Some atheists reject the resurrection accounts because they say the first Christians only believed that Christ’s spirit rose from the dead. They then explain all the evidence for the resurrection as grief-induced visions or hallucinations while Jesus’ body rotted away in the tomb. For example, atheist Dan Barker claims:

It is perfectly consistent with Christian theology to think that the spirit of Jesus, not his body, was awakened from the grave, as Christians today believe that the spirit of Grandpa has gone to heaven while his body rots in the ground. In fact, just a few verses later Paul confirms this: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” The physical body is not important to Christian theology (294-295).

The earliest testimony we have about the Resurrection comes from St. Paul’s letters, and they describe Jesus undergoing a bodily resurrection from the dead. Barker tries to get around this fact by claiming Paul used a Greek word for Jesus’ resurrection that refers only to the resurrection of the spirit rather than the resurrection of the body. Specifically, he claims Paul used the word egeiro, which means simply “rise” or “wake up” and that “Paul did not use the word ‘resurrection’ (anastasis, anistemi) here, though he certainly knew it.”

However, St. Paul says Jesus was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection [Greek, anastaseos] from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). So, contra Barker, Paul does describe Jesus rising from the dead with a form of the Greek word anastasis. Moreover, Paul uses egeiro and anastasis interchangeably when speaking about the relationship between our future resurrection from the dead and the reality of Christ’s resurrection:

Now, if Christ is preached as raised [egegertai] from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection [anastasis] of the dead? But if there is no resurrection [anastasis] of the dead, then Christ has not been raised [egegertai]. If Christ has not been raised [egegertai], then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (1 Cor. 15:12-14).

Paul’s argument is simple: if we do not rise from the dead, then Christ didn’t rise from the dead. But Christ did rise from the dead, so we can have confidence that we too will rise from the dead.

When it comes to Barker’s citation of 1 Corinthians 15:50 (“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”) and Paul’s general use of the term “spiritual body,” we have to remember what Paul was up against in Corinth. Pauline scholar John Zeisler believes that Paul was trying to convince people that the resurrection of the dead was not a mere reanimation of one’s corpse. For Paul, the “spiritual body” in the Resurrection “seems to mean something like ‘outward form,’ or ‘embodiment’ or perhaps better the way in which the person is conveyed and expressed . . . a resurrection of the whole person, involving embodiment but not physical embodiment” (98).

A similar explanation applies to 1 Peter 3:18, where Peter says Christ was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” Jehovah’s Witnesses often cite this text to deny Christ’s bodily resurrection, but as New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says, “The ‘flesh/spirit’ antithesis of 3:18 and 4:6 sounds to modern western ears as though it stands for our ‘physical/non-physical’ distinction; but this would take us down the wrong path.” These verses simply mean that Jesus no longer has a corruptible and mortal body like ours (or “flesh and blood body”). Instead, Jesus has a body infused with supernatural power, or spirit, that makes it “incorruptible” without being immaterial.

Likewise, when Paul says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he is using a “Semitism,” or a Jewish way of speaking about the natural state of humanity apart from the grace of God. We can’t inherit the kingdom without being moved by God’s spirit, but that doesn’t mean we will only be spirits. Spiritual in this context refers to a thing’s orientation as opposed to its substance. It’s like when we say the Bible is a “spiritual book” or when Paul says, “He who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one” (1 Cor. 2:15).

The subjects in these statements are not ghostly apparitions but books and people that are ordered toward the will of God. St. Augustine says, “As the Spirit, when it serves the flesh, is not improperly said to be carnal, so the flesh, when it serves the spirit, will rightly be called spiritual—not because it is changed into spirit, as some suppose who misinterpret the text” (13.20).

Barker also claims Paul cannot be talking about a bodily resurrection, because he describes Jesus “appearing” to the disciples in 1 Corinthians 15. Barker asserts, “the word ‘appeared’ in this passage is also ambiguous and does not require a physical presence. The word ophthe, from the verb horao, is used for both physical sight as well as spiritual visions” (Godless, 295). Barker then gives two examples that he believes prove that Paul is talking about the disciples having a purely spiritual vision of Jesus.

The first involves Luke’s description of how a man from Macedonia appeared (opthe) to Paul in a vision (Acts 16:9-10). The second involves the “appearances” of Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:3). Barker asks the reader, “Did Moses and Elijah appear physically to Peter? Shall we start looking for their empty tombs? This is obviously some kind of visionary appearance” (295).

But Barker’s argument doesn’t work because a person can “appear” to someone without being a ghost or spirit. For example, I might ask my wife, “Are you going to make an appearance at our party tonight?” without expecting her to materialize out of thin air. In the incident with the Macedonian, Luke makes it clear that he’s talking about a dream Paul had because he says, “a vision appeared to Paul in the night” (Acts 16:9). But when Paul and the other New Testament authors talk about Jesus appearing to the disciples, they don’t describe those appearances as being part of a vision or dream.

For example, Luke describes the disciples saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!”  Luke uses the word opthe to describe this appearance but in the proceeding verses he describes Jesus appearing in an explicitly embodied form. Jesus tells the Apostles, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39).

Barker’s use of Moses and Elijah appearing on the Mount of Transfiguration backfires because the text does not describe a purely visionary experience. 2 Kings 2:11 tells us Elijah went up alive into heaven and Jude 9 alludes to a Jewish legend about Moses’ body being taken up to heaven. Peter even declares that he will build a tent for Moses and Elijah (Matt. 19:4), which would be a strange thing to do if these men did not have physical bodies.

Finally, Paul was a Pharisee so he believed in a future, bodily resurrection. But unlike the unconverted Pharisees, Paul taught that our bodies would be transformed so that they will resemble Jesus’ glorified resurrection body. For example, he told the Philippians, “we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (3:21). He told the Church at Rome, “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you” (8:11). This expectation would not make sense unless the first Christians believed Jesus’ body was gloriously reigning in heaven rather than rotting away in a tomb outside of Jerusalem.

When I saw that the New York Times had published an argument against the existence of God with a URL that contained the phrase “philosophy-God-omniscience,” it brought out my inner Catholic-apologist-geek. I became excited at the prospect of teasing out a philosophical puzzle.

But the only puzzle I came away with was this: how could a philosopher at a large public university publish a paper on the existence of God—in the nation’s most prestigious newspaper—that wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman philosophy class?

In his piece, titled “A God Problem,” Peter Atterton asks, “Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?”

Let’s find out.

Atterton first sets his sights on God’s omnipotence with the “paradox of the stone” as it often appears in the form of a question:

"Can God make a rock so heavy that not even he could lift it?"

Atterton notes, “If God can create such a stone, then he is not all powerful, since he himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if he cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then he is not all-powerful, since he cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.”

The answer to the seeming paradox depends on your definition of omnipotence. If you think it means God can “do anything” then he can make a stone he can’t lift and he can lift a stone he can’t make. But this solves the paradox only by throwing logic out the window (which as Atterton notes, some philosophers both past and present have been willing to do).

Fortunately, there’s no need to pay such a high price. When we define divine omnipotence correctly, as “the ability to make the possible actual” or “the ability to perform a logically possible task,” the paradox evaporates.

To put it another way: God can do anything but some strings of words don’t even count as “anything.” You might be able to say terms like “square circles” or “married bachelors” but those terms are as meaningful as a random string of letters like “jorshplat.” (Can God jorshplat? If you say no, is he therefore not omnipotent?)

The philosopher George Mavrodes notes that “a stone too heavy for God to lift” is simply another way of uttering the logically contradictory (and thus nonsensical) phrase, “a stone that cannot be lifted by him whose power is sufficient for lifting anything.”

But Atterton thinks even the “logically possible” explanation doesn’t work because God could have created a logically possible world without evil. “If God is morally perfect,” he writes, “it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t he?”

At this point, Atterton has taken his philosopher’s sights off omnipotence and switched his target to the attribute of omnibenevolence, or the fact that God is all-good, by appealing to the well-worn problem of evil.

Anyone with a basic understanding of it (much less someone with a PhD, as in Atterton’s case) should know that a suitable discussion of the problem of evil is going to take more than a paragraph. And yet that’s all he gives it. He writes, “The standard defense is that evil is necessary for free will,” and quotes Alvin Plantinga’s correct observation that creatures capable of moral good are also capable of moral evil. Atterton then replies to the free will defense by simply saying it don’t explain the problem of physical evil (like cancer or the harm earthquakes cause to humans) or the problem of animal suffering.

Atterton would have been better off dedicating his whole column to these problems instead of briefly discussing and then giving up the paradox of omnipotence or the problem of evil. If he had done this, then he would have had space to address one of the many replies theists have given to these problems including:

• the connection between the moral evil of original sin and our fallen, human natures;
• the opportunities for humans to exhibit moral virtues like courage and compassion;
• the necessity of pain and destruction in a finite, material world that is journeying towards perfection;
• common misunderstandings we have about the nature and ultimate purpose of non-human animal suffering. Our inability to see God’s eternal plan and know the greater good he can bring from any evil be it moral or physical.

The answer to the problem of pain is the same as the answer to the problem of evil: an all-good God can allow evil and pain to exist if he has a good reason for doing so, and the burden of proof is upon the atheist to show that no such reason or reasons exist.

Even philosophers of religion (which is not Atterton’s area of expertise) who themselves are not religious agree that this burden cannot be met. The agnostic scholar Paul Drapersays that “theists face no serious logical problem of evil” and the late atheist J.L. Mackieadmitted, “The problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another.”

Finally, Atterton gets to the section I was most interested in hearing about: the alleged logical contradictions involved with God’s being omniscient. One of the most meticulous critiques of omniscience comes from philosopher Patrick Grim (though well-refuted, ironically, by atheist Jordan Howard Sobel), and I was hoping Atterton would offer a similarly well-thought-out argument.

But instead all we get is this relatively simple argument:

"If God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect."

Just as the paradox of the stone is resolved by providing a more coherent definition of omnipotence, the “paradox of sinful knowledge” is resolved by providing a more coherent definition of omniscience. For example, if you define omniscience as knowing only and all propositional knowledge (or truths like “Fred is six feet tall” or “E=MC²”) then there is no puzzle about God having sinful experiential knowledge like feelings of lust or malice.

But you can also define omniscience more comprehensively as the knowledge of all real or possibly real things. Since evil is an absence of good it is not a “real thing” for God to know but a privation or absence God recognizes. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, “by the fact that God knows good things, He knows evil things also; as by light is known darkness.” God perfectly knows our human emotions because he sustains their very existence. As a result, he knows when they lack something like charity that causes them to become evil.

However, since God is unlimited and perfect being that does not change it doesn’t make sense to say God has emotions or feelings. But this fact about God doesn’t detract from his attribute of being all-knowing. As I wrote in my book Answering Atheism, “Since the statement ‘God is afraid’ (and others like it) is meaningless, it can’t be true. If it can’t be true, it can’t be known. And if it can’t be known, then it can’t contradict God’s omniscience, which involves his knowledge of only all real or potentially real things.”

Arguments like Peter Atterton’s do serve at least one useful purpose: they show how a confused or incorrect understanding of God can lead to rejecting God. Atheist Richard Carrier correctly notes, “Arguments from [God’s] incoherence aren’t really arguments for atheism, but for the reform of theology.”

If our understanding of God seems to be illogical, all this may show is that we must commit to loving the Lord with all our mind (Luke 10:27) and seek his help to elevate our minds to understand him. The Catechism puts it well:

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God—“the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable”—with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God (42).

On February 1, comedian Ricky Gervais appeared on CBS’s The Late Show where he and host Stephen Colbert discussed God and atheism:

Regardless of how you feel about his theological views, Colbert is probably the most famous U.S. celebrity who stands up for the Catholic Faith. His interviews on The Colbert Report with Bart Ehrman and Philip Zimbardo display some of this wit in top form. But Gervais, as opposed to a straight-laced academic, is a fellow comedian whose quick wit made him a formidable opponent. Here are a few of the arguments he made:

The 'One Less God' Objection

Gervais:

"So you believe in one god, I assume. . . . But there are 3,000 to choose from . . . so basically, you believe in—you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more."

The problem with this argument is that it’s like saying to a prosecutor of a murder trial:

"You believe John Smith killed this man? Well, I don’t think anybody killed this man; he died accidentally. I mean, think about it. There are 7 billion potential murderers out there, and you believe that 6,999,999,999 of them did not kill this man. I just believe in one less murderer than you do."

Of course, thoughtful atheists will say, “That’s a bad example! We know murderers exist, but we have no proof any gods exist.”

But that’s not the point.

In the murder example, we know the skeptic is wrong, because, contrary to what he asserts, the prosecutor doesn’t just arbitrarily pick one suspect out of billions, each of whom is equally gulty. Instead, she has good reasons for choosing this one suspect out of all the others. Just because there are thousands of false gods or billions of people who are innocent of a certain crime, it doesn’t follow that there is no true God or no single person who is guilty of a crime.

Christians believe in their God because they have philosophical evidence to show God must be an infinite, self-explained act of being (which disproves the finite gods of mythology). They also have historical evidence that this God uniquely revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. You can dispute that evidence, but you can’t just dismiss it by pointing to large numbers of claims that compete against it.

The 'Science Wins' Objection

Gervais:

"If we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would be the same result."

Gervais said this in response to a salient point Colbert made that Gervais’s explanation that the universe came from a tiny atom apart from God was based on Gervais’s faith in physicists like Stephen Hawking and was not something he could prove himself. Gervais seemed to sense he was in trouble, so he pivoted to the explanation that science has a built-in corrective mechanism and so it will eventually be able to prove itself true, whereas religion can do no such thing.

First, this does not answer Colbert’s original question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, since we can still ask, “Why was there a primeval atom instead of nothing at all?” It also doesn’t refute the argument that God created the universe, because—as I show in my book Answering Atheism—science and philosophy point to a beginning of the universe not from an eternal shrunken atom but from pure nothingness, which would require a transcendent cause.

Second, Gervais has created a false dilemma to allow science to claim victory over religion.

He is correct that fiction, which is something an author creates, is not a law or natural feature of the universe. If every copy of Shakespeare, along with every memory of his works, were destroyed, it is extremely unlikely the works of Shakespeare would come back (though similar stories may appear in their place).

Likewise, its true that if we erased the work of Isaac Newton, that wouldn’t erase Newton’s laws of motion. Hopefully they would be rediscovered and, if that happened, they would likely end up being called something else.

But here’s the false dilemma: either truth is scientific and can be proven in a laboratory or else it is unprovable fiction. Since Bible accounts can’t be confirmed by science, they must be fiction.

Imagine a thousand years from now I wanted to prove the statement, “Ricky Gervais was a well-known comedian in the twenty-first century.” If you destroyed every one of Gervais’s television appearances along with every review written about him and also purged him from people’s memories, then I couldn’t prove he existed. Of course, that wouldn’t prove Gervais was a fictional character.

The same is true of the Bible, which is not a scientific explanation of the world but rather a collection of historical testimonies about how God created the world and revealed himself to mankind. If the Bible and everyone who remembered it were destroyed, then, barring more divine revelation, its contents would be forever lost. But just because a statement can’t be demonstrated in a laboratory doesn’t mean it’s not an important truth about the world or humanity itself.

The 'Redefining Atheism' Gambit

Gervais:

"So, this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, 'There’s a god.' I say, 'You can prove that?' You say, 'No.' I say, 'I don’t believe you then.'"

Atheism is either the strong belief God does not exist or the weaker belief that there is no good reason to believe God exists. It’s convenient in Gervais’s example that the believer doesn’t say, “I can’t prove it mathematically, but I have evidence that God exists.” The atheist could still say, “I don’t believe your evidence,” but if he doesn’t give a reason as to why he finds the evidence unconvincing, then he has simply revealed his own pre-conceived notion that God doesn’t exist.

That’s why I like to ask atheists who say there are no good reasons to believe God exists, “What is the best reason someone has offered for believing in God, and what’s wrong with it?” This allows atheists the opportunity to carry their burden of proof and demonstrate that there are no good reasons to believe God exists.

For example, if I said, “There’s no good reason to believe in the Loch Ness Monster,” that would be my opinion. It wouldn’t become a statement about reality worth examining until I provided evidence for it, such as by explaining why the famous “Nessie” photographs are fakes.

Likewise, an atheist who says there’s no good reason to believe in God gives his opinion, but that’s it. If he picked even one strong argument for the existence of God and showed why it fails, then he’d have evidence to support his opinion and encourage others to adopt it. And that’s basically what Gervais did at the beginning of the interview.

When Colbert asked, “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, Gervais waved away the question by saying the “how” is more important than the “why.” But as the late, world-renowned philosopher Derek Parfit once said, “It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space. When we imagine this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Why is there a universe?”

This shows the question deserves an answer, and that answer may include an ultimate, infinite, self-explained reality that philosophers have traditionally called God.

Claims from atheists like Ricky Gervais that “there is no evidence for God” or “science makes God unnecessary” are merely assertions. And, as the late atheist Christopher Hitchens once said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Atheist astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently tweeted, “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” I did my best in 140 characters to show how this sentiment is the exact of opposite of profound. I said, “@neiltyson ‘Rationalia’ is as useless as ‘Correctistan,’ or a country whose constitution says, 'Always make the correct decisions.'"

Obviously, public policy should rationally consider all the relevant facts and circumstances. But it is naïve to think that all it takes to create a just society is a scientific mindset that “follows the evidence where it leads.”

That’s because the “evidence” we need includes not just facts Dr. Tyson and other scientists can confirm in a laboratory but values that help us interpret those facts and come to correct conclusions. In fact, a tragedy that took place last week perfectly illustrates how we can’t solve every problem with a facile appeal to scientific reasoning.

The Driverless Car Dilemma

Shortly after Dr. Tyson's tweet, Joshua Brown became the first fatality in an accident involving a car using autopilot mode. This won’t spell the end of driverless cars any more than the very first automobile crash kept the horse and buggy in business, but the technology does raise important questions related to ethics and highway safety regulations. For example, a recently published article in the journal Science revealed the attitude of 2,000 people towards this dilemma:

"A driverless car is about to run over ten people, and there is not enough time to for the car to stop. The only the way the car can avoid killing the pedestrians is to swerve into a wall, which will probably kill one or more of the vehicle’s passengers. Should driverless cars be programmed to save as many lives as possible in an accident (utilitarian programming)? Or should they be programmed to do what is necessary to protect their passengers?"

The survey revealed that 76 percent of people believe it is more moral for a driverless car to receive utilitarian programming. In other words, most people think it’s better if a car’s computer sacrificed the vehicle’s passengers in order to save as many lives as possible. But the survey also revealed that 81 percent of respondents would not purchase a driverless car with such programming. Instead, they would prefer a car programmed to protect them and their passengers at all costs.

This brings us back to Dr. Tyson’s suggestion that we follow “the weight of the evidence.” How should Rationalia’s transportation authority deal with the problem of highway fatalities? Should it mandate utilitarian programming in driverless cars in order to achieve the goal of reducing highway fatalities? Or should it allow drivers to choose which programming they want in order to achieve the goal of respecting civil liberties, even if it causes an increase in traffic fatalities?

The “evidence,” or facts and statistical relations, can support both policies, so an appeal to facts alone doesn’t tell us what we ought to do. The “Rationalia” approach won’t resolve dilemmas like this, because ethical disputes tend to be about the values people hold and not just thefacts they observe. This means Rationalia’s anemic constitution cannot resolve societal disputes any more than your GPS unit can resolve a fight your family has over a summer vacation.

In both cases science can give us facts that describe what is, but only philosophical reflection can tell us what we ought to do.

The Myth of Objectivity

In a video, Dr. Tyson explained in more detail why something like Rationalia is necessary. He said, “It is unstable to build a government on a belief system.” [Audience applauds] “What you want is objectively verifiable truths, that we can all agree—that’s what you build your economic system on, your government system.”

What does he mean by “belief system”? In the video Dr. Tyson is clearly referring to religion. He says those kinds of belief systems are unstable, because religious people disagree with one another. Instead, we should build public policy on “objectively verifiable truths,” which are apparently secular in nature. I agree that public policy should not simply mirror what is found in divine revelation (something natural law theorists like St. Thomas Aquinas have known for millennia). But the materialistic, utilitarian thinking that motivates scientists like Dr. Tyson is not exempt from this critique.

Many people, religious and nonreligious, disagree with that belief system. Furthermore, the truth of this value system can’t be “objectively verified” with a scientific instrument. In other words, you can’t build a political philosophy, even one as simple as Rationalia’s, out of something like the periodic table of elements. You need objectively true values or moral facts that can be known only through nonscientific means like intuition or ethical reflection. Since God is pure goodness itself and can be known through reason, we can build equitable societies on moral principles derived from the natural law that compliment the special moral principles we receive from the same source in divine revelation.

There’s nothing wrong with someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson encouraging us to be rational when we debate important social issues. What is objectionable is the claim that because some scientists are successful at solving practical problems we should adopt their personal value systems. We should instead critically examine these value systems and apply nonscientific (but equally valid) philosophical tests to see if they support just societies and affirm the intrinsic dignity of the human person.

In a book that was released a few days ago, Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, critic of religion, and former guest of The Colbert Report, presents what he calls The Big Picture. Neil deGrasse Tyson says the book “weav[es] the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry. Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we’ve figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don’t yet understand. Yet in the end, it’s the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity.”

Unnatural Naturalism

At Salon.com, Carroll took part in an interview with fellow skeptic Phil Torres to discuss the book. At the heart of his work Carroll defends the naturalist worldview. What does that entail? According to Carroll:

"Naturalism is the simple idea that there is only one world, the natural world; there isn’t a separate spiritual or theistic realm of existence. . . . Naturalists are atheists—they don’t believe in God—but the label is a positive claim about what one does believe in rather than what one rejects."

Every definition of naturalism has to face the problem of circularity. Defining naturalism as a belief that “only the natural world exists” is like defining God as “a divine being.” Unless one already knows what God is or what naturalism is, a definition that uses synonymous (or sometimes the same) terms as what’s being defined is unhelpful.

Carroll claims the label of naturalism is a positive one about what does exist (the universe) rather than what does not exist (God). But, as Carroll points out in the interview, naturalists disagree over what constitutes a part of the natural world. Some naturalists say immaterial realities like minds, math, and morality are illusions and don’t exist. Other naturalists say they really do exist but in an immaterial way.

The only thing on which all naturalists agree that is unique to naturalism is that God is not natural, and therefore God (and probably angels or other spiritual beings) does or do not exist. That sounds more like a philosophy defined by what it lacks instead of what it contains.

Improbable Probabilities

Carroll says in the interview:

"I talk a lot in The Big Picture about Bayesian reasoning. To some set of competing ideas, we assign a “prior” credence (roughly, the probability we think each one might be true), then update those credences as we gather new information. It’s crucial that our credence in a given idea never go all the way to precisely 0 or 1, because that means that no new information could possibly change our mind about it. That’s no way to go through life."

While Bayesian reasoning can be very effective, it doesn’t make sense to say there are no statements that have a 100 percent chance of being true or false. People couldn’t even have reasoned conversations with one another without acknowledging self-evident truths of logic like the law of non-contradiction, which holds that there is a 0 percent probability that a statement can be true and false in the same time and in the same way. This is also important when discussing whether God exists, because God is a necessary being; on a Bayesian scale, the probability he exists is 1.

That doesn’t mean the existence of God is self-evident (which is why St. Thomas Aquinas did not subscribe to Anselm’s ontological argument), but it does mean that if the evidence shows God exists, then this is a necessary truth about reality and has to factor into our description of reality as such.

Uncaused Causes

Carroll’s interviewer tries to take the place of the honest lay believer and asks him “[if] every effect has a cause. If the universe is an effect—which one could certainly argue that it is—then what caused it?”

“It’s not true that every effect has a cause,” Carroll replies. “That’s just a convenient way of talking about certain features of the macroscopic world of our everyday experience, one that is not applicable to how nature works at a deeper level. . . . There’s certainly no reason to think that there was something that ‘caused’ it; the universe can just be.”

This seems to be a reference to the fact that some interpretations of quantum physics hold that there can be indeterminate and so “uncaused events.” But that is not the same thing as saying that something like our universe can come into being from pure nothing. (I addressed this objection here a while back). One also can’t say the universe, which didn’t have to exist, can “just be”—that doesn’t answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing (I address this question in chapter 8 of my book Answering Atheism).

Meaningless Meaning

The interview ends with Carroll answering the interviewer’s question about how life can have meaning if the universe will eventually collapse into a state of maximum disorder and all life will perish. According to Carroll:

"The fact that life is temporary is precisely what does give it value. Why should we care about a century-long existence if it was followed by an infinitely long span of additional existence? We are fragile, ephemeral, finite creatures, bringing meaning to the world around us through our understanding and our care. Our lives have meaning exactly because they are all we have, and therefore are infinitely precious to us."

First, the idea that value comes from scarcity applies only in some contexts. It’s true that natural resources are valuable when they are scarce, because the demand outstrips supply. But other things retain their value no matter their abundance. Virtues like love, courage, or compassion don’t become less valuable as more and more people practice them, for example.

Second, Carroll misunderstands the question when he says our lives have meaning because “they are all we have.” When people ask, “What is the meaning of my life?” they don’t want the pedestrian answer, “A series of interconnected conscious experiences and relationships that are embodied within a single person.”

Well, yeah, we know that. What we mean is, “What is my life meant for? What is the purpose of my life?” If atheism is true, the answer is: nothing; your life is a meaningless accident.

The famous twentieth-century atheist Bertrand Russell honestly embraced this depressing truth:

"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."

Of course, there is much more that I can say on these topics, but I will adjourn for now. I just received my copy of Carroll’s book, so keep an eye out for a future critical review of it.

On June 4, a few thousand atheists gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for an event they dubbed the “Reason Rally.” Due to health reasons, Richard Dawkins could not be there in person to address the audience, but he did send a video message, the transcript of which has been passed around via atheist blogs.
 

 
In it, Dawkins highlights how atheists are mistreated in the U.S., especially when religious people ask them the incredibly insensitive question “What church do you go to?“ According to Dawkins:

"The question is presumptuous to the point of rudeness, yet informant after informant tells me how often it’s thrown at newcomers to certain neighborhoods in America, as casually and automatically as a comment on the weather. That the newcomer might not attend a place of worship at all simply doesn’t cross the friendly neighborhood mind."

Yikes! Better not ask people where they go to school, work, or celebrate the holidays on the off chance you’re speaking with a dropout, an unemployed person, or a Jehovah’s Witness. Or, maybe atheists and everyone else can save their indignation for something that is truly offensive (like signs from the last Reason Rally that compare religion to male genitalia).

Do you believe in Magick?

Dawkins also mocked any exercise in critical thinking that leads to the conclusion that God has a real causal effect on the physical universe:

"'God did it' can never be an explanation for anything. It is sheer intellectual cowardice. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock designer, you might as well magick an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman."

But notice the irony in what Dawkins says just a few seconds later:

"It’s like when you see a really brilliant conjuring trick. You have to smack yourself and say, 'No!' However largely my senses and my instincts are screaming 'miracle,' it really isn’t. There is a rational explanation [emphasis added]. In the case of the conjuring trick, we know it’s not a miracle. And honest conjurers like Jamy Ian Swiss, James Randi, and Penn & Teller tell us so."

That, my friends, is called the principle of causality or the principle of sufficient reason. Just as we wouldn’t accept the magician’s answer to be, “The rabbit just appeared in the hat without a cause,” we shouldn’t accept the answer that any object, be it a unicycle or an entire universe, simply “popped” into existence without a cause. Some explanations must be ultimate or final, because if they weren’t you would have an infinite number of explanations that don’t explain anything at all.

The atheistic philosopher Gregory Dawes critiques Dawkins’s demand for such an explanation in this way:

"[Dawkins’s idea is] that religious explanations are unacceptable because they leave unexplained the existence of their explanans (God). Dawkins apparently assumes that every successful explanation should also explain its own explanans. But this is an unreasonable demand. Many of our most successful explanations raise new puzzles and present us with new questions to be answered." (Theism and Explanation 16)

Moreover, God is not more complex than the universe he explains. Theologians since Aquinas have argued that because God has no moving parts and does not fragment his thoughts like we do, he is absolutely simple. Atheist Erik Wielenberg says that Dawkins has given us no reason to think that a designer must be as physically complex as the thing he creates and thus himself need a designer. The universe’s designer could just be an immaterial mind that cannot fail to exist. Wielenberg writes:

"The central weakness of Dawkins’s Gambit, then, is that it is aimed primarily at proving the nonexistence of a being that is unlike the God of traditional monotheism in some important ways. . . . In light of this, I must side with those critics of The God Delusion who have judged Dawkins’s Gambit to be a failure." (“Dawkins’s Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity”)

A Simple Retort

Dawkins does seem to be aware of the critique of his arguments that he doesn’t understand God’s simplicity and so his atheistic argument from design doesn’t succeed. In his video for the Reason Rally, Dawkins said this:

"Some of our best theologians pathetically tried to argue that, far from being complex, God is simple. . . . The effrontery of it is beyond astounding. This supposedly simple God had to know how to set the nuclear force 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity. He had to calculate with similar exactitude the requisite values of half a dozen critical numbers—the fundamental constants of physics. . . . God may be almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, but the one thing he cannot be, if he’s even minimally to meet his job description, is 'all-simple.' The statistical argument against the divine designer remains intact and inescapably devastating."

The problem with Dawkins reply is that he still doesn’t understand divine simplicity, which, in spite of its name, is not an easy concept to understand. Essentially, divine simplicity means that God is one, or he is the perfect and infinite act of being. Not even God’s attributes are divided; so, for example, God’s power is identical to his goodness, which is identical to his knowledge, which is identical to his existence, which is identical to all his other attributes.

St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “[T]here are no parts in you, Lord: neither are you many, but you are so much one and the same with yourself that in nothing are you dissimilar with yourself.” God is just ipsum esse, the act of being, or the great I AM. God knows all things because he sustains them in existence, not because he is a giant cosmic person who inexplicably knows more than we do.

Humans speak of God as if he had different parts because our own minds are limited. We have to do this in order to sensibly talk about God, just as scientists use figurative language to explain imperceptible realties like electrons or black holes. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity” (CCC 43).

Finally, using simpler entities to explain more complex ones is common in science. For example, Maxwell’s equations (which describe electromagnetism) could fit on an index card, whereas a description of their effects would fill a chapter of a textbook. An explanation does not always have to explain everything, and a designer can be simpler than the thing he designs.

Since God is the simplest being imaginable, or infinite undivided being, it’s not necessary to ask who designed God. Any explanation for the universe must have a stopping point, and it’s more rational for that point to be unlimited being that exists by necessity, and therefore has an explanation, and not just an unexplained universe or Big Bang singularity.

(If you’d like to learn more about responding to Dawkins and other atheist arguments, I encourage you to check out my book Answering Atheism.)

One common argument against the inspiration or even the trustworthiness of the Bible is that it affirms the existence of mythical creatures. For example, atheist Jason Long says, “The cockatrice, unicorn, and dragon, are examples of mythical creatures in the Bible that fail to leave any reliable evidence for their existence.”¹

Do these legendary animals prove the Bible itself is a collection of legends? No, because in most cases the Bible is affirming the existence of real animals. It is only the work of later translators, and not the Bible’s original authors, that refer to these legendary creatures. This is especially prevalent in the King James Version of the Bible (or the KJV) which became popular for skeptics to quote ever since Steve Wells used this translation for his popular Skeptics Annotated Bible.

In this post I’ll examine two animals in the KJV that critics often cite: the unicorn and the cockatrice.

Unicorns

A unicorn is a horse with a long horn that protrudes from its forehead that medieval literature described as possessing medicinal or even magical powers. In the KJV the unicorn is depicted as a symbol of strength and wild power. Numbers 23:22 says, “God brought [the Israelites] out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.” In Job 39:9-10 God points out Job’s human limits and says, “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?”

The Hebrew word the KJV translates as “unicorn” is re’em, which modern scholars have identified with an auroch, or a large horned cow that is now extinct. The ancient Assyrians also referred to these animals by the similar name rimu.² So how did the Hebrew word re’em become “unicorn” in translations like the KJV?

The translators of the Septuagint, or the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, used the Greek word monoceros (literally “one-horn”) in place of the Hebrew word re’em. In the fifth century St. Jerome translated the Septuagint into the Latin Vulgate and used the Latin equivalent of “monoceros,” or “unicorn.” Eventually, this word became “unicorn” in English.

But why did the Septuagint translators use a word that literally meant “one horn” instead of something like “wild ox? One theory is that the Septuagint translators may have been thinking of another animal besides a wild ox that also fits the description found in passages like Numbers 23:22. The first century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described a real animal from India called a monoceros that,

“has the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of the boar, while the rest of the body is like that of the horse; it makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead, two cubits in length. This animal, it is said, cannot be taken alive.”³

Today, in northern India, there is a very strong animal with feet like an elephant, a large body, and one horn that protrudes from its head. If we allow some leeway in Pliny’s description (which is necessary in ancient descriptions of unique creatures) we can identify this creature with the modern Indian rhinoceros. Indeed, monoceros means in Greek “one horn” and rhinoceros means “nose horn” (or rino ceros). A rhinoceros would make sense of these passages because, unlike unicorns, they are known for being very strong beasts that can’t be domesticated.

Even though a rhinoceros would fit the sense of these passages, in order to remain faithful to the original language, and to avoid confusion with the medieval conception of a unicorn, most modern translations of the Bible render the Hebrew word in these passages as, “wild ox” and not “unicorn” or “one-horn.”

The Cockatrice 

This creature is mentioned several times in the KJV’s translations of the books of the prophets. Jeremiah 8:17 reads, “For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.” Isaiah 11:8 says, “And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.” Long says of this creature, “The prophet Isaiah informs us that a cockatrice, a mythical creature able to kill it’s victim with a casual glance, will arise from a serpent (Isa. 14:29). What tangible evidence do we have to believe that a creature with this incredible ability has ever existed?”⁴

But Long is mistaken in his description because Isaiah never mentions the “cockatrice” nor does he describe this creature as having supernatural powers. Like the King James Bible in whose pages it is found, the cockatrice is a product of medieval European thinking and would have been unknown to prophets like Jeremiah or Isaiah. According to English scholar Laurence Breiener, “The cockatrice, which no one ever saw, was born by accident toward the end of the twelfth century and died in the middle of the seventeenth.”⁵

Although allusions to the creature can be traced back to Pliny the Elder, the dissident Catholic John Wycliffe first used the term “cockatrice” in 1382 in his popular translation of the Bible. It was later used in the 1535 Coverdale Bible, which may have been the source for the KJV’s use of this word.

While Isaiah and Jeremiah would have been unaware of the “cockatrice,” they would have known what a tsepha‘ was. This is the original Hebrew word used in passages like Isaiah 11:8 and it simply means “snake” or “viper.”⁶ Today, most modern translations render passages like Isaiah 11:8 in this way, “the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den [an adder is a kind of venomous snake].”

Check the Original

Remember that the Bible was not written in 17^th century English. It was written in ancient Hebrew (along with some Aramaic and Greek) for the Old Testament and ancient Greek for the New Testament (the Old Testament was later translated into the Greek Septuagint). This refutes objections raised by atheists like David Mills, who says of passages that seem to describe mythical animals, “in the newer, modern-language translations of the Bible, these ridiculous passages of Scripture have been dishonestly excised, rewritten or edited beyond recognition from their original translation in the King James.”⁷

However, Mills is erroneously treating the KJV as if it were the original text of the Bible. The truth is that newer translations of the Bible are better than the KJV because they use earlier manuscripts that better capture the sense of the Bible’s original text. But even these bibles represent the opinions of modern translators. This is why when we confront a scripture passage that is difficult we must examine what the inspired author originally said in Hebrew or Greek. By doing this we sometimes see that the words the original word author used make more sense than what a later translator used instead, especially if the translation is an older one like the KJV.

Excerpted and adapted from Trent's upcoming book These are Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Bible Difficulties (2016).
 
 
(Image credit: RawStory)

This past weekend former-educational-TV-star-turned-science-advocate Bill Nye posted a video about abortion on Big Think. Nye attempts to use science to resolve the debate about abortion and arrives at the following conclusion: “When it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women.”

The video is a perfect example of Maslow’s Hammer, or the saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the hammer is science and the nail is anything people disagree about. While science can tell us a lot about the world, it can't answer all of our questions.

For example, science gives us facts about the way the world functions (or what is), but only philosophy and/or religion tell us how we should live (or what we ought to be). This includes telling us whether it is right or wrong to kill unborn humans (or any human for that matter).

Refuting Nye's Main Argument

Unfortunately, not only does Nye’s video contain terrible philosophy, it doesn’t even get the science right. Let’s break it down:

"Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans. Eggs get fertilized, and by that I mean sperm get accepted by ova a lot. But that’s not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine wall, the inside of a womb, a woman’s womb."

Yes, human beings in the embryonic stage of life receive nutrients from their mothers' uterus. A human embryo cannot develop into an adult without implanting in the uterus just as a human infant cannot develop into an adult without attaching to his mother's breast or some suitable alternative.

"But if you’re going to hold that as a standard, that is to say if you’re going to say when an egg is fertilized it’s therefore has the same rights as an individual, then whom are you going to sue? Whom are you going to imprison? Every woman who’s had a fertilized egg pass through her? Every guy who’s sperm has fertilized an egg and then it didn’t become a human? Have all these people failed you?"

Does Nye believe that newborns are persons? If so, then does he think we should imprison mothers and fathers whose children die of natural causes like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)? If having a high mortality rate means one is not a person, then born children were not persons throughout much of human history. Historically, (as well as in some parts of the world today) the child mortality rate was between 33% and 50%. That means one-third to one-half of all children died before they reached the age of five.

If we accept that born children sometimes die from causes beyond their parent's control, and that this tragic fact does not nullify their right-to-life, then the fact that unborn children also die from causes beyond their parent's control does not nullify their right-to-life either.

Plus, it may not be the case that large numbers of human organisms are miscarried. Instead, what might be happening is defective human tissue that could never develop into a fully mature human being is lost. According to embryologists Keith Moore and T.V. N. Persaud, “The early loss of embryos appears to represent a disposal of abnormal conceptuses that could not have developed normally.”¹

Answering Ad Hominems and Other Bad Arguments

"It’s just a reflection of a deep scientific lack of understanding and you literally or apparently literally don’t know what you’re talking about. And so when it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women."

Bill, if you want to see someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, look in a mirror. If you want to see the scientific evidence that a human organism begins to exist at conception, watch this video.

"I’m not the first guy to observe this: You have a lot of men of European descent passing these extraordinary laws based on ignorance. Sorry you guys. I know it was written or your interpretation of a book written 5,000 years ago, 50 centuries ago, makes you think that when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby. That’s wrong and so to pass laws based on that belief is inconsistent with nature."

What does being a male of European descent have to do with abortion? This seems pretty racist and sexist to me. Imagine if I said in response to another hot-button issue, “You have a lot of people of African descent protesting police conduct and trying to pass laws that are based on ignorance.”

Also, it was seven white men of European descent that struck down all legal protection for the unborn in Roe v Wade. Now that was an extraordinary law based on ignorance, but their positions are okay because apparently men are only allowed to have an opinion on abortion if they’re pro-choice!

Second, both Christians and non-Christians have put forward powerful, secular arguments against abortion that have nothing to do with the Bible. Read Christopher Kaczor, Patrick Lee, Scott Klusendorf, Don Marquis, Stephen Schwarz, Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, and Frank Beckwith just to name a few.

Third, Christians do not believe that, “when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby.” Sometimes the sperm and egg never meet and so no new life is created. Sometimes they meet but what is created is just randomly generating tissue and not a human organism (e.g. a complete molar pregnancy). But sometimes the sperm and egg recombine to form something that is neither sperm nor egg. It is instead, as the eminent embryologists Fabiola Müller and Ronan O’Rahilly describe, “a new, genetically distinct human organism.”²

Pro-life advocates simply believe that all human organisms (i.e. human beings) ought to be treated equally. They should not be killed just because they are unwanted by older, bigger, more powerful human beings.

On "Telling People What To Do"

"I mean it’s hard not to get frustrated with this everybody. And I know nobody likes abortion, okay. But you can’t tell somebody what to do. I mean she has rights over this, especially if she doesn’t like the guy that got her pregnant. She doesn’t want anything to do with your genes; get over it, especially if she were raped and all this."

Why is it that “nobody” likes abortion? If the unborn are not human beings then abortion would be as innocuous as a wisdom tooth extraction. Instead, society's ambivalence towards abortion is evidence that abortion destroys a living human, organism.

After all, how could two human beings procreate a non-human offspring that only becomes human after birth? The answer is "they can’t.” Therefore, the human organism they procreate (i.e. the baby) should have the same right to life as his born brothers and sisters. All children have the right to loving support from their mother and father even if one of these people "doesn't want anything to do" with the genes of the other. At minimum, children have the right not be killed just because one parent despises the other.

In response to Nye’s assertion that “you can’t tell somebody what to do” I say bullocks. Nye says in another video that fracking, or drilling for natural resources with high pressure water, “can’t be unregulated.” So, it’s okay to tell businesses not to pollute the earth but it's not okay to tell parents not to kill their children. What about "My corporation, my choice!"

Finally, what is the “this” that Nye says women have rights over? I’m sure Nye means “the pregnancy” but that is just a roundabout way of saying the mother has unlimited rights over her unborn child. Civilized people long ago rebuked the idea that children are chattel property of their parents that can be disposed of at a whim. Perhaps Mr. Nye would like to join the rest of us in the 21^st century and stop peddling crude, Stone-Age-like tyranny over helpless human beings.

Are There More Important Issues?

"So it’s very frustrating on the outside, on the other side. We have so many more important things to be dealing with. We have so many more problems to squander resources on than this argument based on bad science, on just lack of understanding."

It’s true abortion isn’t the only issue today any more than slavery was the only issue that affected people in America in the 1850's. But slavery was the most important issue because the lives of human beings matter more than "economic choice" or "state autonomy."

Likewise, if the unborn are human beings then over a million of them are killed in our country ever year and many of their parents suffer physical and emotional trauma related to this killing for decades after the fact. Unless a pro-choice advocate can show the unborn are not human beings (which Nye has failed to do), then he has no grounds to say abortion is not an issue worth pursuing in public debate.

"It’s very frustrating. You wouldn’t know how big a human egg was if it weren’t for microscopes, if it weren’t for scientists, medical researchers looking diligently. You wouldn’t know the process. You wouldn’t have that shot, the famous shot or shots where the sperm are bumping up against the egg. You wouldn’t have that without science. So then to claim that you know the next step when you obviously don’t is trouble."

This argument is akin to saying, “Look, without scientists you wouldn’t even have medicine that treats diseases like syphilis, so don’t tell us it’s wrong to deceive and kill African-Americans in order to study this disease! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

Mr. Nye, you are the one who is completely ignorant of the developmental growth of a human being. By defintion a human embryo is a human being in the first seven weeks of life and a human fetus is a human being in age anywhere from eight weeks until birth. Saying an unborn human being is not human because he or she is an embryo or fetus is as ridiculous as saying a fifteen-year-old is not human because he is a teenager.

"Let me do that again. Let me just pull back. At some point we have to respect the facts. Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective. Just being objective here. Closing abortion clinics. Closing, not giving women access to birth control has not been an effective way to lead to healthier societies. I mean I think we all know that."

I’m going to keep this post limited to just the topic of abortion, but notice that Nye is simply making assertions here and not giving any evidence for his position. He just wields the “hammer of science” (a metaphor that some news sites have even adopted) in order to shut down the discussion with one massive appeal to authority. This is ironic since Bill Nye only has a bachelor's degree in engineering. As one writer puts it, “Calling yourself the ‘Science Guy’ does not mean that you are an expert on anything. It means you're the host of a kids show.”

Why Not Debate the Issue?

"And I understand that you have deeply held beliefs and it really is ultimately out of respect for people, in this case your perception of unborn people. I understand that. But I really encourage you to look at the facts. And I know people are now critical of the expression 'fact-based' but what’s wrong with that? So I just really encourage you to not tell women what to do and not pursue these laws that really are in nobody’s best interest. Just really be objective about this. We have other problems to solve everybody. Come on. Come on. Let’s work together."

You want the facts? Okay, would you be willing to debate the facts about abortion with me? You recently debated Ken Ham on the issue of evolution and his only credentials are a long history of advocating for young earth creationism. When it comes to this issue I have the credentials that would justify a debate between us.

I have a graduate level education and have studied abortion for over a decade. I have written a book that has become the most comprehensive popular-level defense of the pro-life position (which is currently the first thing that comes up when you search “pro-life” on Amazon). It's also been endorsed by nationally known pro-life advocates such as Lila Rose and Fr. Frank Pavone. Finally, I have been invited by secular universities to debate other well-known defenders of the pro-choice position such as Dr. Malcom Potts at UC-Berkeley.

And just so it isn’t “two white men arguing over women’s rights” I would be happy to do a team debate where you and a female pro-choice advocate of your choosing debate me and a female pro-life advocate of my choosing, such as my friend Stephanie Gray. As you said, “I really encourage you to look at the facts.” So, let’s look at the facts together in front of an audience and see who’s position they really support.
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

Editor's Note: There has been rising interest in the "problem of evil" in our comment boxes, and many atheist commenters requested a stronger engagement with the so-called "evidential" version of that argument. So on Wednesday we featured a defense of the "evidential" version from atheist Brian Green Adams. Today, Catholic author Trent Horn offers a critique.

Once my wife and I attended a baseball game where our home team was ahead by eight runs in the top of the ninth inning. We then decided to leave so we wouldn’t get stuck in the parking lot during the mass exodus after the game. When my wife’s mother called and asked if our team had won, we said it had but we didn’t know the final score, since we had left early. She then asked, “Well, how do you know for certain they won?”

She had a point. It was possible that the opposing team had come back to win the game, or that the players on the home team had suffered a freak dugout accident that had forced them to forfeit. It was possible, but extremely improbable. Since it was so improbable, we felt that it was a safe bet to say our team had won.¹

Atheists advance a similar argument from evil against the existence of God. This argument rests its case on the extreme unlikeliness that God exists in the face of tremendous evil or suffering.

The Evidential Argument from Evil

The philosopher William Rowe—who incidentally passed away this week—admits, “There is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of the theistic God.”² However, Rowe claims that while it is logically possible God has good reasons for permitting evil in the world, it seems incredibly unlikely there exist reasons that justify the huge amount of suffering we observe.

As a result, this suffering seems more compatible with an absent God than a purposefully inactive one. Rowe calls this the “evidential argument from evil,” because, rather than the mere presence of evil making it impossible that God exists (i.e. the logical argument from evil), the evidence of large amounts of evil makes it unlikely God exists. Rowe’s version of the problem of evil proceeds as follows:

• P1. If pointless evils exist, then God does not exist
• P2. Pointless evils do exist
• C. Therefore, God does not exist

According to Rowe, although God may tolerate some evils because they serve a greater good (like allowing humans to have free will), there are other evils that seem to serve no greater good. Some of these are called natural evils, and they include things not caused by humans, such as hurricanes and cancer, that kill millions of creatures every year. Rowe provides one specific example of such a natural evil:

"In some distant forest lightning strikes a dead tree, resulting in a forest fire. In the fire a fawn is trapped, horribly burned, and lies in terrible agony for several days before death relieves its suffering."

Rowe argues that evils like this serve no greater good and are therefore more compatible with the non-existence of God. Even though Rowe cannot prove these evils are pointless with the same certainty we can prove 1+1=2, he maintains that the evidence makes it highly probable the evils are pointless, and therefore it is extremely unlikely that God exists.

How Could a Theist Respond to this Argument?

There are several ways a theist could respond to this argument. One less-popular approach is to deny P1, or claim that there is no contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evils that serve no greater good (i.e. pointless or gratuitous evils). The philosopher Peter van Inwagen defends this approach and argues that the concept of “gratuitous evil” is a fuzzy one. He writes:

“[God] cannot remove all the horrors from the world, for that would frustrate his plan for reuniting human beings with himself. And if he prevents only some horrors, how shall he decide which ones to prevent? Where shall he draw the line?—the line between threatened horrors that are prevented and threatened horrors that are allowed to occur? I suggest that wherever he draws the line, it will be an arbitrary line.”³

So, according to van Inwagen, just as a judge must draw a line and impose a sentence that is not necessary for carrying out a goal like “effective deterrence” (e.g. a prison sentence of 9 years and 364 days would be just as effective as a ten year prison sentence when it comes to deterring crime), God has to “draw a line” and allow some evils that are not strictly necessary for attaining a greater good.

Is There Pointless Evil?

In contrast to van Inwagen, most theistic philosophers prefer to challenge P2, or the claim that pointless evils exist. They ask, “How do we know there are some evils that don’t serve a good end?” After all, we can at least conceive of some good reasons God would have for allowing natural evil to exist.

Natural evils may, for example, serve to build our character and help us develop virtue (this is also called a “soul-making” theodicy). Think of the people who selflessly donate time, money, and even things like blood to help with disaster relief projects. We recognize that such acts of compassion are intrinsically good, and when humans freely choose to perform such acts, their choices gradually change their characters and can lead to the great good of their becoming virtuous people. In fact, many of the virtues that make the world a better place are practiced in response to some evil. Consider:

• Courage: Doing what is right in the face of danger.
• Compassion: Suffering alongside someone.
• Love: Putting another person’s needs ahead of your own.

Moreover, natural evils may be an acceptable consequence of living in a world governed by natural laws that lacks gratuitous miraculous interventions (e.g. the fire that warms us can also kill us unless God always intervenes miraculously when fire gets out of hand). Such a world may be an ideal place for embodied, moral agents to live, grow in virtue, and ultimately come to know their creator. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way:

“But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" towards its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.”⁴

Skeptical Theism and “No-see-ums”

Of course, an atheist could say that even if good reasons exist to justify natural evil in general, that is not the same as proving God has good reasons for allowing specific instances of natural or allegedly pointless evil (e.g. the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Holocaust, etc.). The problem with this approach, however, is that it concludes that there are no good reasons for these evils just because those reasons are not immediately apparent to us.

But consider the phenomena of “no-see-ums,” which is a term used by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. It refers to insects you can’t see with the naked eye but have painful bites. The lesson to be learned from no-see-ums is that just because you can’t see something that does not mean the thing in question does not exist.⁵

Granted, when I stand in my backyard and don’t see any elephants I am justified in saying, “There are no elephants in my backyard.” But if I say that “I don’t see any fleas in my backyard,” I am not justified in saying, “There are no fleas in my backyard.” After all, there might be fleas in my backyard, but because they are so small, I am not able to see them. When it comes to the good reasons God has for allowing particular evils to exist we must ask, “Should those reasons be as obvious as elephants, or be as imperceptible as fleas?"

This approach to the evidential problem of evil is also called skeptical theism. It argues that since human beings are limited by time and space, we are no more in a good position to see how seemingly pointless evil can lead to greater goods in the future than we are in a good position to see fleas in a yard from the seats on a typical backyard porch. The sheer number of possibilities that can be generated by seemingly inconsequential events is simply “beyond our ken.”

For example, I sometimes ponder in astonishment the effect my wife’s great-grandmother had when she refused to let her daughter travel on the Titanic. It’s amazing to think of all the effects in the future (such as the birth of my son) that could have been drastically different were she to not have made such a simple choice. And this is just one example, but it is enough to show that an evil that exists in the present can have good effects hundreds or thousands of years from now that we are unable to fathom or predict.

To summarize, the evidential argument from evil relies on the atheist being able to prove that it is very unlikely there are “good reasons that justify serious evils." But human beings are not in a good epistemic (or knowledge-gaining) position to know those reasons do not exist. Therefore, the evidential argument from evil can’t prove that God probably does not exist.

The Reversal Approach

Finally, a theist could reverse Rowe’s argument in the following way:

• If pointless evils exist, then God does not exist.
• God does exist.
• Therefore, pointless evils do not exist.

Because the evidential argument from evil only tries to show that God’s existence is improbable (and not impossible), then it is only fair that the evidence for the existence of God be factored into the discussion. One important piece of evidence would be the very concepts of objective evils, objective goods, and the moral truth that one may only allow evil in order to obtain a greater good or prevent a greater evil (a premise that lies at the heart of the evidential argument from evil). A successful moral argument for the existence of God could show that the very moral framework that the evidential argument from evil relies on in order to make its case is only consistent within a theistic framework.

Conclusion

In closing, please consider this to be a general introduction to this topic from a theistic perspective. The space required for a short article does not permit me to address objections raised by atheistic philosophers like Paul Draper and Erik Wielenberg, which I hope to address in a future post. For now, if you want to learn more about this argument I recommend the following resources:

Overview of the Argument

• Nick Trakakis – “The Evidential Problem of Evil”
• Daniel Howard Snyder Ed. – The Evidential Argument from Evil

Defenses of the Evidential Problem of Evil

• William Rowe – “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”
• Paul Draper – “God and Evil: A Philosophical Inquiry”
• Nick Trakakis – The God Beyond Belief: In Defence of William Rowe’s Evidential Argument from Evil

Critiques of the Evidential Problem of Evil

• William Lane Craig – “The Problem of Evil”
• Stephen J. Wykstra – “The Humean Obstacle To Evidential Arguments From Suffering: On Avoiding The Evils Of 'Appearance'”
• Michael Bergmann and Michael Rea – “In Defense of Skeptical Theism: A Reply to Almeida and Oppy”

Debates

• Craig vs. Grayling – “Belief in God Makes Sense in Light of Tsunamis”

This post was adapted from chapter seven of Trent Horn's book, Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity (Catholic Answers, 2013).
 
 
(Image credit: DavidLaw.com)

In light of the Vanity Fair cover story about Bruce Jenner’s decision to undergo a "gender transition" and current desire to be called Caitlyn Jenner, I thought it would be appropriate to look at five important questions those who support gender-transitioning need to answer.

1. What determines reality: facts or feelings?

My wife used to work at a psychiatric hospital where it was standard procedure to not feed into a patient’s delusions. If a patient, for example, said he was a cat, that would not justify leaving a bowl of milk for him in his room. However, if a patient with a male genetic code and male genitalia said he was a woman, then the staff had to treat him as a woman and refer to him with female pronouns.

But what’s the difference between someone redefining his species and redefining his sex? After all, both of these things are determined anatomically and genetically. Or consider this non-hypothetical example: what if a person thinks she is disabled but is actually healthy? Should we treat her mistaken sense of identity, or should we disable her so her body conforms to her mistaken self-identity?

Well, just as transgender people make a distinction between the sex they were purportedly assigned at birth and the sex they now identify with (i.e., their gender), the “transabled” make a distinction between the disabilities society says they don't have and the disabilities they think they have.

The woman pictured below is named Chloe Jennings-White, and she is “transable.” This means that, although her legs function properly, she still uses leg braces and a wheelchair, because she identifies as “disabled.” Living as an able-bodied person is as painful for her as it is for a transgender person to live in accordance with his biological sex. Some "transabled" people even ask doctors to help them become disabled (such as by having their spinal cords severed).

But how is allowing a person to identify as transable any different from allowing him to identify as transgender? In fact, one researcher in Canada (who happens to be transgender but not transable) says the transgender community hasn’t supported the transabled community because the former doesn’t want its recent momentum in the court of public opinion to grind to a halt by being associated with what most people recognize to be a serious pathology.

Indeed, if we are disgusted that a doctor would amputate the healthy limbs of a transable person, then why aren’t we equally disgusted by a doctor who would amputate the healthy genitals of a transgender person?

2. What do the terms man and woman mean?

If I were to say that a woman is someone who wears high heels and makeup, and has long, flowing hair and a curvy figure, many people would accuse me of sexism. They would say I’m reducing what it means to be a woman to some superficial traits that aren’t representative of all women. After all, some women have short hair, and others can’t stand the aches and pains associated with high heels.

And yet, isn’t that what Jenner’s transformation into a woman is endorsing—the idea that a woman is a svelte and sultry individual who looks good (to some people) in a corset on a magazine cover? In fact, this is one reason that some feminists actually oppose gender reassignment and transgender identities.

So here’s my question to transgender advocates: “What do the terms man and woman actually mean?”

What is the difference between a gender-non-conforming man (a biological male who enjoys looking and acting like a woman but wants to be called a man) and a transgender woman (a biological male who enjoys looking and acting like a woman and wants to be called a woman)?

If the only difference is the terms themselves, then modern “gender ideology” is guilty of eviscerating the concepts of male and female of any objective meaning beyond “what I want to be called.” How can we ever hope to raise well-adjusted men and women who interact with one another in a healthy way (and so form the foundation of civilization) when no one has any idea what men and women are in the first place?

3. Is it hateful to be attracted to one sex but not to transgendered people who identify as that sex?

Many people in the transgender community complain about not being considered “real" men or “real" women. They want to end the distinction between one who is male or female by birth and one who is male or female by choice. In fact, one pro-transgender website says that the idea that transgender people are not “real men and women” is

probably the most hurtful myth of all. It tells us that transgender people are somehow less human because of their gender identification. It is proof that they do not have a place in proper society. It is hateful and unacceptable. Everyone should have the right to be men and women, regardless of sex category or anything else.

This often happens in the realm of dating and interaction with the non-transgendered. For example, a transgender man (i.e., a biological woman who dresses like a man or has undergone surgery to try to resemble a man) may not be attractive to biological women, since they usually desire biological men, not transgender men. He may become indignant when women say, "I only date actual men" or "real men."

Many states already have laws that outlaw discrimination based on “gender identity,” which means that it is illegal for an employer to make distinctions between biological men/women and transgender men/women. Granted, the law has no authority to coerce private citizens to not make those same distinctions. However, the law can legitimize the culture's ostracizing of those who believe there is a difference between biological sex and self-proclaimed gender.

Society may, for example, consider a woman who dates biological men exclusively rather than transgender men (or men who do the same with biological and transgender women) to be as bigoted as someone who refuses to date immigrants because he or she prefers “natural Americans.” Will it become, in the words of the above critic, "hateful and unacceptable" to decline a romantic gesture from a transgendered person because that person is not an "actual" man or a "real" woman that one would normally be attracted to?

4. Will parents be guilty of child abuse if they fail to “transition” their children who identify as transgender?

In the past few years, there have been several high-profile cases of parents who helped their children undergo sex-change reassignment surgery in order to accommodate their identification of being transgendered. One famous case in 2011 involved Thomas Lobel, an 11-year-old boy who identifies as a girl named Tammy. His adoptive lesbian parents claim that Thomas (pictured below between them) has said he was a girl ever since he was three years old, and they worried about suicide risks if they didn’t help him use hormone blockers to stave off puberty.

But what about the mental health risks involved in trying to change a child’s sex? According to John Hopkins University professor Paul McHugh, “When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70 to 80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.” Imagine how devastating it would be for a little boy or girl to have his body permanently mutilated just because he or she expressed a fleeting, childish thought.

The other disturbing scenario we have to confront is this: Confronted with the claim that children with gender identity disorder are at greater risk for suicide and the assumption that a sex-change operation is the only way to prevent such a horrible outcome, will parents be convicted of child abuse if they don’t consent to a child’s sex-change therapy or operation? Imagine a child tells his teacher or counselor, even at the age of four or five, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl; but Mommy says that’s not true.” Could this result in the child being taken from his parents' custody for his own safety? In a culture that celebrates being transgendered, it’s not hard to see this coming to pass.

5. Will a culture that celebrates transgender identities tolerate evidence that such identities are harmful?

According to McHugh:

A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.

When presented with evidence like this, supporters of sex-change therapy usually say that negative health outcomes arise from “social stigmas” or “lack of resources for the transgendered.” But this is a classic example of “heads I win, tails you lose.”

If a transgender person reports having no negative health outcomes, then transgender therapies and surgery are vindicated. But, if a transgender person regrets his decision to change genders or reports having high levels of stress or other disorders, then that’s not because being transgender is harmful. Instead, it’s because society oppresses the transgendered, and that causes their negative mental health outcomes. Of course, this is a convenient way to frame the issue so that one's position can’t be disproved.

We may even come to the point where testimonies of those who underwent sex-change operations and regretted their decision, such as the one shared on the Catholic Answers Focus podcast, will be seen as another cause of stigma and thus be declared anathema in the public square.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: we should not mock or dehumanize people who have gender identity disorder. Someone struggling with this disorder requires counseling, appropriate medical intervention, and an empathetic ear that is willing to listen. But we also shouldn’t celebrate the mutilation of healthy bodies or facilitate the destruction of masculinity and femininity.

We should treat identity disorders equally and not refuse to call something a disorder just because many people disagree with that assessment (truth isn't determined by majority vote, after all). Instead, we must compassionately help the person who has an identity disorder, regardless of his or her age or stage of life, come to know his or her true self and flourish as the person he or she was created to be.
 
 
(Image credit: CNN)