“I am not religious because there is no evidence for it and it’s completely unreasonable. It also limits my freedom.”
How would you respond? I have my own response and I’ll post it after I see a couple of peoples.
Also, sorry if this is in the wrong area.
1: When it comes to “reasons for not believing something,” you can do a lot worse than “lack of evidence.” Put another way, this objection has a valid form. You response necessarily needs to provide the evidence the atheist claims is missing.
2: Completely unreasonable. This has two interpretations. The first, that religion cannot be valid because he perceives it to be ridiculous, is not really a valid one. We can’t really expect the universe to be “serious” or “reasonable.” You can’t argue against platypuses on those grounds, for example.
The second interpretation is less literal but more sympathetic to his meaning. Essentially he finds religious precepts to be completely contrary to what he would expect based on his life experience. Here he is saying that he would expect a religion to be, in some sense, a source of truth about the world. However, his experience of religious people, teachings, and morality has revealed that religious precepts are not reasonable means to that end.
If you want to make an effective response to this, you could try to argue the reasonable-ness of this or that religious precept. I don’t think that is a productive approach since there are too many religious precepts, and each one has a “long tail” of arguments and evidence behind their “reasonable-ness.” At the end of the day, I think your best bet is to simply assert that the precepts
are reasonable,
but only if the evidence from #1 is accepted. Acknowledge that since the conclusions reached
do seem far-fetched, the burden is on you to provide extra-compelling evidence (and later, extra-careful reasoning) to back them up.
3: Limited freedom is a strange sort of emotional-pragmatic sort of objection. Philosophically it doesn’t have much punch, I guess he might try something along the lines of: if God gave us free will he would not subsequently seek to curtail it, therefore religion is wrong about God. I think this is more of a personal objection, and he perceives religious rules as too restrictive. If I were responding to this, I would ask him to consider some activity he feels religion restricts unnecessarily (e.g. masturbation.) There are two possible reasons he would feel that way:
A: He has some evidence or argument as to why that activity should be allowed or is desirable (e.g. lower risk of prostate cancer) and he feels that the religious reasons for prohibition (e.g. a convoluted series of inferences based on ancient texts) is too weak an argument to give up the benefit. In this case, you would be forced to defend the religious prohibition, and likely wouldn’t make much progress.
B: He does not have any evidence for his activity, he just feels that the religious prohibition is arbitrary and malicious. In this case you can defend the existence of religious commandments
in general and thereby defeat this objection.
