How Come It’s So Fucking Hard to Talk to Believers?

Gregory Koukl

If you go to Christian apologetics Websites, you’ll find long, tedious refutations of atheism, just like you’ll find long, tedious anti-Christian screeds on atheist Websites. Because I agree with the atheists, I can’t find much, besides their strident attitude, to disagree with; but when I hit the Christian sites I find I can’t read but a few paragraphs before I’m boiling over at the inaccuracies. And the inaccuracies are most often of the same variety: misstatements of the atheist position. The favorite tactic is to set up a straw dog, knock it down, and congratulate ones self on ones brilliance.

Let me give you this bit of reasoning from Gregory Koukl on the Website Stand to Reason, in an essay called “Evolution Can’t Explain Morality.” He’s explaining what he perceives as the “naturalist” argument for altruistic morality:

“So, in abbreviated form, the reasoning goes like this: I ought to be unselfish because it is better for the group, which is better for the species, which is better for me. So why ought I be unselfish? Because it is better for me. But looking at what is better for me, is selfishness. So all of this so-called description of where morality comes from, gets reduced to this ludicrous statement: I morally ought to be unselfish so that I can be more thoroughly selfish….

“Since morality is prescriptive, not descriptive, and if it is normative…, it talks about how we ought to behave…”

Which is great and nice and tight. Except that the reasoning doesn’t go like that and morality is not prescriptive. Small problems.

Who does Mr. Koukl think prescribes this morality? Isn’t morality more like language: it’s how we do behave, not how we “should” behave? Doesn’t the prescriptive nature of morality come from one person wishing to impose their views on another? It appears as if Mr. Koukl is arguing that because there has to be someone prescribing morality—otherwise we wouldn’t have it—there has to be a god to do the prescribing. If only morality were prescriptive and not a construct of humanity.

But as usual, such apologetics arguments are really admissions that the arguer has no clue what she/he is talking about. They always start with unproven assumptions and carry on from there. That’s the kind of thinking that leads one to think the Ten Commandments are the word of God. No, really, it does.

As to whether or not we should act unselfish, again it’s misstating the situation. It’s not that we should act unselfish, it’s that we do. It’s not that we ought to behave unselfishly, it’s that selfish people tend to not reproduce so well. The species can’t afford to have a slug of selfish people around; it just kills them off early and has them lead miserable, neurotic lives that leave them with weak sperm counts or whatever. In the long run it rewards peaceful cooperative communities, which is why violence has continued to go down in the world for at least 40,000 years: Mother Nature goes on weeding out the violent.

So, all-in-all, we have been unselfish in our lives, beginning with our family and friends and slowly spreading out from there. We’re doing pretty well at not killing our neighbors; and pretty soon we’ll maybe stop killing the folks on the other side of the border, as well. I have hopes. Most everyone wants to reign in corporate power and utilize the resources for the benefit of the entire species. I think we’ll work towards that next. It’s not going to be easy and it will be brutal; but not so bad as we thought and we’ll win. If it’s good for the species, the species will win; and when the species wins, we all win. The species doesn’t care if you’re selfish; it just won’t let you reproduce well. And that’s why the Enlightenment has spread so quickly: people who have slipped the yoke of religious isolationism have done better than those who haven’t: Sweden-Nigeria, for example.

Richard Deem

The second instance comes from a fellow named Richard Deem who runs a Website called, I believe, Evidence for God. You’d think it would be a pretty short site, but he goes on forever. I couldn’t get much past the paragraph quoted below (“Atheists are left with…”), so I wrote him the following:

If you're going to argue against atheism, at least use their real arguments. Don't imagine arguments and then argue against them. The following quote from you is off the charts. It's an incorrect characterization of atheism. No wonder why you strayed. You didn't understand it. No atheist is going to deny the possibility of God, only the probability of God. Big difference. Anything imaginable is possible; not everything that is imagined is probable. God is highly improbable; that's all we're saying. And that's just a statistical fact.

[Richard’s argument.]

“Atheists are left with a dilemma, since their worldview requires that all things that begin to exist must have a cause. So, logic requires the admission that the universe had a cause. Virtually all atheists say that this cause was some natural phenomenon. It is also possible that the cause of the universe was a supernatural intelligence (i.e., God). However, there is no direct observational evidence for either belief. Those who are ‘strong atheists’ (not working out in the gym, but having a belief that no god exists) have just violated one of the main rules of atheism - that all beliefs are based upon observational evidence. So, any atheist who denies the possible existence of God violates his own worldview.”

To Richard’s credit, he responded to my note:

“Johan,

“Please provide the data behind your claim that ‘God is highly improbable.’ Where are your statistics?”

I gave him my statistics. I replied with this:

It's the statistics of fantasy. Any fantasy can be true in some universe, but to rank statistically, you need a body of data. You have to have a sample of at least one. Without a sample, it's in the realm of fantasy. And an unnecessary one, at that. Every religion is a myth system that has nothing to do with observable reality. None of them explain anything. Now, religions do have a lot of functions in society, don't get me wrong, but it's not in the realm of explaining how the universe works. Religions have no idea about that. Myths aren't reality. They're very influential, but they aren't real. So, the chance of any fiction being real approaches zero in this universe and to be statistically probable would require multiverses and still wouldn't explain observable reality in this universe. In other words, God has the same statistical chance of existing as does Bugs Bunny or J. Alfred Prufrock.

(The next two paragraphs were not in the original letter.)

Let me talk about math for a little bit, because I’m abysmal at it. Nonetheless, if I have faith in anything, it’s math. I have faith in it primarily for two reasons: A) no matter how many times I look at it, 2+2=4; and B) my television works. Now, I don’t understand the connection between 2+2 and my television, but I do know that, if all the numbers don’t line up properly, my television won’t work. I know they can figure out the numbers so accurately that they can put a car on the surface of Mars; so I’ve got good faith that when they tell me the universe is 13.7 billion light-years across, I believe them. I have faith they’re telling me the truth. I have not personally done the math myself, but I have faith that it’s being done correctly.

Ergo, what happened prior to the Big Bang is a mathematical question, at this point, and the math isn’t pointing to any god. The math, right now, is pointing to multiverses which makes a lot more sense. If you were to plot a curve of our understanding of our place in the universe, it would show an exponential expanding of that understanding, from being in the center of the world, to being on a planet around which the sky revolved, to being part of a solar system, to being part of a universe. Logically, it makes sense that there’s something beyond the universe; turns out it wasn’t God but rather more universes. In other words, the math has never pointed towards God. The math never points to a deus ex machina.

(Back to the letter.)

So, yeah, God has an infinitely small possibility of existing, at least in a form any religion on Earth would recognize as God. Which is why I said to not defeat us atheists by positing an argument we don't use. It means you didn't understand the argument or were deliberately misstating it to win your point.

Sam Harris

Pardon me here for nattering on. I was looking for an image of Mr. Deem to accompany this post when I ran across the following statement where he’s critiquing Sam Harris:

“The fact that Harris himself acknowledges that he cannot live up to his own moral values calls into question whether ‘science can determine human values’ in any meaningful way.”

That’s the sort of statement that makes me question the education they’re handing out at Mr. Deem’s alma mater, California State University of Los Angeles. Richard is saying that, because people don’t necessarily follow their moral prescripts, that those prescripts couldn’t have come from evolution? Richard, science isn’t in the business of determining moral codes; science is in the business of learning where moral codes come from. Who does or doesn’t follow a moral code has no influence on where that code comes from. That’s fairly elementary logic. Given that there’s absolutely no observational hint that there’s any sort of god functioning in our world, it makes sense that morality is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Logically, it can be no other way.

The last quote from Deem showed up in paragraph four of his essay, so you can see why I never get beyond the beginnings of apologetics polemics. It’s hard to want to read further when confronted early on with such basic errors. See why I worry about his education?