Tag meta-arguments against god

Some Meta-Arguments Against God, Part 2

Lack of good apologetics

As with direct evidence, theists have had thousands of years to figure out what their gods are like, what they want, how they operate, and so forth. And yet, there are no good apologetics or arguments for any god’s existence. Most of them rely on false dichotomies, or faulty reasoning, or faulty assumptions, or are otherwise flawed.

In fact, one of the most popular apologetic arguments, Pascal’s wager explicitly begins with the premise that the existence or nonexistence of God cannot be known. This is not an argument that you pull out if there’s direct evidence of the truth of your claim. And yet, it comes up all the time.

In fact, many bad arguments keep coming back over and over. There appears to be no mechanism (selective pressure, if you will) for getting rid of bad arguments.

One running theme that I’ve noticed is that a lot of apologetic claims are not arguments for a god, but rather excuses for the lack of evidence, or excuses to reinforce someone’s failing belief. “You need to have faith” is just “trust me” in fancy clothes. “God doesn’t want to show himself for fear of undermining our free will” isn’t an argument, it’s an excuse for the absence of evidence. In fact, so is the whole “faith is a good thing” constellation of memes (which people don’t believe anyway, but we’ll address that later).

The world of apologetics is littered with arguments that, in any other context, would be relegated to the bottom of the barrel. Perhaps the most famous of these is Tertullian’s “Credo quia absurdum” — “I believe it because it is absurd”. Whether you take that as “I believe weird things” or as “The apostles wouldn’t have tried so hard to convince us of something that wasn’t true”, it still doesn’t belong on anyone’s top 10 list.

“I can feel Jesus in my heart” is just “dude, I’m telling you, I saw it!”. It’s something you resort to when you don’t have anything better.

“God works through people” just means that people do remarkable things. It’s not an argument for the existence of a god, it’s another excuse for the absence of evidence.

Now, people will say that esteemed theologians don’t use bad arguments like “well, just look at the trees and the birds and stuff”, and that’s mostly true. However, their arguments tend to be flawed in other ways. C.S. Lewis’s famous trilemma, Liar, Lunatic or Lord ignores possibilities like “Legend” (which also fits the alliteration). This is an elementary logical flaw that Lewis himself, if not one of his early reviewers, should have spotted.

Alvin Plantinga has come up with a version of the ontological argument for the existence of God, which relies on certain properties of modal logic. I don’t claim to understand it. On the other hand, presumably a lot of philosophers do, and I’m not hearing a lot of conversion stories about philosophers converting to Plantinga’s brand of theism.

In fact, that’s a running theme: there are simple arguments that people cite when asked why they believe in gods, all of which are wrong. And then there are the sophisticated complex arguments, but no one is convinced by those. It’s almost as if the complex arguments are just excuses to believe; if they sound complicated enough, you can pretend that they’re sound, and rest assured that somewhere out there, someone has a good justification for your faith.

Some Meta-Arguments Against God, Part 1

It’s widely acknowledged that it isn’t possible to prove absolutely
that no gods exist, any more than it’s impossible to prove absolutely
that no invisible unicorns exist. Every atheist I know freely
acknowledges that. But at the same time, one can easily argue that
gods (or invisible unicorns) are very unlikely to exist.

A lot of these arguments are meta-arguments, in that they don’t stand
on their own, but build upon arguments made by theists.

Lack of evidence

Despite what a lot of people think, atheism isn’t the firm belief that
there aren’t any gods. Rather, it’s a lack of belief in gods.
To put it another way, the atheist position is “You believers haven’t
made your case. I’m not convinced that you’re right.”

So the lack of evidence is the big one. There is no good evidence for
any gods. No verified miracles, no verified prophecies, no burning
bushes, no nothing.

There’s a saying that “absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence”. This is true as far as it goes, but absence of evidence
where we would expect to see some is evidence of absence.
If I say that there’s a Thai restaurant at 15th and K, the fact that
you’ve never heard of it doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. If, however, you
go down to 15th and K, and look all over, and fail to find the Thai
restaurant, that is good evidence that I’m wrong.

Theists have had thousands of years to demonstrate that their various
gods are real. And they’ve tried. Oh, boy, have they tried. And so
far, bupkis. No divine abodes on top of Mount Olympus, no rainbow
bridge to Asgard, no Noah’s Ark, no nothing.

Okay, so maybe gods aren’t directly detectable, either with our senses
or simple measurement devices. Maybe they don’t reflect visible light,
or emit sound waves, or pull compass needles toward them. That still
leaves indirect evidence.

I’ve seen satellite photos in which you couldn’t see ships, but you
could see their wakes. A lot of extrasolar planets have been
discovered not by direct observation, but by they affect the orbit of
their sun. Heck, if it comes to that, all nuclear physics is done
through indirect observation: protons and electrons are too small to
see, but we can observe the shape of trails in a bubble chamber, or
flashes of light on a CRT.

It’s not just the so-called hard sciences, either: there are
statistical methods for figuring out whether an election was rigged by
looking for anomalies in the results, the sorts of things that would
be introduced by a cheater, but unlikely to come up by chance.

And yet, nothing. No good direct evidence, no good indirect evidence.
The Templeton Foundation keeps throwing money at trying to come up
with evidence of a god — studies on intercessory prayer, that
sort of thing — and so far they’ve come up with two kinds of
results: ones that come from flawed experiments, and ones that show no
effect.

I don’t think it’s just me being overly skeptical: after 2000 years,
Christians have still failed to convince two thirds of the world’s
population that they’re right. Jews and Hindus have had even longer.
Miracles of Islam
are not convincing to anyone but Muslims. And so on, and so forth.