If you don’t like how your life is going, why don’t you just ask God for help?

In my last post, I mentioned that my life really isn’t good enough to be worth trading away the hope of heaven, just so I can live by my own rules for what relatively little time I have left in this life. I anticipate the titular question is the type of thing a well-meaning Christian might ask. I’m also drawing some inspiration from my mom, who never hesitates (whenever I’m complaining about my sad state in life) to say that “following God is the only way to true happiness.” This fails to move me, though, because if that were true, I would’ve never left the church in the first place. If that were true, I should think that after two thousand years of Christianity, there wouldn’t still be all this conflict and disagreement about which religion was the right and true one, because it would slowly-but-surely be plainly evident to everyone (not just the people who already believe it) that one religion gets better “results” than the others.

But anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent. Since I’m so dissatisfied with my life, I can see how a person who believes in the power of prayer might think that asking God for help would be a good start to get myself on the right track. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed thinking about how pitiful my miserable existence is, I might have a moment of weakness and think, “eh, maybe I should just give it a try. What could it hurt?”

Aren’t people just atheists because they don’t want to obey God?

(Click here for a longer, more detailed version of this.)

A man or woman rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the paucity of evidence. One rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit one’s need for God.

--Ravi Zacharias

(How atheists think,
according to Jack Chick)

There are three fundamental problems I see with this argument. The first is the use of generalized language. When Christians make this argument, I almost never hear them saying, “some atheists just reject God because they want an excuse to sin.” If they did say that, I don’t think I would have any major problem with this. After all, every position or stance has its share of people who believe in it for irrational reasons. I’m not familiar with any atheists who only reject God because they want to avoid moral accountability, but I don’t doubt that there are a few out there. So if the claim was just that “some atheists” do this, I wouldn’t be able to disagree.

But that’s not the claim. The accusation is universally applied, without any exceptions being offered. The way I parse the wording of that Ravi Zacharias quote, the tacit implication is that every single atheist in the entire history of the world only rejected God out of moral resistance. Rationally speaking, that’s a fairly untenable position to hold, because it would only take a single example to prove that proposition false. Personally, I know myself to be just such an example.

What would it take to convince you that God exists?

I don’t think most people intend it this way when they ask it, but this question seems to have a lot of potential to be kind of a trap question. There are basically two ways you can answer; general or specific. If you just answer in general terms, like saying “anything that meets the normal standards of evidence,” then you can be accused of not answering the question (example here; sorry for the language, I was rather salty at the time). On the other hand, if you say something specific, like, “if all the stars rearranged themselves to say “God exists!” and people got it on video, and each area saw the message in their own language,” then the person who asked the question might get on your case for making a scenario that you know is never gonna happen. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that every religious person would act this way, but I think there is a real potential for it.)

So, answering the question can be tricky, but I don’t even think answering it should be necessary. I think the very fact that the question needs to be asked is a mild type of evidence against the existence of God. Imagine if somebody asked you, “what would it take to convince you that the sun exists?” Well, not much, really. All I have to do is look at it (but only briefly, because if I look at it for too long, I’ll go blind, and that doesn’t seem likely to happen if the sun doesn’t even exist). If God really were real, would it seriously be so hard to figure out which purely-abstract arguments or easily-reinterpreted evidence would convince us? To me, all the theories about “divine hiddenness,” and debates between continuationists and cessationists, are just attempts to rationalize the very clear fact that God’s presence just isn’t readily apparent in our world, the way it purports to be in the stories of scripture.

So I think the question shouldn’t even need to be asked, but it also shouldn’t need to be answered (and if you think that’s just me dodging the question, then you’re not listening to what I’m saying). Because, here’s the real kicker. I don’t need to know what would convince me that God exists, because if a god who really is all-knowing does exist, then he (or it) will know exactly what it would take to convince me that he exists. If he’s all-powerful, then he will be able to make it happen, and if he loves me, then he will want it to happen. In a way, then, it’s almost a parallel to the Problem of Evil. If God exists and knows everything, then he not only knows what it would take to convince me, he also knows that I want to be convinced (because I prefer to believe true things, and spending eternity in paradise wouldn’t be a bad deal either). So if he knows what it would take to convince me, he knows I want to be convinced, and he wants me to be convinced (which I grant wouldn’t be the case if the Calvinists are right, and I’m just not one of the Elect), then why haven’t I been convinced?

At present, I believe the best explanation is that such a god simply doesn’t exist.

Do you reject the possibility of miracles?

In a previous post, I said that I’m a naturalist not because I assume the natural is all there is, but simply because I haven’t seen sufficient evidence for the supernatural. That makes the question of how I respond to miracle claims very relevant. Now, I should note before going any further that there are two different types of usages for the word “miracle.” The more casual usage is simply of a very unusual or unlikely event, but not one that anyone thinks is inexplicable from a natural standpoint. But the other, the one we’re talking about here, is the usage where the event could not possibly have happened without a deity interfering with or suspending the natural laws. In short, something that would be impossible without the intervention of God.

Given that conception of miracles, it naturally follows then that a recognition of miracles happening is an admission that some type of God must exist. Since I don’t believe in God or the supernatural, you can easily infer that I don’t believe in any miracle claims either. From there, you might make the further inference that I’m rejecting all miracle claims just as a general rule. This wouldn’t be an entirely unwarranted assumption, since there have been prominent atheists who held this position. Probably the most well-known is David Hume; I’m an avid watcher of religious debates, and his name comes up a lot in those debates that involve discussing the validity of miracle claims (usually the issue of whether Jesus’ resurrection was a historical event). Hume’s position was that, given the very nature of miracles, a miracle will always be the least probable explanation for any given event.

Think about it like this; if a friend told you that they saw someone walking and talking who you both thought was dead, what possible explanations could there be for that?

1. Your friend is mistaken.
2. Your friend is lying.
3. That other person was never really dead in the first place.
4. A miracle has occurred, and this person has risen from the dead by the supernatural power of God.

Now, think about the general likelihood of these options. #1 is always a possibility. Unless the claimed miracle has been recorded on video (and isn’t it just amazing that this never seems to happen with the more visually-dramatic types of miracles?), then I can’t imagine any possible scenario where the person claiming the miracle couldn’t simply be mistaken. #2 is a little more variable in terms of how trustworthy you consider the person who’s claiming the miracle, but at the end of the day, it’s still more likely that a trustworthy person might be lying (perhaps they’re simply playing a joke on you, with no real malicious intent), than that a person has been raised from the dead. Someone telling a lie is a common occurrence that we all know and agree does happen on a regular basis. Resurrections are nothing of the kind. So even if you trust the person as honest, them being dishonest in this one specific case is still more likely than a dead person coming back to life.

#3 is pretty unlikely, but it’s still something that has been known to happen in the real world. Though it’s much more common in the realm of fiction, it’s not unheard of for someone to fake their own death, or for someone to be pronounced dead and then still end up reviving later (this was much more common in the past, when the medical procedures for determining that someone was dead were more primitive). Or, going back to the first two options, the news you and your friend received that this person was dead could have been inaccurate in the first place. None of these things are commonplace and ordinary, but they’re still more likely (in the sense of there already being known and verified cases of this happening) than a dead person coming back to life.

Now, consider #4 again. Any of those first three options would still be viable whether God exists or not. This option, however, would be entirely impossible if God (or some other supernatural power) doesn’t exist. But then, even if God does exist, this option would still be wildly unlikely, because even most people who fully believe in God don’t believe that resurrections are a regular occurrence. Even the Bible, where the existence of God is a given, and miracles (in general) are quite commonplace, people being brought back from the dead only happens a small number of times. So even if you are completely convinced that God exists, this explanation is still less likely than the first three.

So, as I understand it, that’s basically how Hume’s line of thought goes. He rejects miracles because they’re always going to be the least likely explanation for any given miracle claim or phenomenon. To an extent, I agree with his reasoning, but I don’t keep pace with his train of thought all the way to its destination of rejecting the possibility of miracles completely. I think this is a compelling argument for why miracles should be seen as wildly improbable, and thus be subject to a very high standard of evidence. But I won’t go so far as saying that makes them impossible, because wildly improbable things can and do happen in reality.

Basically, then, my stance is that I’m going to approach any miracle claim with a high level of skepticism and demand a high quality of evidence, but I’m not going to simply rule them out completely. I try not to rule anything out completely.

There’s one other thing that’s worth keeping in mind, though. The way that the very definition of miracles makes the existence of God (or something supernatural) necessary for them to be real, causes it to be very problematic to use miracles as an argument for the existence of God. It seems like a sound deductive argument to say, “a miracle happened, and miracles can only happen if God exists, therefore God exists.” But the problem is, in most cases that first statement (“a miracle happened”) won’t have actually been properly established. The only reason you don’t have any trouble believing a miracle really did happen is because you already believed in God anyway. So using this as a purported proof of God’s existence can very easily be just Begging the Question, and I don’t think it would be especially compelling if this were your primary argument for the existence of God.

Return Salvo: You Don’t Gotta Believe

This is a review of an article called, “You Gotta Believe: Atheist or Not, You Already Have More Faith Than You Realize,” by James S. Spiegel, which appeared in Salvo (a very conservative Christian magazine). I previously reviewed the article in a much more detailed and thorough (but stream-of-consciousness) fashion, responding to each point as I read the article for the first time. My intention is for this to be a more streamlined and concise review.

Spiegel begins by saying that we all take the reliability of our senses on faith, a point which I commented on separately here. The point he’s trying to make is that we all have things that we need to put our faith in just to get through the day, so also putting your faith in God really isn’t that bad. Spiegel acknowledges, “some faith commitments are more reasonable than others,” and agrees that there is a difference between “justified faith” and “blind faith.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t make any effort to define his terms or draw any meaningful, clear distinction between those two qualitative levels of faith. The problem I have with this type of argument is that it’s too easy for an apologist to essentially say, “you have ‘faith’ in some concept (because there’s actually really good evidence that it’s true), so you might as well have faith in God too,” but without providing the same level of really good evidence for God. At the end of the day, I think that is basically what Spiegel does here.

The arguments he gives for why faith in God is just as reasonable as faith in those other concepts are, in my opinion, very thin. In the paragraph immediately before the section on “Reasonable Religious Faith,” he states, “in order to have a justified faith in a person or thing, your trust must be grounded in some objectively good reasons.” Despite that, his first argument for faith in God being reasonable is the fact that “millions of people all over the world have reported experiences of God.” Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything less objective than personal experiences. Maybe if all those millions of people had the same personal experience, then there might be something to it, but people in every religion have personal experiences of the divine (or near-death experiences) which just happen to align with what was already in their minds. That’s not an “objectively good reason” to have faith in God.

His second reason is that there are things like gravity and love that we can’t directly see, but we know they exist because we can see the effects of them. The problem is, he never even bothers to make any sort of connective argument to justify the claim that God is on an equal basis with things like that. He just baldly asserts it, saying simply, “these are no less matters of faith than belief in God.” That’s it. That’s the whole argument; he never makes any effort to show how God is like gravity and love in that sense, or what effects of his existence we can see (other than the personal experiences, which are still subjective). Speaking formally, that seems like a clear non sequitur. Speaking informally, it just doesn’t seem like a very good argument. And those two arguments are the only ones he ever makes in the whole article for why belief in God is justified.

After that, he delves into a bunch of other “faith commitments” that theists and atheists share (but again, makes no effort to show that faith in God is on equal footing with those). Then he claims that naturalists must have a faith in something he calls the “naturalist explainability thesis,” which is basically the claim that atheists must believe by faith that everything has a natural explanation (another issue I dealt with separately, here). Working off of that claim, he begins to wrap up the article by claiming that atheists actually make a bigger leap of faith than theists. But observe the way he tries to justify that:

Now it is true that the theist also believes by faith that divine intelligence created life, consciousness, and the laws of nature. But considering the attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity, this actually seems much less of a leap of faith than the atheist makes in holding to the naturalist explainability thesis. It is for this reason that some have claimed that it is not the theist but the atheist who exhibits more faith.

Of course, that’s all well and good if you already believe in God as he does, if you’ve already made that leap of faith that he claims isn’t happening. But what is the basis for the claim that the theist isn’t making much of a leap? “The attributes of an almighty, all-wise God and his infinite capacity for creativity.” But how does he know God even has these attributes in the first place? Early on in the article, he acknowledged that the authority of Scripture can’t be proved, so it can’t just be from the Bible. He’s certainly made no arguments in this article for how it would be justified faith that God has any of those attributes, much less all. In short, he’s defending the assertion that theists aren’t making a leap of faith by making a different leap of faith. And yet, he has the hubris to say that atheists are the ones who have a more untenable level of faith. As I’ve discussed in my previous posts, I don’t think any faith is required to be an atheist. But there is a lot of faith required to be a theist, as James Spiegel clearly demonstrates, even in the very argument which intends to show that theists don’t require a leap of faith. 

Don’t you just assume that everything has a natural explanation?

This is another common argument in the “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” line of criticism. The accusation is that since atheists don’t believe in a God to perform all the creative acts that shaped the universe, we must then just believe dogmatically in materialism as an article of faith. That even if the current progress of the scientific community has absolutely no earthly idea how something may have occurred naturally, we just have to believe by assumption or presupposition that there is a natural explanation.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that I disagree with this accusation. While I’m sure there are some naturalists who believe in naturalism through pure dogma (there are, after all, some irrational people in every group), that is not the position I hold. The position I hold is that I will not believe in the supernatural until I have reasonable evidence that it is real. If we define “natural” as “anything that is not supernatural,” then you don’t have to make a pledge to believe that the natural is all there is to be a naturalist. All you need is to not believe in the supernatural. Just like not believing in God is all it takes to be an atheist (without needing to make any claims to know there is no God), naturalism can be a “negative” belief (a lack of belief in something) rather than a claim to definite certainty that the natural is all that exists.

Even so, modern science has provided us with many examples of things that now have accepted natural explanation, which previously could only be explained supernaturally. The diversity of living organisms on Earth is probably the biggest example, but there are others, like disease, weather, and planetary rotation. In times past, people have just accepted that there wasn’t any natural explanation for any of these things, but now we know that there is. So that gives a good inductive basis to expect that there might be further natural explanation for other mysteries that are yet unsolved.

Though we have that good inductive reason to expect more natural explanations, we still don’t need to assume them. In the areas where we don’t have answers yet, many naturalists have no problem saying, “we don’t know, and that’s okay.” As Michael Shermer put it, in response to a claim that something could be not be explained through existing scientific knowledge:

So what? The fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation. It just means that we don’t know everything. Such uncertainty is at the very heart of science and is what makes it such a challenging enterprise.*

Let me clarify what I think he’s saying here, because I suspect someone who is less sympathetic towards naturalism may well read this quote and see it as some kind of admission that naturalists are completely closed to any supernatural explanation no matter what. But notice, the issue at play is simply that there’s no existing natural explanation for something. There’s not even a claim being made that there’s actual evidence for a supernatural explanation, just the lack of evidence for a natural one. This is not a case where Shermer has been presented with clear evidence for the supernatural and he still says “we don’t know” despite that. Rather, this is yet another case where religious people act like a simple lack of natural explanation means the supernatural explanation should be accepted by default.

With that in mind, what I think Shermer’s saying here is that if there’s no evidence for a natural explanation, and no evidence for a supernatural explanation, then it’s better to just accept that we don’t know, instead of assuming a supernatural explanation so we can feel like we’ve closed the gap in our knowledge.

This is quite contrary to the assertion that the naturalist has to assume a natural explanation without any evidentiary foundation. Shermer’s position here (which I believe is shared by many rationally-minded atheists) is that it’s better to accept ignorance than believe a conclusion which is completely without foundation. Religious people will toss out examples like the origin of life or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, and act like the absence of a definite natural explanation means that atheists just believe dogmatically by faith. On the contrary, I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable, and demands no faith at all, to say “we don’t know what caused life to emerge, but until you give me any actual evidence that it was God, I’m not gonna believe that.” Because, if I did just assume it was God without any positive evidence (as opposed to the “evidence” of simply not having any other explanation), then I would be living dogmatically as a theist, not an atheist.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/surviving-death-on-larry-king-live-2010-03/

Don’t you need faith to believe in the reliability of your senses?

Doesn’t it take faith to believe in the reliability of our senses?

Sometimes, religious people seem to act like giving any examples of something that requires “faith” for anyone to get through their day makes it perfectly justified to have faith in a specific God. One of the common examples of this is the fact that we generally trust that our senses are reliable. Personally, I don’t just assume or blindly trust that my senses are reliable; I think it’s much more rational to operate with the awareness that they might not be at any given time. And yet, it’s true that I still need to trust their reliability to some degree, at least as a provisional conclusion. Religious people will argue that this is purely a matter of faith or presupposition, because the any attempt to validate or justify the reliability of your senses would still require the use of your senses.  I don’t accept this, because you can use one of your senses to confirm another. If you see a wall in front of you (sense of sight), you can put out your hand and feel to confirm that the wall is really there (sense of touch).

Someone might object, “but that’s still using your senses to confirm your senses!” Maybe I’m just missing some basic philosophical implication that’s obvious to everyone else, but I don’t see why the senses should all be bundled together in the consideration of their reliability. The sense of touch is not the same as the sense of sight; why must our judgment of their reliability be all-or-nothing? If I took off my eyeglasses, I will have good reason to distrust the reliability of my sense of sight; but that doesn’t give me any reason at all to think that my other four senses have become deficient as well. On the contrary, studies have shown that a brain which lacks the reliability of one sense (i.e. being blind or deaf) will rewire itself so that the other senses are more heightened.* Thus, I see no basis for the mindset that we must judge the reliability of “our senses” as an all-or-nothing packaged deal. I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable to validate the reliability of one of our senses using another one of our senses.

And lest you argue that this just moves the issue back a step (because I would then need to justify what validates the second sense that validated the first), I see no reason why the senses can’t mutually validate each other. Let’s say I’m not sure whether I should trust the reliability of my sense of sight, so I use my sense of touch to validate it. In doing so, I’m not assuming (or taking on faith) the reliability of my sense of touch; if the sensory data of my sight and touch didn’t match, I wouldn’t just assume one was correct and the other was wrong, so I’m not placing any faith in either sense’s reliability there. Rather, it is the fact that they agree which validates both of them.

Think of it like scientific experiments. When one scientist conducts an experiment, the accepted scientific method is for someone else to go along and reproduce the experiment to double-check the first scientist’s findings. If the findings of the two experiments don’t agree, the accepted scientific method is not to just arbitrarily decide, “well, the first one was done right, so the second one must have some mistake,” or vice versa. They don’t just assume that either one was correct. Even so, if both experiments turn out the same way, then it is taken as good evidence that there is something to the results of that experiment (while always leaving the door open for additional data to be added). So I don’t think there’s anything circular or irrational about using two sources of data to validate each other.

I would go even further and say that this is a perfectly common practice. If there are two witnesses to a crime (or perhaps two suspects who are pleading innocence), then investigators will question them for details separately, and then see how well the two stories align. If they don’t match up, the detectives may not treat either testimony as reliable, but if they do (especially if the police are sure they didn’t have an opportunity to discuss and plan out their cover story together), then that will give them both some validation as being reliable, even though neither of them had been validated individually beforehand.

Now, I will grant that it’s even better if the investigators have some external way of verifying their stories. I’m not saying that this type of mutual validation is the best warrant for a belief we could ever possibly have. But in the case of judging the reliability of our senses, I think it’s more than adequate. Then again, I think we actually do have an external source of verification; our continued survival. Think about the illustration of seeing and feeling a wall. If our senses were completely unreliable, how many times would we run into walls, or fall into holes, or otherwise interact with our environment in dangerous ways, before it killed us? Unless we all have unreliable senses in an unperceived world that is completely safe and docile, then I can see no way that our senses being unreliable wouldn’t prove fatal very quickly. I don’t need to have implicit faith in the reliability of my senses to see that the fact I’m alive at all demonstrates that they’re doing the job well enough.

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* http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/

How can you trust the scientific method when it can't be verified by the scientific method?

In the Q&A portion of this debate, an audience member asks Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza, “on what basis can you dismiss the principle of parsimony?” D’Souza replies by glibly showing that you can't use the principle of parsimony to show that the principle of parsimony is valid. This is very similar to the oft-used argument (especially by William Lane Craig) that you can't use the scientific method to show that the scientific method is valid. The problem with this type of argument is that things like parsimony, science and the rules of rationality are methods for validating propositions. You can't use the scientific method to prove the scientific method, because the scientific method is not a proposition. It's not either true or false; it's an approach, a style, a means, of finding out which propositions are true or false.

You can't prove that a recipe is true or false (in the sense of being the one right and true way to bake a cake, for instance), but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the recipe. What matters with a recipe is not whether it can be shown to be propositionally true, but what it results in. If you use a recipe for a cake, and the result is a really good cake, then keep using the recipe. It doesn't matter that you can't show it to be propositionally true, because it gets results. So it is with things like the scientific method and the rules of rationality. They're not validated because we can show them to be true (remember, a method can't be either true or false), they're validated by the fact that they get results.

Have you ever actually read any of William Lane Craig's books?

The short answer is no, not any of his whole books. The long answer is, after seeing a lot of arguments from him in other forms (he even answered a question from me in his Q&A column), I don't believe it would be anything but a complete waste of time to read a whole book. Observe the following quote…

First of all, I think that I would tell them that they need to understand the proper relationship between faith and reason. And my view here is, that the way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit, in my heart. And that this gives me a self-authenticating means of knowing that Christianity is true, wholly apart from the evidence. And, therefore, if in some historically-contingent circumstances, the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don’t think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I’m in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that in fact the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me. (Source)

…And by the way, that’s not just something he said in an interview in the spur of a moment. I did research his actual scholarly work enough to know that his flagship book (Reasonable Faith) has a whole section on this, where he repeatedly reinforces the idea that the way Christians know Christianity is true is ultimately because of the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, so reason and rationality must only ever be subordinate to that.

See here (Google Books link is dead, but you can follow along if you happen to have a physical copy), the section starting on page 47 with the header “Role of Argument and Evidence.” Here are a few of the most damning quotes, if you don’t feel like reading the whole thing…

“I’ve already said that it is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role.” 

“Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith;” [...That is, not to find out whether our faith is actually true or not.]

[Down on page 51] “Therefore, the role of rational argumentation in knowing Christianity to be true is the role of a servant. A person knows Christianity is true because the Holy Spirit tells him it is true, and while argument and evidence can be used to support this conclusion, they cannot legitimately overrule it.”

…In short, Craig admits over and over again that his entire worldview is based on a feeling, not facts, data, arguments, or evidence. He further admits that no amount of arguments or evidence would ever changes his mind, and even seems proud of that! He then compounds the sophistry of ignoring arguments himself while using arguments to convince other people, by reframing the feeling which serves as the basis for his belief in an intellectual-sounding buzz-phrase, “the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit.” At the end of the day, he’s no different from all the Young-Earth Creationists who openly admit that they will simply dismiss any evidence which goes against their presuppositions. He’s not a bit different. But I’m supposed to respect his intellectual or philosophical acumen?

But wait there’s more; there’s also this other little nugget which he wrote right above that section on page 47…

“Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.”

…I don’t know about anybody else, but I know (just as fully and confidently as I know anything about myself) that the reason I’m not a Christian has nothing to do with loving darkness rather than light. But hey, William Lane Craig is the foremost Christian philosopher of our time, so he must know my own heart, my own motivations, better than I do, right? Pardon me if I’m skeptical.

So, just that quickly, in one short section of one of his thirty or so books, he’s completely torpedoed his intellectual credibility for me in not one, but two different ways. And that’s without even factoring in all the many things he’s said and done to torpedo his credibility for me in all of his many debates.

Couldn't hell just be separation from God?

A lot of atheists (myself included) believe that the doctrine of infinite torture in hell for finite sins in this life is drastically, ludicrously unjust. Some Christians will rebut this by offering the theory that hell isn't really a Dante-esque place of endless sadism and torture; rather, the torture comes simply from being separated from God, and that's all.

Contrary to this comparatively pleasant idea, however, there are quite a few verses in the New Testament (as ol' Hitch was so fond of saying, it wasn't until "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," that the concept of eternal torture was introduced) which explicitly reference a fiery-torture version of hell. I'll be honest, I was surprised myself by how many there were. Off the top of my head, I could only think of one in the gospels, and a few in Revelation. So I did some googling, and it turns out I was indeed missing quite a few. I'm gonna start with the “primary source” quotations, i.e. the words of Jesus, but I'm also gonna start with the weakest one from that group...

(All bold emphasis is my own.)

Luke 16:24 [in the story of the rich man and Lazarus] - So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

…Now, of course, this one is from a parable, so it’s easy to dismiss descriptions here as just being poetic imagery. Are we really expected to believe that people who are punished with eternal separation from God are literally within shouting distance of heaven? Not likely. So, taken individually, the description of fiery agony here could be dismissed as just poetic imagery, but it just so happens that this description meshes quite well with plenty of references to hellfire that are much more straightforward…

Mark 9:43 - If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire,

Matthew 5:22 - But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'You good-for-nothing,' shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.

Matthew 13:40-42 [Jesus describing the real meaning behind the parable of the wheat and the tares] - ⁴⁰"So just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. ⁴¹"The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, ⁴²and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Matthew 18:9 - If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell.

Matthew 25:41 - Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;

…So, that seems pretty conclusive to me already, but if you go outside of the gospels, there are even more straightforward references to a fiery hell…

James 3:6 - And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell.

Jude 1:7 - just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

Revelation 14:9-10 - ⁹Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, "If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, ¹⁰he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.

Revelation 20:15 - And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Revelation 21:8 - "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

…So there you have it. Eleven different verses (not counting whatever parallel verses there may be to some of the Gospel quotes) which very specifically and directly describe fire as a fundamental characteristic of hell. Unless there’s some other verse I don’t know about which specifically says that all of these verses are just speaking symbolically, then I don’t see how you could possibly hold the position that the doctrine of “mild hell” is Biblical, in light of all these verses.