Greg and Amy respond to an atheist who claims that Christians rely on “a book and an invisible God” and have no actual evidence that God exists.
Transcript
Objection: Religion is synonymous with pretending to know things you do not know. No man has ever seen God. No Christian has any evidence for God. Yet you claim authority based on a book and an invisible God. Talk about ego. Wow.
Greg: Well, you know, first, a whole bunch of things are going on there. Okay? And notice that these are complete assertions. There’s no rationale given at all. And then there’s a claim about the nature of faith—faith is when you believe something, and you have, essentially—it’s pretending to know things you do not know. That’s Peter Boghossian. That’s almost a quotation out of atheist Peter Boghossian’s book A Manual for Creating Atheists. Okay. Well, he’s welcome—Dan’s welcome—to that opinion. The problem with that view is—and this really, kind of, dawned upon me as I looked at Copleston’s History of Philosophy. Now, that’s like ten volumes going back to the ancients and all the way to the present time. And I originally bought the series—the volumes—of the History of Philosophy when I started my MA Phil program under J. P. Moreland. I wanted to be more educated, be able to draw from a standard resource about this. It turns out that from about the mid-second century, maybe third century, up until the 19th century—you got like 1,600 years—virtually every single prominent philosopher in Western civilization was a biblical theist.
Now, that doesn’t prove that biblical theism is true. What it seems to indicate, without question, is that it ain’t dumb—that it ain’t the case that there is no evidence. Ever read Thomas Aquinas? Ever read Anselm? Ever read Augustine? These guys were towering intellects. Okay? Now, you may think that their arguments don’t go through for whatever reasons, but they aren’t nothing. They aren’t mere assertions—acting like you know what you don’t know. Okay. These were all religious people who were able to parse out the discipline of epistemology much better than virtually anybody can do now. And epistemology is a philosophical field of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And how can we trust what we know? And empiricism is—I mean, empirical means—is only one means of knowing things—using your five senses—but empiricism is flatly refuted because, for one, it’s self-refuting, and there are all kinds of things that we know that we don’t see. I wonder if Dan knows what he’s thinking. Of course he knows what he’s thinking. Can he see his thoughts? No, he can’t see his thoughts. Well, if he says that there’s no good evidence for God because we can’t see him, then also, by the same standard, there’s no good evidence for Dan’s thoughts because even Dan can’t see them. Now, Dan has private access to them, but it’s direct access. It’s not through seeing. And there are a host—all kinds of things need to be true for the empirical method to work to begin with, which is largely employed in the scientific endeavor. But the implication is, okay, you’re pretending to know things you do not know. Well, that’s a matter of debate.
Amy: That’s the very crux of the debate.
Greg: That’s the crux of it. And this is just an assertion. Okay? But it’s a standard atheist assertion—because religion is based on faith, and faith is pretending to know what you don’t know. Okay?
Amy: According to them.
Greg: According to them. See, they’ve defined it. Now, if they want to believe that for themselves, fine. But they can’t apply that to religious people as if that’s their definition, because if you’re going to refute a person’s view, you’ve got to refute their view, not your distortion of their view. And I’ve talked about this at length in The Story of Reality. I talk about it at length, probably, in Tactics and at length in Street Smarts when I deal with atheism. And this is one of the kind of claims that come through. Of course, this doesn’t prove or give evidence for our responses here that God does exist. It’s just making the point that this kind of complaint falls apart—it’s vacuous. It falls apart immediately. It mischaracterizes at least Christian religious understanding of what faith entails. It totally mischaracterizes the entire field of knowledge by asserting an empirical demand for verification for knowledge. But, of course, if you think there must be an empirical verification for you to know something, apparently the person who’s saying that believes that he knows that an empirical verification is required to know something, and that itself cannot be verified empirically. That’s why it’s self-refuting.
“No Christian has any evidence for God.” Well, how about this: a big bang needs a big banger. Does that make sense? A footprint in the sand seems to be evidence for someone walking there. Oh, well, it might not be the right understanding of that footprint, though it seems pretty obvious, but it’s not no evidence—and, by the way, I deal with both of these problems in Street Smarts—because there’s a difference between saying your evidence is not persuasive and there being no evidence. Okay? And a guy like Dan is not persuaded. Okay, fine. That’s his prerogative to look at what’s there and say, “It doesn’t go through. It’s not adequate,” or whatever. But it’s a whole different thing to say there’s no evidence.
I think Darwinian evolution is false. I would never say there’s no evidence for it, because homology, for example, seems to be—at least at first glance—support for descent with modification. All right? That so many creatures have similar characteristics. It looks like they evolved from some primitive form and then took their own directions but carried with them these same characteristics. Okay? So, all right. Now, I don’t think when you look closer at it, it turns out to be decisive evidence. Okay? But it still is evidence. So, I think that this way of approaching the details is not charitable at all. It’s utterly dismissive, and to me, it’s evidence of somebody who is not thoughtful about the issue.
Amy: Well, that’s how I take it. If somebody says there’s no evidence, I just assume they’ve never looked at anything. But then, but then, why would I have a conversation about this? Because you’ve never thought about it if you’re saying there’s no evidence. I think most of the time what they mean is, “I’m not convinced by it.” But they should say what they mean because it just really sounds like they haven’t even looked into this at all.
Greg: Especially if the person—I mean, atheists characteristically present themselves as the rational ones. “We’re the rational ones, the reasonable ones. We’re the brights.” The language that...I just had his name and I lost it.
Amy: Was that Dawkins?
Greg: Not Dawkins. The guy who just died.
Amy: Dennett.
Greg: Daniel Dennett. He coined that term for his kind. “We’re the brights.” Okay, well then, it seems to me you can understand the Christian view and the notion of faith that they offer enough to be able to at least engage that and then show, well, your faith is based in evidence. The text says, “By many convincing proofs” (Acts chapter one). You know? And “Paul reasoned with them from the Scriptures.” Then Acts 17, and “having presented proof for these claims, having raised him from the dead.” You know, this is all throughout. Now, whether somebody believes those things or not, that’s a different matter. The point is, what is being offered as a foundation for confidence and belief—faith, if you will—it’s reasons and evidence.
So, to say there is no evidence—that would be true of almost every other religious view. Where is the evidence that substantiates your understanding, your theology, that kind of thing? But that is not the case for Christianity. I mean, religious apologetics grew out of Christianity. It’s built into the warp and woof of the biblical worldview because God invades the world—that’s the view—and leaves behind fingerprints, and we can look at the fingerprints, and we can point them out. Now, if you want to show why that isn’t a good conclusion to draw from the alleged fingerprints, that’s another matter. No problem. Okay? But that’s entirely a different thing from saying no Christian has any evidence for God. What about the origin of the universe? What about the origin of life? What about the origin of conscience? What about objective morality, which is necessary to ground the problem of evil—which atheists frequently complain about? Evolution is not going to give you objective morality. It can only give you subjective morality, if it can give you any morality at all. That’s another discussion. But here, the last line. Can you read that?
Amy: “Yet you claim authority based on a book and an invisible God.”
Greg: Okay. Authority based on a book. I’m wondering where Dan gets most of his information about the world that he thinks is actually true. We get it from books. We get it from books. So, to dismiss a conviction because you get it from a book is silly. Almost everything we know, we find out from someone else who we think is an authority or an adequate authority to give us the truth of the matter. Okay? The question is whether that authority or that book is trustworthy. That’s a fair question, and it’s one we can ask about the Bible. But he’s not saying that. You get it from a book. Handwaving, you know. Go away, dumb, stupid. By the way, when you go to college, do you buy some books for your classes? So, that’s why this is silly.
But then he says, um, “an invisible God—talk about ego.” Well, that is a moral judgment. In other words, “You guys got a big inflated ego, and that’s not a good thing to have.” But wait a minute. Where does an atheist get the standard that it’s not good to have a big inflated ego? Where is the moral foundation coming from for him? From evolution? Why should I care what he evolved to believe is good or bad? It’s just an evolution. I could have evolved differently. On what grounds does he condemn what he thinks is an inflated ego? So, this kind of challenge goes south in all kinds of ways.
Amy: I just want to comment on something that showed up a couple times in this question. So, one comment here is, “No man has ever seen God,” and then he brings up it’s based on a book and an invisible God. So, the idea that God is unseen seems to be a problem for him. But here’s something, Dan, that you can consider. If someone were to say to me that there’s a physical God, I would immediately know he was false. Because you cannot have a physical God creating all of physical reality. He’d be creating himself. That’s just not possible. If all of physical reality began at a certain time, and God existed apart from that, then he can’t be a physical being. Therefore, we can’t see him. I mean, that’s just obvious.
Greg: That’s the nature of being a god—or the God.
Amy: Well, it’s certainly the nature of being a god who’s possible, because I know immediately, if someone says that they can see a physical god, that that’s not possible. So, it’s actually the opposite of what you’re thinking here. Saying that there’s an invisible God means that it’s possible this God is actually real, and it’s the opposite of what you have assumed here.