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.

What pop culture influence primed you for atheism?

I feel like this is kind of a tricky question, because I think the tendency is for the hardcore religious people to look at that kind of thing and say, "see, that just brainwashed you into losing your faith; that's why I don't let my kids watch or listen to anything secular!" Dan Barker once made the comment, "If I had limited myself to Christian authors, I would still be a Christian to this day."

Of course, we atheists see that is a recognition that it's important to expose yourself to different viewpoints to increase your chances of reaching conclusions which are actually consistent with reality. But for dyed-in-the-wool believers, that can just be read as a cautionary tale which should teach diligent Christians to quit reading and watching the infidel material you've been absorbing, because it could cause you to lose your faith (not because your faith is wrong, of course, but because those heathens are so darn good at deceiving people).

I actually had a whole debate with my brother one time, after he said that he thought my enjoyment of comics and such worldly media was partly responsible for my break from the church. I don't remember him ever being able to give any good reasons why he thought that was the case, but the point is that when believers become non-believers, other believers who want to hold onto the feeling that their belief is rational look for things like this to justify how the apostate only left for irrational reasons.

That being the case, I have to state up front the caveat that I don't think this did anything like that (brainwashing me into apostasy or making me leave for irrational reasons), and in fact I don't think this really did much to make me leave the church in the first place (the question is about what primed you for atheism, and I wasn't a full-scale atheist until long after I left the church). With those caveats, I think the answer for me is a podcast called You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes. The show features Pete interviewing various famous people (the vast majority of whom are fellow comedians), but as the title suggests, they get into some topics that are far off the beaten path of the usual interview, and one of those topics is God and religion. So while listening to that podcast, I heard people with a lot of different viewpoints talk about why they held those viewpoints.

What's kind of ironic, though, is that there's been this weird sort of mirror parallelism between Pete's story and my own. His upbringing was similar to mine in that he was raised in the church and sincerely believed it himself, but then he lost faith as an adult. When I first started listening to the podcast, I was still a dogmatic believer, but chill enough that it didn't offend my sensibilities to listen to someone who had left the church. I guess I just figured my faith was stronger than his, and I inwardly cheered whenever one of the guests professed faith as well.

Anyway, this mirror parallelism I mention is basically, in the episodes I listened to as a believer, Pete was very much like, "fuck religion, I'm just done with it," and it seemed like most of his guests were atheist or nonreligious. But then, in the episodes I listened to after I became more of a full-scale atheist, Pete seemed to drift back to a more spiritually-minded, "I don't go to church but I do pray," "I don't know if the stories in the gospels are true, but I really like the ideas they convey" kind of guy, and it seemed like more of his guests were either somewhat religious, or the kind of person who calls themselves an agnostic and says it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as a theist (to his credit, Pete usually did a really good job of straightening those people out about how "agnostic" and "atheist" are not mutually exclusive, and how ascribing the label of atheist to yourself does not necessarily indicate a claim to knowledge).

I recognize that this is most likely an effect of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, at least in part, but it still kinda humorously seems as if Pete Holmes (and the show) are going along this path that seems to mirror and reverse my own. I suppose it would be really funny if, after a few years, I slid back into a softer "spiritual, but not religious" stance, and then the episodes I was listening to at that time showed Pete developing into a rabid anti-theist.

So yeah, that's probably a much longer answer than anyone would ever expect to such a simple question.

Is ignoring the Old Testament law cherry-picking?

When people like Sam Harris say that forgetting about the "vile" parts of the Old Testament law is cherry-picking, isn't that a deliberate distortion of Christian theology?

This is a fairly common defense, that the bad parts of the Old Testament law can be "legitimately" thrown out because the New Testament establishes a new covenant. This is undeniably a crucial aspect of Pauline theology, so if you start with the presupposition that the Bible does not ever contradict itself (even if it appears to), then yes, you can say that the New Testament (taken as a whole) does establish that.

But even so, there are parts of the gospels where Jesus emphasizes the importance of keeping the old law. Take the story of the rich young ruler in Luke 18, for example. Anyone who's been to Sunday School will know all about how this guy asked Jesus "what must I do to be saved," and Jesus answered, "sell everything you have and give it to the poor." But what most people seem to overlook is that before Jesus says this, his first response to the question about how to inherit eternal life is simply to keep the commandments. He didn't say (or even hint), "just wait until I rise from the dead and believe in me, and you'll be set." He said to keep the Old Testament laws. Remember, that was in response to a question, not just about how to be a good person, but how to inherit eternal life.

Another example is in Matthew 5, when Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. Sure, that sounds more or less like the New Covenant doctrine. But then, immediately after that he says that not one stroke of the old law will disappear until heaven and earth pass away. I've had discussions about this before (quite recently, in fact), and the question for me with this passage always comes down to this; why does the phrase "until heaven and earth pass away" even appear in this verse at all, if his resurrection is the point when he will fulfill the old law and usher in the new covenant?

Matthew 23:2-3 could certainly be seen as an instruction to continue keeping the old laws, but that's a bit more subtle.

I would agree that Paul teaches that the old laws don't need to be kept. But who is the higher authority for you, Paul or Jesus? Heck, Paul even said himself in Romans 7:12, that the Law is holy. See, that's another big problem with this defense against those ugly parts of the Old Testament. New Covenant theology says those laws are not necessary for salvation, but it never says that those laws are evil or wrong. It never disavows them. So to act like this doctrine makes it okay to just completely forget them now is exactly the cherry-picking that Sam Harris said it was.