Demolishing Triablogue: Steve Hays' dishonestly simplistic analogy between seeing god and seeing people

This is my reply to an article by Steve Hays entitled

Affirmative claims

Posted by steveat10:38 AM

It's common for the average atheist to say the burden of proof is on the Christian, because the Christian is affirming something to be the case whereas the atheist simply lacks belief in deities.

The actual truth is that anybody who makes a claim, has a burden of proof, including atheists.  If they affirm there is no god, they are making a knowledge-claim that existing evidence does not support theism.  We expect an innocent defendant in court to explain why the alleged evidence of his guilt doesn't really show his guilt, so, no reason to think otherwise in the case of the atheist confronted with alleged theistic evidences.

The implication is that an existential claim or affirmation has an initial presumption against it, which the claimant must overcome by providing countervailing evidence.

No.  If a complete stranger comes up to you on the street and says "I work at the circle-K store in Souix Falls", you are not intellectually obligated to agree with the claim, that obligation doesn't arise until they provide at least some type of evidence beyond their mere word to support it.  The alternative is a stupid theory of gullibility that says we are initially obligated to believe any logically possible thing anybody tells us unless we are prepared to disprove that claim.  

If so, that's a general principle which applies to all kinds of existential claims, and not to Christianity in particular. But is that reasonable?

Yes, it is reasonable to consider an alleged matter unproven if the claimant refuses to supply corroborating evidence independent of their solitary word.  That includes claims that atheism is true.

The problem for you then is when it becomes reasonable to move from "this has remained unproven" over to "therefore it probably isn't true".  Well if a bunch of people continually fail in their efforts to prove a proposition true, you cannot blame the skeptic for starting to be suspicious at some point that this occurs because the proposition really is false.  How long have Mormons failed to demonstrate the divine authenticity of the book of mormon?  Can you blame the atheist who says if that book wasn't fraudulent, surely some Mormon apologist would have made a good positive case for it by now?

Is that a principle atheists accept in general?

Yes.  You don't believe my claim to be able to levitate objects solely by my mind, unless I give corroborating evidence of some sort, and I don't believe god exists unless you show corroborating evidence of some sort.

Actually, my most powerful reason for rejecting god's existence is the argument from the incoherence of religious language.  Yes, there's a "definition" for god in the dictionary, but there's also a definition for "fairy".  Once we start asking questions about it, we find that the only way to make 'god' coherent is to insist that language not operate the way it normally does, i.e., god can hear me, but he doesn't have any physical mechanism to receive audio signals, he can see me, but he doesn't have any physical mechanism to process light, etc.  

So it doesn't matter if there really exists some type of immaterial basis enabling god to notice such physical things, you cannot demonstrate such immaterial basis in the first place.  And that's your first lesson in why your god is an incoherent concept.  

It doesn't matter if the criminal defendant is innocent, if it looks like he is guilty (i.e., his gun at the scene of the crime, and several witnesses contradicted his alibi), can you really blame the jury for calling it like they see it? I think not, despite the fact that it really sucks to be convicted of a crime you didn't commit.  What are you going to do now?  Start a grass-roots movement to change the law so that inerrancy-affirming Calvinists are the only people legally authorized to be jurors in court trials?   After all, wouldn't that, in Steve Hays' opinion, increase the probability that juries will return correct verdicts?

Or did Steve Hays' god infallibly predestine him to not care about false jury verdicts that much?

Suppose two students are standing outside a class room, peering into the class room through the open doorway. One student says the class room is occupy.

Your blindingly perfect god of inerrancy must not have been inspiring you while you were typing out that last incorrectly spelled word.  And in the bible, whether god speaks through you is the more serious question, not whether your arguments can be supported philosophically.  This is an absurd criticism in light of my own standards, but makes perfect sense under your own belief in bible inerrancy and the blinding theoretical perfection of this sky-based theory you put so much stock in.

His classmate, with the same view, says he has no opinion on whether the class room is empty or not.

And if the atheist-classmate's looking for himself into the classroom to check, has the potential to bring a shitload of problems into his life, he might be reasonable to refuse to look into that classroom himself.  That is, his atheism might be technically "wrong", but it causes him less havoc in life than if he choose to look, get interested, and correspondingly get caught up in the "which god is real" debate that Christians have with each other, and spend the next 50 years of his life enduring other Christian fundamentalists who say the particular Christian god he chose was the wrong one. 

Many people just don't need the crap that comes with marriage, and likewise many people don't need all the extra crap that the atheism-Christianity debate brings.

And such atheists can be rationally warranted to consider the matter unimportant by noting that the eternal conscious torment-view of hell has been disputed by Christians throughout history and even conservative Christians (who would be least likely to dispute such a thing)  are starting to dispute it within the last 50 years, not to mention the fact that it contradicts the standards of god's own justice elsewhere in the bible.  

And that's to say nothing about how all Christian doctrine goes right in the toilet all because of my inerrant argument against the resurrection of Jesus.   If Christ is not risen, your faith in literal hell-fire torture for atheists is in vain.  Indeed, if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, that means you've been misinterpreting the OT for 2,000 years, making it reasonable to suppose that after falsifying Christianity, the OT is nothing but a fatally ambiguous fairy tale that one is better to consign to the past as a historical curiosity instead of taking it seriously.  So the more Jesus didn't rise from the dead, the more even basic Judaism is incorrect.

At that point, the alleged proofs for theism would have to be just as potentially threatening against Christians as they are against atheists.

And let's not forget that you, Steve Hays, are a Calvinist.  When you show the world that atheists are stupid and unreasonable for refusing to take Christian evidence seriously (i.e., for disagreeing with your opinions), what you aren't telling the world is that, according to your allegedly biblical calvinist theology,  atheists were infallibly predestined by your god to adopt this false attitude, and therefore any sense of their having a choice to know what the truth is and act accordingly, was only illusory.   Nothing is more comical than a strong Calvinist having the least bit of motive to go out and evangelize the lost, which is precisely why Steve Hays gives no impression that he ever wastes his time doing any such thing. After all, if you choose to just sit at home googling the latest in Christian scholarship all day long,  well then your god surely must have infallibly predestined you from all eternity to disobey his revealed command that you evangelize.

Steve might reply "If we love Jesus, we won't desire to use God's infallible predestining decree as a license to sin or be lazy", but that doesn't necessarily follow:  what if your Calvinist god infallibly predestined you to think that the fatalistic theology of the bible was a justifiable license to sin?  You will say no self-respecting Calvinist would think that way, but that's about as stupid as saying no self-respecting Calvinist would desire to commit adultery.

Lest the reader think I am pushing Steve into an extreme form of hyperCalvinism he doesn't actually espouse, let his comment from another Triablogue entry settle the matter forever:

iii) If someone disobeys God's revealed will, that's because God "secretly" willed them to disobey his revealed will. 

 See that full blog here.

In other words, Steve thinks that when Christians commit adultery, their violation of God's revealed will in the 10 commandments "thou shalt not commit adultery" was nevertheless what God "secretly" willed them to do.

And then Steve wonders why most non-Calvinist Christians find Calvinism be a shocking deviation from normative behavior?

 So i guess a good question for hyperCalvinists like Steve is how they can pretend atheists have the least bit of intellectual obligation to do anything Steve tells them to do.  In light of Calvinism, that's the same thing as saying atheists have an intellectual obligation to deviate from God's infallible decree that they remain blinded to the light.  Looked at another way, Steve should compliment atheists for their blindness...it came from God no less than Steve's salvation did. 

Perhaps Steve will "explain" that god gets "mad" at people who do exactly what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants? Is the bible seriously so wonderfully perfect and amazing that it intellectually obligates us to throw away all basic common sense reasoning?  I'm a skeptic, and I doubt it.

Let's just say THIS atheist doesn't exactly worry about the question "what if Christianity is true!?".   I'm quite aware that if I adopted that religion, I could very well end up joining the "wrong" denomination for decades before discovering that it was heretical.  Between generically denying god's existence, and misrepresenting the Christian god to the world, it would seem the former is the lesser of the two evils.

Hays continues:

Suppose the first student said the class room is occupied because, peering through the doorway, other students appear in his field of vision. He sees students (or the impression of students) inside the class room. Is there an initial presumption that his affirmation is false?

No, Steve, the atheist being hit with a barrage of Christian metaphysical, historical and philosophical arguments for theism, of the sort which intellectuals of all stripes have intensely debated for centuries, is not analogous to the atheist having the opportunity to look through a door to see if people are in a room, and then trusting what his eyes tell him about the situation.  Your analogy fails because it is absurdly more simplistic than the real convoluted complexity that attends all Christian arguments for theism.  Otherwise, you'd have to say that I can see God by looking into the sky just as easily as I can see people in a room by looking through the doorway.

But nice try.

Is something additional required to overcome that initial presumption to the contrary? 

 For the above-stated reasons, yes.  If God could be discerned as easily as physically looking into the sky the way people in a room can be discerned by looking through the doorway, you wouldn't need to be making arguments like this.

So...Steve...is God's existence as easily discernible as that?  Can I see god in the sky just as easily as I'd see a class full of students through a doorway?  Or did you dumb down the complex issue of theism more than is philosophically defensible?

He simply finds himself in an epistemic situation where he's confronted with manifest evidence that something is the case.

I believe what my eyes tell me is there.  If I could physically see God as easily as I could see kids in a classroom, I wouldn't be an atheist.

What more is required? There's no shift from a presumption to the contrary to an affirmation. Was there a prior point at which the onus was on him to justify his belief?

No, because no fool denies the possibility of students existing in classrooms.  But since smart people have debated whether "god exists" for centuries, one can be reasonable to say you have deceptively taken a very complex matter and pretended it to be analogous to a very simplistic case involving things that nobody seriously denies. 

Now as a Calvinist you might think people who deny god's existence are akin to people who deny the existence of students who can obviously be seen by simply looking through the door into the classroom, but the fact is, your god cannot be as directly observed as kids in a class, and it's the fact of the need to make inferential leaps in the case of 'god', that condemns your simplistic analogy here.

And what about his classmate? Even though students appear in his field of vision as well, does he have no burden of proof so long as he makes no claim one way or the other? Is the onus not on him to explain how he can be noncommittal in the face of evidence that eliminates one of the two options (either it's vacant or occupied)? Is he justified in withholding judgment at that point?

Same answer, and nice try, but no dice.