There are a couple things I can appreciate about the “Who designed the Designer?” argument.

Although it is rooted in a caricature of the kalam cosmological argument’s first premise ("Whatever begins to exist has a cause"), it is a positive argument for atheism, and it does attempt to deal with the God hypothesis in the only arena where God’s existence may be decisively confirmed or refuted: the arena of philosophy.

The God defended by Christian theists is a transcendent, eternal, and spiritual being. He is the one creator of all physical reality and existed before all of time, space, matter, and energy. Being “outside” the natural world, God cannot be discovered nor refuted by science alone. For this reason the arguments for and against God’s existence must be, in the end, philosophical.

For instance, if the skeptic could expose an error in the formulation of the popular kalam argument—say, that its major premise “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” is false—then this would force one of theism’s most compelling arguments to the chopping block. Indeed, such a refutation has been attempted by astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, who tried to claim in his book A Universe from Nothing that the universe indeed can and did arise from nothing.

Krauss was critically rebuked in the New York Times by fellow atheist David Albert for equivocating on the word nothing. Of course, even if Krauss had been successful, and the validity of the kalam argument had been seriously maligned, this would still not prove definitively that atheism is true; it would only disprove one theistic argument.

How then can the atheist go the full distance and prove theism false? He can show that a divine attribute (e.g., omniscience) is internally contradictory in itself; he can show that two or more of the divine attributes contradict one another; or he can show that God’s attributes contradict a known fact about the world we live in.

Let’s consider three of God’s best-known divine attributes: his omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

First, let’s work out our definition of God a bit more. As noted, God is pure spirit—an immaterial “mind”—who exists outside of time and space. We may also say that he is the perfect act of being itself, and thus all perfections are in him. In other words, God cannot be perfected further because he is infinite perfection.

Because God has no parts, is infinite in being, and is therefore absolutely “simple,” we can say that God’s infinite power is his infinite goodness, which is his infinite knowledge, and so on. Thus in the end, it is much more profitable for us to speak about God in analogies (all-powerful, etc.) and to speak about what God is not (spaceless, etc).

Omniscience

Now let’s consider God’s omniscience. God knows all truths and accepts nothing false as true. But could an all-good God know what it is like to sin? Yes, for God knows all truths; but he doesn't know all truths directly from personal experience. God knows what it is like to sin by knowing what it is like for us to sin.

Now, if God is all-knowing—if he knows everything every person will ever do—what does that mean for our free will? Is such causal liberty an illusion? Not at all. I can know my influenza-stricken, gagging child is about to vomit without causing her to vomit. Foreknowledge does not equal causality.

Omnipotence

This brings us to the claim of God's omnipotence. Is there any philosophical contradiction that can be drawn out of God's infinite power? As we have noted, God cannot sin because he is morally perfect, the perfect standard of what it means to be good. Thus God has the power to do all logically possible things; that is, he has the power to do all meaningful things. That is why he cannot create a four-sided triangle (which is really nothing at all).

Nor can God create a rock that is too heavy for his all-powerful self to lift. Such a notion is meaningless, because it fails to acknowledge how God really is. A bachelor cannot forget his wife’s birthday because he is a bachelor; God cannot be overpowered by any creature because he is omnipotent.

Omnipresence

Finally, what about God’s omnipresence? How can this be so? Well, as long as God is unbound by time and space there is no contradiction. Not only has God created all things, but also his presence is necessary to sustain them in being, just as the presence of hydrogen atoms is necessary to sustain water in being. God is present to all beings, but he is not all beings (that’s pantheism). He is present to all things, and the existence of all things is dependent on his presence, just as the caller of a square dance is present to the dancers on the floor and the existence of the square dance depends on the mind (and voice) of the caller.

Thus God, who contains all perfections within himself, can rightly be referred to as all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, etc. We cannot say (by the way) that God is a “pre-eminently peerless stinker”—contrary to the charge of Dr. Dawkins—because stinkiness is a privation of a good; but God is perfectly good. Such an assertion of God’s infinite stinkiness is an amusing bit of rhetoric but it does not in the least follow logically from the given philosophical definition of God. It betrays Dawkins’s misunderstanding of who God is.

It suffices to say that philosophical proofs for or against God’s existence will not be sufficiently worked out without rigorous intellectual groundwork. Indeed, the finite limits of human reason that force us into analogies and negative statements about God can sometimes lead to frustration and headaches. But I side with G.K. Chesterton, who acknowledged “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“We have to make this planet as good as we possibly can and try to leave it a better place than we found it.”

The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, responds to the trite apothegm with unsurprising applause. But off-stage, after the cameras are turned off, the proverbial devil of the details rears his ugly head.

A weary Dawkins—one almost gets the sense that he’d rather not talk to anybody at all—kneels besides a disabled woman in a wheelchair, handing her a signed copy of his book and forcing a smile for the camera. The woman looks ecstatic to meet her hero; Dawkins seems to still be busy pummeling on Pell in some dusty corner of the same restless mind that gave rise to The God Delusion almost a decade ago.

We see this all play out in the 2013 homage to the New Atheism, "The Unbelievers", a sort of promotional travelogue which follows Dawkins and fellow atheist Lawrence Krauss around the globe to—like two real-life Hazel Moteses—spread the gospel of unbelief.

But Dawkins recently admitted something about people who, like this particular fan, suffer from a lifelong disability: it would have been better for them to have never been born.

Contemplating over Twitter what a woman pregnant with a Down Syndrome child ought to do, Dawkins said: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” The controversial and callous remark—certainly not the first from Dawkins—was not so much walked back as walked forward in his formal apology.

Dawkins is not the only New Atheist that has been mired in public controversy in recent years. From Krauss' cringe-worthy debate with a Muslim scholar to Sam Harris' recent comments about Islam on Bill Maher's show, bizarre, off-color public statements from the New Atheists—often made, or at least said to be made, because of an unflinching commitment to naturalism—are resulting in charges of brutality, misogyny, bigotry, and the same kinds of unflattering associations Dawkins had hoped to keep squarely on God’s head.

Of course, no mountain of personal controversies could discredit the claims of these self-styled “brights” or of atheists more generally. To suggest otherwise would be to engage in the very ad hominem attacks of which some of them are all too fond. But these headlines are, in their way, a visible symptom of what seems to be the diminishing traction and declining vitality of the entire New Atheist movement.

To put it in no uncertain terms: the New Atheism, if not already dead, is quickly dying.

This is first evident in a very literal way, in their fallen ranks. The “fifth horsemen” of the New Atheism, Victor Stenger, passed away a few months ago, but the loss of their leading horseman Christopher Hitchens in 2011 immediately comes to mind.

With Hitchens’ death, the New Atheism lost its scintillating, seductive flair. The wittiest, most likeable new atheist may not have converted as many as he would’ve liked, but certainly won the attention and admiration of many in the Christian community. In one of the first articles at Strange Notions, titled “Why I Loved to Listen to Christopher Hitchens,” Father Robert Barron confesses:

“I think I watched every Hitchens debate that I could find on YouTube; I subscribed to Vanity Fair largely because Hitchens was a regular contributor; I read every one of his books...No one wrote quite like Christopher Hitchens. Whether he was describing an uprising on the streets of Athens, or criticizing the formation of young men in the British boarding schools of the 1950s, or defending his support of the Iraq war, or begging people to let go of what he took to be their childish belief in God, Hitchens was unfailingly intelligent, perceptive, funny, sarcastic, and addictively readable.”

If Christopher Hitchens was the most stimulating New Atheist, the erudite Santa-lookalike Daniel Dennett was always the most scholarly. But, like Saint Nick himself, the philosopher has vacated the public eye so suddenly as to cast doubt on his very existence. Dennett has made no new enemies, inflamed no Twitter wars, and penned no blog screeds about the stupidity of faith. Instead—perhaps with an eye toward securing his legacy as a serious philosopher—he’s been sitting down with respected Christian thinker Alvin Plantinga for a civil, serious dialogue about science and religion.

And here, we see the root cause of the New Atheism’s decline: its lack of a sturdy philosophical foundation. Any organization can withstand its bad press if it’s grounded in something human, something wise, something timeless. But all along, scholars have grumbled that—unlike the writings of a Nietzsche, Sartre, or Russell—the New Atheism lacked intellectual depth and was doomed to self-destruction.

And they were right. Krauss looks like a farm team player brought up to revitalize a crumbling organization, trying (and failing) to recreate Hitch’s signature rhetorical jukes. Meanwhile, Dawkins is resorting to odd trick plays which never get off the ground. (His bizarre mutations of the mind art show comes to mind.) Nothing is meshing the way it used to, and the overcompensation on the part of the remaining leaders—and pushback from their rank and file—is telling.

Meanwhile, less vociferous unbelievers are gladly rushing in to fill that profitable cultural space. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for example, has rightly been accused of bungling the history of the Church with relation to science in his new "Cosmos" series—but he’s also quick to admit that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to God. “The only ‘ist’ I am is a scientist,” Tyson says in a Big Think interview. “What is my stance on religion, or spirituality, or God? I would say if I’d find a word that came closest, it would be agnostic...Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active atheists. They’re like in-your-face atheists, and they want to change policies, and they’re having debates. I don’t have the time, the interest, the energy to do any of that. I’m a scientist.”

Then there is Thomas Nagel, a renowned philosopher who—going beyond Tyson—is an avowed atheist. Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False drove fellow atheists up the wall, not only for its defection from the creed of naturalism, but for its alignment with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga—the same Christian enemy who has been sitting down with Dennett for tea.

Lastly, there’s physicist and atheist Sean Carroll who—going even beyond Nagel—is committed to the materialist conception of nature. Carroll penned an insightful piece recently titled “Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things About Philosophy.” While men like Dawkins, Krauss, and Stephen Hawking routinely dismiss philosophy as obfuscating gibberish that only serves to embolden the theologians, Carroll acknowledges that philosophy adds quite a lot to the modern scientific project. “The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works,” Carroll writes. “Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway...It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest.”

This, happily, is the new tenor of the conversation. The apparently intramural rivalry between two fundamentalist spins on the world looks increasingly at odds with the problems and possibilities an open-minded majority face on the ground, and warriors from each side are deigning to say to the other, like Pound to Whitman:

I have detested you long enough...
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

That’s not to say that passionate disagreement has ended—it hasn’t, and never will. But the tone and style of "The Unbelievers" seems a decade too late; the moment has passed. As celebrities like Bill Pullman and Cameron Diaz offer public support for this un-dynamic duo, and Krauss proudly holds up a tweet from Miley Cyrus with his picture and the quotation “forget Jesus,” the only real message that gets across is that intellectual fashions, like all fashions, come and go.

And as things continue to change where philosophical substance is concerned, the New Atheists and their readers will either change too, or fade away, raging against the dying of the brights.
 
 
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As an intellectual movement, Christianity has a head start on atheism. So it's only natural that believers would find some of the current arguments against God less than satisfying.

But in the interests of a more robust debate, I want to offer my tips for atheists wanting to make a dent in the Faith. I've got some advice on arguments that should be dropped and some admissions about where Christians are vulnerable.

Before beginning, though, I want to point out that these tips don't necessarily concern all atheists in general. My goal isn't to straw-man atheists as a group. Obviously, there are vast and varied beliefs among atheists. But the advice here applies to some of the most common beliefs I've encountered.

Tip #1. Dip into Christianity's intellectual tradition

 
This is the 1,984th year since April 7, AD 30, the widely accepted date among historians for the crucifixion of Jesus (the 1,981st if you find the arguments for April 3, AD 33 persuasive). Christians have been pondering this stuff for a long time. They've faced textual, historical, and philosophical scrutiny in almost every era, and they have left a sophisticated literary trail of reasons for the Faith.

My first tip, then, is to gain some awareness of the Church's vast intellectual tradition. It is not enough to quip that "intellectual" and "church" are oxymoronic. Origen, Augustine, Philoponus, Aquinas, and the rest are giants of Western thought. Without some familiarity with these figures, or their modern equivalents—Pannenberg, Ward, MacIntrye, McGrath, Plantinga, Hart, Volf—popular atheists can sound like the kid in English class: "Miss, Shakespeare is stupid!"

Tip #2. Notice how believers use the word "faith"

 
One of the things that becomes apparent in serious Christian literature is that almost no one uses "faith" in the sense of believing things without reasons. That might be Richard Dawkins' preferred definition—except when he was publicly asked by Oxford's Professor John Lennox whether he had "faith" in his lovely wife—but it is important to know that in theology "faith" always means personal trust in the God whose existence one accepts on other grounds. I think God is real for philosophical, historical, and experiential reasons. Only on the basis of my reasoned conviction can I then trust God—have faith in him—in the sense meant in theology.

Tip #3. Recognize the status of Six-Day Creationism

 
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss have done a disservice to atheism by talking as though Six-Day Creationism is the default Christian conviction. But mainstream Christianity for decades has dismissed Six-Day Creationism as a misguided (if well-intentioned) project. Most Christian theologians and seminaries have taught for years that Genesis 1 was never intended to be read concretely, let alone scientifically. This isn't Christians retreating before the troubling advances of science. From the earliest centuries many of the greats of Judaism (e.g., Philo and Maimonides) and Christianity (e.g., Clement, Ambrose, and Augustine) taught that the "six days" of Genesis are a literary device, not a marker of time.

Tip #4. Repeat after me: few theologians embrace a God-of-the-gaps

 
One slightly annoying feature of New Atheism is the constant claim that believers invoke God as an explanation of the "gaps" in our knowledge of the universe: as we fill in the gaps with more science, God disappears. Even as thoughtful a man as Lawrence Krauss, a noted physicist, did this just last month on British radio following new evidence of the earliest moments of the Big Bang.

But serious theists have always leaned on philosophical, theological, and personal arguments for God, instead of proposing a God-of-the-gaps. They've also welcomed explanations of the mechanics of the universe as further indications of the rational order of reality, and therefore of the presence of a Mind behind reality.

Thus Krauss and others battling against the mythical God-of-the-gaps sound like a clever mechanic who imagines that just because he can explain how a car works he has done away with the Manufacturer.

Tip #5. "Atheists just go one god more" is a joke, not an argument

 
I wish I had a dollar for every time an atheist insisted to me that I am an atheist with respect to Thor, Zeus, Krishna, and so on, and that atheists just go "one god more". As every trained philosopher knows, Christians are not absolute atheists with regard to other gods. They happily affirm the shared theistic logic that there must be a powerful Mind behind a rational universe. The disagreements concern how the deity has revealed itself in the world. Atheism is not just an extension of monotheism any more than celibacy is an extension of monogamy.

Tip #6. Claims that Christianity is social "poison" backfire

 
Moving from science and philosophy to sociology, I regard New Atheism's "religion poisons everything" argument as perhaps its greatest faux pas. Not just because it is obviously untrue but because anyone who has entertained the idea and then bumped into an actual Christian community will quickly wonder what other fabrications Hitchens and Dawkins have spun.

I don't just mean that anyone who dips into Christian history will discover that the violence of Christendom is dwarfed by the bloodshed of non-religious and irreligious conflicts. I mean that those who find themselves, or their loved ones, in genuine need in almost any country in the Western world are very, very likely to become the beneficiaries of direct and indirect Christian compassion. The faithful account for an inordinate amount of "volunteering hours", they give blood at higher-than-normal rates, and the largest charities are mostly Christian organizations. This doesn't make Christians better than atheists, but it puts the lie to the claim that they're worse.

Tip #7. Concede that Jesus lived, then argue about the details

 
Nearly ten years after Richard Dawkins said that "a serious historical case" can be made that Jesus "never lived" (even if he admits that his existence is probable), it is astonishing to me that some atheists still agree with him. Even the man Dawkins cites at this point, G.A. Wells (a professor of German language, not a historian), published his own change of mind right about the time The God Delusion came out.

New Atheists should accept the academic reality that the vast majority of specialists in secular universities throughout the world consider it beyond reasonable doubt that Jesus lived, taught, gained a reputation as a healer, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and was soon heralded by his followers as the resurrected Messiah. Unless skeptics can begin their arguments from this academic baseline, they are the mirror image of the religious fundamentalists they despise—unwilling to accept the scholarly mainstream over their metaphysical commitments.

Tip #8. Persuasion involves three factors

 
Aristotle was the first to point out that persuasion occurs through three factors: intellectual (logos), psychological (pathos), and social or ethical (ethos). People rarely change their minds merely on account of objective evidence. They usually need to feel the personal relevance and impact of a claim, and they also must feel that the source of the claim—whether a scientist or a priest—is trustworthy.

Christians frequently admit that their convictions developed under the influence of all three elements. When skeptics, however, insist that their unbelief is based solely on "evidence", they appear one-dimensional and lacking in self-awareness. They would do better to figure out how to incorporate their evidence within the broader context of its personal relevance and credibility. I think this is why Alain de Botton is a far more persuasive atheist (for thoughtful folk) than Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss. It also helps explain why churches attract more enquirers than the local skeptics club.

Tip #9. Ask us about Old Testament violence

 
I promised to highlight vulnerabilities of the Christian Faith. Here are two.

Most thoughtful Christians find it difficult to reconcile the loving, self-sacrificial presentation of God in the New Testament with the seemingly harsh and violent portrayals of divinity in the Old Testament. I am not endorsing Richard Dawkins' attempts in chapter 7 of The God Delusion. There he mistakenly includes stories that the Old Testament itself holds up as counter examples of true piety. But there is a dissonance between Christ's "love your enemies" and Moses' "slay the wicked".

I am not sure this line of argument has the power to undo Christian convictions entirely. I, for one, feel that the lines of evidence pointing to God's self-disclosure in Christ are so robust that I am able to ponder the inconsistencies in the Old Testament without chucking in the Faith. Still, I reckon this is one line of scrutiny Christians haven't yet fully answered.

Tip #10. Press us on hell and judgment

 
Questions can also be raised about God's fairness with the world. I don't mean the problem of evil and suffering: philosophers seem to regard that argument as a "draw". I am talking about how Christians can, on the one hand, affirm God's costly love in Jesus Christ and, yet, on the other, maintain Christ's equally clear message that those who refuse the Creator will face eternal judgment. If God is so eager for our friendship that he would enter our world, share our humanity, and bear our punishment on the cross, how could he feel it is appropriate to send anyone to endless judgment?

This is a peculiar problem of the Christian gospel. If God were principally holy and righteous, and only occasionally magnanimous in special circumstances, we wouldn't be shocked by final judgment. But it is precisely because Jesus described God as a Father rushing to embrace and kiss the returning "prodigal" that Christians wonder how to hold this in tension with warnings of hell and judgment.

Again, I'm not giving up on classical Christianity because of this internally generated dilemma, but I admit to feeling squeamish about it, and I secretly hope atheists in my audiences don't think to ask me about it.

In the end, I don't think there are any strong scientific, philosophical, or historical arguments against Christianity. Most of those in current circulation are nowhere near as persuasive as New Atheism imagines. Contemporary skeptics would do well to drop them. Paradoxically, I do think Christianity is vulnerable at precisely the points of its own emphases. Its insistence on love, humility, and non-violence is what makes the Old Testament seem inconsistent. Its claim that God "loves us to death" (literally) creates the dilemma of its teaching about final judgment. Pressing Christians on this inner logic of the cross of Christ will make for a very interesting debate, I am sure. Believers may have decent answers, but at least, during this season, you'll be touching a truly raw nerve of their Easter Faith.
 
 
Originally posted at ABC. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Good Enough Mother)

Why is there something rather than nothing? This question, usually thought to fall strictly within the purview of philosophy and theology, has recently received attention in the world of popular science thanks to books by Stephen Hawking and Lawrence M. Krauss. Interestingly, these authors propose something similar to what Christians have always believed—that the universe came into existence out of nothing, or ex nihilo—but they think this could have happened spontaneously, or without God.

Both books, Hawking’s The Grand Design (2010) and Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (2012), have already been thoroughly reviewed—Hawking notably by physicist Steven M. Barr and philosopher John Haldane, and Krauss by philosophers David Albert and Edward Feser. The reviewers (not to mention Stephen Colbert) focus plenty of attention on the authors’ misuse of the term “nothing,” and I take them to have shown that neither book establishes its extraordinary thesis: that physics can explain why there is something rather than nothing. In the aftermath of this skirmish, I want simply to sketch an outline of the traditional theory.

The theory has at least three basic parts: (1) the universe is created ex nihilo; (2) the Creator possesses infinite power; (3) the existence of the universe is totally dependent on God. Saying that the universe is “from nothing” is meant to distinguish the act of creation from an act of art or craftsmanship. The carpenter and the sculptor make their products out of something—wood or metal, for example—but God’s creative act presupposes no preexisting material. “From nothing” also excludes the idea that creatures are made up of God, that he enters into their composition. Creation reflects the Creator, it does not change him into itself. Note, too, that the creation of a thing from nothing, strictly speaking, is not a change. A change is from something to something, while creation is from nothing to something.

The second proposition, that the Creator possesses infinite power, may seem intuitive. Still, St. Thomas’s explanation rewards reflection. A product, he says, depends on its producer and on the materials out of which it is produced. The more the material is not apt to be fashioned into a product, the greater the producer’s power must be. Now, the “material” of creation is nothing, which, more than anything else, is not apt to become anything. Since there is no proportion between nothing’s utter lack of potency and a finite power, the power that produces something out of nothing must be infinite.

The third proposition, that the universe is totally dependent on God, is probably best shown, again, by contrast with products of human making. A table depends on the property of stiffness in wood, in order to maintain the shape given to it by the carpenter. But the world, made out of nothing, has no such dependence; it is totally dependent on God. Even the actions and interrelations of creatures—the table’s support of the vase, the friendship of two colleagues—are underwritten and embraced by God’s creative action. Creatures, moreover, cannot take over their own creation from God, first, because creatures are not infinite in power and, second, because self-creation would entail the impossible, namely, pre-existing one’s own creation. Even God does not create himself.

The world requires, therefore, to be continuously created. Creation cannot be only a one-time event at the beginning of time. At this very moment, were God not causing the cosmos to exist, there would be nothing rather than something. Such continuous creation theologians call conservation. On this point, the traditional theory of creation is incompatible with Deism, according to which God is like a watchmaker who winds up the world and, for the most part, leaves it to tick on its own. Conservation is important also as a condition for the possibility of an eternal world. St. Thomas argued that, even if the universe had always existed, it would still need to be created at every moment of its existence.

If you’re going to ask, why is there is something rather than nothing? this is the kind of answer you need. The question is not about the character of the universe or the manner in which it exists. It is not a question of why there is movement in the world, or why there is time, or why the physical universe is governed by certain natural laws and not others. The question, why something? primarily concerns not how the universe exists but that it exists. It is precisely the existence of the cosmos—not the content of the cosmos—that needs explaining.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Alan Piper, a Dominican student brother of the Province of St. Joseph. Used with permission.
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