Debating with atheists

[prodigalson2011]

In Stephen Law’s recent debate with William Lane Craig, Law used Craig’s premises arguing for the existence of a benevolent god and, I think, successfully demonstrated that they could just as easily be used to demonstrate the existence of a malevolent god. Given the choice between empiricism and philosophy argument in establishing the truth of propositions that have effects in the real world, I’ll go with empiricism every time.

I had never listened to that particular debate before, but I took the liberty of doing so yesterday and I have to say that that argument was pretty weak and easily refutable. Craig did away with it pretty quickly and then avoided dwelling on it further. Whether or not that weakened his standing, I don’t know, but I think Craig turned out just fine. Law himself said as much after the debate (he seemed to think Craig had gotten the better of him. I tend to agree.) Anyway, here’s a quick refutation of “evil God” that’s a little more in depth than what Craig put forth (this is not my own argument, btw):

1. God is evil thus lacks love and goodness
2. Everything that exists is contingent upon God
3. We have and experience love and goodness… thus the argument fails as it contradicts premise 1,2…

Expressed in more abstract terms:

1. G does not have property X (notice the argument is not G != G but G !=X)
2. Everything is contingent from G
3. Z who is contingent from G as per 2. has property X…and thus the argument fails.

In short, if God exists then, by definition, everything else that exists is contingent upon Him. If we experience love and goodness (as I think most of us do) then love and goodness must be present in God. (“But what about the existence of evil?” you’re probably asking. “If everything is contingent upon God, then evil must be present in Him, too right?” No. But I’ll come to that presently.)

Further, since God is absolute being, the existence of evil in Him is a logical impossibility. Why? Because evil is contingent upon good and not the other way around. There can be goodness without evil, but there cannot be evil without goodness. The very existence of evil depends on some absolute good that can be corrupted. Absolute goodness can only come from God. More strictly speaking, “evil” is not a thing in itself, but rather is simply a privation of a real good. So good must precede evil. God must precede all else. Ergo, if there is a God, He must be good.

P.S. If you think you actually rely totally on empiricism, well… you lack understanding of both science and philosophy. I don’t say this to insult, but to encourage you to look more deeply into the matter. Science is founded upon philosophy and metaphysical assumptions. Any claim one way or the other, whether for agnosticism, atheism or theism, that one derives from scientific evidence must necessarily pass through the lens of metaphysical interpretation. It is best to understand how to properly do the latter.

 

[loro]

Anyway I’ve got to some sort of consensus with that person by now. Thanks to God, and to everyone who prayed for me!

 

[stephen_law]

Prodigalson2011 said:

“I think Craig turned out just fine. Law himself said as much after the debate (he seemed to think Craig had gotten the better of him. I tend to agree.)”

I’d love to know where I said that. It’s rubbish. In fact, even one theist agreed I won. apologiapad.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/bill-craig-loses-a-debate-and-all-sorts-of-goodies-are-revealed/

The refutation then offered is an “impossibility argument” of the sort anticipated and dealt with in my paper.

 

[prodigalson2011]

Prodigalson2011 said:

“I think Craig turned out just fine. Law himself said as much after the debate (he seemed to think Craig had gotten the better of him. I tend to agree.)”

I’d love to know where I said that. It’s rubbish. In fact, even one theist agreed I won. apologiapad.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/bill-craig-loses-a-debate-and-all-sorts-of-goodies-are-revealed/

The refutation then offered is an “impossibility argument” of the sort anticipated and dealt with in my paper.

Alright, “Mr. Law.” I find it highly unlikely that you prowl the web looking for critics on random forums, but I’ll bite.

On “your” very own blog, “you” said:

Still, I could certainly have done better. My debating skills are pretty poor compared to Craig’s.

Sounds like a concession to me.

 

[lerapt78]

Ok here’s one I had yesterday: A person started talking about how the fact that medicine has improved over the last century, has lead to the increase of the human population, which then leads to exhaustion of the Earth’s resources such as petroleum or carbon, which is going to cause big problems for the next generations - perhaps starvations, and energy crisis. Then knowing that I’m a Christian, he said that it’s a contradiction in our moral Law (he just says that, and doesn’t propose an alternative), because our culture is saturated by attitudes in favour of protecting lives, and that removes the mechanisms of natural selection.
Then he started arguing that I’m a fanatic because I think that my system is the only righteous one.

Sorry - it took me a while to get back to your thread.

The idea that medicine suppresses or counteracts natural selection (or natural death, to put it in more theologic terms) is technically true in most cases. What I’m not sure of however, is how this argument is supposed to disprove the existence of God. The administration of medication is simply one way of protecting ourselves from harmful pathogens.

This concept however, could be equally applied to *all *instances in which humans struggle to protect themselves from a hostile environment when we find our natural defenses to be insufficient. For example, choosing to kill an animal in order to wear its fur, construct a shelter, or build a fire in extremely cold climates could also be considered an affront to natural selection, for humans are not naturally equipped to withstand sub-zero temperatures without the use of indirect preservation. Cold, wind, lightning - these are visible and/or measurable environmental threats to which we are naturally defenseless. Bacteria and viruses on the other hand, are invisible environmental threats to which we also are (sometimes) naturally defenseless. So, just as an animal might build a nest using foreign building materials (and whichever cognitive capacity it has to design the structure), so has the human used his naturally higher intellectual capabilities to devise a protective serum or pill against nature’s more complicated dangers.

If we are not supposed to use our brains to devise methods of survival when our natural immune systems are threatened by malignant organisms, then I would think an atheist would find it equally ridiculous to use an inflatable life vest if we found ourselves drowning – this acquiescence to water would serve natural selection quite well, since humans didn’t naturally evolve to include gills in our biological infrastructure.

That being said, I suspect your friend was referring to more than just the application of medicine alone when he made the dingo/rabbit analogy. Feel free to PM if you want to discuss a different subject within this subject.

 

[RebeccaJ]

Recently, quite often I have had discussions about God and religion with my friends who are atheists. In most cases I was the only Christian at the table, and since I am a physics student, I’m often talking with many other people who are into science, so my “opponents” were usually very intelligent people.

The thing is that I’m proud of being a Christian, and feel a need to share my Faith. So whenever a conversation goes into the subject of religion or morality, I can’t remain silent. I just feel that I should try to explain to them, what they’ve misunderstood.

However recently these kind of debates don’t serve me well. Not that I’m anywhere near losing my Faith, but even though I have a good relationship with God, and have experienced the Charisms myself, the arguments and explainations that my debaters bring up, often seem to be really sensible, and often I just know too little to give a counter argument. Also they usually don’t tend to be that respectful, so I often get to hear epithets, and mocking remarks, which then stick in my head and disturb my joy of being a Christian. (I hope things I say about God, etc. don’t leave them alone either )

For example I’ve heard from them explainations for Resting in the Holy Spirit, that it might be a placebo effect, and the thing is that no matter how strong I believe that it’s really the Holy Spirit, I can’t just rule their explaination out with certainty - and that really does seriously spoil my joy, when I take part in charismatic worships.

Does any of you have or have had similar sentiments? How to deal with them? Should I try to approach the issue in a different way?

Maybe also I could take this opportunity to ask you for a prayer for helping me with fixing this problem.

Placebo effect…I would guess it is coming from an atheist view that people who are religious are so because it meets an emotional or psychological need. From the Christian view, this is a reduction of our faith to emotion (or feeling). As though that is all our faith is.

Would you agree that our faith is an encounter? An experience? With Truth itself? Truth, having a name, Jesus Christ? What we feel has an importance to this encounter, just as an encounter with beauty does. We can be wounded by beauty, we can be wounded by Truth, in that sort of wound that strikes at your heart and cannot be ignored. It is part of who we are as humans, and it is part of our human experience.

This sort of experiential evidence is discounted among a lot of atheists, but not all. Empirical evidence is the primary view of science. The scientific approach is an appropriate approach to science, but I would caution you against living your life according to empirical evidence alone, and questioning all experience as suspect because it is subjective. For what are we, if not what we experience? To remove what you feel from your experiences is not even a human response. It is impossible for anyone to do so, including your friends. And why would you want to?

It is certainly more than ok to reason out what you feel, make some self observations if you will. You may find there are some cases where you are absolutely certain that feelings of the Holy Spirit have not been generated from within yourself. Other times where you might be certain there are other factors contributing to how you feel. And some times where you just won’t be sure.

Then, you must decide, what this means to your faith. As a convert from atheism, feelings have been an important part of my conversion and faith, but they were never the primary driver of my faith. My feelings correspond to my experience. There are experiences of the Spirit that cannot be explained away as “placebo effects”.

One other thing, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not of a nature that you can lay them out on a table and examine them. They aren’t conducive to the the scientific method.

Remember that song by Garbage, “Stupid Girl”? The lyrics “Don’t believe in fear. Don’t believe in faith. Don’t believe in anything, that you can’t break. You stupid girl.”…struck me as rather convincing, in its condemnation, while I was in the process of converting from atheism.

 

[loro]

lerapt78 - thanks, I’ll send you a pm later today.

RebeccaJ:

people who are religious are so because it meets an emotional or psychological need

I don’t know - but I guess if an atheist is thinking about this, that’s the only “logical” explaination.

Would you agree that our faith is an encounter? (…)

Oh sure I do. It’s a journey, and a relationship. And certainly I’ve heard about healings by the Holy Spirit (but I’ve never seen one), and about demonic manifestations - which can’t be explained by science.
My experience with the Holy Spirit has changed my life. It has set me free from something that was ruining it for half a year, literally within 1 day. Atheists, when I tell it to them, call that a lucky coincidence.

But when they say so… what am I supposed to answer? I understand their point, I know how statistics works, and I have nothing in my defence. I **believe **it was the Holy Spirit.

 

[RebeccaJ]

lerapt78 - thanks, I’ll send you a pm later today.

RebeccaJ:

I don’t know - but I guess if an atheist is thinking about this, that’s the only “logical” explaination.

Oh sure I do. It’s a journey, and a relationship. And certainly I’ve heard about healings by the Holy Spirit (but I’ve never seen one), and about demonic manifestations - which can’t be explained by science.
My experience with the Holy Spirit has changed my life. It has set me free from something that was ruining it for half a year, literally within 1 day. Atheists, when I tell it to them, call that a lucky coincidence.

But when they say so… what am I supposed to answer? I understand their point, I know how statistics works, and I have nothing in my defence. I **believe **it was the Holy Spirit.

loro, it is your experience and your faith. Another person, be they Catholic, atheist, whatever, can believe whatever they like about it, it doesn’t change your experience.

Believe me, I go through these conversations with my husband on a regular basis. He will never believe, and has every excuse in the world for my experiences. But they aren’t his.

Once you have explained your position, you can only agree to disagree with your friends. It just isn’t in them, at this point in their lives, to believe. From the outside, as an atheist, faith doesn’t make any sense at all, unless it is couched as a psychological event. One in which they see themselves as immune. “Placebo effect” is a psychological event.

As a person who came from atheism, I can clearly see their unbelief as a psychological event.

 

[loro]

My little crisis is gone already, but carrying on with the discussion:

it doesn’t change your experience.

I agree.

When I experienced the Holy Spirit for the 1st time I was already considering myself as a Christian, but I wasn’t too much into it, and my reaction was: “I can’t believe it! These things are not just “myths”, they are REALLY happening - so God and everything - it’s all actually true!”. And it all started from there. That’s my experience, and a reaction which was an outcome of my analysis.

Now whenever someone else is offering a more “down to earth” explaination - which I can’t exclude based on just my experience - I can’t help thinking “what if…”

Whenever an atheist brings up a sensible argument, despite all my experiences, it also leads me to thinking “what if…”

Last time, when I was participating in the Holy Spirit worships - the “what if…” thoughts also did slip into my mind… And they were disturbing me.

Btw, just out of curiosity, what happened in your life so that you became a Catholic?
(I know it’s getting further and further away from the original topic, so maybe let’s carry on in pm’s?)

 

[loro]

lerapt78,

This concept however, could be equally applied to all instances (…)

This is a very good point!

What I’m not sure of however, is how this argument is supposed to disprove the existence of God.

His message was, that there is the contradiction, because one of the motivations of our moral Law is to make us live in harmony with each other, not doing any harm to one another, but at the same time Christian “loving one another”, valuing life and doing our best to save it in all circumstances - may lead us to overpopulation and huge problems in the future (such as starvations, etc.).

And I also thought at that time that things can’t be that way, since God’s Law always leads to good fruits, and sins lead to bad fruits. So if things worked out as described above, it would be a disproval of this.

The points I made later were:

• If we’re comparing our system, to a system in which we would “perform” the natural selection ourselves - then we’re comparing a situation in which there are deaths possible, to one in which there are sure deaths, hence the former one is better.
• There are situations in which bad fruits can’t be avoided - maybe this is one of them. But I claim that the Catholic system leads in this case to the least amount of bad fruits, and so there’s no contradiction
• We’re not exactly like rabbits, because we develop science and technology, which have the power of shaping our enviroment, to accomodate an increasing population and meet its e.g. energy needs etc. So these analogies can’t be totally accurate, and there’s a possibility that the scientists will figure something out to prevent this doomsday scenario from happening.
• for Christians - even if this scenario comes true - starvation and deaths caused by overpopulation are not the worst things that can happen. Going to hell is. (Then we started discussing Torquemada, as an example of a person whose “orthodox” views lead many people to death)

Did I say the right things?

 

[RebeccaJ]

My little crisis is gone already, but carrying on with the discussion:

I agree.

When I experienced the Holy Spirit for the 1st time I was already considering myself as a Christian, but I wasn’t too much into it, and my reaction was: “I can’t believe it! These things are not just “myths”, they are REALLY happening - so God and everything - it’s all actually true!”. And it all started from there. That’s my experience, and a reaction which was an outcome of my analysis.

Now whenever someone else is offering a more “down to earth” explaination - which I can’t exclude based on just my experience - I can’t help thinking “what if…”

Whenever an atheist brings up a sensible argument, despite all my experiences, it also leads me to thinking “what if…”

Last time, when I was participating in the Holy Spirit worships - the “what if…” thoughts also did slip into my mind… And they were disturbing me.

Btw, just out of curiosity, what happened in your life so that you became a Catholic?
(I know it’s getting further and further away from the original topic, so maybe let’s carry on in pm’s?)

The “what ifs” are natural. It is more than fine to reason out your experience and your faith.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked : who can know it? (Jer 17:9)

 

[RebeccaJ]

My little crisis is gone already, but carrying on with the discussion:

I agree.

When I experienced the Holy Spirit for the 1st time I was already considering myself as a Christian, but I wasn’t too much into it, and my reaction was: “I can’t believe it! These things are not just “myths”, they are REALLY happening - so God and everything - it’s all actually true!”. And it all started from there. That’s my experience, and a reaction which was an outcome of my analysis.

Now whenever someone else is offering a more “down to earth” explaination - which I can’t exclude based on just my experience - I can’t help thinking “what if…”

Whenever an atheist brings up a sensible argument, despite all my experiences, it also leads me to thinking “what if…”

Last time, when I was participating in the Holy Spirit worships - the “what if…” thoughts also did slip into my mind… And they were disturbing me.

Btw, just out of curiosity, what happened in your life so that you became a Catholic?
(I know it’s getting further and further away from the original topic, so maybe let’s carry on in pm’s?)

That whatifs are natural. There is nothing wrong with reasoning out your faith.

An exercise in explaining away experiences…I can’t see the point. It is a nihilist way of thinking, and there are more than a few nihilistic atheists. Nothing is real to them. I know, because I was once one of those nihilists.

My life, is long and convoluted. Can’t say there is one thing that “just happened”. It is a journey, with one thing leading to another. But I asked the same question, “what happened” on the night I was baptized, confirmed and received communion for the first time. I was kind of floored.

Faith is what happened, and considering that faith has never been anything that I generated from myself…I can’t explain my faith in terms of “my faith”. Faith is a gift, and for me, I’m not reluctant to call faith a miracle. It isn’t something I can explain away. I really wouldn’t know how.