Challenging the New Atheists

In the November 2006 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf coined the term "New Atheist". In his article, "The Church of the New Believer" he defined the New Atheist as someone who will "not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God."¹, In other words, there is a movement today where atheists are engaged in an ideological war with people of faith, and they feel they are on the side of virtue.

Three primary proponents of this "war against faith" (Wolf's term) are highlighted in the article - zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, End of Faith author Sam Harris, and philosophy professor Daniel Dennett. Although each seems to take a different tact in their approach to unseating the entrenched religious viewpoints of the masses, they all seem to argue that they advance their cause as a moral obligation.

Eroding the Moral Argument

The fact that Dawkins, Dennett and Harris all appeal to a moral framework in their belief system fascinates me, for by its nature, atheism has no objective standard by which to claim moral values. The article restates Dawkins position that bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. But talking about things like moral rights and wrongs bring the question of good and evil into play and that requires a moral framework from which to judge things as being either "good" or "evil".²  One must have a basis to compare one's actions or ideas to classify them as falling into one category or the other .

This is one area where an atheistic worldview fails. Moral frameworks require a moral lawgiver who transcends humanity. In other words, moral laws require an all-good God who can tell us what's good and what isn't. Without God, then man is the ultimate arbitrator of what's good and what's not, which simply means that it's my opinion against yours. In fact, if evolution is true, if we really are here only due to a random series of natural processes, then saying we "shouldn't" do this or that is tantamount to saying a comet shouldn't have struck the earth and killed all the dinosaurs. So the primary premise of the New Atheists really rests on an assumption of God's existence while they try to deny that very existence! Every time they claim a moral reason for advancing their cause, they are trying to smuggle in a condition that could only exist if God does.

Self-Refuting Assumptions

The contradictory nature of Dawkins and company doesn't stop with morality, though. Dawkins admits in the article that the main point of contention is a clash of worldviews - those who hold to naturalism versus supernaturalism. Naturalism is the belief that the only things that can be believed are those things that can be measured by science. We see this in the article as it says how some scientists who hold to a supernatural world view have "implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. This leaves the atheist with the upper hand… There's barely a field of modern research - cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology - in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed."

First of all, the second statement is really question-begging. Only if one assumes that we must nullify supernatural explanations for natural ones does one arrive at these "corrosive arguments". But, beyond that, the concept of scientific naturalism collapses upon itself. You see, one must first start with the assumption that the only things we can really know are those things that can be verified scientifically. But that particular premise - that we can only know something if it is scientific -cannot itself be discovered by any type of science. It is a statement of fact that cannot be justified by its own criteria. Imagine if I said to you "Only statements in Latin are true facts." Since that statement is in English, it doesn't meet its own criteria - it refutes its very premise and must therefore be false. The same is true for the scientific naturalist.

Dennett believes that "neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school." But again, science cannot test for God any more than it can test for love. They start with an assumption that supernaturalism cannot be true and then build a set of rules that by definition exclude supernatural causes from being considered evidence. However, the rules that they build do not themselves stem from scientific discovery, so they must be false.

Having Faith in Non-Faith

The fact that Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett hold to these rules is one example of how these "freethinkers" really are nothing of the sort, merely adherents to another form of faith. The article points to research by anthropologists that we humans are naturally wired for faith and atheism, when examined carefully, is simply one type of belief system with its dogmas and orthodoxy. The language throughout the article cannot escape this. We see Harris talking about a kind of "religion of reason" with a Sabbath and prayer. Dennett says that no rational creature would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things. Dawkins invokes morality in his position. But to build a religion on non-religion is also contradictory. And by the end of the article, the author begins to note this himself.

Wolf writes that "Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of the apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery - this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy." He then goes on to conclude that, while he is an agnostic, he couldn't be one of the New Atheists. "The irony of the New Atheism, this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism - is too much for me." Wolf claims that his desire to not be dogmatic about his nonbelief is reasonable. "It simply reflects our deepest democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could be wrong."

My question to Wolf would be from where do the values of democracy come? This is certainly not the way evolution works, claiming survival of the fittest and let all the others go extinct. Indeed, as the New Atheists become more and more vocal in their opposition to faith in general and Christian faith in particular, they cannot help but draw upon the tenets of faith in order to make their points. And that, as rational beings should see, is telling evidence that they are wrong.

Recently, I've contributed to a book that focuses on the New Atheism movement and the problems inherent there. Entitled True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheists, it holds contributions from prominent apologists including William Lane Craig, Sean McDowell, and Tim McGrew on why the New Atheism fails. Now, you may receive your copy as free thank you gift for supporting our efforts at Come Reason. Just click here for details.

References

1. "Church of the Non-Believers"  Wired Magazine, November 2006.  See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html for the full article.

2. There is, of course a third option, that the thing in question is neither good nor bad but morally neutral. Given the purposes of our discussion, though, the categories above will suffice to make my point.

Contempt Prior to Examination is an Intellectual Vice

William Paley on how intellectuals can be biased against evidence:

Contempt prior to examination is an intellectual vice from which the greatest faculties of mind are not free. I know not indeed whether men of the greatest faculties of mind are not the subject to it. Such men feel themselves seated upon an eminence. Looking down from their height upon the follies of mankind, they behold contending tenets wasting their idle strength upon one another, with the common disdain of the absurdity of them all. This habit of thought, however comfortable to the mind which entertains it, or however natural to great parts, is extremely dangerous; and more apt, than almost any other disposition, to produce hasty and contemptuous, and, by consequence, erroneous judgments both of persons and opinions.

Paley, William. The Works of William Paley: With a Life of the Author, Volume 4
(London: G. and J. Robinson, etc. 1825.) 395.

Modern Heresies: Christian Science (video)

What is Christian Science? How does it relate to historic Christianity? In this video, Lenny reviews a bit of the history and beliefs of Mary Baker Eddy and the Church of Christ, Scientist. Drawing parallels to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, Lenny show why Christian Science is really a wolf in sheep's clothing.

 

Why the Law of Gravity Cannot Create the Universe

Stephen Hawking is a very smart man. I think that statement is uncontroversial. Hawking is recognized as a brilliant mathematician and theoretical physicist, and the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years. That was the same position Isaac Newton held when his writings were changing the face of science and mathematics simultaneously. Some have even called Hawking one of the smartest men alive. So when in his recent book The Grand Design, Hawking and co-writer Leonard Mlodinow seek to answer what they term "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" people take notice.

But because someone is brilliant, especially in their field of study, it doesn't always make them right. One of those ultimate questions (they really list three) is "Why is there something rather than nothing?"1 Hawking and Mlodinow's answer is simply, "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"2. They rely on the simple actions of gravity at a quantum level to balance the positive and negative energy of the universe and to create matter, time, and space.

I've written on some of the issues with quantum vacuums before, but there's a fundamental problem with this scenario, that may be easy to grasp. One cannot rely on a law to do anything by itself. The law of gravity cannot be the starting point because laws don't exist if there is nothing upon which the law governs. For a familiar comparison, let's look at traffic laws such as the speed limit.

Everyone who drives is familiar with a speed limit. The speed limit is a law set by a governing body in order to control the flow of traffic and keep the drivers safe in their vehicles. Some areas such as Germany's autobahn have no speed limit. But for a speed limit to mean anything, you have to have at least two other things: a vehicle and a road. If no road exists and there are no vehicles yet invented, limiting someone's driving to 65 miles per hour is not only foolish, it doesn't mean anything. How can you limit driving when no vehicles exist? And if there's no road to drive on, then there's no way to begin forward motion.

Imagine if you will creating laws as to how high and how fast the winged horse Pegasus can fly and you might see the problem. While your laws can be very specific and detailed, it doesn't matter because there is no wined horse for those laws to govern.

In The Grand Design, the authors use John Conway's Game of Life as their example of how a simple set of laws can lead to new patterns that weren't originally anticipated3. Hawking and Mlodinow extrapolates this into how all matter interacts and says we are the result of the same kind of new, surprising patterns. But the same problem applies. Conway's rules are just fine, but if there is no grid of squares and there are no lights to "live" or "die" as his rules define, then the game never gets off the ground. There's nothing to blink, so no new shapes appear. Of course, beyond even these problems, there's still one additional question that hasn't been answered. We know that Conway wrote the rules to his Game of Life, but who wrote the Law of Gravity?

It is unfortunate for the authors of The Grand Design that in their zeal to dismiss God from the creative process they assume that the Law of Gravity can answer all their problems. The question "why is there something rather than nothing" cannot be answered with gravity because gravity is a something. It's actually part of the question. Gravity and those objects that gravity affects are part of the something that needs explaining.  Postulating gravity before the creation of anything else is simply trying to place a speed limit on a flying horse. The outcome produces no effect at all.

References

1 Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Random House Pub., 2010. 10.
2 Ibid. 180.
3 Ibid. 172-179.

Did the Church Pick and Choose Bible Books?

Recently, some friends and I were discussing the Protestant claim of relying on the Bible alone as the source of authority for our faith and how that differs from the Roman Catholic view. For those unfamiliar with the issue, the Roman Catholic position holds that Scripture and sacred tradition are dual sources of authority. It is this sacred tradition that gives the Pope his status and influences their beliefs on many issues.1

One friend brought up a claim made by a Catholic on an Internet discussion board. He said that Protestants depend on tradition as well, at least in some sense, since they depend on the traditional selection of books that make up the Bible. Someone had to choose which books would be included, so doesn't this mean we're holding to tradition on at least one point? The answer is no and it is an important reasons why - especially since others will try to say our choices for which books were included in the Bible was somehow arbitrary. I've reproduced the letter below and provided my answer to help clarify our understanding of the origin of our Bible.

The Question of Scripture Alone

< --- Original Message --- >
There is no such thing as a sola scripturist. For it is impossible to demonstrate that Scripture is Scripture by only using Scripture!

How do we know that the Table of Contents at the beginning of our Bibles is "accurate" (that is, that all the books contained within are divinely inspired)?

We have to rely upon the people who put the list together -- which means we have to rely upon church tradition being divinely inspired in the development of the canon.

The question for the Protestant CANNOT be: "Should I only accept the Scripture as divinely inspired?" but rather: "To what degree should I accept church tradition (along with Scripture) as divinely inspired?"
< --- End --- >

I think we need to be careful in our assessment of how we got our Bible. So much hinges on a proper grasp of why we view certain documents as inspired, since the Bible's authority hinges directly on whether or not the scriptures do indeed have their origin in God.

The first thing one must remember when discussing the inclusion of documents as scripture: no church or council ever appointed certain works as inspired and others as not inspired. This is so important, I want to repeat it. No church or council ever appointed certain works as inspired and others as not inspired. All the early church, beginning with the apostles, maintained that one does not declare a writing to be the word of God, but one recognizes that the word of God has been given and treats it appropriately. It's similar to the laws of nature. For example, one does not decide that gravity is a law of nature. It's not as though someone declared that the earth should exert a forced pulling us downward and that somehow made gravity came true. They simply observe its effects and state that the law exists.

Let's look at a few points that show how we can observe the inspirational nature of Scripture:

Identifying Scriptural Authority

The claim was "There is no such thing as a sola scripturist. For it is impossible to demonstrate that Scripture is scripture by only using Scripture!"

This claim isn't true. Remember, the Bible isn't a single writing, but 66 separate documents written by different authors over 1500 years. Therefore it is not circular to argue that when the New Testament authors refer to the Old Testament as Scripture it is supportable.

The two main identifying characteristics of scripture are 1) they derive from authoritative sources (God's prophet, apostolic authority, etc.) and 2) they hold predictive prophecy (ref Deut. 18:22).

Divine Authority in the Old Testament

Both in the Old Testament and the New Testament, claims of divine inspiration are made directly. The Old Testament prophets say over and over again "Thus saith the Lord" claiming to speak God's message to the people. They supported this claim with various prophetic predictions. This is why Peter writes "But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."

Jesus also directly authenticates the Old Testament in its entirety. In Luke 24:44 Jesus says, "These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me." Thus Jesus is saying that the Old Testament is the prophetic Word of God. He also references "The blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah" encapsulating the first and last martyr of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Ultimately, we can form the argument this way:

1. Jesus claimed to have divine authority to speak on behalf of God
2. Jesus said that his resurrection from the dead would authenticate his authority
3. We have good historic evidence that Jesus rose from the dead
4. Therefore, Jesus' statements on the inspiration of Scripture have authority

The writer to Hebrews put it this way: "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds" (Heb1:1). God's word is His Son, so His word is authoritative in authenticating other areas of Scripture.

We've gone rather quickly through the main points in discussing the initial claim of Scriptural authority. If you'd like a more detailed study of the concept of Biblical inspiration, get a copy of our audio teaching "How We Can Know the Bible is REALLY from God".

References

1. See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15006b.htm for a detailed explanation of this doctrine.