The Apology of Martiro: Part 10 of 10

Finally, if you have truly retained an open mind from your "careful and deliberate study," then you should avoid making pronouncements about the Christian faith that imply an unwillingness to consider the possibility of arguments you have not yet come across—or perhaps ones you have considered but have rejected for poor reasons. In the words of Charles Peirce: Do not block the path of inquiry!

Several years ago I was approached by two Mormons who asked to come inside my home and speak with me about their religion. For over two hours we debated the tenets of the Mormon faith and whether or not its claims could be reliably justified. By the end of that two hours, they had presented several arguments for Mormonism that I had never heard before. Yet, I still remained unconvinced. Exasperated, one of the Mormons said to me:

 "How can you reject all of these arguments that we have just presented to you? You were admittedly unfamiliar with them when we arrived and yet you reject them without ample time to consider their merits. Should you not withhold judgment until you are able to reflect on every argument in greater detail?"

To his impassioned plea I responded:

"If I am to withhold judgment until every possible argument regarding your faith has been made and rejected, I must delay judgment on all matters of all faiths everywhere. I must be equally open to accepting the tenets of Islam and Christianity, of Hinduism and Janism. I must adhere to all religious doctrines and systematically go through each and every one refuting their claims. Rather than analyzing claims from a position of disbelief, I should advocate belief in all claims as the default position until they can be proven false. Is this what you are advocating? Is this what you believe?"

After a few moments of awkward silence, the two Mormons left without engaging me in the customary prayer of reception that typically marks the conclusion of their conversion attempts. I have thought about that meeting many times in the ensuing years and the requests that those two men laid upon me. It is in some ways similar to the request that you are making now. While you do not seem to be advocating a default position of belief, you are asking me to withhold judgment of Christian claims until not only all arguments are heard, but also all potential arguments. Considering that even after a lifetime of study one would be unlikely to come across all possible arguments for the validity of Christianity, are you suggesting that no one is permitted to cast doubt upon its claims? If so, then could not the same argument be used for the claims of countless other religions? If not, then what makes you think that I am unwilling to consider the possibility of arguments that I have not yet come across? I know that there are other arguments out there. There are also countless arguments "proving" the truths of Islam that I am unaware of. Should I withhold pronouncements about the Islamic faith as well? While I may never be able to consider every apologetic argument, the main ones are apparent to anyone who engages in even a cursory study of the subject. Of the most frequently cited arguments, I have found none that adequately withstand the same level of scrutiny and critical thought that I apply to every other area of inquiry in my life. That is not to say that I will not one day stumble across an argument that erases all doubt from my mind through a series of unassailable rational proofs. But have you ever asked yourself, if God's message is so obvious and so important for Him to convey to man, would it really require all of the complicated arguments that have been designed to prove it? After countless millennia of sincere and honest men all wrestling with the questions of God's existence and identity, yet arriving at answers as varied as the personalities of each, does this seem like a God that even wants to be known?

This response is not written to you. Although your critique of my initial post provided the catalyst for a more thorough explanation of my disbelief, nothing herein is conveyed for your benefit. There is nothing I can say and no refutation I can give that will make you change your mind on this subject as is apparent by your adherence to faith. That is the problem with faith. It starts with a presupposition and then looks for corroborating evidence to validate it. This is the very antithesis of the Scientific Method and a direct affront to how we go about determining truth. This post is written for every other person who may have encountered these doubts within their own mind but has been unwilling or unable to express them out of fear of condemnation. The pursuit of truth is not something that anyone should be afraid of...it should be something we embrace. My only goal when I started down this path of inquiry was to arrive at an accurate understanding of the world by looking at evidence and using reason. My position is not so rigid as to be unaffected by new information as it is not bound by any dogma. If God is able to present Himself in a way commensurate with every other facet of reality constituting the world around me, then I will readily recognize his existence. Until that time, I am not only justified in my disbelief, but am required to do so if I am to be intellectually honest. And that is the one thing in all of this convolution that I am certain of. I may never find the answers I seek or convince others of my true motivations, but I know that my journey is a virtuous one all the same. It is on the shoulders of giants that I look out into the vast distance before me so that I might peek just over the horizon. Somewhere out there is the truth of which I seek...and if you'll come with me, I promise you'll always be in good company.

A short clip from The Atheist Experience weekly broadcast from Austin, TX. Host: Matt Dillahunty

The Apology of Martiro: Part 9 of 10

Eighth, when you say, "Such a man is unwilling or unable to accept reality on its own terms and live his life accordingly, preferring instead to rely on religion as an anesthetic to make sense out of an otherwise very uncertain world. It is a crutch. It is a narcotic," do you mean to assign this as a criticism to all believers, or only those who have a very weak faith and in fact to rely on religion as an anesthetic? If the former, I can think of quite a few believers throughout history who faced a much harder reality than you or I could even imagine. Take Bonhoeffer, for example. And, at a theoretical level, I would add that accepting Christianity doesn't remove the uncertainty from the world. The need to trust God presupposes that uncertainty, so it very clearly can't eradicate it.

If you rely on faith as an acceptable means of understanding our world then you are anesthetizing yourself from reality. Far from those with weak faith most egregiously committing this error, I would argue that as one's faith increases so too does his or her misunderstanding of reality. Facing hardship probably induces some people to gravitate towards faith because it helps makes sense out of an otherwise chaotic world and justifies their experience. Bonhoeffer's trials were likely made somewhat easier in his own mind by believing that his suffering was unavoidable and that his life was being used for a greater good. This still has no bearing on whether or not any of that is true. I never claimed that accepting Christianity removes uncertainty from the world, only that those who ascribe to its doctrines use them to attempt to anyway. After all, didn't you know that everything happens for a reason?    

The Apology of Martiro: Part 8 of 10

Seventh, shouldn't we expect that a God who is Logos and is responsible for giving us the imago Dei, by which we have intellect and will, will not demand blind faith? If it is part of Christianity's greatest commandment—straight from the Old Testament and accepted by Jesus himself in the Gospels—that we should love him with all our minds, shouldn't this be intellectually significant? It strikes me as rather disingenuous for you to say that Christianity involves surrendering our reason. Some of the greatest philosophy and science, not to mention the university, has come to us as a result of Christianity. Only if you conflate Christianity with Christian fundamentalism can you "in good faith" reject faith's relation to reason.

When I was a Christian, I used to draw a distinction between faith and blind faith. I felt that faith was believing something to be true after first building a rational bridge to get me halfway there. For example, I believed the world was created by God because I could look around me and see that the world exhibited order to it. I could use my mind to understand mathematics, explore the bounds of my creativity, and reason through logical absolutes to help give me a better understanding of everything I experienced. Even though I didn't fully understand how any of this worked, I believed that there must be a higher power that had given me these gifts. I accepted this on faith.

Conversely, blind faith meant simply believing any random claim that was made about anything. Accepting that Zeus threw lightning bolts from high atop Mount Olympus would be a claim accepted on blind faith and all such notions were summarily rejected. But as I began to reflect on the merits of accepting something on faith, I noticed that this method of inquiry still shared a unsettling trait with its blind counterpart. Both faith and blind faith were not, as I had once believed, different in kind but rather only in degree. It was only when I realized that even if faith were not blind it still meant believing things for which I had no evidence that the line between the two began to blur. I realized that in no other area of my life did I apply such a standard. In my understanding of the human body, nature, physics, etc., I always used reason and evidence as a means of determining truth. Yet in the one area of my life where ultimate truth is concerned, I was being told that evidence is not enough. Faith was required.

My mistake was in believing that truth was subject to my desire to know it. It was an error that sacrifices understanding for the promise of assurance and conflates hubris with enlightenment, all under the guise of a supposed humility rooted in faith. Faith promised me a comprehensive understanding of my world when the weight of evidence had not yet provided me with the answers I was seeking. The thought of admitting ignorance on many of the fundamental questions of our existence was anathema to me and faith was a way to avert this dilemma. It was not until I realized that it is acceptable to admit to myself that I don't know all of the answers that I was finally able to cast aside the false promises of faith. Reason and evidence may never be able to provide me with all of the answers I am looking for but this does not mean that I should simply fill in the missing pieces with unsupported claims. I should simply admit that I don't know and keeping searching.

The Apology of Martiro: Part 7 of 10

Sixth, your acceptance of the Euthyphro dilemma really shows how insincere or superficial your study of apologetics really was. Countless Christian philosophers have pointed out that this is a false dilemma. It is not the case that the good is good independently of God, as a standard to which he is subject. It is also not the case that whatever God wills is good simply by divine fiat, which would make the good arbitrary. Rather, God is the good—God is goodness. Goodness is neither arbitrary nor a standard independent of God's nature. God is the standard.

                                               

Personal attacks have once again reared their ugly heads. My insincerity notwithstanding, perhaps we can debate the problem of Euthyphro's dilemma on its own merits rather than mine. I simply disagree with your contention that this is a false dilemma. Asserting that "God is goodness" seems like a esoteric way of averting the question at hand, yet it also suffers the same  problems of any other faith-based claim. Namely, you have made an assertion without evidence. "Good" is not personified in anything but is instead a concept we use to determine how we are to behave towards one another. It is completely dependent on the human experience. If all humans ceased to exist, so too would the concepts of good and evil since there would be no one to experience these things.

Attempting to make the argument that God is the good and this goodness is thereby a part of his nature also suffers from the same problem of the Cosmological argument. The most obvious question to ask is "Did God choose His nature?". If so, we are once again confronted  with the first horn in Euthyphro's Dilemma. If not, the second. All we have managed to do is once again push the question back a single step without getting any closer to an answer.

However, I have a more primal objection to your claim that "God is goodness" that relates to the Moral Argument for God's existence. If God is truly the standard of good, why does he advocate so many things in the Bible that are simply not good? One has only to turn to the Old Testament to find countless stories of God advocating murder, infanticide, rape, and slavery. In the New Testament we do not see this side of God as much, but we still have stories of Paul advocating slavery when he commands slaves to "obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" Eph 6:5. Would this not have been a perfect opportunity to condemn slavery as being wrong in all times, in all places, for all people? Some Christians will attempt to make exceptions for these verses by claiming that read in the proper context, God is not advocating slavery but rather making some other point. This is patently absurd. There is no context. There is no context in which the owning of another human being is ever considered permissible. And when someone starts attempting to justify atrocities out of an unwavering belief that God's commands are somehow justified by His inherent nature, they are on a slippery slope of moral ambiguity.

The Apology of Martiro: Part 6 of 10

Fifth, your understanding of faith is not that which is promoted in the New Testament or by Christian intellectuals spanning the entire history of Christendom. Your rejection of faith is not a rejection of quintessentially Christian faith, but a faith of your own concoction. This, if you have studied logic, is known as attacking a straw man.

I am uninterested in how Christian intellectuals have redefined a word in order to suit their purposes. Far from being a "faith of my own concoction", I am adhering to the recognized definition of the word and understand it to mean a belief in something for which we have insufficient evidence. After all, if we did have evidence for a belief then faith would not be required as evidentiary support would be enough. Faith is believing something to be true without evidence or, at times, in spite of evidence to the contrary. That is what the word means and that is what I am rejecting. If you are expanding its meaning to include trust, reverence, devotion, obedience, or anything else, then simply use those words instead. Assigning additional meanings to existing words not only causes unnecessary confusion, but also serves to bolster their power by providing artificial lattice work. I suspect that is why it has been done and that is why you reject my rejection of faith. Even if you were to accept my argument that things should not be believed without evidence, you have ascribed so many other meanings to this word that knocking down one pillar will not collapse the building. There is a straw man here, but only one that has been overstuffed.

The Apology of Martiro: Part 5 of 10

Fourth, you make this confession without so much as suggesting what it is about the arguments for Christianity you found to be "misguided or patently absurd." I have a suspicion that it wasn't reason that was guiding you to such conclusions. For example, when you say "I slowly began to realize that my justifications for believing what I had been taught was true were no more valid that the countless claims made by any number of other religions, all of which I summarily rejected without qualm," it tells me you haven't really undertaken a serious study of Christian apologetics—or, if you have, you've rejected the apologist's arguments on the basis of a specious set of presuppositions which were not themselves ever subjected to rational scrutiny.

Again, my reason for not going into greater detail for the justification of my disbelief is because my original post was merely a confession, not an apologetic diatribe. Here are some of the apologetic arguments I have considered and a brief response to each.

Argument 1: Cosmological Argument - If everything that exists has a cause, why is a special exception made for God? The problem of infinite regress is unavoidable here, which is perhaps why the Kalam variant was introduced to contemporary audiences by William Lane Craig. However, if we are to accept the Kalam's premise that everything that began to exist has a cause, we still have no reason to suppose God is immune to this rule, only an assumption. Yet even if we make this assumption, we must ask ourselves why it is reasonable to believe that a god has always existed but unreasonable to make the same concession for the universe. The distinction is arbitrary. Even if a first cause is admitted, this cause does not necessarily entail personification as it could just as easily be naturally occurring. To assert a god must be the first cause would require evidence.

Argument 2: Teleological Argument (ex. Paley's Watchmaker) - Just because something has the appearance of design does not necessarily mean it was designed. The reason I can recognize that a watch I found lying on the beach was manmade is because I have prior knowledge of this fact. I know that people make watches and have observed both the design of a completed watch and the non-design of the raw materials composing it. Conversely, I don't have any experience with what proponents of this argument consider a "non-designed" world. I only have experience with natural objects that appear to have some level of complexity to them. However, complexity does not constitute design. A snowflake is much more complex than my name written on a piece of paper, yet we ascribe the cause of one to natural events and the other to design. The reason is because we understand the physics behind how a snowflake is created and know that this process occurs naturally, independent of any mind directing its motions. We must have a natural reference point in order for the recognition of design to have any meaning or else it is impossible to distinguish between the two.

Argument 3: Ontological Argument - Imagining the greatest thing possible does not prove existence. I can imagine the greatest unicorn to ever roam the Great Plains of Narnia but this does not mean it actually exists.

Argument 4: Pascal's Wager - The false dilemma here is that our only options are to worship the Christian God or not. However, there are many other gods that we would need to also worship in order to hedge our bets. In fact, we would need to believe in all gods if we were to wager correctly. This introduces the problem of insincerity, however, in that we are worshiping God/gods not out of reverence, but out of fear that something bad will happen if we don't. Those who make an earnest attempt to determine the correct God but are unable to do so would be condemned while those who never even undertook such a journey, preferring instead to simply blindly follow would be rewarded. I doubt this is the sort of reverence a just God would prefer.

Argument 5: Moral Argument - I will address this in your sixth objection.

The aforementioned claims all pertain more to belief in God than acceptance of Christianity. Specifically, I reject Christian claims because its supposed evidence is no more substantiated than that of other religious claims. Miracles performed by Jesus in the Bible have no basis for belief whatsoever in that they are merely anecdotal and in no way constitute evidence. A position of disbelief is actually the default by which any claim is subject to until the one making the claim has met their burden of proof. For example, I don't believe that there is a teapot orbiting the moon. If someone told me that there was a teapot orbiting the moon, the rational position would be to disbelieve them. I am justified in this disbelief because I have never seen a teapot orbiting the moon or have any evidence of teapots doing such things. However, if I pulled out a telescope and looked up at the moon, only to see a teapot whisking its way through space, my position would now change. The burden of proof for the claim that a teapot is orbiting the moon would have been met and my beliefs would shift accordingly.

The same is true with God. I do not believe that Allah, Zeus, or any other ancient deities actually exist. I am justified in this belief because no evidence has ever been presented to me that Allah or Zeus exist. Despite all of ancient Greece and 1.6 billion Muslims alive today telling me that these gods exist, I have no reason to believe it because their personal feelings and anecdotes are not sufficient. You probably feel the same way. You immediately recognize that although someone may be passionate about a belief to the point of certitude, this belief must still be validated with evidence. Hence, you don't believe in Allah or Zeus. You believe in the Christian God. You believe in this God, presumably, because you feel that a certain burden of proof has been met to justify this belief. You may have affirmations from friends and family that these beliefs are true, personal feelings of awe and wonderment whenever you think about this god, or apologetics that you believe all justify faith in the Christian God. Most importantly, you must have something that is different from what Muslims have that convinces you that you're right and they're wrong.

And that's when we start to look at evidence. All of the justifications of faith I just named are not evidence. Even something as supposedly scientific as Christian Apologetics only serves to postulate questions that it then attempts to answer by presupposing a Christian God. And that is why I struggle with faith. In every other aspect of my life, I apply a standard of critical thought to determine what is and what is not true. Nothing is exempt from this level of scrutiny because my understanding of reality would suffer otherwise. When I apply the same level of critical thought to Christianity as I do to every other religion, indeed every other aspect of my life, it simply doesn't measure up. I don't believe that Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a winged horse at the exact spot that the Temple Mount now resides. This is a perfectly rational position to take and no Christian would fault me for taking it. Yet, I have the exact same amount of evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, Moses talked to God, or any number of such miracles as I do for the claim that Mohammed ascended to heaven. Therefore, I must either apply critical thought and reject both claims or suspend it and accept both. But no one accepts both. They believe one and deny the other, attributing their decision to faith. This is problematic because it in no way allows us to arrive at an accurate understanding of our world and in many ways hinders it. Faith is simply the belief in an idea despite no corroborating evidence and, sometimes, even in the face of conflicting evidence. It is not a path to truth.

The Apology of Martiro: Part 4 of 10

Third, it is unclear why, if you had undertaken any serious study of apologetics, "things like faith were easily ripped apart since they could appeal not to reasons, but only authority." Faith is an existential response to God, à la Kierkegaard, but it is founded in facts. The natural theology of Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists, when coupled with the historical apologetics of N.T. Wright, Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig, provides a sturdy intellectual foundation for the Christian faith. And if you've read the New Atheists, you know they have nothing on Aquinas. Dawkins attempt to tackle the Five Ways in his book The God Delusion, for instance, is quite demonstrably pitiful.

This is where the emotional pleas are made. After all, how could anyone have read these great apologetical works and not have arrived at the same conclusions at you. Clearly, the only explanation must be that I did simply not "undertake any serious study".

If we are to abide by Kierkegaard's Existentialism and take our necessary leap of faith, we must admit that we are uncertain of our choice. For if we possessed certainty in our decision, faith would be rendered moot and the consequences of our decision assured. Let us now suppose that there are two men, a Muslim and a Christian. Each desires to take this leap of faith, knowing that their reason and study have brought them only thus far and the next step to God must be taken only through faith. Which one then will be taking a step closer to God and which one will leap only into the abyss? Have we a way to tell? If faith is our only means of knowledge, both paths are indistinguishable. A man may have faith in a great many things, but if those things have no basis in reality then his faith has served not to guide his steps, but rather to obscure them altogether.

Now let us observe Aquinas' Five Ways. The first three are quite similar and jointly form what is commonly referred to as the Cosmological Argument. This apologetic maintains that since actions have causes, we can trace this unbroken chain of events all the way back to the beginning to determine what set them in motion. The argument goes on to postulate that since nothing can cause itself to happen, something outside of the known universe must represent this initial cause.

This cause is said to be God who created everything from nothing. God was able to do this, it is claimed, because He resides beyond the realm of time, reason, and physics and is not bound by the rules dictating how everything else must behave. Despite the fact that there is no evidence for this belief, for the sake of argument I will concede that something from outside of our reality could have created something from nothing. Even if this were true, nothing presupposes that this thing must be personified. It could just as easily be a natural event. To go one step further and claim that this new cause is now more than a cause, that it has godlike attributes is simply a claim for which we have no evidence. All we have managed to do is move the chain of events one step further back, yet we are no closer to answering our original question than we were before.