I used to be a lawyer before entering seminary to prepare for the Catholic priesthood. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that I’m fascinated by questions about the “burden of proof” in religious questions. For example, does the burden of proof fall on the believer or the atheist? What sort of evidence is permissible to meet this burden of proof? Do “extraordinary” claims require extraordinary evidence? Should they meet an extraordinary burden of proof, above the burden required for other sorts of claims? Here are four ways that those questions are answered incorrectly:

Error #1: The burden of proof falls with theists, and not with atheists.

Frequently, atheists will claim that “atheism isn’t a belief,” and therefore doesn’t require evidence, and that the burden of proof falls solely with the believer. This is false. As Luke Muehlhauser at Common Sense Atheism explains, “I think the burden of proof falls on whoever makes a positive claim.” It’s true, this means that believers should be able to provide support for this, but it also means that if you disbelieve in God, you should also be able to support this belief:

“If you claim that Yahweh exists, it’s not my duty to disprove Yahweh. [….] But most intellectually-inclined atheists I know do not merely “lack” a belief in God – as, say, my dog lacks a belief in God. Atheists like to avoid the burden of proof during debates, so they say they merely “lack” a belief in God. But this is not what their writings usually suggest. No, most intellectual atheists positively believe that God does not exist. In fact, most of them will say – at least to other atheists – that it’s “obvious” there is no God, or that they “know” – as well as we can “know” anything – that God does not exist.
 
Thus, if the atheist wants to defend what he really believes, then he, too, has a burden of proof. He should give reasons for why he thinks that God almost certainly doesn’t exist.”

This is the critical distinction. To go from “I’m not convinced from the evidence that Christianity/theism is true” to “therefore, Christianity/theism is false” is a logical leap not supported by the evidence. Alvin Plantinga has a helpful illustration:

“[L]ack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.”

I don’t believe that there are an even number of stars. But I also don’t doubt that there are an even number of stars. Lack of evidence for X isn’t evidence of its opposite, and in this case, the weight of the evidence is perfectly 50-50.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways in which lack of evidence can be probative: if I claim that it’s been raining all afternoon, the lack of water on the ground would be evidence against my claim. So there’s no reason atheists couldn’t argue that, if God existed, we’d see X and Y, but don’t see those things, and therefore He doesn’t exist. That would be a logical proof, but would take actual intellectual legwork. The alternative of pretending to be agnostic (a phenomenon Muehlhauser rightly treats as widespread) is much easier. It just happens to be intellectually dishonest.

Error #2: Christian Beliefs are either scientifically-evaluable or non-provable / non-falsifiable.

Given that the party making a positive claim (either that there is a God, or that there isn’t) has the burden of proof, what counts as proof? Oftentimes, there’s a false dichotomy that truth-claims (like religious claims) are analyzable in the way that scientific questions are, or else they’re nonsense. Here’s Muehlhauser apparently falling into that trap:

“Christians have done a good job of making it impossible to disprove their God. Yahweh used to be hiding just above the clouds, from where he would throw rocks at the Amorites and do other fun stuff. Now he’s some kind of invisible, transcendent being we couldn’t possibly disprove. But we don’t have to. It’s the duty of Christians to show us some reason to think Yahweh exists. Christians have the burden of proof, because they are making a positive claim. The atheist merely says, “I see no reason to accept your claim, just like I see no reason to accept the claims of Scientology.”

If this is any indication, Muehlhauser’s understanding of Christianity and history is a big part of the problem. He assumes that we used to think that God was “hiding just above the clouds,” because he takes Joshua 10:10-11 embarrassingly literally to mean that God was on a cloud throwing rocks. Further, he claims that Christians did “a good job of making it impossible to disprove their God,” as if the transcendence of God was something we invented as an evasion from these brilliant atheist rebuttals (where does God sit on cloudless days? Shucks!).

In reality, Christian theology has been clear about God’s transcendence for the entirety of Christian history. God’s transcendence can also be shown to be metaphysically necessary from the work of pre-Christian philosophers like Aristotle. Further, you can trace God’s transcendence all the way back to Genesis 1:1, which says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” not “in the beginning, God sat on a cloud in the heavens and created the earth.” It’s true that, out of necessity, the Bible frequently uses anthropomorphic language to describe God and His actions, but what other language could we use? It’s also clear, from the very start, that much of this language is understood by author and reasonably-smart readers alike to be metaphorical and analogical. When God says in Exodus 19:4, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself,” no reasonable person takes that to mean that Landroval swooped in and brought the Jews out of Egypt. After all, the prior 18 chapters just finished explaining how the Israelites escaped Egypt.

If you read the Bible by assuming that it is written by and for idiots, don’t be surprised if your Biblical exegesis is idiotic. This might seem like a side point (and admittedly is, somewhat), but Muehlhauser goes on from here to conclude that belief in the Christian God is like believing in a being like Odin, a categorical error only made possible by treating God like an artifact of this universe rather than the universe’s Creator.

So that’s part of the problem. The more important point here is Muehlhauser’s implicit admission that he doesn’t even know how to evaluate the Christian claim of a transcendent God. He needs to imagine that God is a silly rock-throwing cloud monster, because that’s the kind of being he understands how to analyze. Elsewhere, he writes that:

“Skepticism and critical thinking teach us important lessons: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Correlation does not imply causation. Don’t take authority too seriously. Claims should be specific and falsifiable."

Underlying this appears to be an attempt to analyze God the way that one would approach the question of whether or not quasars exists. Even the categories of “falsification” assume a particular approach to rational inquiry, an approach well-suited for the natural sciences, but often ill-suited outside of the realm for which it was invented. Take the principle of non-contradiction, for example: it’s a non-falsifiable, untestable logical axiom, but is true nevertheless. This is true of literally all logical axioms. (By the way, without these logical axioms, science is impossible, so this idea that all truth must be falsifiable can be shown to be false). The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, while in no way favorable towards religion, acknowledges the incompleteness of this worldview:

“12 times 12 is 144 is something you can establish from the comfort of your armchair by reason alone. You can do this with other conceptual truths. It’s possible, for example, to figure out whether my great-grandmother’s uncle’s grandson must be my second cousin once removed by just unpacking these concepts and examining the logical relations that hold between them. Again this can be done from the comfort of an armchair. No empirical investigation is required. Or suppose an explorer claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle in some remote rainforest. Do we need to mount an expensive expedition to check whether this claim is true? No, again we can establish its falsity by conceptual, armchair methods.
 
So, even while acknowledging that science, as characterized here, is an extraordinarily powerful tool, let’s also acknowledge that other non-scientific but nevertheless rational methods also have their place when it comes to arriving at reasonable belief – including armchair methods. Science is merely one way – albeit a very important way – of arriving at reasonable beliefs.”

Given this, consider the kinds of claims that Christians make about God. Unlike, for examples, we’re not claiming that God is a creature that originated from this universe, came into power, and reshaped the universe. We’re saying that God is an uncreated Being (indeed, Being itself) and is the origin of all created reality. By definition, such a God isn’t going to be confined to the law of nature… laws He created. We’re making metaphysical claims, and Muehlhauser, like many atheists, is trying to evaluate them like physical claims. It’s true that we also believe that this God became man (without ceasing to be God), but this is a historical claim, and history doesn’t permit of scientific laboratory testing particularly well, either.

I’m not here attempting to prove either God’s existence or the truth of the Incarnation, only to say that those propositions aren’t claims that the natural sciences is equipped to handle, just as it’s not equipped to handle claims like “John Quincy Adams was a member of the Anti-Masonic Party” or “When an equal amount is taken from equals, an equal amount results” or “beauty is a transcendental.”

Error #3: Extraordinary claims logically require extraordinary evidence.

Carl Sagan was fond of quoting Marcello Truzzi’s saying (alluded to above, by Muehlhauser) that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If this is meant as a description of the way we normally approach truth-claims, it’s true enough. We tend to hold things we find credible to a much lower burden of proof than things we find incredible. But trying to turn it into a logical rule is a disaster.

For starters, it renders incoherent results. Imagine a murder trial in which three people were in the room with the victim when he was shot, and forensics proves that there were two shooters. All three are brought up on trial. Using Truzzi’s standard, does this mean that the elevated burden of proof is on each of the three defendants (since there’s only a one in three chance that he’s guilty, making innocence more extraordinary in this case) or on the prosecution (because murder is an extraordinary sort of event)?

Worse, almost everything turns on what you consider “extraordinary,” a term that only appears objective (for example, a person who believed that all weather events were caused by the actions of the gods wouldn’t view such divine intervention as “extraordinary). In practice, this is an example of confirmation bias, which refers to “a person’s tendency to favor information that confirms their assumptions, preconceptions or hypotheses whether these are actually and independently true or not.” If something agrees with an atheist’s assumptions, it’s ‘ordinary,’ and held to one standard. If it disagrees, it’s ‘extraordinary,’ and held to a much higher standard.  All of us are prone to confirmation bias, but the “extraordinary claims / extraordinary evidence” mantra only serves to entrench it.

Error #4: Religious claims should be held to a higher burden of proof than other claims.

The final error I want to address is a permutation of the third one: it’s the idea that, as “extraordinary claims,” religious claims should be held to a a higher standard of proof than ordinary claims.

The normal standard for believing in something is what’s called a “50+1” standard. If you think of assent as balance between “belief” and “disbelief,” any tilting of the scales, however slight, points to the proper outcome. And this is how we normally use “belief,” to the point that it appears illogical and incoherent to do otherwise. G.E. Moore’s famous paradox is that statements like “It is raining and I don’t believe that it is raining” don’t mean anything. You’re affirming two contradictory statements. So, too, to say that “God probably exists, but I don’t believe He does” doesn’t appear to mean anything. And if the likelihood of God’s existence is above 50% (however slightly), then He probably exists.

Although apparently incoherent, this error actually points to an important feature of religious belief. Faith isn’t just an intellectual assent to the historical and metaphysical data. It’s also an act of trust, requiring an act of the will. No matter how clear the historical evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection, you can always choose to ignore or deny it. Pope St. Gregory the Great points out that this was even true of the Apostles who encountered the Resurrected Christ, which is why Jesus can still refer to Thomas’ faithful response as “belief” (John 20:29): “Thomas saw a human being, whom he acknowledged to be God, and said: My Lord and my God. Seeing, he believed; looking at one who was true man, he cried out that this was God, the God he could not see.”

This is an important dimension, because it’s easy to pretend that this is all exclusively on the level of the intellect, that belief and disbelief are motivated solely by the weight of the evidence (and that therefore, all wrong opinions in matters of faith are a matter of ignorance or simple mistake). When a person announces that they will choose not to believe in God even if the weight of evidence tips in His favor, they’re announcing something else is at hand.

Conclusions

So there you have it: (1) the burden of proof falls to the party making a claim (whether that claim is that God does or does not exist); (2) this burden should be met in a manner appropriate to the type of claims (so don’t expect scientific claims to be proven in the same way that historical ones are, for example); (3) requiring special evidence for claims you deem “extraordinary” opens the door for confirmation bias [and so you should be extremely cautious about doing so]; and (4) there’s no rational, disinterested reason to hold religious claims to a higher burden of proof than any other kinds of claims.
 
 
(Image credit: Valdosta Today)

There’s a huge movement that’s sweeping Austin right now called Explore God. If you live in central Texas, you know what I’m talking about. You pull out of your driveway and you see a sign in the yard across the street. You get on the highway and there’s a billboard. You drive past a church to see a big Explore God banner out front, then, on your way home, more signs dot the houses as you drive through your neighborhood.

I was blown away by the saturation level that the people behind this movement managed to achieve, and curious about the campaign’s content. Since it seems to be targeting seekers and non-believers, I pulled up the section of the website that discusses atheism to see whom they got to address this topic. To my shock, I found...

Me.

I vaguely remembered the time a camera crew visited my house when I was 9,000 months pregnant. Evidently that was for this Explore God thing. I had no idea! Well, I had some idea. I mean, they said something about the internet and God and billboards, but I didn’t catch most of it since I was busy trying to find a way to ask if they needed any footage of me taking a three-hour nap.

Anyway, I would have eventually figured out that something was up, since my email and social media accounts have been hit with a new round of feedback from the online atheist world. It’s been a while since I’ve had large numbers of people calling my conversion, my sanity, and my mental coherence into question, and it’s provided me with a good opportunity to take a step back and ask myself, Why did I become a Christian?

I’ve been pondering the question for the past few days as I fold laundry and make lunches, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

On Having Proof

 
The issue that arises over and over again when you talk about atheist-to-Christian conversions is one of proof. We atheists had seen plenty of people concoct nonsensical and internally inconsistent belief systems because they confused “what feels good” with “what is true.” It struck me as a very dangerous path to start assenting to beliefs that cannot be disentangled from the messy world of subjective experience.

Deep down in my heart of hearts, I might feel that the sun revolves around the earth...but before I start announcing this as a truth about the way the universe works, I should go ahead and examine the evidence to see if it is actually true. It is this kind of never-wavering requirement for proof that allows us to have a clear-eyed look at the universe. No area of life should be exempt from this sort of analysis, certainly not religion.

Doesn’t that mean, then, that it’s impossible for any person who holds to this way of thinking to be a believer? At most, you could be an agnostic. But since religion cannot be proven in any kind of verifiable way, a person cannot both subscribe to an evidence-based way of evaluating the world and be a believer. One or the other has to go. Right?

For most of my life, I would have said yes. Absolutely, yes. But then, about 10 years ago, I began to reconsider.

Filming for #ExploreGod

I began to consider that many of the pioneers of science believed in God—Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Boyle, and Mendel, to name just a few. Almost all the great Greek and Roman thinkers of antiquity believed that supernatural forces were at work in the world. In fact, among people considered to be the greatest minds of history, only a small percentage were atheists.

Realizing that so many bright people believed in God didn’t make me think they were right—after all, there are bright people in every belief system—but it did pique my interest about the issue of proof.

Was I really ready to say that I was a more analytical thinker than my engineer grandfather? Was I seriously going to claim that the monk Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, did not require evidence before believing a theory to be true? Did I honestly think that it never occurred to Galileo to question assumptions?

These questions lingered in the back of my mind as a series of events played out that led me to consider that there might be more to life than the material world alone. I set out on a search for truth about the spiritual realm, which pretty quickly led me to the only lasting world religion whose founder claimed to be God. I came to see that there was a strong case that a person named Jesus of Nazareth did exist. I thought it was interesting that Christianity spread like wildfire through the ancient world, despite the fact that becoming a Christian often meant persecution or even death.

I began reading works by the great Christian thinkers, and was surprised that their arguments in favor of belief were more intriguing than the ones I’d always heard (mainly “Shut up,” and “You’re going to hell”). In fact, this was some of the most reasonable, lucid writing I’d ever encountered.

Yet I still had not seen proof. I was caught in a no-man’s land between finding the case for Christianity extremely compelling, and not being able to take the leap to belief because I could not prove it to be true.

I didn’t know where to turn, so I decided to do an experiment: something rang true about Augustine’s famous statement that you must believe so that you might understand, and so I began to live my life as if God did exist. I prayed, even though I felt like I was talking to myself; I followed the Christian moral code; I read the Bible and honestly tried to understand what it might be trying to teach me. I conformed my life to a God-centered life, even thought I wasn’t sure I believed that God existed.

There was no big thunder-and-lightning encounter with Jesus, and, frankly, I only rarely “felt” God’s presence. But once I began this experiment, it was as if some hidden, tremendously powerful magnet had been activated within me that began pulling me in one direction. One odd “coincidence” after another formed a breadcrumb trail to lead me to God, and it sure did seem like some external force was acting in my life in a real way.

But the most interesting part was this:

The more I went through the motions of believing in God, the more the world made sense to me; the more human history made sense to me; the more I started to make sense to me. The picture of human life that I’d formed based on science alone now seemed incomplete. I still believed everything I’d learned through the lens of science, but I now saw a whole other dimension to the world around me. It was like the difference between looking at a picture of a double-fudge chocolate cake and having one in front of me to smell, touch, and taste: everything I knew before was still there, but I was now experiencing it in a much more intense and vivid way.

I’d considered my life before this God experiment to be good, and it was in many ways, but it now seemed disordered, confused, and flat compared to the life I had now. Little lingering issues faded away; parts of life that had seemed overwhelming were diffused and put in their proper place; I saw that certain actions that had seem innocuous in my atheist worldview had caused great harm to me and to others. I was finally able to put a name to the deep stirrings within my soul I’d experience when listening to a profound piece of music or hearing about an act of evil; I understood why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, what drove the efforts to build the great cathedrals. For the first time I felt the depth of my potential as a human, a woman, and a mother.

When I considered this experience in light of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth, the improbable spread of early Christianity, and the seamless and perfectly, internally-consistent traditional Christian moral code that has stood strong for two thousand years, something clicked. To borrow from an analogy I once heard someone else use, it was like finding the box top that made all the puzzle pieces come together. Atheism allowed me to complete a few sections, but its box top had me constantly jamming pieces together in a way that didn’t work. With Christianity, everything snapped into place.

Finally, I had found my proof—though it wasn’t the type of proof that I’d originally been looking for.

What I came to see is that there are different kinds of proof in the world. The process for proving that the Horsehead Nebula is 1,500 light years from earth is different than the process for proving that the bad guy committed the crime, and the process for proving that God exists is more different still.

And so, to the folks who want to know what kind of proof I have to offer for my Christian beliefs, I would say this:

I can show you lots of evidence, and, if you’re willing to consider it with an open mind, I think I can make the case that this belief system is at least worth a second look. But I cannot prove its truth to you in the way I can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. The human soul is a necessary component of the God experiment, and the laboratory in which it takes place is the individual human heart. Yes, there is compelling, verifiable evidence for the truths of this belief system, but an analysis of evidence will not—cannot—get you all the way there.

If you are standing back and waiting for the data alone to convince you that God exists, that’s like holding a piece of litmus paper above a solution but never dipping it in. You can have a complete understanding of how the hydrogen atoms in the liquid would potentially interact with the dye on the paper, but until the paper has contact with the solution, the experiment is not complete.

And guess what: in the God experiment, your entire life is the litmus paper.

So no, you absolutely do not have to check your analytical, evidence-based way of evaluating the world at the door when you step into the waters of spirituality. Just understand that when you begin to explore God, you’re looking for an entirely different kind of proof.
 
 
Originally posted at Conversion Diary. Used with author's permission.

The problem of something coming from nothing arises out of three kinds of realities which require a cause for their existence. One, realities that have a beginning; two, realities which are conditioned in their existence (dependent for their existence on something else—the fulfillment of other conditions); and three, realities that are conditioned by time.

I am restricting my comments here to realities which have a beginning. If you are interested in conditioned realities, read chapter three of my book New Proofs for the Existence of God, and if you are interested in realities conditioned by time, read chapter five of the same book.

Returning to realities which have a beginning, if a reality—say, our universe—has a beginning, then that beginning point represents the point at which the universe came into existence (including its physical time). Prior to that point the physical universe did not exist—in other words, it was nothing—absolute nothing. Now here is where the problem of something coming from nothing appears on the scene. If the universe was truly nothing, and if from nothing only nothing can come, then the universe needs something beyond itself to cause it to exist—to bring it from nothing to something. Without this transcendent cause (Creator), the universe could not bring itself from nothing to something, because it was nothing.

If a reality doesn’t have a beginning, if it is not conditioned in its existence, and if it is not conditioned by time, that reality does not have to have a creator—it does not have to have a cause for its existence, because it was never nothing (as our universe was prior to its beginning) and it was not dependent on anything else for its existence. It is its own existence—indeed, it is existence or being itself. Such a reality is not contradictory—it is, in the words of many philosophers, necessary.

There is nothing in the world of logic that requires every being to have a creator or a cause. The only beings that require a creator or a cause, as I said above, are those which have a beginning, those which are dependent on something else for their existence, and those which are conditioned by time.

Now let’s return to the question. God is defined as a being that does not have a beginning, that is not dependent on anything for its existence, and that is not conditioned by time, and so God does not need a cause. Indeed, if you read chapters three and five of New Proofs, you will see that God must exist, because there must exist at least one reality which has no beginning, is not dependent on anything else for its existence, and is not conditioned by time.

The short reason for this, which is explained fully in the book, is as follows: if all beings have a beginning, then all beings will have been nothing prior to their beginning, but this means that nothing will ever come into existence. Why? Let’s say our universe is nothing without the existence of a prior reality, but that prior reality is nothing without the existence of another prior reality, and so forth ad infinitum. Then the whole of reality is nothing without prior realities, but we have no end to the prior realities (which are nothing).

In short, the sum total of all the realities which are nothing without other realities, which are nothing without other realities, which are nothing...is nothing. Zero added to itself an infinite number of times is zero.

You can read the full explanation in chapters three through five of the book. If you do not have at least one "reality which is NOT nothing prior to a beginning" (like God), then you have no reality at all.

Now it just so happens that there can be only one reality that does not have a beginning, is not dependent on anything else for its existence, and is not conditioned by time. The proofs for this are in the book, and it will take too long to explain them here. The ultimate conclusion is there has to be at least one "beginningless being"—and there can be only one "beginningless being"—and this is what we mean by "God."

Now let’s return to the question—the reason we ask the question "why does the universe have a cause?" or "why do we have to explain how the universe came from nothing to something?" is because there is an increasing amount of evidence from physics, the philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics that imply and even require that the universe has a beginning. This evidence can be found in chapters one through five of New Proofs) and includes the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth 2003 theorem, entropy, the Borde-Vilenkin 1993 theorem, etc. These questions don’t come up with respect to God because there is not only no evidence that God had a beginning, or is dependent on something for its existence, or is conditioned by time. Indeed, as noted above, there must be at least one being—and only one being (i.e. God)—that does not have a beginning, is not dependent on anything for its existence, and is not conditioned by time.
 
 
This article originally appeared at MagisReasonFaith.org. Used with author's permission.
(Image Credit: NASA)