I just watched a video presentation by Timothy Keller. He is a Presbyterian Minister who wrote a book entitled “The Reason for God.” I felt a sense of “Déjà vu all over again” while watching his presentation. I have read a lot of Christian apologist’s books. When you are raised an evangelical Christian and then declare yourself an atheist when you are 18 years old, you get a lot of these books as well-meaning gifts. I have a pretty awesome collection of books by Ravi Zacharias, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, C.S. Lewis, Norman Geisler, and others.
Keller starts with making the same old “atheists are mean” argument. We should respect human beings because because that is the way we would like to be treated. This does not mean we don’t have the right to criticize institutions that have incoherent beliefs or are abusive. This also does not mean that we have to give any degree of deference to ideas that are bad. Do we “respect” the ideas of astrologers? Any atheist who is nasty to religious people should stop. But the ongoing project of pointing out the philosophical problems and bad effects of religion should never cease.
He then completely misses the point of the “outsider test for religion.” He phrases it as “People born in Madagascar have their religious beliefs, I have mine, and atheists have theirs. Therefore, disbelief or belief are based partly on culture, so atheism is no better than any religious belief.” The problem is that the outsider test for religion posits that we should critically analyze all religions with an eye for whether a particular religion is coherent and logical. So far, no religion has passed. This method is how we know that our beliefs can be correct despite the culture in which we were raised. You need to look at your religion through other religion’s eyes. Keller just seems to ball religion and atheism into one vague mass of culturally influenced belief. Yet he has written a book to convince people that his god exists, so he clearly understands that we can use our minds to analyze whether such a belief is true.
This leads to the key misconception that almost all christian apologists have. Keller says “It takes as much faith to believe in a god than to disbelieve.” He supports this by saying “all arguments against the existence of god fail.” This is where the outsider test for religion really kicks in. Mr. Keller, do you agree with the following statements? “All arguments against the existence of Allah have failed.” “All arguments against the existence of Vishnu have failed.” “All arguments against Thor have failed.” Of course not. The outsider test for religion simply points out that atheism is the default position, and you must establish with positive evidence that your god exists. However, Keller continues on to deface the argument from suffering, as one of the arguments against god hat have failed. He does this with the old Chestnut “God’s purposes are better than ours.” Ok, but he still hasn’t established the existence of god, so we can ignore this out of hand. He then goes on to claim that “these arguments from evil fail with philosophers.” Really? Why aren’t you writing a scholarly article refuting Paul Draper’s “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists,” instead of trying to write popular books convincing the masses your religion is right? The argument from suffering is still alive and well in the philosophy of religion, no matter what Keller says.
He extends the cloud of misconceptions by saying: “it takes more faith to disbelieve in a god to believe is a god, because god makes more sense of the things we see in the world.” He gives two examples to support this idea. They are both spectacularly bad.
First, the argument from fine tuning. I have written about this issue earlier. The math used to support arguments from fine tuning is suspect, and in any case, these arguments amount to nothing more than metaphysical speculation because there is no good definition of what “fine-tuning” even means.
Second, he gives us an argument from human rights. This is the old question “how do atheists get their morality?” This question of human rights has no connection to your god, Mr. Keller. As you said, our morality is different that our grandparent’s morality and our grandchildren’s morality will be different than ours. Our ideas of morality evolve. Your Christian god is not an account for morality any more than any other religions, and is far inferior (in coherence terms) to almost any philosophical account of ethics. Also, where does the bible reference “human rights?” Somewhere between the slaughter of the Amalekites and Paul’s endorsement of of slavery, it’s in there, right?
I know that this post won’t necessarily convince someone who already believes. But I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to examine the arguments that are out there in popular literature to understand what the apologists are saying. If someone gives you “Reasons for God” I think you should exchange with them Guy P. Harrison’s Book “50 reasons people give for believing in a god.” Dialogue is good, and hopefully, the best ideas will win.
“They are both spectacularly bad.”
This again and again is my reaction to almost all of the “reasons for God” theists give. Back when I was an agnostic, I was expecting to run into a couple of points I found compelling. I have been searching in vain for these ever since.