"Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings" by David G. McAfee - A Book Review

I realized that after I completed the podcast series on the second edition of David McAfee's freshman book Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings, I never actually posted the text for the review. I have had several people ask about it and I kept sending people to the Scribd page where the Pdf was stored but never got around to posting it here. So at long last, here is the text of that book review. McAfee's silence on the issues of his book is deafening.

   Book Review of Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings by David McAfee by Tyler Vela

"Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do What is Just?" God and Morality in the Bible

         

 

            In Genesis 18 the Lord comes to meet with Abraham and tells him of his plans to judge the wicked cities of the plain. Often we think of only Sodom and Gomorrah but in fact there were several city states in the plains that were, at that time wicked and cruel. Abraham is told that the outcry against the people of the plain had become great – they were violent, oppressive, cruel, perverse and engaged in all manner of idolatry including continual human sacrifices. Abraham, undoubtedly concerned about his nephew Lot who went to live in those very cities then begins to plead for their safety and he says something striking. He asks if God will sweep away the righteous with the wicked. How will God discriminate between those who are wicked and those who are not? The text tells us,

²³ Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? ²⁵ Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” ²⁶ And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Genesis 18:23-26

Abraham then “negotiates” God down to just 10 people in all of the plains before God leaves to go down to the cities. What is striking is Abraham’s question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” This is the question that confronts us in today’s article.

It is common place in the debates between unbelievers[1] and Christians for the so called “atrocities” of the Old Testament to be brought into play. It is not long into the discussion, especially when the topic is that of morality and the kind of justificatory pre-conditions for morality to exist at all, that God will be called a moral monster and that the Bible cannot serve as an adequate foundation for objective morals because it condones slavery, rape, genocide, and patriarchy, or so the argument goes. Without delving into the merits or viability of those interpretations of the Biblical laws and narratives, I want to instead analyze the form of the arguments that are made. I have been increasingly aware of the diminished view of God in the west and how it impacts not only the unbelieving community but the Christian community as well. There was a time that God was viewed as so holy and righteous that to even use his name improperly was not just a social taboo but a detestable sin. However now it has become almost common place even among believers. We are told to make no image of God in the Bible but we are now in a place where a box off hit like Bruce Almighty portrays God (as played by Morgan Freeman) as a kind, albeit passive, sage-like wise man, more holy man than omnipotent Creator. Family Guy is a hit show across nearly all demographics (Evangelicals included) and what often makes us balk is not that it portrays God as an old white bearded man with a somewhat skewed moral compass but rather the kind of off color sexual or violence based humor that is used. What makes us cringe (but not look away) is the irreverent and sacrilegious material. The problem is that it is culturally irreverent and sacrilegious not religiously so. It pushes the envelope on our Late Modern American sensibilities of sex and gender which seem to not include religious piety even among the conservatives. What we see is that in the West there is an entirely diminished theological view of God, even among those who claim to base their lives on the Bible.

            God, for most Americans, is something like Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. If he exists, he is an entirely genteel, pedestrian and just wants us to be good and healthy. He wants us to be nice to our neighbors (so long as it doesn’t cost us anything) and helps us out every now and then but largely we are on our own.[2] Even Christians have largely lost the exalted view of God as holy and righteous. I’m not even sure those words would be readily understood by an average church goer. In fact we hardly even know what those terms mean anymore. We no longer live in a culture of monarchs but rather want a president who is down to earth and a lot like us. We are egalitarian through and through and reject any idea of subservience to a higher power unless it makes us better of. So naturally we imagine that God must be just like us. In order for us to think that God is good, his morals must be like our morals and his ways like our ways. He must thinks like us, believe like us, love like us, and act like us or else he is not only foreign to us but inferior. We have no idea what Isaiah could have meant when he wrote:

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Isaiah is here telling us that God is simply not like us. His ways are not our ways. He does not think like us. He is not like us. While I can sympathize with the sentiment that God is one of us because of the incarnation such that Jesus became like us, it seems that the diminished view of God running rampant in the West is incarnational theology gone horribly awry. I should note at this point that I am not trying to here argue that God exists or that he is in fact holy and righteous and worthy of praise and adoration (though I think all of those things are true – and unimaginably greatly so). I am simply setting up what the predominate theological milieu of the day is in the West in which these debates occur.

When the unbeliever challenges the Christian about the morality of God in the Bible, often the kind of responses given by Christians are to give justifications for why what God did in the Old Testament are actually inline with our current moral beliefs and should not be seen as immoral. They are, in essence, trying to make God palatable to modern skeptics and so they try to tame God and cut him down to size. To that extent the unbeliever and the believer seem to be playing on the same field. They both seem to agree that God is subservient to the moral law in the same way that we as humans are. It is this arena of discourse that I would like to challenge in this article.

It is my contention that believers often do a disservice to themselves by agreeing to play on that turf in the first place. When we attempt to defend God as moral just like us we may have good intentions but we are actually capitulating to a weaker concept of God than what is found in the Bible. To put it bluntly, we have lost the battle before a single shot is fired because we simply passively accept a kind of post-enlightenment humanistic slant on what God must be like. Once we realize this, we can see that the demands of the unbeliever for us to defend God are strawmen concepts that we should not feel compelled to respond to. It is simply not the case that God must be moral like we are moral. Not because God is “above the law” so to speak like some kind of tyrannical brut, but because God is categorically not like us. God is not a human. God is not a created being bound to the law of another. God is the ultimate ground of being and is so holy that we strain to comprehend him. As Christians we struggle to defend God because the concept of God we are defending is, in effect indefensible. Not because the Biblical God is indefensible, but the washed out and cheapened concept of God as a being a lot like us is an indefensible idol. One simply needs to read Job or the prophets to understand what it means for the Lord to be a holy and all consuming fire. The reason why we have a hard time understanding the severity of some of the punishments in the Old Testament is because we do not think sin is really all that severe, and we do not think sin is all that severe because we do not think God is all that holy or man all that bad. Both are “basically good.” We place man higher than the Bible places him with regard to rectitude and God far lower than the heavens are from the earth. We do not understand the gravity of sin because we do not think that God is really all that great.

            So it is on that playing field that these debates are played and lost. Let us consider the following two categories of Biblical teaching and narratives.

Theological Backgrounds	Narratives
God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, holy, righteous, perfect, immutable, jealous, and judge of all the earth. Humanity is created by God in God’s image, fallen in sin, and deserving of the penalty due to sin which is death (eternal separation from God).	God commands the conquest of the nations of Canaan. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to test him.

I chose some relatively simple concepts that are replete throughout the Bible and so hopefully will not be widely contested as “biblical” concepts. It seems that in order for the unbeliever’s objection to go forward they must be selective on which aspects of the Biblical concept of God that are permitted to enter into the discussion and thus constitute the lesser vision of God than that of the Biblical writers as we have discussed above. This means that when the unbeliever asks the Christian why God would command “genocide” they are poisoning the well so to speak. Because we as humans recognize that mass slaughter of our fellow humans is a grave moral evil the challenge is posed that if God were to do it, he would be evil like the mass murderers of our recent past. The main problem with the question is that God is not like us and we are not like God.

I used to give the example of the difference between a private citizen and a judge with regard to a crime such that we recognize that a judge has a certain authority to pronounce and execute sentencing and justice against a criminal that a private citizen simply does not have. For example, a private citizen cannot take a criminal and lock him away in a cellar whereas a judge has the authority to pronounce a criminal guilty and sentence him to life in prison. The right to judge a criminal is simply categorically different between a private citizen and a judge. I used to think that this was an apt illustration of the difference between humans and God. I have recently come to think that while it is a helpful illustration so far as it goes, it is not completely accurate, not because God is more like us, but because the distance between us and God is greater than the distance between a private citizen and a judge. A human judge is still human. While he has certain rights vested to him by the state to execute justice, he also has certain moral obligations that he must, in good conscious, adhere to. This seems to me where God is not only categorically different from us in the sense that God is the judge of the earth and we are not, but also in the sense that God is not bound to a standard exterior to himself whereas we as humans are. God is not vested with authority to judge. He is, by nature the rightful judge of humanity and we are not. We have in our common nomenclature sayings like “to play God.” These were brought into the language for a reason. Long ago we recognized that God was the author and giver of life and that it was only by his good pleasure that we came to be and continued to live. God quite literally had the right to take life when he saw fit for his good purposes and to execute justice against evil and sin. The saying however hardly makes sense to modern Westerners because we have become so autonomous that even Christians do not believe God would be “moral” if he judged us for sin. No, we think that we can just come as we are and stay as we are and God just loves us like a senile old grandfather who thinks his grandchildren can do no wrong. The common Western Christian, whether they know it or not, who believes that God will not judge sin is like the wicked in Psalm 10 who says to God, “You will not call to account.” One simply needs to read Lamentations to understand that God takes sin a lot more seriously than we do.

            At this point the unbeliever will surely protest that I am simply begging the question not only of God’s existence but also of his holy nature and our sinful condition. I actually concede the point. I am doing that. Yet it seems to me that I am permitted to by the nature of the unbeliever’s argument. This is now where what I have been saying so far comes to full blossom. The objection of the unbeliever that God is a “moral monster” in the Old Testament is actually an arguendo, what is commonly an argument of the form, “For the sake of argument let us assume that X is  true and reduce it to absurdity.” In order for the argument to work, the unbeliever must assume the existence of God and the accuracy of the Biblical text even if they are not aware that this is what they are doing. The argument is, whether they like it or not, if God exists and if the stories in the Bible are accurate then we can examine the morality of it all and conclude that God acted wickedly. It is precisely here that the Christian is then allowed to assume everything that is entailed within the Bible and Christian theology. In order for the unbeliever’s argument to work, it must be successful as an argument for an internal inconsistency within the Bible and the Christian theological system as a whole. It is an attempt to show that God cannot be viewed as moral and benevolent while at the same time being vicious and violent and genocidal for example. The unbeliever wants us to conclude that the Bible admonishes wicked action and therefore the god of the Bible would be evil (if he existed) and so we should reject both.

            So it is precisely here that the argument fails because it does not allow everything that the Bible teaches on the subject or that is held by Christian theology. It selects a slim sliver of the concept of God in the Bible and thus is only a refutation of a lesser concept of God. When the full weight of the Scriptures comes to bear on the issue the problem simply evaporates because the lesser concept of God is plainly not the Biblical concept of God. We can respond by saying that if God exists as described in the Bible (i.e. holy, righteous, judge, omniscient, etc) and if humanity is sinful and wicked as described in the Bible and if the wages of sin is death as described in the Bible then God acting in judgment against a wicked and evil people is not genocide or evil. It is the actions of the judge of creation meting out justice against sin as a holy God.

It is in this regard that I often point out the inconsistency of arguments like those put forward by people like Christopher Hitchens who would say that God was evil for judging the Canaanites but then turn around and say that God is evil for not intervening to stop the Nazis and the Holocaust. This position states that God was evil for judging a wicked nation and was evil for not judging a wicked nation. Besides the problem of ignoring the historic Christian position that Christ is present in all human suffering and oppression, this objection by Hitchens reveals not only an inconsistent standard but also that Hitchens is working on a diminished view of God – something that should not surprise us since he is quite literally a God despiser. He loathes the concept of God so why should we think that he would interact with an exalted concept of God as holy, righteous and pure and humanity as sinful and wicked?

Now at this point the unbeliever may then double back and say something like, “Well you still haven’t shown that God even exists in the first place” and that is all true and fine. We haven’t. Yet at that point he cannot help himself to the conclusion of his objection that the God of the Bible is a moral monster as evidence against the existence of God because once we allow the full weight of the Scriptures to come to bear on the question that diminished view of God is simply not tenable.

While it is not my intention in this article to prove that the Bible is the revealed and inspired Scriptures of God or that God exists and has acted in human history, I think what has been shown is that in order for the “Moral Monster” argument to go through, the believer must be willing to work with the low and diminished view of the unbeliever rather than the high and exalted view of God as holy Creator and Judge as found in the Bible. We should not be afraid to stand our ground and refuse to play on that turf in order to win a battle that can never be won because we have already sacrificed the Biblical view of God before we even start.  

The day after God destroyed the cities of the plain, Abraham rushed down to the cliff where he had negotiated with God and he saw the answer to his question. He may not have known at that time that God had spared Lot and his daughters but he did see that God had condemned the wicked of the plains. What we do not see if Abraham questioning if God was cruel or evil or judging sin. Rather what Abraham saw was that there was not 10 righteous people in all of the cities of the plain. His question was not if God was holy, it was if humanity was righteous. We must come to a place where we understand that God is the judge of all the earth and is holy, and that we are creatures who are created in his image and yet sin against that image and live on borrowed time and in need of grace. The unbeliever may not believe this, but we should not be willing to allow a diminished view of God filter into our theology. The god of the atheist is a moral monster. That diminished and vapid concept of a god that is just like us, who cannot judge us and who has no claim on us is indefensible. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the unbeliever. I am an unbeliever in that god. Thankfully, the holy God who has revealed himself in the Bible is not that God. The unbeliever may not believe that such a being exists, he may hate him and kick against the pricks, but once we allow all of what the Bible tells us about the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity, there is no internal contradiction between God being all good and God commanding what he wills in the Scriptures.  

---

[1] Here I am intentionally avoiding the use of the term “skeptics” because I am becoming more sure that skeptic or its kissing cousin “free thinker” are terms that Christians can consciously adopt for themselves and should no be co-opted by the unbelievers.

[2] Sociologist Christian Smith argues that  the predominate functional religion of most Americans (commonly called “folk religion”) is that of a kind of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I largely agree but would also add that it is functionally Pelagian with a diminished view of sin on top of a kind of American “can doery” mixed in. 

A Response to David Smalley’s Top 10 Reasons I’m Atheist

A Response to David Smalley’s

Top 10 Reasons I’m Atheist

http://dogmadebate.com/uncategorized/2014/04/top-10-reasons-im-atheist/

(my comments are in white and his are in red highlighted)

Lists like this are becoming ubiquitous in the atheistic blog-o-sphere. Every few months I run across a new one and often hope to find something truly novel or challenging. In fact often I hope to find any of the 10 reasons to be, well, reasonable.[1] Sadly that is few and far between and this list is hardly the exception. I was told by numerous people that The Dogma Debate Podcast was fair and balanced and that the hosts were charitable and well researched on the topics they debate on the show. With that recommendation I decided to look them up. No sooner had I sat down with my cup of coffee and opened their home page that I saw this article. After quickly skimming over this article and several others on the site, I realized that the recommendation was false advertising. Maybe they are better on their show than on the blog, but if this list is anything to go by, the prospects are not very promising.

Here I will give a brief rejoinder to each of the 11 points (yes he threw in an 11^th on his list of ten instead of just calling it his Top 11 Reasons) and let the reader decide for themselves if his reasons are all that reasonable. Because I have addressed most of these issues at length,[2] brief is hardly even adequate enough to describe what is about to take place. To anyone even remotely familiar with Christian theology, this will be a strange trip through the mind of this atheist, and for those who find the kind of “reasons” in this list to be rational, well, maybe I have become pessimistic over time but I think I could probably write a whole dissertation on each with flawless reasoning and cite scholars on all sides and you would still likely not see the problem with these points as he states them. I often wonder: if this is the kind of Christianity that atheists like this blogger have rejected, have they really rejected Christianity at all or just a strange distortion of it that only the most theologically weird type would ever endorse in the first place? For anyone who has followed my blog or Facebook groups for very long, you will be familiar with the question that I often ask atheists about their religious background. I know that this is anecdotal but after asking it probably over 1000 times, I have noticed what appears to be a strong correlation between how atheistic and hostile to religion a person is to them being raised in an overly legalistic, fundamentalistic, anti-intellectual kind of church where question are not allowed and dogma is shallow and legalistic. They don’t learn how to reason about their faith and so they learn the most vapid and indefensible kind of theological systems that, as Terry Eagleton put it in his review of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, only theological weirdos would believe.

So let us look at the 10 reasons why this atheists claims are rationales for holding to atheism.

1. If we truly had one creator speaking to prophets, it would do so consistently, not contradictory as thousands of different religions have proven.

This is a strange way to start. If we had a Creator speaking to prophets, why should we expect that all religions would be spoken to? I mean if he were to try and put this point in the form of a logical syllogism it would hide so many enthymemes[3] that it would die a death of a thousand qualifications and make the reason, as stated, a complete non sequitur. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that Christianity is true and the world is exactly how the Christian says that it is – created but fallen, and populated by believers and unbelievers alike. Would it follow then that all religious movements and self-proclaimed prophets would all rightly hear God? Doubtful. In fact we would expect to find false prophets and teachers. This diversity admittedly doesn’t argue in favor of Christianity but it certainly doesn’t militate against it.

In addition to this, a contradiction between different religions is hardly a problem for any one religion. For example, it is not a problem for Christianity that it contradicts Islam anymore than it is a problem for the Big Bang that it contradicts the Steady State model. They are true or false on their own merits. The existence of diverse and opposing and indeed contradictory positions is not a reason to say that all are false or even that one is more probably false. This is just completely incoherent for the author to maintain.

2. Living by the means of man helping man, and realizing time on earth is not a practice run, creates an urgency of life that requires fulfilling.

Again why would this make atheism more plausibly true? Even if this statement is true (which I will argue in a moment patently is not) what would this show? Since when does a sense of urgency make something more or less true? Or even more or less beneficial? And even if we argue for a sense of urgency as a virtue, then Christianity which holds that Christ could return at any moment would (and does) create a sense of urgency for many believers the world over. Would the blogger say that this adds to the truth quotient of Christian theism? That is highly unlikely.

Beyond that, the main problem with this premise is that it just seems horribly inaccurate. First of all, under Christianity this life is not a “practice run.” This is just rhetorical tom foolery. Christianity has never held that this life is a “practice run.” This life is the first chapter of the story. It is no more a “practice run” than infancy is a practice run for adolescence. Furthermore, we know from countless studies that it is religion and not atheism or secularism or humanism that is one of the biggest contributing factors in determining how much one donates their time or their money to charity. If religion were to vanish of the face of the earth tomorrow, so would the overwhelming majority of charities and worldwide aide work around the world. This “reason” is simply at odds with the real world.

To add insult to injury for this “reason,” hidden in it is the assumption that there is a real moral good in helping man. But why should this be the case on naturalism? Why ought we help each other? We have no moral foundation on naturalism for that to even be a meaningful sentiment and have every reason to adopt moral nihilism and impose our own will to power. So not only is this premise misleading and inaccurate, but it is also completely unjustifiable on his own worldview.

3. I asked my four-year-old daughter where the stars came from. She confidently said “The moon made them.” I followed by asking “Then where did the moon come from?” She strongly asserted “Daddy, the moon is the boss. Nobody made the moon.” This is an unmistakably familiar mindset; and rightfully embarrassing for an adult to hold such similar thought.

        The last I checked, we do not look at our children to be the pillars of reason and nuanced thought and this 3rd point is prime evidence for why that is. We could ask the same child where humans came from. They might answer that they come from mommies and daddies. Then we ask where mommies and daddies come from. The stork. Take that evolution?

The major problem with this “argument” is that it just makes a massive category mistake. It is simply not the case that the moon and God are even analogous concepts or entities. The moon just is a finite, contingent, material object. God, if he exists, is an immutable, necessary, immaterial entity. To compare the two is like saying that playing too close to PacMan will kill you instantly because he is round and yellow just like the sun. The unreasonableness of this third point may reveal why the author takes logic notes from his 4 year old…

4. Demeter, Jesus, Apollo, Horus, Zeus, Mithra, Yahweh, Tammuz, Ganesha, and Allah are only 10 of the thousands of gods recorded in history. An Atheist is not one that refuses to read religious doctrine; it is often one who reads too many.

       “Aether, Steady State Models, Lemarkism, Evolution and countless other failed scientific theories are recorded in history. A creationist is not one who refuses to read religious literature; it is often one who reads too much.” I wonder how he would feel about question begging and throwing evolution in with those other demonstrably failed scientific theories just because they have some vague similarities as being “scientific” and generalizing to all of them? Probably not so happy about it. This kind of Jesus Mythicism is so nonsensical that it’s bizarre anyone who claims to be rational actually defends it. It is like he has only listened to Zeitgeist and loved it without ever actually being “skeptical” and checking the sources and the claims.[4] This kind of “reasoning” is so uneducated and absurd that it is almost astonishing that the writer actually published this to the public. I have trained my junior high school students to reason better than this and to be more skeptical than this! If this kind of argumentation was turned in, I would give the paper and F without a second thought. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I do not like the conclusion. This is just shoddy thinking with zero research to support it. Pure and simple.

5. In the technicalities of most religions, there is no difference between a believer that dies before having time to repent, and a nonbeliever that rejected the doctrine altogether.

For Christianity this is literally meaningless. A believer just is one that repents and an unbeliever is one that does not. There are no “technicalities” (whatever he even possibly means by religious "technicalities") to the Christian position on this. Since I have no desire to defend religion generally, and am not even convinced that "religion" is a coherent unified concept, the fact that this quite literally has no traction with Christianity is enough for me on this point.

6. If the Christian god created humans as sinners, how could it rightfully expect us to believe the corrupt messengers it has sent to teach us the way of life?

        Under Christianity, God did not create humans as sinners. So this is just a flat out strawman and thus again has no traction with anything even remotely related to historic orthodox Christianity.

7. “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?” – Epicurus

        The Logicial problem of evil has been solved to nearly every philosopher’s satisfaction by Alvin Plantinga. This is true of even the most atheistic philosophers who were the strongest advocates of the argument such as Mackie and Rowe. Mackie writes, "Since this defense is formally [that is, logically] possible, and its principle involves no real abandonment of our ordinary view of the opposition between good and evil, we can concede that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another. But whether this offers a real solution of the problem is another question." To simply throw out this quote by Epicurus without any acknowledgement that even most atheistic philosophers believe it to be resolved is either due to utter ignorance and irrationality, or else due to complete deceit. Either is inexcusable for someone who wants to be known  for clear and educated thought on these issues.

8. All babies are Atheists. Religions are taught depending on the location and era in which you are raised. Being born in the U.S. in 1974 does not make you right, it most likely just makes you another Christian. That’s no better or worse than the person born in Tibet in 1955, who proudly worships the Dalai Lama.

        Babies are not atheists. Babies do not have belief forming faculties. They do not say “give me more evidence” or “I disbelieve in God” or “Godtards are all deluded.” Babies have no beliefs. They cannot have beliefs. They simply don’t have the rational capacity to form them yet. So in that case, babies are “atheists” in the same way that rocks, dogs and lobotomy patients are “atheists.” If your position has the same logical foundation as getting a full frontal lobotomy, then that is on you my friend. But when I was an atheist I actually had reasons and arguments for my disbeliefs and was more rational in my disbelief than a baby or a person suffering from irreversible head trauma.

What can we say about the position that we are just the product of how we are raised? Besides the fact that many convert to belief or disbelief showing that we are often capable to think for ourselves, this “argument” is problematic for two main reasons. The first, and most basic, is that this just is the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is where someone tries to discredit a view but discrediting how a person came to hold that view. So let’s imagine that he is right. Christians are only ever Christians because they were raised that way. So what? Nothing follows from that which has any affect on the truth or falsity of the Christian belief system. I could come to believe that the earth orbits the sun because I read it in a comic book. That would be a pretty silly reason to come to that belief but would the silliness of it make the belief less true? Not at all. Second, this argument cuts both ways and would hold true of atheism as well and theism. If the blogger were not born in a late modern, western nation like America, he would likely not be an atheist. If he was born in Tibet in 1955 he too would probably worship the Dalai Lama. So does that make his atheism less plausible? No it doesn’t. Because it commits the genetic fallacy.

9. It is better to find your own answers and make an educated decision, than to intentionally remain uneducated and make a fearful one.

        I’m not sure what this has to do with religion. Studies show that more education one achieves the more religious they are. Sociologist Christian Smith wrote in his ground breaking work,

However, something very interesting emerged when scholars took a second look at the question more recently. They found that the religiously undermining effect of higher education on recent generation of youth disappeared. Most of the older research was conducted on baby boomers for whom college did indeed corrode religious faith and practice. But many studies more recently have shown that conventional wisdom about baby boomers does not apply to today's youth. Higher education no longer seem to diminish religion in emerging adults." "In every case, emerging adults are slightly more religious than those who are not in college, although only the differences in overall religiousness and service attendance are statistically significant. In short, if anything, it is not attending college that is associated with lower levels of religious practice, though those differences are slight.[5]

This is supported by other research that shows that while an undergraduate degree may be a factor in some diminished belief, graduate work and post graduate work actually increase religiosity.[6] Possible proof for the cliché that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Another study finds that,

"The effects of income become insignificant, however, the impact of education actually reverses in the United States: it is the more educated who attend church most frequently. It therefore appears that the typical socioeconomic profile of churchgoing is indeed somewhat distinctive in the United States when compared with other wealthy countries."[7]

Sociologist Philip Schwadel in his metasurvey found that it was actually higher levels of education which are most determinative of increased religious participation and religious practice in daily life. And not only that but it was also a factor in generating greater tolerance for atheists' public opposition to religion (such as the current list under review) and greater skepticism of "exclusivist religious viewpoints and biblical literalism."[8]

Other studies have repeatedly confirmed this finding. “Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping out of the American religious sector, similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market," said lead researcher W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.[9] In fact some studies have shown that while the religious “nones” tend to have high levels of education, it is actually the agnostics who are driving up the average and that by in large atheists have a relatively low educational average.[10] There is a whole mass of studies that have been performed that flat out disprove the myth that high education will lead to high secularity and less religiosity.[11] It may make this blogger feel good but to equate religious belief with fear of finding answers and intentional remaining educated is so absurd that it itself is evidence that the author is likely fearful  of education on this issue.

10. Only for the sake of argument, if I were to astonishingly find myself face to face with a supreme being, I would expect to be judged on my life as a humanist, and how I treated others, (just as most Christians plan to be judged on character, not on the actual Ten Commandments). If my positive actions were ignored, and I was instead judged on using my intelligence to doubt religious doctrines created by human sinners, I would rather be eternally punished than bow to such an unfair tyrant who made things seemingly impossible for humans to succeed at this horrific game.

        This is a weird reason to be an atheist because it isn’t a reason to BE an atheist. It is the position that “well if I am wrong, then God better damn well do what I want him to do!” It assumes his positive actions can merit grace (which is unmerited favor), that it was his “intelligence” that got him into trouble (rather than his sinful desire for autonomy) and that the doctrines were “created by human sinners” – all basically saying, “If we assume that atheism is true and that this strawman that I am presenting is what Christianity is, then look how reasonable it is to be an atheist!”

In addition to this, Christians don’t believe that we are judged on character OR the Ten Commandments. The fact that he thinks that this is what Christians believe is not really his fault. The sad reality is that American Evangelicalism has largely lost its Biblical and Protestant moorings of salvation by grace and, following Finney, ran headlong into legalism and a kind of American Pelagianism of works based righteousness. Many sadly agree with the lie of the Nazis that "work will set you free." But the fact that he thinks that this is a critique of Christianity as a worldview rather than a critique of a specific heretical theological and cultural phenomena again shows that the author just does not know what he is talking about.

            The author  then writes:

After more than 5 years of responding to comments on this and continuing my debates and investigations into religion, and my own psychology, I realized there was an 11th, and most important reason for my atheism…

11. I simply refuse to be a hypocrite. I refuse to be disingenuous. I refuse to fake it. I could go through the motions, attend the churches, shake the hands, follow the rituals of whichever religion or denomination of Christianity I liked the best, sing the songs, and help with the luncheons. That still wouldn’t make me a believer. It would make me a pretender. I am honest with myself and those around me that these things don’t make sense to me. That doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me an atheist.

This is the first “almost” reasonable thing he has said because it is so trivially true that it is a wonder why he feels the need to add it. No one asked him to fake it. This “reason” isn’t really that reasonable as an objection however since it isn’t really an argument for why one should BE an atheist. It just says, “Since I’m an atheist then I’m not going to fake not being an atheist.” Okay…. No one asked him to. But this is his list to explain why he IS an atheist. This doesn’t explain why he is an atheist. It just says that he is an atheist because he is an atheist and couldn’t fake to be anything else.

Again if we use that same rationale, I am a Christian because I am a Christian and I couldn’t fake to be anything else. So would that trivial statement of autobiographical blatancy merit a “here! here!” from our atheist blogger? Again, it is doubtful.

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[1] Here I am willing to set aside for the sake of brevity the Transcendental Argument that argues that without God as the necessary precondition, we wouldn’t have laws of logic to begin with and thus no atheistic arguments are every consistently reasonable.

[2] You can find most of these addressed in my review of David McAfee’s book here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/154151833/Book-Review-of-Disproving-Christianity-and-Other-Secular-Writings-by-David-McAfee

[3] An enthymeme in logic is an unstated premise

[4] I recommend two sources for this: Ronald Nash’s book The Gospel and the Greeks, and Glenn Peoples podcast in which he responds to Zeitgeist found here: http://www.rightreason.org/2010/episode-038-zeitgeist/

[5] Smith, Christian; Patricia Snell (2009). Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging adults. Oxford University Press. pp. 248–251. ISBN 9780195371796

[6] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527506.100-where-do-atheists-come-from.html?full=true

[7] Norris, Pippa; Ronald Inglehart (2011). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 267-268.

[8] Schwadel, Philip (2011). "The Effects of Education on Americans’ Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Affiliations". Review of Religious Research 53

[9] Fowler, Daniel. "Less-educated Americans turning their backs on religion". American Sociological Association. Eureka.

[10] Edited by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar. "Secularism & Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives". Hartford, CT: Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC), 2007. p. 36.

[11] Smith, Christian (1998). American Evangelicalism : Embattled and Thriving. University of Chicago Press. p. 76-77;