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

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

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

4 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

5 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.

6 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

7 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 the idea.) [1] 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 ever found a church on their master's announcements. [2] 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 agree on anything of importance. [3]

8 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 reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. [4] 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.

9 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 often imprisoned or killed. [5] 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

10 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

11 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

12 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.

13 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 better nature: reason, honesty, and love. [6] 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 ideas for their own sake. [7] 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 Reason has built the modern world. [8] 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 Nicias, Do you then believe there are gods?... What proof have you? [9] 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 not put too many difficulties in the way of satisfying it [10] (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. [11] 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 species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction. [12] 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. [13] (See further on this in Chuck Edwards essay, chapter

14 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. [14] 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

15 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. [15] 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. [16] 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.

16 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. [17] (Emphasis added.) Five decades later, in 1997, Thomas Nagel honestly admitted to an irrational motivation for unbelief

17 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. [18] (Emphasis added.) 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 them with these reasons after the fact. [19] (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 regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. [20] (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

18 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 choose what I choose. [21] 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 the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? [22] 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. [23] 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:

19 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, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. [24] 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.

20 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, or worse, a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. [25] On pages 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.

21 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. [26] 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,

22 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 (mentioned in the fifth step of Dawkins argument), [27] 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, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. [28] 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 Western thought. [29] 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.

23 Chapter Four: Richard Dawkins: Long on Rhetoric, Short on Reason Chuck Edwards [30] If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. [31] 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 it. [32] But other reviewers and subsequent books [33] 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 [34] 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. [35] 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?