Modern Library

In this overview of why we should accept that God is not the source of morality, Raymond D. Bradley first outlines four kinds of crimes that God willingly admits to causing, committing, condoning, or commanding, if the holy scriptures are to be believed: crimes against humanity, war crimes, licensing moral mayhem and murder, and crimes of torture. Since any one of these would contravene morality, a being responsible for them could hardly be said to be a source of morality. There is an explicit contradiction between God's moral perfection and his scriptural crimes since, as Bradley says, "a morally perfect being would not do anything that is morally wrong." So which core belief are traditional theists willing to give up to avoid this contradiction?

Several commentators have attempted to reduce Hume's maxim about miracles to a formula in the language of probability theory. This paper examines two such attempts, one of which is based on the probability of the alleged miracle conditioned by the testimony for it, and the other on its unconditional probability. The conditional probability leads to a formula that is valid—though only when qualified—but not useful, while the unconditional probability results in an invalid formula. The utility of expressing Hume's maxim in terms of probability theory is shown to be questionable, and an alternative approach is presented.

Up to the present day, a large number of the followers of Abrahamic religions have insisted that the accounts of creation found in the book of Genesis are a literal historical account of past events. Do they have any basis in actual history? Are they original to the Hebrew people? If not, what or who inspired them? In this thorough examination of the history and mythology of the cultures surrounding ancient Israel, Jason Gibson compares the oldest creation myths of Mesopotamia with those found in Genesis to demonstrate a clear connection between ancient Hebrew beliefs and the Sumerian myths that predated them.

In this article David Kyle Johnson argues that both the diversity of religious experiences and natural explanations for them entail that religious experiences cannot provide justification for religious beliefs. Johnson first considers the supposed role of religious experiences in justifying religious belief, then shows how the diversity of religious experiences raises an inductive problem that negates the ability of religious experience to justify religious belief. Finally, he shows that available natural explanations for religious experiences have the same end result by providing better explanations of religious experiences than religious explanations of them.

In this greatly expanded version of his contribution to The Antipodean Philosopher, Raymond D. Bradley uses H. L. Mencken's classic "Memorial Service" as a jumping off point to explain why he is an atheist, and not an "agnostic," about the existence of any members of the category "gods." Since which gods happen to predominate in the society into which one was born depends upon accidents of birth, how can anyone justifiably have confidence that any of the gods on Mencken's list actually exist? Turning to our own Western monotheistic tradition, Bradley goes on critique the intellectual and moral defense that believers have mounted for the biblical God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with particular emphasis on "intelligent design" and "fine-tuning" arguments and how the pastorate feign ignorance about what their own biblical scholarship has uncovered about the all-too-human origins of their "revealed" sacred texts.

In The Case Against Miracles, John Loftus continues his counterapologetic project by focusing on miracle claims. Although ostensibly a multicontributor response to Lee Strobel's work, it passes over the point-by-point response format and instead provides a range of arguments that miracle claims should be met with incredulity. David Corner argues that apologists cannot even meet the basic criteria of showing that an alleged miracle has occurred, that it cannot be explained by natural causes, and that it is not simply a natural anomaly to established facts. Matt McCormick argues that the performance of miracles is inconsistent with God's traditional divine attributes. John Loftus argues that alleged miracles must be demonstrably impossible on naturalistic grounds while simultaneously meeting a high bar of evidence that they actually occurred. Darren Slade notes a major shortcoming in Craig S. Keener's overt enthusiasm for recording miracle stories without being able to verify them independently. Slade recommends that miracle investigators instead employ forensic and law enforcement methods like Criteria-Based Content Analysis and the ADVOKATE criteria for assessing eyewitness testimony. Other pieces argue that since the New Testament suggested an imminent return of Christ, the absence of Christ's return is evidence for the prophetic failure of the text; that the Bible is not an accurate source of history; and that specific miraculous claims within the biblical text contradict scientific discoveries. Loftus' penultimate chapter primarily serves as a response to Michael Licona's recent apologetic monograph on the resurrection of Jesus.

Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith aims to answer the "toughest objections to Christianity" through interviews with well-known Christian apologists. In the introduction, Strobel lists what he calls Christianity's "Big Eight Conundrums"—including many of the questions that Secular Web author Paul Doland continually asked himself when he was still a Christian. Though Strobel generally does a good job of explaining the objections, the more Doland contemplated Strobel's interviewees' responses, the less satisfying he found those responses to be. This point-by-point critique aims to explain why Doland found each of these responses to be weak at best or preposterous at worst, and he was consequently forced to conclude that Strobel may have actually produced a case against faith. This latest edition includes extensive revisions to the section of Objection 2 concerning the rationality of belief in miracles.

Commentary on Paul Doland's Critique of Strobel's Case for Faith (n.d.) by Avue (Off Site)

While Paul Doland's critique of Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith shows a decent understanding of current issues within the Christian Church and the socio-religious issues surrounding the Church, he does not show a good understanding of Christianity itself. He shows this, for example, in his discussions of God as heavenly father, original sin, and salvation.

No Better than Strobel: A Reply to God and Science's Case for Faith (2020)

In his earlier Secular Web critique of Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith, Paul Doland concluded that by raising tough questions for Christianity but failing to adequately respond to them, Strobel (and his interviewees) inadvertently ending up producing a strong case against faith. A rejoinder to Doland's critique was subsequently published on the God and Science website. In this response to that rejoinder, Doland defends his original conclusion that neither The Case for Faith in particular, nor Christianity in general, provide believable and coherent answers to the sorts of questions that Strobel originally raised. Nor, for that matter, does the attempt by the God and Science website to rehabilitate Strobel's answers to Christianity's toughest questions.

In this paper Horia Plugaru argues that theism is necessarily false because attributes usually ascribed to God, such as the property of being morally perfect, are incompatible with God's alleged creation of sentient beings. Using the resources of contemporary debates on the ethics of procreation, Plugaru develops this new logical argument against theism on the foundation of David Benatar's axiological asymmetry, which, on top of elegantly explaining four commonly held judgments, entails that sentient beings are always harmed by coming into existence. Since God is said to be responsible for bringing sentient beings into existence, even though he had no need to do so, he cannot be morally perfect; and if moral perfection is taken to be a defining attribute of God, then God cannot exist. After formally presenting the argument, Plugaru defends its crucial premises against possible objections in order to show just how much force the argument has against them.

Two of the most salient beliefs that most theists hold are that God is maximally good and loving, and that the eternal postmortem experience of the beatific vision of God is the summum bonum for all human beings. Given these two foundational theistic tenets, in this paper Richard Schoenig argues that God would have created humans in what he calls heaven world, and immediately and directly offered to all of them the option of experiencing that highest good—thereby skipping the pain, suffering, and confusion which suffuses this world. The argument developed in the paper concludes that there are no good reasons why God would not have created heaven world rather than this world. If so, then the existence of this world rather than heaven world constitutes adequate evidence that God does not exist.

In his earlier Secular Web critique of Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith, Paul Doland concluded that by raising tough questions for Christianity but failing to adequately respond to them, Strobel (and his interviewees) inadvertently ending up producing a strong case against faith. A rejoinder to Doland's critique was subsequently published on the God and Science website. In this response to that rejoinder, Doland defends his original conclusion that neither The Case for Faith in particular, nor Christianity in general, provide believable and coherent answers to the sorts of questions that Strobel originally raised. Nor, for that matter, does the attempt by the God and Science website to rehabilitate Strobel's answers to Christianity's toughest questions.

The ontological argument for the existence of God has a long and well-discussed history. First clearly articulated by St. Anselm in 1078, it almost immediately generated lively debate, debate that continues to the present day. Attacks on the argument have been launched by Gaunilo, St. Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and others, and those attacks have forced supporters of the argument (including, but not limited to, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and David Bentley Hart) to present different formulations of it. This has sharpened the lines of demarcation between the two sides and made the issues involved clearer. In this article, James R. Henderson addresses an aspect of the debate that has been largely neglected—exactly what it means to "exist in the mind" in Anselm's sense. Henderson ultimately concludes that the coherence of the concept of God needs to be established before the ontological argument can be given any weight.

C. S. Lewis' argument from reason is perhaps his most famous argument because of the legendary debate that it inspired. In a response to it at Oxford University's Socratic Club, G. E. M. Anscombe reputedly demolished the argument, causing Lewis to withdraw from contributing to apologetics ever again. Many disagree that Anscombe actually demolished Lewis' central point, but grant that the encounter destroyed Lewis' confidence as a philosopher. In this paper (originally presented as a talk) David Kyle Johnson argues that Lewis' encounter with Anscombe should have reduced his confidence as an apologist because his argument rests on an embarrassing fundamental misunderstanding. In particular, after outlining the exchange between Lewis and Anscombe, Johnson aims to show that Lewis severely misunderstood both naturalism and evolution, and that this misunderstanding permeated Lewis' argument from reason.

Whether deserved or not, Antony Flew acquired a reputation for wrongheadedly using Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion against theological statements such as "God exists" or "God loves us." He also famously maintained that God debates should proceed under a presumption of atheism, with theistic debaters bearing the entire burden of proof while atheistic debaters simply tore down their arguments. In this paper Charles Echelbarger aims to make sense of why Flew seemed to be opposed to atheist debaters bearing a burden of proof by additionally offering positive arguments for atheism. Echelbarger concludes that a presumption of atheism may be justified if an atheist debater provides justified doubts that "God exists" expresses a proposition that could be true or false at all, such as if the concept of God definitionally includes the incoherent notion of an agent that acts outside of time. Theological statements may be unfalsifiable precisely because they possess such undetected conceptual incoherence. Though flawed in presentation, Flew's basic insight is more important than has often been acknowledged, and it is still highly relevant to current discussions in the philosophy of religion.

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.

There's a discrepancy between the Gospel of Luke on the one hand, and the Gospels of Mark and Matthew on the other, as to where Jesus' disciples were instructed to stay after Jesus' resurrection. Luke has the post-Resurrection Jesus instructing them to stay in Jerusalem, whereas Mark and Matthew have him telling them to stay in Galilee. In an article for Apologetics Press, Eric Lyons attempts to explain away this discrepancy by positing that Jesus' post-Resurrection instructions to his disciples in Luke didn't necessarily happen on Easter Sunday, but could have happened on a subsequent day. In this response to Apologetics Press, however, J. C. Jackson points out that this interpretation is flatly inconsistent with the conclusions of innumerable Christian scholars and theologians. Worse still, it's inconsistent with the understanding of early Christians themselves, who were willing to simply remove references to an event in Luke's Gospel altogether in order to smooth over the timeline problems that keeping them would lay bare. But most damning of all, Jackson's direct analysis of the context clearly demonstrates that Apologetics Press' rationalization of the discrepancy immediately falls apart.

A paper written over twenty years proves a mathematical theorem purporting to show that a supernaturalistic explanation for the universe is not supported by the anthropic principle, the notion that the observed properties of the universe must be compatible with its observers since otherwise the observers couldn't exist. Although this theorem is undoubtedly correct, it is not a very useful argument against the fine-tuning argument, whose standard premise is that fine-tuning is extremely improbable if naturalism is true. In the present paper Stephen Nygaard explains this mathematical theorem, presents some criticisms of it, and examines some counterarguments to the fine-tuning argument in which this theorem does not play a significant role. Nygaard shows that other aspects of probability theory, particularly the odds form of Bayes' theorem, are much more useful in uncovering the shortcomings of the fine-tuning argument. In particular, the fine-tuning argument ultimately fails because theism is not an explanation of apparent fine-tuning at all in any practical sense, so even if naturalism were unable to explain apparent fine-tuning, theism would not be a better alternative.

In an earlier critique of Orthodox rabbi Moshe Averick's Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism, Michael D. Reynolds pointed out that Averick's book is typical of recent popular works attacking "atheism" in leaning on various informal logical fallacies. In this follow-up critique Reynolds focuses specifically on what Averick has to say about the "failure" of naturalistic accounts of the origin of life, which comprise forty-eight percent of the text of Nonsense of a High Order. Reynolds finds that Averick is ignorant of the nature of science and its principles, that he either does not know, or else fails to understand, the standard scientific explanations of the topics that he addresses, that this ignorance or incomprehension causes him to invent odd notions that completely misrepresent the standard scientific view, that he arbitrarily rejects standard scientific explanations without providing any substantial argument against them, and that he repeatedly asserts that something is true without offering any argument for its truth, among other things.

Orthodox rabbi Moshe Averick's Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism is in many ways typical of that niche of recent popular books that attack modern "atheism." The errors that plague Averick's own thinking are often found in other authors of similar works. For example, Averick repeatedly makes assertions without providing any arguments to back them up, fails to engage relevant research on the issues that he touches on, and misrepresents the views of his opponents. He also spills a great deal of ink critiquing idiosyncratic views of his opponents as if they were typical of nontheists as a whole, uncharitably attaches false meanings to his opponents' statements, and takes their words out of context. He both mischaracterizes how science is done and twists cherry-picked scientific findings to create the appearance that they support his own religiously informed positions. Projecting his own unwillingness "to consider anything that presents a challenge to his dearly held belief system" on to his opponents, Averick steadfastly advocates the existence of spirits and their frequent interaction with our world, that human minds involve a spiritual component, and that the Supreme Spirit sustaining the physical world has handed down rules for us to follow, dismissing naturalistic accounts of mind, meaning, and morality for the flimsiest of reasons.

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.

In this essay Horia George Plugaru rebuts the skeptical theism response to the evidential argument from evil by employing an intuitive moral principle called the principle of theodical individualism. Although skeptical theists deny the existence of pointless evil, theodical individualism signals its existence. The only recourse left to skeptical theists is to fall into moral paralysis or make serious concessions to proponents of the evidential argument from evil.

It is commonly held that science and religion are in conflict, but a number of sophisticated believers and historians have disputed this. They have pointed out that there has never been a state of continuous conflict between science and religion, and that many scientists have been religious. Though both of these points are true, neither speak to whether the content of religious doctrines remain tenable in light of various scientific developments. In this essay Bart Klink argues that there is indeed a genuine conflict between science and religion, and that it manifests itself on four different levels. Historically, there has been conflict between the content of religious doctrines and the developing body of scientific knowledge. Sociologically, scientists are significantly less religious than nonscientists, and people of faith explicitly reject scientific findings on religious grounds. In psychology, the cognitive science of religion has had a debunking effect by providing naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs that, while not strictly refuting them, nevertheless render supernatural accounts of their origins improbable. Finally, there has been a philosophical conflict in the sense that the sciences have made the existence of a personal God and other theistic claims (e.g., to divine revelations, miracles, and answered prayers) improbable. Science has historically 'desupernaturalized' phenomena and provided a coherent naturalistic big picture of the universe that has only lead to a monologue between science and religion—one in favor of science.

A family of theistic arguments contends that the human ability to reason is to be expected under theism, but is surprising under metaphysical naturalism, and thus provides evidence favoring theism over naturalism. One common line of argument is that unguided evolution favors traits that aid in survival and reproduction, rather than traits conducive to discovering the truth. Thus, evolutionary naturalism provides us with no reason to expect our cognitive faculties to be reliable, whereas theism does provide us with reason to believe that God would have created human beings with cognitive faculties aimed at discovering the truth. Several naturalists have responded with arguments that there is in fact significant survival and reproductive value in having accurate cognitive faculties, but in this paper Aron Lucas takes a different tact. Namely, Lucas argues that even if the general fact that human beings can reason favors theism over naturalism, nevertheless the more specific fact that human reasoning suffers from a variety of cognitive biases favors naturalism over theism. If this is right, then arguments from reason can only be deemed successful by understating the full extent of our knowledge concerning human reasoning, thereby committing what Paul Draper has called the fallacy of understated evidence. After fully outlining the available data concerning human reasoning, Lucas concludes that the existence of human cognitive biases does not merely neutralize the evidential significance of the human ability to reason, but in fact overpowers it, tipping the scales in favor of naturalism (all else held equal).

The traditional authors of the canonical Gospels—Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee—are not held to be the Gospels' actual authors by the majority of mainstream New Testament scholars. Christian apologists nevertheless produce a lot of material advocating the view that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus' disciples or their attendants. Much of the general public is unfamiliar with the mainstream scholarly view that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions in order to provide a faith narrative of Christianity's central figure, Jesus Christ. While Matthew Wade Ferguson has previously discussed why scholars do not consider the Gospels to be historical documents, in this essay he explores a number of internal and external reasons why scholars doubt the traditional authorial attributions of the Gospels.

William Lane Craig's kalam cosmological argument maintains that the universe had a beginning. One of his arguments for this premise aims to show that a beginningless universe is metaphysically impossible, either because an actual infinite cannot exist because it would result in counterintuitive absurdities, or because time consists of a temporal series of events formed by successive addition, and that it's not possible for any such series to be an actual infinite. In the first of two previous papers, Arnold T. Guminski presents his solution to the problem of counterintuitive absurdities, which he believes results from applying Cantorian theory to the real world. However, his alternative version of the application of Cantorian theory to the real world attempts to achieve by a priori methods what can only be accomplished a posteriori, raises the question of whether a set theory can be fully developed that is consistent with it, and addresses "counterintuitive absurdities" that are not absurdities at all. In his second paper, Guminski correctly argues that it's possible for time to have no beginning by showing that the totality of all time need not be formed by successive addition, but this argument succeeds independently of his alternative version of the application of Cantorian theory to the real world, rendering it unnecessary.

Does God command what is morally right because it is right, or is it right because God commands it? If God commands what is right because it is right, then rightness appears to be determined by moral standards that are independent of God's commands, and that God himself is morally required to obey, calling into question his status as Supreme Being. On the other hand, if what is right is right because God commands it, then there are no moral constraints on what God commands, rendering morality completely arbitrary: even horrific actions would be deemed right. This modernized Euthyphro dilemma can be converted into an argument against the existence of the God of traditional monotheism, a sovereign creator. Although this Socratic argument does not refute God's existence as a Supreme Being, it nevertheless underscores a serious challenge to theists who argue that morality requires the truth of theism.

In Hume's Abject Failure, philosopher John Earman argues that David Hume's famous maxim that no testimony is sufficient to establish that a miracle has occurred unless its falsehood would be more miraculous than the miracle itself is just a trivial tautology, namely that we should not believe a miracle claim unless the evidence makes it more probable than not. But even if this interpretation is correct, contemporary Christian apologists fail to satisfy Hume's purportedly obvious condition that it must be more probable that a miracle occurred than that it did not occur when they argue that the miraculous resurrection of Jesus probably occurred.

In Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God, Paul Copan attempts a bold apologetic of the Judeo-Christian God's moral status. The so-called new atheists see the biblical God as a promotor of genocide, slavery, murder, rape, and other immoral acts. But the only serious objections to the biblical God's moral status are passages in which immoral acts are clearly done because of God's will, or are explicitly approved of by God. Even with this caveat, however, the Bible clearly prescribes immoral behavior that Copan cannot explain away in this fashion. Premarital sex is explicit grounds for divorce or execution of a wife, but not of a husband; rape warrants punishment when a married woman is raped, but not when an unmarried one is violated; the fathers of female victims of rape can refuse marriage to their rapist, but not the victims themselves; peoples who simply do not accept the dominant theology of Israel should be executed in war, making exception for the traumatized adolescent girls of conquered nations, whom Israelite soldiers can "spare" for themselves; and so on. In order to maintain his belief that Yahweh is morally perfect, Copan must explain away any Old Testament evidence of God's moral culpability in light of the more loving and inclusive New Testament passages. But this does not provide an objective examination of the biblical God's moral status, and thus will only appeal to Christians who are worried the about possibility that their God might be a moral monster.