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.