If you’re reading this, you probably think the problem of evil makes for the best atheistic argument.
The world is imperfect and full of unnecessary suffering, so how could the God we’d prefer to worship have created this world? There’s plainly a conflict between the lovable God that theistic religions tend to present, and the world this God is supposed to have made. So, if the evil and imperfections are real, God can’t be.
That argument goes back not just to David Hume but to Epicurus from the fourth century BCE, so it’s one of the oldest atheistic arguments. But it’s also perhaps the most intuitive. No complicated logic is needed to perceive the apparent conflict. Indeed, the argument itself is almost beside the point since the experience of gross unfairness can discredit popular conceptions of God.
As important as the problem of evil may be, I don’t think it’s the best that atheism can offer.
Why the problem of evil is only a runner-up
For one thing, the argument from evil is easily countered by appealing to God’s mysterious nature and to his hidden motives. While religions may reassure their members with comforting conceptions of God, they also scare them into submission by reminding them that God is holy, just, and transcendent. While it’s true that the God we’d prefer to worship may not have created the world as it is, it’s vain and blasphemous to posit such an idol in the first place. Who says God is bound by our standards?
Again, the strength of the argument from evil is more psychological than logical. Regardless of what’s logically possible, such as a hidden reason why God would allow evil to occur, religions wouldn’t survive if they held up a wholly atrocious image of God. Such a deity would eventually have no worshippers.
If the only God that could have created a largely evil world is a monstrous one, what would be the point of worshipping him? We couldn’t expect such a deity to abide by his promises, so we couldn’t expect a pleasant afterlife even if we obeyed this God’s commandments. Thus, we’d be wise to disregard the monstrous deity and enjoy at least several decades of ordinary, secular life not overshadowed by that appalling religion. Then we’d just have to hope for the best in the afterlife, much as an ant might be reduced to hoping that a large mammal won’t accidentally or maliciously step on it.
In any case, the unfalsifiable, fictive contents of theistic myths insulate these religions from any such frontal assault. You can always adjust your theological interpretations to make sense of any new piece of evidence or historical development. For that reason, some ancient religions are still here in the modern period, and their members can still proudly call themselves “Christians,” “Muslims,” or “Hindus” even when all the old, naïve, anthropocentric speculations come across as flatly preposterous or outrageous in the twenty-first century.
The dichotomy between the sacred and the profane
I’ve always found the stronger atheistic approach to be deconstructive. Instead of criticizing the religious contents from an external vantage point, what you do is simply study the religions, note the suspicious inconsistencies, and infer that the religions aren’t suitable as sacred institutions. You can enjoy the myths as stories and respect the historical importance of religions, but if the theology falls apart when scrutinized, there’s nothing there to accept or to reject. The religions are held up by faith because they’re not freestanding as models of reality.
This atheistic approach works itself out differently, depending on the religion, but there’s a general reason why we should expect any theistic religion to be incoherent, a reason that stems from the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between the transcendent realm of God’s perfection and the natural realm of mundane events. Religions are directed towards the sacred, ideally providing an overview of the profane order in terms set by that higher order.
The profane order includes our secular pursuits and perceptions. We breathe, eat, defecate, walk, sleep, raise families, work a job, grow old, and die. And we conceptualize things instrumentally to get by in a world that’s apparently something other than what we’d expect on the loftiest theological grounds. Even mystics and pantheists will find themselves distinguishing between the hidden oneness of everything and the illusion of their multiplicity in what scientists call “nature.”
Of course, that dichotomy entails the problem of evil. But notice also what happens to the dichotomy in history: due to the creedal or otherwise traditional nature of the religions that endure for centuries, the theological conception of the sacred is relatively stable, as fixed by the revered scriptures that are written at the religion’s point of origin, while the profane order changes drastically, especially with modernization.
Our secular practices progress while the creed and the rituals stay the same. In short, religious folks are conservative in their view of what’s sacred, but they’re relatively progressive in their professional, familial, mundane contexts.
True, in the Middle East or in fringe cults, families might still be as patriarchal or otherwise premodern as they were centuries ago. But even socially conservative religious people are pressured to adapt to the changing zeitgeist, to the historical revolutions that have transformed the profane world, whereas the incentives are the opposite in the case of the sacred. All religious people are expected to revere their scriptures and their ancient rituals. To modernize the religion is to secularize it.
The resulting dilemma for religions
Thus, the less modern and more traditional the theology, the more the myths and rituals will be archaic nonstarters as the profane order progresses and violates the premodern mindset. Studying a highly conservative religion in the twenty-first century, you’d find myriad conflicts between the religion’s functions, assumptions, and practices, on the one hand, and those of modernity on the other. This is the situation of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in rural parts of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, southern Africa, and Russia, as well as in large parts of the Middle East, northern Africa, and India, respectively.
To avoid becoming obsolete in that fashion, religions typically modernize their theology. That modernization can’t, however, amount to a complete rewriting of the sacred scriptures since that would be blasphemous. Instead, the religion will tolerate certain liberal interpretations of problematic passages or will adjust its practices, if only to abide by the secular law.
Here, then, is a source of religions’ incoherence. Religions must straddle both the supposed sacredness of their point of origin, including their scriptures and the tales of their founding miracles, and the progressive standards of the profane order which includes those of secular society. Again, the theology must remain relatively unchanged across the centuries, lest the religion destroy itself, whereas the external, secular society changes radically with the revolutions of science, capitalism, industry, and democracy.
That straddling is bound to be awkward for the organized religions that overstay their welcome.
The striking incoherence of Christianity
Just to take an egregious example in the case of Christianity.
Modernity imposed itself on the elite study of the Bible, with the historical-critical method, and this secular method of objectifying and naturalizing history was meant to apply scientific standards even at the cost of undermining faith in the Church’s dogmas. The result was a spectacular increase of knowledge in how the Bible was written, what genre its books belong to, what they say in their historical contexts, and what likely happened in the early Christian period.
For example, modern historians discovered the synoptic problem of the Gospels, noting these books’ strong intertextual relationship that would make no sense if they were written by eyewitnesses, as Christian tradition decreed. Moreover, these historians pursued knowledge of what they called “the historical Jesus,” as opposed to the Christ of faith, and they determined that the available evidence doesn’t support an expansive a view of the former. That is, they found that the historical Jesus is largely lost to time because the New Testament isn’t so trustworthy as a historical record. The documents are anonymous, propagandistic, hagiographic, fanciful, interdependent, late, contradictory, and/or forged.
The incoherence of Christianity thus presents itself strikingly in the split between what the Christian elites know about their religion, from their studies, and what the Christian laity believes in its comparative ignorance. The priests typically conceal or downplay the subversive discoveries and perspectives to maintain their religion’s mystique.
The atheist’s best strategy, then, is effectively to act like a treacherous priest, to study the religion and to give away the secrets of the temple, to alert the laity that its emperor’s wearing no clothes. The atheist can do so by acting as a parasite within the Christian body, by acquiring some advanced knowledge of the subject that’s bound to fall apart under scrutiny for the above reason. Again, the more the religion attempts to modernize itself while retaining its sacred inspiration, the more the religion will come apart at the seams in trying to have it both ways.
For example, Christians may have to concede that three of the four canonical gospels depended on the fourth one, and that they were written decades after Jesus’s life, after Jerusalem’s destruction in around 70 CE. But Christians will have to maintain that the authors were divinely inspired. Yet why would a divinely inspired author have to copy at length from another source? Shouldn’t such an author be writing in the flow state, letting his or her muse deploy the author as a vessel? What kind of divinely inspired writer stoops to merely nitpicking a prior account, as the authors of Matthew and Luke probably do in their use of Mark?
The irony of atheistic knowledge of religion
All of which is ironic, of course, because a religion’s adherents will insist that studying their faith is bound to attract you to it. But that would be an equivocation since what the religion’s guardians would mean, rather, is that you’ll become an initiate if you’re indoctrinated into it. Indoctrinating yourself is very different from studying the thing objectively from an outsider’s vantage point. Most religious people are indoctrinated as children, so they absorb the stories and the culture before they’re able to think critically about them.
The atheistic adult has no such handicap. She can study the religion like an anthropologist until she comes to understand the religion’s core beliefs and practices. Some apologists maintain that they embraced their religion as adults because of such study, or that they converted from atheism to the religion’s perspective. No such testimony should be trusted as the whole truth in the case of Christianity, at least, because that apologist is engaged in the same propaganda as the New Testament’s authors who meant to “spread the good news.”
In any case, conversion experiences are very rare since we seldom change our mind on major issues. Unless the atheist grew up as a member of the religion, studying that religion later — after she became an atheist — poses very little threat to his or her atheistic beliefs and secular lifestyle. The more she learns about the religion in question, the more “dirt” she digs up. This will increase her appreciation of how the religion makes itself palatable as a contender in the modern period only by partially modernizing its creed and myths, and thus by injecting the profane, as it were, into the sacred, destroying its conceptions of the latter and of itself as a religion, from within.
The atheist need only record how modernized religions are weak imitations of their former theocracies and are politically compromised betrayals of their founding ideals; that is, she need only present religions as they are in the grand sweep of history. Doing so inevitably humanizes and secularizes religions, neutralizing them in the process. With objective understanding of how religions originate and develop, they come across as all-too human products, to be entertained henceforth on literary, historical, and political grounds.
Faith in the religious doctrines or worship of the mythic protagonists usually depends on ignorance. The more you know about the religion, the less you’re inclined to be crudely literalistic or militant in pushing a religious agenda. The Dunning-Kruger effect is operative here, so the atheist should shed light on a religion to embarrass the loudest, least knowledgeable, and most oafish practitioners.
The argument from religion’s incoherence
What, then, is the strongest atheistic argument? Here’s one formulation of it, and we can call it the argument from religion’s inevitable incoherence:
(1) For historical reasons, each theistic religion tends to contradict itself — and not just here and there in its peripheral teachings, but in its core message that defines its identity or brand.
(2) Thus, each theistic religion is hollow and is propped up in its later stages by naïve faith and absentminded tradition, or by indoctrination and behavioural automation.
(3) Therefore, no long-lasting theistic religion presents the atheist with a sustainable claim about a deity, which is to say that each such religion refutes itself (such as in its attempt to modernize itself), doing the atheist’s work for her.
First, then, the atheist assumes the religion’s incoherence in (1), an assumption that would be independently supported, depending on the religion on offer.
Then, in (2), the atheist infers that the best explanation of that incoherence is that the religion is a mere human product that adapts awkwardly to modernity, for example, to remain competitive as an institution for political and commercial reasons, or to protect its members from painful cognitive dissonance.
And as stated, the logic of this argument is deconstructive in that it leaves atheistic worldviews as the only viable contenders, as stated in (3), on the assumption that the religions’ core theological contents dissolve upon examination.
Again, the atheist’s job should be to learn why this argument is true for any “great” (long-lasting) theistic religion, by using some religions as case studies. She can study those religions from historical and anthropological perspectives and use that knowledge to back up (1).
Why that argument is stronger than the argument from evil
Notice the crucial advantage this argument has over the argument from evil. The latter can be dismissed by appealing to an ad hoc theodicy, whereas the former uses that very arbitrary, shifting nature of theology as a premise, taking it for granted and explaining it on atheistic grounds.
The theist refutes the argument from evil by appealing to some conception of God, such as to the deity’s resort to an unknowable plan. But no such appeal to theology helps the theist in response to the argument from religion’s incoherence. This latter argument welcomes the theist’s conception of God since that conception is bound to be self-contradictory and thus to do the atheist’s work for her. The atheist merely gives the theist rope to hang herself with her jumbled theological interpretations, or rather supplies the damning information herself when the theist isn’t forthcoming with it.
Does God have a hidden plan? How could a necessary being have any such personal attribute? Wouldn’t that make God a limited, contingent being, a knowable thing rather than the unknowable ground of all beings? Or if God is love, how could “he” also be so consumed with a sense of retribution that he’d be willing to torture forever most of the people he created? Or if God’s the creator of billions of galaxies, why would he think like a primitive person in seeking a blood sacrifice to deal with the pseudo-problem of his creatures’ sinful impurity?
And so on and so forth, down through each of the sordid, archaic doctrines, and for each of the premodern theistic religions that no longer make much sense.
Another advantage is that support for (1) is already well under way since atheists and agnostics typically know more about religions than do the practitioners, as a Pew poll indicates.
The mystical utility of religious self-contradictions
I’ll close by considering some common religious explanations of the doctrinal incoherence that would compete with the atheistic account.
First, there’s mysticism, the idea that God is ineffable so we can’t hope to model the divine with any logical or scientifically respectable framework. God is beyond our comprehension, so religious people should seek to experience God as a transcendent possibility or energy source, not idolize the divine with intellectual conceits.
Moreover, suggests the mystic, the attempt to rationally understand God or to reduce the sacred to profane terms is bound to be flawed, but the theological contradictions can ironically free the initiate from such limited terms. That is, once the practitioner sees the limits of reason, she can seek a nonrational basis of her religion, in some ecstatic experience.
Whatever other problems mysticism may have, though, the point to emphasize here is that any such appeal already conflicts with theism. The argument from religion’s incoherence should target historical formulations of exoteric theism since those are the ones that most likely fall afoul of modernity and thus undermine themselves in their attempt to remain viable past their prime.
Indeed, mysticism provides another ground for self-contradiction since talk of the mystic’s deity — of the absolute ground of being, the oneness of everything, or universal, impersonal consciousness — will contradict theistic messages. Indeed, studying the contrast between esoteric (mystical and quasi-atheistic) and exoteric (anthropomorphizing and literalistic) religions, or between elite and folk interpretations of the myths and creeds should be part of the atheist’s training in support of the foregoing argument from incoherence.
Thus, mysticism ends up supporting this atheistic argument, provided that the atheist calls attention to the likely equivocation between mystical and lay theologies.
The fallibility of human interpretations of the divine
Lastly, an apologist might credit the contradictions to the corruption of scripture due to human fallibility. The religion would rest on miraculous, divine revelation and while the scriptures would be divinely inspired, naturally they’d be infected with human errors and biases.
This, however, is a prime example of the straddling or the artificial, ad hoc centrism we can expect from a mainstream religion. Whereas the scriptures used to be inerrant, now they’re only “inspired.” That casuistic weasel word is a product of the religion’s modernization since it’s supposed to insulate the key events or experiences that define the religion, by being vague enough to withstand challenges to the core theology while sacrificing the periphery to rational scrutiny.
At this point the atheist should merely dig a little deeper. Which religious doctrines are core, and do the practitioners agree on that front or do the sects openly contradict each other? Why wouldn’t God be powerful enough to overcome human bias, to make the revelation flawless or to protect the scriptures throughout history, especially if the eternal state of our afterlife hangs in the balance? Why has God waited so long to reveal himself fully, long after the scriptures have lost their magical sheen due to secular progress, so that by now no one can be fairly blamed for doubting them? Does divine inspiration mean that any religious doctrine is ironclad? What’s the difference between divine inspiration and the mere artistic kind? If the scriptures are inspired just by an idealistic vision, wouldn’t that make them literary works of art, subject mainly, then, to aesthetic evaluation?
Answering such questions would place the apologist at odds either with her religious tradition or with modernity, which would render her attempts at reconciling them more precarious. The more compromised the religious message appears, the more it loses its mystique, and the more we’ll be inclined to look elsewhere for a spiritual/existential perspective and practice.