The Atheist’s Supposedly Daunting Explanatory Burden
And why religious folks have it much worse
Does atheism entail absurdities so that atheists end up having an enormous burden of proof?
According to Alan Shlemon’s article on the apologetics website Stand to Reason, called “Atheism’s Burden of Proof,” atheism “entails at least three incredible assertions that require a lot of explaining.”
Yet Shlemon’s case is so clumsy and wrongheaded, it’s hard to imagine it was written in good faith. The point of writing his article must have been not to think critically to get to the truth, but to strawman atheism to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes. What else is new in Christian propaganda?
Purely for the fun of it, then, and not because Shlemon’s article warrants a serious response, let’s look at his three arguments.
Did the universe come from nothing?
First, he says, atheists “explain how the universe came into existence by itself.” Shlemon goes on to say, “Without a personal agent (like God) causing the universe to begin to exist, the atheist must explain how all of space, time, and matter created itself.”
Now just ponder those two statements for a moment. Supposedly, it’s “incredible” for the atheist to imply that “the universe came into existence by itself,” but the theist is spared that problem because the theist posits “a personal agent (like God)” who caused the universe to exist. Yet of course, God is supposed to be eternal and uncreated, so how is theism supposed to improve on naturalistic atheism? Shlemon thinks God solves the atheist’s problem since God creates the universe, but positing God obviously just creates a problem at least as big, so there’s no progress here.
Did God somehow create himself? By being more faithful to the analogy with human societies than monotheism, the polytheistic version of theism made more sense in this respect since there was supposedly a society of gods, each generation giving birth to the next. But although the monotheistic deity may create angels or quasi-gods, this supreme being has no parents, in which case God’s existence must be at least as baffling to theists as nature’s is to atheists.
Still, Shlemon’s account of the atheist’s problem here is straight out of the Middle Ages:
Keep in mind that “before” the universe existed, nothing existed. There was no space, no atoms, no time, no vacuum — literally nothing — before the universe began. If nothing exists, nothing can begin to exist. That is, you can’t create everything (or anything!) in the universe when there is nothing to create from and there is nothing or no one to do the creating. You can’t even say that the laws of physics created the universe because even those didn’t exist before the universe existed. So, while it’s true that the atheist doesn’t have to give evidence that God doesn’t exist, he still needs to explain how the universe popped into existence by itself from nothing.
By putting “before” in scare quotes, Shlemon seems to sense that it’s contradictory to speak of a time before the universe since that would be a point before time’s origination. But he talks that way regardless, instead of grappling with the counterintuitiveness of all such cosmological questions. Similarly, what exactly could “nothing” be such that nothing could be said to “exist,” as Shlemon says it would have existed at that point? The fact that these questions are counterintuitive should, by itself, rule out theistic personification as a philosophical contender.
Anyway, Shlemon strawmans scientific cosmology by speaking as if the issue were how “the universe popped into existence by itself from nothing.” On the contrary, the universe as it is now, with all its stars and planets, evolved from a simpler stage when there were no stars.
Cosmology indicates that the spatiotemporal domain of matter and energy emerged from a subatomic fluctuation of something like a gravitational singularity, so the question is about the origin of the simplest subatomic bits of matter and spacetime that inflated and evolved into the present universe over billions of years. Whatever mysteries remain to be solved, the point again is that scientists tracked the universe’s origin not directly to nothing, but to much simpler stages and things.
Does theism improve on that scientific account by saying that “God” “created” the universe with a miracle? Obviously not, since that would be a pseudo-explanation that increases our understanding not at all. Theistic cosmology is like a shell game, but far from eliminating the problem like a ball that magically disappears from under a shell, the theist transfers the cosmological mystery to the vacuity of theological discourse. Indeed, the theist magnifies that mystery by being dogmatic about some alleged miracles. Scientists try to resolve mysteries, whereas theism implies that that would be sinful arrogance in the case of theology.
In my view, we shouldn’t expect to understand cosmology at an intuitive level, not unless we stretch our minds so that we learn to think like futuristic transhumans. But doubting the relevance of our armchair reasoning is far from trusting in some ancient religion’s anthropocentric prejudices.
The point is that it takes chutzpah or some gross confusion to say the atheist has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to cosmology, when atheists generally defer to physicists and mathematicians who’ve been busy for several centuries explaining the universe’s evolution, while Christian apologists are content rather with the poetry of Genesis that says God did it all with magic words.
Christian dogmatists have no business even using the word “explanation,” let alone criticizing scientists’ good-faith explanations that are methodologically naturalistic and thus atheistic.
Free will from physics?
Second, Shlemon says atheists “need to explain how free will can exist if humans are entirely physical objects.”
According to him, “Humans can act freely only if they have an immaterial soul that is separate from their physical body. It’s your soul that thinks, unencumbered by the deterministic laws of physics and chemistry.” But according to atheists, he says, “we have no soul. Humans are made of physical matter and nothing more. We are merely machines, albeit biological and complex ones.”
Thus, atheists “need to explain how free will can arise from a purely physical object. That’s an unenviable position to be in because we all know physical objects don’t have the ability to engage in free will acts, no matter how complex their arrangement of physical parts.”
But this is a juvenile construction of a strawman. Is Shlemon unaware that there are more sciences than just physics and chemistry? He speaks of biology, too, but why stop there? Why not add the “softer” sciences, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, and so forth? What makes these sciences “soft” compared to the “hard” sciences is that the soft ones deal precisely with minds, and it’s the mind that would be relatively autonomous.
Does the theist explain free will by positing an “immaterial soul” that’s separate from its body? Nope, since then the theist has the Cartesian problem of explaining how the two things interact. How could a ghost control a body?
Instead, as we know from the relevant sciences, we have a mind that programs a brain that maneuvers its body. On top of that, as we know from the liberal arts, too, including history, our species progressed, as we like to think of it, by learning to use external symbols, a kind of species-wide “modernity” that led eventually to the formation of civilized cultures. These cultures add to the skull’s shielding of the brain, enabling the human mind to act independently so that, unlike animals, a person isn’t a slave to his or her natural environment. We build artificial environments that produce cultural feedback loops that further divide us from the wilderness. That cultural complexity undermines strictly biological, chemical, or physical explanations of our behaviour.
If you want to know why someone opens the fridge, physics won’t help you much. You need the special sciences to explain that kind of event, in which case you’re well on your way to positing a limited form of free will. We have limited, non-miraculous self-control over our actions. Compared to wild animals, we’re autonomous because nature divides itself into innumerable dimensions, stages, levels, solar systems, and species, and each of these things goes its separate way, to some extent. Once solar systems and galaxies divide, for example, you don’t explain what happens on one planet solely by referring to what happens on a distant planet. Each natural thing evolves separately because vast amounts of space and time separate nature’s parts.
Similarly, despite the evolutionary continuity between species, there are scientific experts on spider behaviour who know little about lions and bats because species, too, go their separate ways. Granted, that doesn’t mean planets and insects are free. But this isolation of nature’s parts in the universal vastness is the ultimate source of personal autonomy.
Nature isn’t a giant dystopia run by a monarchical control freak who micromanages everything according to a simple set of laws. Sure, there are physical laws underlying all natural events, but they don’t explain the workings of the complex levels of things that emerge from that basis. Grappling with the emergent patterns requires special models and vocabularies, and in our case, you need the psychological and sociological concepts of minds, cultures, and thus limited autonomy (self-control).
Shlemon just makes a hash of this by presuming it’s all about physics or nothing for atheists, which is a grotesque, clueless oversimplification.
Natural morality?
Finally, Shlemon thinks the atheist has trouble accounting for morality. Theists are lucky, he implies, since they get to say that “what’s right and wrong is known because there is a God who provides a standard of morality. Furthermore, morals can’t change because they are grounded in God’s unchanging character.”
By contrast, he says, atheists maintain that “there is no God to provide a standard of morality. Morals could still exist, but not as objective features of the universe. Rather, morals would depend on individuals, groups, or cultures. What’s right and wrong would be relative and open to change as people’s ideas evolve.”
But this is, at best, an undergraduate student’s level of understanding of the philosophical issues. Indeed, those quotations are incoherent since Shlemon needs to talk out of both sides of his mouth. His theism requires him to say that morality comes from a lawgiver and thus a person, or in other words, a subject. But because his brand of religion is conservative, he needs his morals to be “unchanging” or traditional, barring moral advances on authoritarian barbarities, so he must turn his subjective deity into a virtual object, a “subject” who never changes his mind, or whose “character” is “unchanging.”
Why would God’s character be unchanging? What sort of person, mind, or subject would God be if he never changes his mind? He’d be a subject in name only, a subject that’s as good as an object, in which case theism slides into atheism. After all, what could God’s mind do without changing? If God’s timeless, he couldn’t have one thought after another, but in that case, what does it mean to say God has “thoughts” at all? Wouldn’t the analogy between natural and supernatural minds be weakened to the point of being empty?
No, if morality must come from a subject, morality is, of course, subjective, not objective. Sure, religious morality might be independent of our minds, but not God’s.
The talk of God’s “unchanging character” is an old dodge that’s meant to escape Plato’s immortal Euthyphro argument. If morality comes from God’s will, morality is subjective and arbitrary or subject to change (contrary to the conservative’s authoritarian wish). If morality is independent of God’s will, so that it comes from God’s “character,” which would be part of his pseudo-body, morality would be objective, and thus theism (the positing of a divine person/subject who created the universe and intervenes miraculously in its affairs) wouldn’t be needed to explain morality.
Not even Christian theism implies that morality is unchanging, however. If you look closely at the myths and dogmas, you find one moral code for natural life, and another for God’s kingdom, the supposed afterlife. Will God have to change his mind, then, when he finally returns to rule over us directly and no longer indirectly via his demonic dupes? Or didn’t God change his mind when he made a second “testament” with humanity, superseding his one with the Jews? Did God’s mind change once more when he sent the world the Prophet Muhammad?
Indeed, morality should be context-sensitive since the alternative would be totalitarian. We should strive to improve our conduct where we can or to live up to some ideals, but those ideals should be realistic, not irrelevant to what we can do. So, as Christian faith transforms our character, as Christians would have it, God would elevate his expectations for us.
What’s the difference, then, between saying that God tailors his expectations to suit what things are, and saying that he changes his mind? Unrepentant sinners are held to a practically impossible standard, requiring God’s graceful intrusion to redeem his creation, namely his “son’s” sacrificial death. That’s one moral order, and it’s supposed to be followed by the return of Edenic paradise, a paradise that would likely be as eternal and flawless as it was before it fell into sin.
What the conservative Christian wants to say is that homosexuality, for instance, is always wrong, regardless of what anyone on Earth thinks. But if that moral principle comes from God, and God’s a person, that principle should be subject to a change of God’s mind. If God’s mind is frozen and he can’t learn anything because he’s always known everything, then it makes no sense to say God sent us his son because he saw that nature became a depraved place. In fact, all Christian talk of God’s “mind” would be nonsensical because no literal mind is frozen and unchanging. This disparity between the philosopher’s abstract “God” and the naïve laity’s personal deity means, as I said, that for the more reflective theists, theism reduces to atheism.
Notice that morality could have an objective basis only if it were grounded in a real object, as in something impersonal, like a godless natural order. So, it’s the atheist who can contend that morality is partly objective by showing how morality evolves from animal instincts, nature’s mindless creativity, and our existential condition of being people who must confront nature’s wild absurdity. As usual, the theist only muddies the waters.
Shlemon thinks theists can easily explain morality, but Soren Kierkegaard showed how that’s not so. The theist must confront the potential for a divine dictatorship that would require the theist to carry out what seems like a grave evil solely because God commands it. What makes God good? His power? Wouldn’t God be beyond any pedestrian sense of good and evil? So why wouldn’t God’s acts or rules seem monstrous to us, given our mere mammalian sensibilities?
According to the Bible, God commanded Abraham to kill his son Isaac, and Abraham must have begun to do so “with fear and trembling,” as Kierkegaard puts it. This is based on Philippians 2:12–13: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”
Why fear God? Because of the implicit cosmic horror in Isaiah 55:9, in which God says, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Again, what’s the theist’s point of calling God “good” or praising him for his “moral” commandments? How would the mortal theist know the difference between good and bad commandments that come from God? Wouldn’t the theist have to follow them, regardless of what anyone else thinks of them? And if God’s ways are higher than ours, how could we know we ought to approve of God’s commandments?
The Christian theist is enjoined to trust in God, but this faith-based submission is far from knowing that real morality comes from God. As far as this theist knows, God is responsible for an absurd dystopia, as in Eastern mysticism or Gnostic cosmology, so that an evil or incompetent deity would dress up his commandments as good, initiating the angelic rebellion and our enlightened pursuit of moksha, or escape from God’s sinister Creation.
Atheistic morality is free from such dystopian implications. Could anything be good or right in nature? Sure, because nature produces everything in space and time, including people who can envision preferable alternatives that deal nobly with our universal plight, so that the preferences wouldn’t be so arbitrary or idiosyncratic.
Anyway, whatever philosophical troubles there are for naturalistic atheists, you can be sure that Christian theists are plagued by a hundred times as many.