Linda and I are spending the night in the historic district of Philadelphia. We've just finished 9 days of "conferencing" in Wisconsin and, this weekend, in Philadelphia at Villanova University.
This weekend's conference was with my dear friends at Faith Bible Church in New York City. Dr. John Hao and his wife Rosie are the great leaders of FBC. This was their annual summer conference, and I was the main speaker for the English-speaking Chinese congregation.
As I was about the leave Villanova early this afternoon one of the young Chinese men asked me the question: what are the best atheistic arguments available today? My immediate answer was: 1) the evidential argument from evil; and 2) the argument from divine hiddenness. The two best books on these are: The Evidential Argument from Evil, edited by Daniel Howard-Snyder, and Divine Hiddenness: New Essays, edited by Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser. Both books are collections of essays written by atheists, agnostics, and theists. If you want to dive into these arguments these are the books to begin with. (Note: they are rigorous philosophically.)
I brought Divine Hiddenness with me on these trips, and read several essays. I was especially taken by philosopher Paul Moser's essay "Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiding." I think I'm going to give it a re-read. Especially since J.P. Moreland, who was the main speaker at the Wisconsin conference I was at, highly recommended the work Moser is now doing. I'd really like to read Moser's edited collection of essays Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays. Nicholas Rescher calls Moser's The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology "a profound and illuminating treatment on as big an issue as issues get." To me it looks like Moser's "Cognitive Idolatry" essay in Divine Hiddenness is a brief version of his full-blown study done in The Elusive God. But... it's $72.
5 comments:
The best performance by an atheist in a debate that I'm familiar with was Paul Draper vs William Lane Craig. Maybe not as heady and technical as some others, but totally disarming to Craig in my opinion and one of the rare defeats amongst Craig's long list of victories. I used to have a link to it, but it's not working any more. I have the .mp3 though if you aren't able to find it online and you're interested let me know. It's about 10 MB so I could mail it to you.
Actually, I just tried google and got it here if this works for you.
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/12/william-lane-craig-v-paul-draper-debate.html
Thank you so much John. I'll probably give this a listen. I'm familiar with Draper's criticism of Bill's Kalam argument. Both Bill's argument and Draper's "A Critique of the Kalam Cosmological Argument" are in the Philosophy of Religion text I use at MCCC - Pojman's Phil of Religion: An Anthology.
I got the link - thanks!
Jon - I'm now listening to the Draper-Craig debate. I just read (a few days ago) Draper's essay in the book Divine Hiddenness. As I listent to Draper he's preenting a lot of the same material.
George H. Smith's "Atheism -- The Case Against God" and Victor Stenger's "God -- The Failed Hypothesis" are, I think, the two best arguments against the existence of deities. Richard Dawkins's "The Greatest Show On Earth" disproves creationism beyond a doubt. And I think the notion that God answers prayers is thoroughly debunked by the "Why Does God Hate Amputees?" website.
The latter is my favorite argument, for its simplicity and obviousness. It notes that people with, say, cancer, often pray to God for healing, and they go back to the doctor who tells them that their cancer has completely disappeared, whereupon the people claim a miracle has taken place and God has answered their prayers. Now, of course, there are two possible explanations for this: 1) That God really miraculously cured them, or 2) That the cancer went into remission thanks to good medical treatment and a stroke of luck, and it is only coincidental that the person also prayed to a deity at the same time. Thus, cancer going away is not a definitive measure of whether or not God answers prayers. All sorts of illnesses, ailments, and predicaments can be rectified by natural means in a "seemingly" miraculous way. But to truly test the hypothesis that God answers prayers, one would need a miraculous event that could only be miraculous, and not merely coincidental. Some people have proposed amputees as the perfect kind of subject for this question, because amputated limbs cannot naturally regrow in humans--there would be no natural explanation if someone prayed to God for healing and their amputated limb was regenerated. However, there has never been such a recorded instance of an amputee regrowing a limb--if there had been, it would be major news. One would think that, out of all the prayers God has supposedly answered, out of all the different ailments God has supposedly cured, that he would have healed at least one amputee. Yet, in the only instances where the hand of God could truly be verified, the hand of God is mysteriously absent.
Hi Josiah - thank you for commenting. Here are a few thoughts I have re. the amputee argument against a God who answers prayer.
1) I have clinical evidence where, using abductive reasoning (inference as the best explanation), cancer has completely gone away (therefore it's not "in remission"). The order has been this: 1) Person A has cancer and is being treated for cancer. 2) Person A receives prayer. 3)Tests show that Person A no longer has cancer.
I've been collaborating with two scholars on forthcoming books on divine healing, where these kind of healings following prayers will be documented.
2) Of course "cancer going away" is not a "definitive" answer, since all such examples are only either inductively or abductively probable. The same holds for the amputee argument. While it may seem more obvious in the amputee example, it's still only a probableistic argument, and not a deductive (logically necessary) argument.
3) I simply do not know that there has never been a healing of an amputee. I don't think it's true that if an amputee was healed, somewhgere and sometime in the world, it would thereby be "major news." Perhaps a secular press would not report it, but a religious press would?
4) Surely it's not true that the only instances "where the hand of God could be truly verified" are like healings of amputees. Precisely because all such "verification" will only be probable and not necessary.
5) I think the amputee argument is only convincing to those who already believe there is no God. Note that if that's true, then the argument begs the question. Probably that's why someone like myself who studies, in-depth, philosophy of religion issues such as the problem of evil, remains essentially undeterred by this argument. One's noetic framework comes into play. Mine is theism, and I still find theism more coherent than atheism.
6) Which leads to my last thought: atheism (philosophical naturalism) is fraught with more conceptual problems than theism. I find atheism contains incoherencies that surpass the amputee example such as, e.g., the issues philosopher J.P. Moreland raises re. philosophical naturalism in his Consciousness and the Existence of God.
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