An Attempt to Refute My 13 Reasons – And My Response

09Feb07

Jack Mielke has written a response – at a staggering 40 pages, no less – trying to refute my 13 Reasons Not to Believe in God. You can find his response as a PDF file here, hosted with his permission. In this post, I’m gonna respond to some of the points he makes in general, and then I’m gonna return to his specific points in a later post. As you might have guessed, my stance is radically different from Jack’s – I’m a commited atheist, while he’s a commited Christian. I must say up front that I’m not particularly impressed personally, but I invite believers and non-believers alike to make up their minds themselves.

First of all, there’s the repeated assertion that there is no evidence for evolution. I could probably let that speak for itself, but I won’t. This is, of course, utter nonsense. I suggest you take a look at the Talk Origins Archive, and especially 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. Then try to find a well regarded scientist who disbelieves evolution on scientific grounds. Unless you have a scientific objection to the theory of evolution, I suggest you forget all about evolution. His bare assertion that there is much science thas goes against evolution is frankly laughable.

Later on, Jack tries to pin all of modern society’s problems on the teaching of evolution:

Take a good look at what happened to society when evolution began to take over the thinking process in our schools. The rise of violent and sexual crimes went through the roof after atheistic humanism demanded the platform. School shootings were unheard of until now. When you tell children that there is no God, no moral absolutes and they are nothing but animals, what else can you expect from their behavior?

I would expect exactly the same behavior. After all, God is only an authority that can award or punish you for your actions. What problem do you think youth is going to have relating to another authority, such as school, government officials, parents or other adults? Assuming that the only way you can behave morally is if you have fear for an authority, why must that authority be God? It can equally well be a physical person. At least I and most people I know relate better to actual, physical threats or promises of award from people they know to be non-fictional than to gods and supernaturals whom they have never seen. That, of course, is granting that the only way for someone to behave morally is from fear of an authority, a premise I won’t grant.

This brings us to morality and God. Jack tries to circumvent all of my complaints about the evils in the world, and those that are direct effects of religion, by repeatedly asserting without argument that there can be no morality without God, and that this means that my complaints about evil are groundless; in fact, I have no right to claim that anything is evil or good in my worldview. Here is one of the sections dealing with morality:

To call an action evil or good presupposes a standard that enables us to tell the difference. If all morality is relative, then the actions of a child molester, rapist, murder and so on can not really be called evil in any qualitative sense. As a matter of fact, there is not even a basis for calling Christians intolerant since that is a moral value judgment! It’s telling the Christian that intolerance is wrong, but why should the Christian take such an accusation seriously when the person making the objection doesn’t believe in moral absolutes? This is simply blowing hot air.

Tell me, does calling a certain food good, as in tasting good, or bad, as in tasting bad, presuppose a standard that enables us to tell the difference? It does not. Taste is subjective. I don’t see people arguing that there must be a god for otherwise there would be no objective taste. Otherwise, they would not be able to say that a person who thinks poo is good is in fact wrong. It’s true; there is no objective standard by which to judge the taste of poo. I’d wager you’ve never tasted it yourself, and neither have I, so we’re not even entitled to express our subjective opinion on the matter.

Never mind the severe problems you encounter if you try to ground an objective morality in God. You’ll inevitably encounter the well-known Euthyphro Dilemma, from a dialogue by Plato between Socrates and Euthyphro. In it, Socrates and Euthyphro meet at the courthouse. Socrates is charged with corrupting the youth, and Euthyphro is there do charge his father for the murder of a slave. Socrates is surprised that a man would take his own father to court, and reasons that Euthyphro must be well versed in piety and impiety, the will of the gods. This sets the stage for a discussion about the nature of piety. In the dialogue, Socrates asks whether the pious is commanded by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is commanded by the gods. We can adapt the question to

Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?

If you choose the first horn, that yes, God commands what He commands because it is moral, then morality is really independent of God and we therefore don’t need God to have morality. If, on the other hand, you choose the second horn and end up with what is called “Divine Command Theory”, morality is equal to whatever God commands. Morality is totally arbitrary. Completely dependent on God’s whim. In other words, might makes right. Since God is the absolute authority, only by virtue of authority is something right. If God commanded murder and theft to be virtues, and compassion and forgiveness sins, those would be virtues and sins, good and bad. If you respond by saying that God wouldn’t tell us to do something that is evil, you’re trapped in your own cicular definition: only God’s command can make something good or evil. In other words, saying God wouldn’t ask us to do something evil makes absolutely no sense since what God tells us to do is good by definition.

This means saying that God is good is meaningless, because it would be equal to saying “God does what God commands”. Never mind the fact that God doesn’t do what he commands. God seems fond of genocide, for instance.

This would mean all sins are equal. Murder is no worse than lying, because in both cases one has disobeyed God.

Jack makes the common, but still irritating mistake of assuming that atheism is anything like religion. The truth is, atheism is simply a specific position on a specific question. Atheism itself is amoral; a moral system must be external to atheism. This does not mean that every worldview that incorporates atheism must be amoral. Have you ever studied any non-theistic moral theories? If not, then this is simply an argument from ignorance. You have asserted that morality must come from God, but you have not given any reason for me to accept this. The burden of proof is on you. I certainly cannot see the logical connection between morality and God unless you set morality equal to the will of God. This is merely redefinition, and you’ve yet to produce a compelling argument for your definition of morality and how it is any better than setting morality to be equal to any number of things. Why can’t morality be equal to whatever our instincts tell us is right or wrong? Why can’t it be equal to social consensus? Or some as yet undiscovered laws akin to the ones in mathematics or physics?

You seem to be obsessed with the thought that morality must be absolute, descended from an absolute authority. Yahweh does change His mind from time to time, and His law is only valid at times, like you yourself admitted:

To answer your question about the sacrifice of one’s son to God, you are obviously referring to Abraham’s offering of Isaac. Here you have made some wrong assumptions. First of all, this incident was a one-time test of faith, not the standard practice and expected conduct for the whole culture or religious body. Throughout the Bible, Scripture repeatedly forbids child sacrifice, even though some people did it
anyway. This was not something God demanded as a binding law on all people. You are trying to take a one-time event, designed for a specific purpose, and present it as normative. This is a misapplication.

I’m not trying to take a one time event and present is as the norm. I am, however, using this as evidence that God’s laws aren’t applicable under all circumstances, something you seem to be taking for granted.

If God is really the originator of morality, why don’t you support all his laws? I know you’re against abortion, but why aren’t you trying to make it legal to kill your son if he disobeys you, like the Bible says? Or are you seriously saying this is how the world should be? If not, it seems like you’re cherry picking laws from the Bible. You’ve admitted that for the Bible to make any sense at all, you must interpret it heavily. With what authority can you claim that your interpretation, and your ignorance of some key laws, is correct? Are you seriously interpreting the word of God? It would seem like only God himself has the authority to do that.

You should take a look at hedonism, utilitarianism, rational egoism, moral realism, moral subjectivism, moral pragmatism and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism before you brush off non-theistic morality.

You could, of course, argue that although morality is not something that must inherently come from God, atheists have no good reason to refrain from doing the bad or for doing the good. It’s easy to show the wrongness of this empirically. Through evolution, we have evolved into a social species. We have social instincts, meaning we already have a kind of builtin understanding of morality. This causes us (generally) to feel bad when we do something wrong. We can also show easily that millions of atheists lead moral lives. You’d be hard pressed to find an empirical study that found correlation between lack of moral behavior and atheism. If anything, I think such a study would show the opposite, that theists are worse, though that’s a totally unscientific guess.

Jack counters the problem of evil by saying we can’t know whether God is working on it or not. But if God is almighty, why does it take so much time? It seems like Jack is claiming that we live in the best of possible worlds, i.e. the amount of evil in the world is the least logically possible, and also that it’s logically impossible for God to speed up the process. In other words, less evil in the world or God fixing the problem of evil faster would somehow be a logical contradiction. If this is what you’re saying, Jack, please demonstrate it. If not, it would seem like God is an evil bastard, since he doesn’t care to speed up the process of removing evil from the world.

Jack says the reason there is evil in the world is because people don’t heed God’s advice:

The reason there is so much evil is because people are too arrogant to heed good advice. Wouldn’t it be a better world if people didn’t murder, steal, lie, gossip, slander and corrupt marriage? This is what God’s laws were given to maintain. So why is there so much unhappiness and insecurity? Because people won’t obey those laws!!!

Guess he missed the part where God creates evil.

I brought up the use of condoms in my original post. They prevent HIV. Recommending not using them seems, well, evil. However, there’s a better option:

As for the use of condoms, there is another way to deal with the problem of HIV: don’t have sex until you are married to person without HIV and keep true to them only! This way, you have the POTENTIAL to have stable and happy children, because they see an example of commitment and trust within a marriage. A condom may work, but then again, it might not. No one is forcing that person to have sex; that is a choice they are choosing to make. What is the best way for people to avoid having a drunk driving accident? Don’t drink! Your logic here is faulty. The best preventative measure is to avoid the action altogether, but that seems too simple.

Comparing sex to drunk driving is wrong. Humans don’t have an instinct that tells us to drive while drunk. We do have a drive for sex. It’s natural. Without it, the human race would die out. That might actually be good for the planet, but then again, God would probably be pissed. It’s much easier to avoid drunk driving than to avoid having sex, because while you have conscious control over your drunk driving, you don’t have conscious control over your sexual excitement. It’s akin to saying: “What’s the best way to avoid getting fat? Don’t eat!” We humans have an instinct to eat. if we don’t, we get unhappy, sick, and might even die. While we won’t die without sex, I’m pretty sure you get the analogy.

I must say I’m unimpressed by Jack’s arguments. I’ll return to his individual objections later, but this post is already long enough as it is.

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