinking, is currently gaining

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popularity among lay Christians.

So let’s take a closer look at this story. Abraham had already experienced the incredible miracle of his wife delivering a son well after she had entered into menopause. Reading the story at face value, we understand that Abraham has repeatedly met with God in profound and personally transformative experiences, and seen abundant evidence of God’s tremendous goodness and love. Given this background of extraordinary personal revelation and miraculous experiences, the extreme test that God proposes, of sacrificing his only son, can actually be answered with Abraham’s rational trust in God’s goodness and provision. This, in fact, is what the biblical narrative showcases. Within the story itself, we are told that Abraham concluded, before he went up the mountain, that “God himself will supply the lamb” (Gen. 22:8). Later biblical reflection on this narrative intends to highlight this rational process. As we see in Hebrews 11, Abraham “had embraced the promises,” in that “God had said to him, ‘It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.’” So, “Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead.” The biblical pattern of coming to faith always begins with evidence. The first stage of evidence is the pervasive knowledge of God discernible in creation (Rom. 1:20). In addition, sometimes the evidence is the experience of personally encountering God. (To automatically dismiss this evidence as psychic malfunction is to beg the question.) Sometimes the evidence comes from observing the fulfillment of prophecy or witnessing a miracle. Following these profound experiences of God and his work, the believer rightly and reasonably continues to trust in God’s existence and good plan through other, more ambiguous, circumstances. There is always a moral, rational “step” to be taken in responding to God by trusting Him, but no absurd leap is ever implied. Reason and the Resurrection The paradigmatic case of a rational faith is the Resurrection of Jesus. Critics scoff, saying, “We have science; we know that dead men don’t rise! Only the superstitious ancients could believe a silly myth like that!” Of course, the natural irreversibility of death has been well known among pretty much every society, as it was for the first Christians. As the apostle Paul, one of history’s most radically converted skeptics, put it, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain . . . we are of all people most to be pitied.” no faith.”

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Paul is saying, “If there’s no reality to our claims, if they lack evidence, then there’s

What kind of evidence did Paul have for the bodily resurrection of Jesus? He and the early Christian community were galvanized by the shared conviction of multiple eyewitnesses, based upon “many convincing proofs.” For a period of forty days, their once-crucified leader lived, breathed, spoke, and ate among the group of people who knew him best: the once-cowardly Peter, then the twelve of the inner circle; afterward, “more than 500 brothers and sisters at once, most of whom are still living,” followed by his own half-brother James, then all the apostles, and finally the once-hostile

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Paul.

Although the strength of this evidence might seem to diminish for subsequent generations, this need not be the case. In the account of an appearance to Thomas given in John 20:24-29, Jesus implies that future generations won’t have the same privileged access. He doesn’t reprimand Thomas for seeking evidence per se—after all, he assists him—rather, for Thomas’s slowness to believe Jesus’ credentials and predictions of his resurrection (Mt. 16:21, 17:9, 20:19, 26:32). Jesus had promised that his resurrection would be a miraculous “sign,” and throughout his ministry made explicit appeals

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to the evidence of his miracles and fulfilled prophecies.

After the Resurrection, when subsequent generations did arise, they were blessed and encouraged by the testimonies of the large number of eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15:3-7). Today we have direct access to the early written records of the accounts, including the prophetic evidence that Thomas ignored. The essential ingredients of an appropriately historical case remain firm, compelling one-time leading atheist philosopher Antony Flew to remark, “The evidence for the resurrection is better than for

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claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity. ” The appeals to eyewitness testimony for this critical event establish the early Christians’ very high regard for reason and objectively evaluated evidence.

Reason and Christian Practice The Christian message is about the coming kingdom of God and the need to be reconciled to God through this kingdom’s sovereign, Jesus Christ. That reconciliation was accomplished by Jesus on a Roman cross, with forgiveness of sins now extended to all as a free gift. Many people don’t realize there is also an outworking of this salvation in the Christian life, sometimes called sanctification. In light of the hope of eternal life, the Christian life now is considered a journey of preparation. The early church had a thoroughgoing view of the refining purpose of situational temptations, trials, and sufferings, opening up new vistas for the formation of virtues, like patience, courage, kindness, compassion, perseverance, self-control, and humility. The point of developing these traits is that holy character is essential for the age to come. According to Romans 12:1-2, that transformation involves the constant renewal of the mind. The disciplined moral and spiritual life requires the mind, since “by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable,” which occurs through “powers of discernment trained

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by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” Discernment is presented as a trained skill, a sensibility for moral reasoning. God’s moral will amounts to whatever is good in a given situation:

if it were just a matter of being told what to do, we would not need to think, nor would we ever develop. The task is to think well, and to think on one’s feet about what constitutes the right thing to do. We draw on knowledge gained through general revelation (knowledge acquired by means of experience, observation, and conscience) and special revelation, the great resource of Scripture, with its every episode teaching us something of righteous character (including what not to do). Although absolute moral commands like the Ten Commandments form a clear ethical framework, Jesus taught that they can be more organically distilled into principles that pervade a person’s character. In particular, he taught, our moral duties can be summed up in loving God and loving our fellow human beings. These tasks still need to be unpacked, for they may involve complex ethical dilemmas, and the weighing of greater and lesser goods and evils. The way of love requires understanding, as it reaches deep, beyond appearances, into the area of real needs and truths. The practice of discernment, in light of its goals, makes moral reasoning productive in the here-and-now.

Reason and Justification Prior to this point we have not considered whether the use of reason is legitimate. Most people simply assume that it is, however there are numerous reasons to worry that it’s not. What kind of foundation or criterion is necessary for the existence and use of reason? This is a critical issue. Philosopher Jaegwon Kim notes that, “to identify the criteria by which we ought to regulate acceptance and rejection of beliefs . . . has been the agenda of Western epistemology to

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this day.” Kim alludes here to the “epistemic norms” by which we evaluate and conclude that we are justified in believing something. We need to be able to speak genuinely of things like “good reasons” and “adequate evidence.” Reason, like ethics, is a thoroughly normative project. As well, it is characteristically a truth-seeking activity, since it has always been aimed at deriving accurate beliefs. This has come to be called the “traditional view” of epistemology or justification. It involves the familiar use of logical argument, and a standard view of knowledge as justified, true belief (despite exceptional cases). Champions of reason in our day would require such a view of justification, and I would include myself among them. The difficulty seems to be that this is metaphysical terrain. We understand, however, that our reasoning takes place in the more physical location of the human brain. Accordingly, a project is underway to reduce or “naturalize” reason and justification, which “could be understood as the process of shifting emphasis from logical analysis of relations between propositions, to analysis

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concerned with cognitive processes of forming beliefs.” But as Campbell and Poller lament, “In doing naturalistic epistemology, we must reconcile ourselves to much weaker (indeed, profoundly indirect) ‘justification’ than traditional epistemology sought.”

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What are we to make of this? Where can we find an adequate justification for reason and knowledge?

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga captures the main components as he defines external conditions necessary for knowledge:

A belief has [justification] if and only if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design [129] plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. As we will see, everything hinges on the possibility of a brain that functions properly. Behind this question stand big-picture accounts of what the universe is like and how it developed. We will be interested here in contrasting Christianity with its primary rival account in Metaphysical Naturalism (or simply Naturalism).

The Problem of Reason Conceptually, Naturalism is the assumption of closed causal systems, principally in viewing the cosmos itself as closed to any outside influence. As such, a naturalistic explanation for the origin and growth in complexity of biological life must invoke mechanisms that are strictly “blind” with regard to goals or ends. Its account of biological evolution, therefore, cannot validly speak of foresight or goal-directedness. Naturalism is a monism. Under monism, all existence is part of a single continuum. This entails that distinct categories such as animal, vegetable, and mineral are illusory and arbitrary with respect to fundamental reality. It further entails that any particular parts, such as human beings, have no essential identity. If human beings are not essentially different from our material bodies, then the notion of a unique person or “self” evaporates. G. K. Chesterton marveled at the apparent absurdity of entertaining this: “You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves

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whether they have any selves.” Monistic relations are wholly internal and relativistic, which is why they lead inescapably to reductionism. Contemporary naturalism’s outlook on the cosmos actually has much in common with that of the ancient Epicureans. Fascinatingly, when the apostle Paul engaged Epicurean and Stoic philosophers (Acts 17:22-31), he appropriated some of their own concepts in order to convey his message. In so doing, he also weighed in on their ongoing debate, from the point of view of a Christian metaphysic. In his discourse, Paul was concerned that the divine Being not be reduced to the created order, and that human beings be understood to derive our existence from him (figuratively, God’s “offspring”). God is not part of the physical world, yet while humans in many ways are, we are not reducible to it. Nature’s causality is not closed: there is openness to a transcendent causal principle. The only serious candidate for such an active influence from outside the system would be a Creator. Paul’s scheme was entirely consistent, exposing his audience’s point of incoherence: their reduction of divinity to physical things. This clash of paradigms in the first century reverberates through the centuries down to the present day.

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Epicureanism was rediscovered in the early Renaissance and from there passed into the modern reductionist, materialist framework for describing nature—a program bent not only on denying anything beyond the material realm, but also on reducing everything to an ever smaller set of constituent parts and emphasizing these parts as ultimate reality. Epicureanism provided the prototype of the meaningless universe: [132] godless, governed by chance, purposeless. The mention of purpose here is noteworthy, as it relates to teleology as the most radical point of departure between rival explanatory schemes, Naturalism and Christianity. Teleology is the study of a contested feature of the universe: the assignment of purposes, goals, or ends to things. As a mode of explanation, teleology correlates purposes with functions; goals with strivings; ends with means. Following Aristotle, the purpose for which something is made is implicated in its cause. Christianity affirms the presence of telos everywhere, while Naturalism always excludes it (except from the realm

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of human artefacts).

What has this to do with reason? Recall that reasoning has been conceived as a normative project, aimed at the (teleological) goal of arriving at truth. But naturalism conflicts with the apparent reality of teleology, as James Barham explains:

Naturalism in its present form is indeed guilty [of] exclusion of inconvenient facts. The recalcitrant datum it is neglecting [is] normativity. This hole at the heart of science where normativity should be is a spectre haunting much of our contemporary intellectual life. It is, after all, one of the more obvious facts about the world that biological processes occur for a reason: namely, to achieve some goal or purpose. This teleological organization of living things establishes a norm according to which individual actions may be assigned a value, judged as good or bad, properly functioning or malfunctioning. These are perfectly objective facts about the world, in no way dependent on human observers. If human beings had never existed, countless billions of other living creatures would still have pursued their various goals in exactly the same way. Yet, metaphysical naturalism would have us believe that teleology is some sort of illusion. In other words, all of the life sciences, as well as the social sciences and the humanities, are making constant use of a principle that officially does not [134] exist! This is a deeply pathological situation that cannot go on forever. Barham here claims that normativity is everywhere evinced in real biological systems, on the basis that they are widely claimed in general to have some function. For instance, the function of a creature’s heart would be to circulate blood. “To circulate blood” is the purpose, or normative standard, which in turn defines whether the heart is functioning properly. As a standard or goal, it is blatantly teleological, which is strictly incompatible with the established form of Naturalism. In a

volume intended to tackle such issues, Patrick J. Ward is similarly frank. Speaking of the field of evolutionary biology, he writes:

There is at least one outstanding case where the widespread usage of a teleological concept seems motivated by a genuine belief in the objective reality of an end-directedness. The biological concept of adaption is teleological in attributing the responses of an organism to its surroundings to “functionality” for the organism itself. If the concept of “function” does not represent any objective reality, being a purely heuristic device of the human brain, then Darwin’s theory of adaption via natural selection likewise does not address any objective reality. It is therefore an outstanding problem in biology that without an accepted scientific theory of end-directedness as an objective property of biological processes and responses, a great deal of the current conceptual [135] foundation of biology is open to serious dispute. To state it succinctly, teleology must be rejected, but this comes at a severe price: the linchpin concept of “function” around which the paradigm of evolutionary adaption revolves is a phantom. Accordingly, the human brain is not “for” thinking reliable thoughts at all. As Plantinga observed, “Naturalism also lacks room for the notion of proper function for non-artifacts, and hence lacks room for the notion of proper function for our cognitive faculties. It therefore has no room for the notion of knowledge.”

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Attempts to naturalize reason serve to illustrate reductionism’s devastating payload: logical thought and argument has become redundant. The familiar proposal that all “design” in the biological world is only apparent, or illusory, turns on the naturalistic rejection of a Creator’s teleological hand in nature. The demonstrable fallout from such a proposal is this cascading reductive effect that eventually topples reason itself. As an account of reason, that is simply not satisfactory.

Conclusion I have emphasized Naturalism’s failure to justify reason, but I trust it has been clear all along that the flipside is the solution provided by Christianity. A Christian explanation succeeds precisely by establishing the notions of properly functioning cognitive equipment, and its normative goal of truthseeking. This means that when it exalts reason throughout its theological system, as we surveyed further above, it does so with complete legitimacy. In light of these discoveries, my hope is that readers of all stripes might acknowledge the Bible’s ideal of mature, virtuous thinking, patiently encourage negligent Christians to no longer “reason like a

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child,” and admonish critics to abandon their stereotypes. These responses will provide for a more fruitful—and reasonable—engagement.

Chapter Ten: The Marriage of Faith and Reason David Marshall Faith is often assumed to be an irrational act, a “leap” into the unknown over an empty chasm where evidence ought to lie. This assumption is deeply ingrained in Western thinking, even language. The “Age of Faith” is contrasted with the “Age of Reason.” We’re told to “take it on faith” when we have no reason to believe something at all. The difference between “science” and “religion” is supposed by many to parallel this alleged disconnect between faith and reason. Biologist Sheldon Gottlieb wrote, “In the world of the supernatural, anything goes, and the only limitation is the extent of one’s imagination. No evidence is required to substantiate any claims” (Commentary, September 1996). Similarly, in her history of American freethinkers, Susan Jacoby remarked, “The scientific method itself, with its demand to ‘Prove it,’ discourages the leaps of faith in the unverifiable that are the essence of any religion.” That faith conflicts with reason is the quintessence of conventional wisdom. This is also one of the foundational assumptions of the New Atheism. The works of such atheist “rock stars” as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, along with up-and-coming wannabes, is often explicitly founded on the what we might call the “blind faith meme,” the assumption that Christians view faith as the virtue of believing, as Dawkins put it, “not only in the absence of evidence, but in the teeth of the evidence.” Thus, Sam Harris entitled his first book The End of Faith. John Loftus subtitled one of his books Why Faith Fails. Victor Stenger titled chapter two of The New Atheism, in which he quoted me extensively, and misread me terribly, “The Folly of Faith.” This widespread understanding of faith and reason is deeply mistaken. Faith is not some peculiar, mystical path to belief in things probably unreal. In fact, faith is simply one of two faculties (along with its close cousin, reason) by which we know all that we know. Without faith, in the Christian sense of the word, it is not only impossible to please God, it is impossible to walk down the street, say “Good morning!” to your wife, fill in a map of the United States with the names of states, or say, “I believe in common descent and the brotherhood of primates.” The Christian view of faith sheds light on how human beings interact with the world around us. Christian epistemology offers a deeper understanding of what we know, and how we know it, than does a naïvely uncritical scientism, a worship of the “scientific method.” I intend, in this chapter, to describe how the Gospel of Jesus Christ brings about the “marriage of faith and reason.”

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When I originally wrote the material that constitutes the current chapter, I emailed it to a number of Christian thinkers I respect. Four kindly responded: Gary Habermas, historian and one of the world’s leading authorities on evidence for the resurrection; Ward Gasque, theologian and New Testament scholar; Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Missions; and Jason Pratt, philosopher and novelist. Two atheists (a scientist and a historian) also dialogued with me on this subject in the course of the original discussion. Habermas suggested that I add a “comprehensive

definition (of faith) from the New Testament,” along with a discussion of methodology. Winter also thought I needed to say something about what “faith” means in the New Testament. I mention this to support the fact that what I am writing here is not my own idiosyncratic view; it is what evangelical Christian scholars agree is true about faith. No doubt the New Testament is the place to start to obtain the true Christian view of what faith really means. But every reader can open the Bible and see for himself how the word is used. So I’ll compromise. After defining faith, I’ll give an overview of seven ways in which the New Testament intimately connects faith and reason—without doing a word study, which some readers might find tedious. After defining faith, looking at general patterns in the New Testament, I’ll try to clear up a common misperception about faith, one that is often grounded in the story of Doubting Thomas. (In chapter nine, Peter Grice has already cleared up a similar misperception about the great “faith” chapter, Hebrews 11.) In the Appendix, I cite Christian thinkers down through the ages, and show how faith and reason have been intimately, and fruitfully, joined in their thought. What Is Faith? By faith, I contend that Christians usually mean, “holding firmly to and acting on what you have good reason to think is true.” In Jesus and the Religions of Man (2000), I compared faith and reason to two chopsticks, with which the human mind feeds itself on the truth. Faith must be tested by reason. But reason relies on four levels of faith for all the facts that it holds dear: faith in the mind, senses, other people, and (the question at issue between theists and atheists) in God. An atheist with an interest in the history of science, “Hypatia,” told me she believed that the sun would rise tomorrow based not on faith, but on “an amassed preponderance of past physical evidence.” But how does one access that evidence? I asked. Even to say, “The sun rose this morning,” you have to trust your mind (its rationality and memory), your senses (visual and tactual), or (some days), people who affirm that despite morning fog, the sun shines in the fields of heaven above. And so to act on that belief, say by taking your camera out in the predawn to take pictures of the sunrise, “is an act of great faith.” Another atheist, “Dr. H,” who has worked in both philosophy and science, responded: I think the nuance you put on the term “faith” is incorrect. You are talking about something other than faith; something other than religious faith, at least . . . Most of the Christian apologetics that I have read reminds me of my faeries at the bottom of my garden. You will either believe in my faeries by faith, or you won’t, and if you don’t, there is very little point in arguing over whether they are wearing pink or purple sneakers. To support his point, he reminded me of “doubting Thomas”: “Thomas is gently rebuked, in fact, for requiring some kind of proof.” Dr. H continued:

If you elect to believe it, you do so on faith alone. And by faith I mean the actual, biblical kind of faith, where you get rebuked if you ask for proof other than circular logic . . . AND you get rewarded for checking your brain at the door. (Blessed are those who do not see, and yet believe.) All right, then. Let’s look at what the “actual, biblical kind of faith” looks like, including in the “doubting Thomas” passage from which Dr. H quoted twice, here. Faith and Reason in the New Testament Radical historian Richard Carrier boldly applied the “Blind Faith Meme” to the first Christians: You don’t need evidence, you just need faith . . . We find no evidence that any Christian converts did any fact-checking before converting . . . Indeed, every Christian who actually tells us what convinced him explicitly say she didn’t check any facts but merely believed upon hearing the story and reading the scriptures and just “feeling” it was right. In fact, Carrier claimed: Every early discussion we have from Christians regarding their methodology for testing claims either omits, rejects, or even denigrates rational, empirical methods and promotes instead faith-based methods of finding secrets hidden in scripture and relying on spiritual inspirations and revelations, and then verifying all this by whether their psychosomatic

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