We're All Atheists Now?

When you atheists understand why a jury can convict one particular person for a crime and not any of the other 7+ billion people on the planet who are technically eligible suspects, then you will understand why I am a Christian believer. The available evidence points to the Christian God, not to Zeus, Thor, or Quetzalcoatl.

If one were to live by the logic presented in this uncompelling meme, our judicial system would collapse. A lawyer for a likely murder suspect could simply say to the jury, "Surely you would agree that all these other people in this courtroom are innocent of this crime. I'm simply asking that you go one suspect further and declare my client innocent of these charges."

We are confident in the Christian God because that is where the evidence points regardless of the other options.

[This response is adapted from the work of Andy Bannister in Chapter 3 of The Atheist Who Didn't Exist.]

Science and Observations of God

What is the message of this meme?

• Science improves our knowledge over time. We have better images now of things that were previously inaccessible to us.
• Science couldn't then nor can it now observe God.
• Therefore, God must not be real because science cannot see him.

How to respond?

1. Science is a wonderful enterprise that does indeed improve our knowledge, and Christians should embrace, rather than fear, it.
2. The traditional Christian conception of God is that he is not physical, so we should not expect to be able to physically see him.
3. This world is full of things that skeptics, atheists, and scientists in general have good reason to believe exist even though they cannot see them, such as magnetic fields, quarks, a mathematical point or line, past genetic mutations, past transitional forms for which there are no fossils, force carriers in physics like photons or gluons, and past historical events for which there are no records.
4. The epistemology (or way of knowing) of this meme and of the average skeptic is weak sauce. If we limited our knowledge to only that which we could see, then we would know very few things indeed.

If atheists and skeptics want to claim that they can be confident in their lack of belief in God because science hasn't observed him, then to be consistent they must also claim to lack a belief in many other things that are not controversial.

Putting God Out of a Job?

In my interactions with members of our local freethought society, it is simply assumed that science has displaced God. He has become unnecessary because our knowledge of physics, chemistry, cosmology, and biology have grown immensely. Our gaps of knowledge are being filled in, and therefore there is no need for God.

By way of response, I came across  this quotation from physicist Luke Barnes, co-author of the wonderful book, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. He speaks directly to this tendency on the part of atheists to assume that God retreats on the field of battle as scientific knowledge marches forward:

The relationship of God to the Universe is something like that of an author to a book. We won’t find J. K. Rowling in Hogwarts or Shakespeare in fair Verona. We can’t put the author out of a job by discovering a new character, or deciphering the plot, of finding the first page of the book, which reveals how the story started. This is not a hastily revised ‘modern’ God, retreating in the face of science. It predates the scientific revolution by a few thousand years, and for the most part was the worldview of the makers of the scientific revolution.

The Christian Philosopher of science and mathematician, John Lennox, makes a similar point in his book, God's Undertaker:

…understanding the mechanism by which a Ford car works is not in itself an argument for regarding Mr. Ford himself as non-existent. The existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism. 

How silly would it be for a car mechanic to lift the hood and declare, "I don't see Henry Ford! He must not exist!" In the same way as our scientific knowledge progresses, we do not put God out of a job.

Christian theists do not hold to "god-of-the-gaps" theology that says because we do not understand something, therefore God did it. No serious Christian thinker has ever advocated this position. Rather, God is a necessary being who is the ground of all existence. This view of God has been dominant since Aristotle, who although was not a Christian, he understood the need for a different kind of being to ground all motion and change.

Ironically, even as atheists assert that they are the rational and educated ones, they operate with a view of God that historically no one has ever held. I have found this lack of interaction with serious Christian theism to be a hallmark of the thought of our local freethinkers, thus one of my goals for continuing to join them is to disrupt their echo chamber and to represent (as best I can) the stream of Christian philosophy that they have never interacted with.