In his Secular Web article "No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese," Keith Parsons had argued that the explanatory success of science makes belief in God logically unnecessary in the Laplacian sense of "I have no need of the hypothesis." In "Job Opening: Creator of the Universe—A Reply to Keith Parsons," Paul Herrick responded that, in principle, theism cannot be rendered explanatorily powerless by the progress of science. In this response to Herrick's reply, Parsons thoroughly dismantles Herrick's cosmological argument for the existence of God piece by piece, with particular emphasis on Herrick's claim that God created our universe out of pure love.
As skeptics see it, recent theistic arguments are pretty much old hat. Their basic modus operandi has always been the same: represent some aspect of the universe as requiring an explanation that no naturalistic hypothesis can provide, and then propose God as the only possible or most satisfactory solution. Skeptics retort that either no explanation is required, naturalistic accounts suffice, or God provides no uniquely satisfactory explanation. The details may change, but the pattern remains the same. The theistic pattern is exemplified in the work of Dallas Willard, particularly his three-stage argument for the existence of God. Willard argues that God is needed because the natural universe is not enough. In this response, Keith Parsons provides the standard retort: naturalism suffices to answer all legitimate questions, and the appeal to God is either useless or obscurantist.
The received view of Hume scholars is that Part I of David Hume's essay "Of Miracles" proffers an argument that it is never rational to accept a miracle claim on the basis on testimonial evidence. But even among those advocating the received view, there's debate about exactly what argument is being offered in Part I. More significantly, the received view of Part I is notoriously hard to reconcile with the four evidential arguments offered in Part II of the essay. For if no testimony would ever be sufficient to establish that a miracle has occurred under any circumstances, why bother to evaluate whether the testimony that we actually have is good enough to rationally accept that any miracles have in fact occurred? In this essay Keith Parsons reconciles Parts I and II of Hume's long-debated "Of Miracles" by interpreting Part I to be allowing the possibility that one could rationally affirm the occurrence of a miracle on the basis of testimony in an ideal case. Part II then simply aims to show that no actual miracle claims even come close to approximating the ideal case. That is, in Part I Hume the philosopher lays out exactly how heavy a burden of proof the miracle claimant must meet when miracle claims are directed toward the well-prepared skeptic. Then in Part II Hume the historian cites the historical evidence that has been offered for miracle claims to show how unlikely it is that any actual miracle claim can meet such a burden. These two parts combine to show that, while it is in principle possible to substantiate a miracle claim with human testimony, the actual circumstances of such claims disclose a vast gap between what is verifiable in principle and what is confirmable in practice.
If God is all-powerful, then he can prevent evil; and if he is as good as can be, then he will prevent it. Why, then, does evil exist? The existence of evil implies that either God is not all-powerful, or he is not perfectly good. And if the traditional God must be both, then the existence of evil entails that such a God does not exist. Unless, of course, God has some morally sufficient reason for permitting evil—to prevent even greater evils, perhaps, or to enable some greater good. But examples of apparently pointless evils could be multiplied indefinitely, and some evils are so egregiously awful that no conceivable attendant good would be great enough to justify permitting them. But perhaps there are attendant goods that we, with our finite minds, simply cannot conceive. Perhaps; but this solution comes at a price. If we can have no inkling of what God would permit to happen, then we can equally have no inkling of whether God does, or even could, exist.
According to Alister McGrath, the early 21st century marks the decline of atheism. In this critique of McGrath's arguments, Keith Parsons considers whether the intellectual clout, stature, or influence of atheism has in fact declined in recent years, concluding that McGrath does not even begin to address the real intellectual case for atheism. That disbelief in God is just as much a matter of faith as belief in God can only be a stale platitude from McGrath given his failure to even superficially survey the best arguments for atheism. McGrath does address, however, four charges made by Richard Dawkins against religion, including the charge that evolution makes God unnecessary as an explanation and that religion is a source of much of the misery in the world. Parsons concludes that once one appropriately qualifies or refines Dawkins' accusations, McGrath's critique fails to adequately address the underlying problems for religion that inspire them. Moreover, to the extent that the influence of inherently controversial and divisive religions on people's lives grows, a corresponding dawn of the popularity of atheism is inevitable.
In Kingdom Coming Michelle Goldberg lets America's "Christian Reconstructionists," who openly advocate making the Bible the basis of a shari'a-type religious law, speak for themselves. Though considered extreme even within the religious right, an offshoot called dominionism, or Christian Nationalism, openly advocates theocracy and is rapidly gaining ground among "mainstream" right-wing Christians. Those swept away in this fundamentalist counterculture live in a universe that they have created, separate from and parallel to the one that the rest of us live in. The immediate danger they pose is not their impact on social issues, but the subversion of rationality itself, which has been achieved to an alarming extent. Today the best established scientific conclusions are routinely undermined and derided, and even the mainstream media feel that they have to offer "balance" on scientific issues by giving equal time to cranks and crackpots. The religious right is motivated, organized, and well-funded, and they are not going away. We ignore them at our peril. Goldberg has done us a service in giving us a beautifully crafted statement of why we fight.
One of the clearest statements of the case for a Creator is written by Roy Abraham Varghese in his introduction to the volume Cosmos, Bios, Theos. Here Varghese argues that the best explanation for why there is something rather than nothing necessarily terminates in God, rather than the ultimate features of the physical universe, for unlike any physical thing, God is self-explanatory. But we are left completely in the dark on the sense in which God is self-explanatory, and how that would differ from the self-explanatoriness of a putative original, uncaused state of the physical universe. Consequently, I argue that there is no intellectual difficulty in postulating an initial state of the universe as a ultimate brute fact, and conclude that Varghese's arguments to the contrary fail.
Parsons argues that the question, 'Why be moral?,' is no more of a problem for the nontheist than for the theist.
Philosopher of science and zoologist Michael Ruse answers the question posed in the title his book Can a Darwinian be a Christian? in the affirmative. Ruse argues that a conflict only arises from a literal reading of Genesis. If Christianity actually depended upon such a literal reading, Ruse concedes, the resulting conflict with science would simply be all the worse for Christianity; but, pace Alvin Plantinga, Christianity does not depend upon such antiquated literalism. Although Ruse thinks that conflict can be avoided by merely adopting methodological naturalism without conflating it with the metaphysical variety, Parsons has his doubts, particularly when it comes to the issue of design. Parsons notes, for instance, that a loving Creator could've done much better than create us through a process that depends upon the vast waste, pain, and ugliness of natural selection, and that apparent design has increasingly given way to naturalistic explanations in biology--forcing theists to look for other gaps for God to fill.
In this explanation of why he is not a Christian, Keith Parsons discusses the role that Christianity has played in perpetuating suffering throughout human history, the bizarre doctrine of inflicting eternal punishment on persons for having the wrong beliefs, the composition, inconsistencies, and absurdities of the New Testament Gospels, William Lane Craig's flawed case for the resurrection of Jesus, the role of legendary development and hallucinations in early Christianity, and C.S. Lewis' weak justifications for the Christian prohibition on premarital sex.
Keith Parsons refutes seven popular misconceptions about atheism.
A Review of Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Robin Le Poidevin
The "evidentialist challenge" is the gauntlet thrown down by atheist writers such as Antony Flew, Norwood Russell Hanson, and Michael Scriven. They argue that in debates over the existence of God, the burden of proof should fall on the theist. They contend that if theists are unable to provide cogent arguments for theism, i.e. arguments showing that it is at least more probable than not that God exists, then atheism wins by default. It follows that atheists are under no obligation to argue for the nonexistence of God; their only task is to show that theistic arguments fail. Prof. Ralph McInerny argues that the burden of proof should fall on the unbeliever. Here I shall rebut Prof. McInerny's claim and argue that, in the context of public debate over the truth of theism, theists cannot shirk a heavy burden of proof.
The "book is a logically deft and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of religion. It should be useful for undergraduate courses, though parts, such as the discussion of the modal ontological argument, are quite complex and certain to confuse beginners. The book is also a brief for atheism. In general, it serves both of its functions well. However, the three parts of the book are unequal in value. I found part 3, in which Le Poidevin examines the possibility of religion without God, to be of less interest than the earlier sections. Further, though I regard part 1, 'The Limits of Theistic Explanation,' as a nearly complete success, I have some reservations about the treatment of the problem of evil in part 2."
Chapter Four Miracles, Confirmation, and Apologetics The preceding chapters have examined and criticized three different attempts to support theism by construing it as a well-confirmed scientific or quasi-scientific hypothesis. Of course, many other arguments of this sort have been or could be offered. However, if the conclusions of the first three chapters are correct; the […]
Chapter Five Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism The last chapter ended on an inconclusive note. The skeptical arguments examined there provide ample protection against certain kinds of aggressive apologetic, but it is not clear that they constitute decisive arguments against theism in general. This chapter will attempt to develop such a general anti-theistic argument. […]
Abstract This thesis examines various attempts to construe theism as an explanatory hypothesis and to defend it with arguments similar to those employed in the confirmation of scientific hypotheses. It is the aim of this work to show that such a construal fails to confirm theism and in actuality leads to its disconfirmation. The first […]
Bibliography of Works Cited Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Beversluis, John. C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1985. Boden, Margaret. “Miracles and Scientific Explanation.” Ratio, 11 (1969). Bultmann, Rudolf. “Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkuendigung.” (1941) […]
Conclusion Works highly critical of theism sometimes end on a note of hesitancy. After carefully criticizing theism, skeptics sometimes feel an onus to offer alternative forms of spirituality or at least to argue that life in a godless universe need not be meaningless. Such doubt and hesitancy are hardly surprising. Although the tide of secularism […]
Introduction The philosophical defense of theism has taken many different directions in recent years. The effort to produce strictly demonstrative theistic proofs has not been completely abandoned, but it has long since moved from centre stage. Some of the new modes of philosophical theism are quite ingenious, such as Alvin Plantinga’s effort to construe belief […]
Chapter One Creationism: The Theistic Hypothesis as Pseudoscience One of the more significant social movements of the past few years has been the revival of militant Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. Following the 1925 Scopes trial–a judicial victory but a public relations disaster for Biblical literalists–there came a period of retreat during which fundamentalism […]
Chapter Two Schlesinger on the Confirmation of Theism The first lesson to be learned from the failure of “scientific” creationism is that theism should not be presented in the guise of a scientific theory. Any such effort is bound to lapse into pseudoscience in just the way and for the same reasons as did creationism. […]
Chapter Three Swinburne and the Inductive Cosmological Argument Richard Swinburne, in his book The Existence of God, presents what is easily the most careful, comprehensive, and plausible set of arguments yet offered in defense of theism as an explanatory hypothesis.[1] He begins, admirably, with a detailed examination of the nature of inductive argument, the structure […]
This thesis examines various attempts to construe theism as an explanatory hypothesis and to defend it with arguments similar to those employed in the confirmation of scientific hypotheses. It is the aim of this work to show that such a construal fails to confirm theism and in actuality leads to its disconfirmation.
(1982) Keith Parsons The following thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982 Introduction Traditionally, a belief in the occurrence of miracles has been considered an important element of Christian faith. The miracles […]
(1982) Preface: Attempts to Avoid the Problems Keith Parsons This thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982. This section, Preface: Attempts to Avoid the Problems, was ommitted from the final thesis but […]
(1982) Bibliography Keith Parsons The following thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982 Boden, Margaret A. “Miracles and Scientific Explanation.” Ratio, 11 (1969), 137-44. Burns, R. M. The Great Debate on Miracles. […]
(1982) Chapter 1: The Consistency of the Concept Keith Parsons This thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982. Chapter 1: The Consistency of the Concept The most potent sort of objection that […]
(1982) Chapter 2: Confirming the Occurrence of Apparent Miracles Keith Parsons This thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982. Once it is agreed that the miraculous is not an inconsistent concept, the […]
(1982) Chapter 3: Three Criticisms Keith Parsons This thesis was originally written by Keith Parsons in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University, 1982. In the first two chapters of this thesis we have reached the following conclusions: First, we have […]
