A rational argument for God’s existence

Alan Roebuck writes:

Here is a top-notch audio presentation, a response to the “New Atheists,” of the reasons why atheism is irrational, and accordingly why God exists. The speaker is David Anderson, an English protestant pastor (in Derbyshire, of all places), and, I presume, a trained philosopher.

What makes this presentation especially good? For one thing, Anderson explicitly states that his goal is to go on the attack, and many Christian apologists are, unfortunately, too nice to the aggressive atheists. [LA replies: Remember Michael Novak’s pathetic response to Heather Mac Donald!] He argues that atheists are not atheists because they have neutrally and dispassionately examined the evidence and found it wantingbut because their false worldview makes them radically misunderstand this evidence. Anderson attacks the atheists at what they believe to be their strong point: their rationality. By demonstrating that the atheistic worldview is fundamentally irrational, and therefore false, he simultaneously undercuts their foundation and demonstrates that a God exists.

The lecture lasts 77 minutes. If you are new to this type of argumentation, I think that you will find it to be very stimulating, and very encouraging for your faith.

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Bill writes from Maryland:

Your correspondent Alan Roebuck writes: “Here is a top-notch audio presentation, a response to the “New Atheists,” of the reasons why atheism is irrational, and accordingly why God exists … If you are new to this type of argumentation, I think that you will find it to be very stimulating, and very encouraging for your faith.”

Those of your and Roebuck’s cast of mind may wish to confront atheism because of the pernicious effects you believe it to have within Western societies. But Roebuck is referring here to a more personal reason—because such a confrontation, where successful, is “very encouraging for your faith.” By “your faith” he clearly means “one’s faith.” But if you have faith, why do you care about reason? Why do you personally care about rational arguments for God’s existence?

LA replies:

From the start, Christianity was treated as not only in conformity with reason, but as the highest expression of reason: “In the beginning was the Word.” Word is the translation of logos, meaning the philosophical principle of intelligibility, the quality that makes things understandable to reason. Thus Christ, the revealed unbegotten Son of God, is also the principle of intelligibility, through whom God articulated the world and gave it knowable form, and through whom (Christ being perfect God and perfect man) God becomes intelligible to man. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas wrote a vast tome proving the truths of Christianity through logical reasoning. In the late middle ages, there began a growing split between faith and reason, holding that they were in different and unrelated spheres. That was a terrible mistake. Since Christians are reasonable creatures, it is important to them that the truths of Christianity make sense to our reason; Western culture at its core is based on revelation and reason, Jerusalem and Athens. Furthermore, Christians seek to convince non-Christians of the truth of Christianity, so naturally they have an interest in showing that Christianity can be explained (at least up to a point) in terms of reason.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Can Bill from Maryland really not know how Christians could care whether their beliefs made any rational sense? He must have a very, very low opinion indeed of believing Christians, if he blinks uncomprehendingly at the idea that they value little things like ordinary human reason. I never cease to be astonished at this level of ignorance of and disdain for the basics of the Christian religion, on the part of people whose civilization is in such large measure built upon it. I suppose it’s part of what comes from years spent learning that our nation was essentially founded by unbelieving rationalists whose prime achievement was to hold back the tide of Puritan irrationality on their way to constructing a society based on pure reason.

LA replies:

It is true that atheists such as Brooke Allen, author of Our Godless Constitution (and also a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, though she declares she is no more a conservative than she is a believer) have an agenda to re-write the American founding in strictly secular terms comfortable to themselves, and this involves casting the founders as non-believers In this connection I highly recommend Michael and Jana Novak’s book, Washington’s God, which, while unsatisfactory in numerous ways, nevertheless gives the fullest picture of Washington’s religious beliefs. Washington was certainly not a Deist (a person who believes that everything knowable and worth knowing about God can be known through natural reason), though there were deistic elements in his thought. The key proof that Washington was not a Deist is that he believed that the Almighty responds to our prayers. He constantly enjoined his soldiers, in devout language echoing the Anglican prayer book, to pray in order to put themselves in alignment with Providence and so receive the divine favor for the American cause. He made the same sorts of statements to the American people as president, for example in his First Inaugural Address and in his first Thanksgiving proclamation.

However, while the Novaks demonstrate the absurdity of thinking that Washington was a Deist, (a view that even intelligent and sympathetic Washington biographers such as James Thomas Flexner have held), they also fail to demonstrate what they contend to be the case, that Washington was a believing Christian.

My own view of this interesting matter is as follows: Washington, as the Novaks put it (see page 144), had a deep and abiding belief in the God of the Bible, whom he called Providence; indeed, given his constant, urgent, heart-felt references to Providence, his belief in God was central to his life and may have been the strongest of any U.S. president. This is what the Novak’s book, with its numerous quotes of Washingtons’s statements on God, many of which I had not read before, has brought me to realize. At the same time, despite believing ardently in what he called Providence and despite being a life-long member of Anglican parishes and a vestryman, he did not have a definite or strongly held personal belief in Christ. If he did believe in Christ in any real way, then surely he would have used the words “Jesus Christ” or at least referred to Jesus obliquely more than once or twice in the 37 volumes of his collected works! And this was why, not being a strong or convinced believer in Christ, and also being scrupulously honest, he always remained silent about his personal beliefs when asked about them.

Washington was not a skeptic, non-believer, or Deist, as many secularly minded writers argue, nor, as many Christians argue, was he simply a Christian. He had his own unique belief in the biblical God, which he expressed in ways that were in conformity with and drew heavily on Christianity.

LA continues:

By the way, Brooke Allen in her chapter on George Washington portrays him as non-believer who went through the motions of believing, out of social propriety and the exigencies of class control. She flat-out ignores his voluminous statements of faith in Providence and his calls on the American people to seek God’s favor through prayer and moral reformation. To cover up the massive amount of evidence that contradicts her thesis marks her as an intellectual fraud. However, she may simply be stupid. I heard that in an exchange with Michael Novak, she referred to his book on Washington, and referred to Jana Novak as Michael Novak’s wife, and Novak gently pointed out that Jana is his daughter, not his wife. Now, the way that Jana and Michael came to collaborate on this project is told right at the beginning of the book. For Allen not to have seen it shows intellectual incompetence at best. This quality of deliberate un-knowing seems to be a common feature of today’s professional atheists.

Kristor writes:

Bill from Maryland writes, “if you have faith, why do you care about reason? Why do you personally care about rational arguments for God’s existence?”

All reasoning proceeds from axioms that cannot be proved in the terms of the formal language they define. Axioms are articles of faith. So faith is logically prior to reason. Unless you have faith, you cannot reason. Hume and Godel both demonstrated this truth, in different ways.

That axioms are indemonstrable articles of faith does not necessarily make them false. They could not work as axioms in formal languages adequate to concretely actual worlds—in other words, they would be incredible—unless they were self-evidently true. So truth is logically prior to faith. If there were no truth, there could be no self-evidently true axioms.

So Bill’s question (though I doubt he would want to phrase it in these terms) is really, “if you have access to truth, why do you need to reason?” The answer is that, although I can know the truth, I am not God, and so know it imperfectly. Reasoning helps me discover such imperfection; which is to say, that it improves my knowledge. Better knowledge is useful to animals.

Finally, I personally care about rational arguments for God’s existence because God, if he exists, provides adequate grounds for treating some axioms or others as true. If he does not exist, it is hard to see how there could be such a thing as an objectively true state of affairs, in either the Platonic logico-mathematical realm, or the actual world that is the object of natural history, science, and moral philosophy. If there is no objective truth, then nothing can be believed.

Ian B. writes:

I hear Alan and Lawrence’s complaints about Christian apologists being too nice to aggressive atheists. It irks me to no end that the majority of theistic rebuttals to intellectual thugs like Dawkins or Hitchens seem to begin with these fawning odes to their “brilliant minds” or their “clarity of thought” or the “relentless questioning that has marked their careers” or whatever have you. In Michael Novak’s case, the gushing over MacDonald reached a gag-inducing level of over-the-top sycophancy. For me it’s a breath of fresh air whenever a Christian apologist, while maintaining a Christian attitude and commitment to the truth, goes for the jugular.

I can see one reason why Christian apologists keep taking such a conciliatory tone in these debates: They’re trying to uphold the liberal tradition of civilized, gentlemanly debate. The problem is, this form of debate was created by gentlemen to be used between gentlemen, and doesn’t work when your opponent is a thug who abuses the rules of civilized debate. It’s analogous to trying to use diplomacy with terrorists groups, the same way you would to resolve a dispute with a fellow civilized state.

The favor is never returned from the atheist side. They never compliment the mental faculties of the person they are debating. In their telling, everyone who disagrees with them does so out of a mental deficiency of some sort, and they know better because they are rational, unlike the deluded masses. Their favored tool of persuasion is ridicule and insult.

It’s easy to see one big reason for the discrepancy. The atheist needs some explanation for why he is right and everyone else is wrong. Unlike the theist, he can’t appeal to the grace of God for showing him the light, which leaves him with only one possible recourse: that he knows the truth because he is just mentally superior and more rational than everybody else. For that reason, it’s vital to the atheist’s position that he’s right because he is personally smarter than the next guy, in a way that it isn’t for the theist. Of course, it’s nearly impossible for a human being to hold this belief without also being an arrogant, self-congratulatory jerk, who is contemptuous of dissenters and dismisses their arguments out of hand. That’s why atheists tend to be so brutish and uncivil in their public argument.

It’s also one reason why I think praising the atheist’s rational faculties is a big mistake. Even though it’s not important to the Christian’s position that he is smarter than the atheist, you only help the atheist make his case when you gush over how bright he supposedly is. You also make yourself look like a useful idiot if you do that, as onlookers then see not just the atheist, but even his opponent, exclaiming how brilliant the atheist is. To the outside observer who sees this, the Christian looks like a pathetic groveler, submitting to the atheist’s claim of superior knowledge with a dopey grin on his face.

If the atheist is really as smart as he thinks he is, let him prove it himself. If he fails to demonstrate it convincingly, he undercuts the credibility of his own position by his own criteria. There’s no reason the apologist should help the atheist overcome his self-imposed obstacle. The apologist’s focus should be on showing the vacuity and irrationality of his position.

Finally, I think too many Christian apologists are just trying to be nice, and they think they’re doing the Christianly thing by not attacking. I think they’re forgetting the whole point of debate. It’s not a game. It’s not to show what a nice, agreeable bunch of folks Christians are.

The atheist is putting his ideas out in the public sphere for a reason: He wants to move people to his camp and to model public policy in accordance with his views. He comes to fight. The job of the apologist is, or rather should be, whether he likes it or not, to fight back; to discredit and marginalize those views; to persuade people that those views are foolish, irrational, false, not worthy of assent, etc; and hence to prevent them from accepting those views and to keep those views from becoming the basis of public policy. If the apologist just wants to gab and make friends, he should choose a different line of work.

LA replies:

Great comment by Ian B., with terrific observations. I recommend he send this to Michael (“I respect John Derbyshire’s brilliant insights and Heather Mac Donald’s sincere searching questions so much!”) Novak.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 12, 2007 01:38 AM | Send