The Ontological Argument

Craig’s version of the ontological argument comes from Alvin Plantinga, and might be better described as the modal argument (”modal” is a bit of philosophy jargon for “having to do with possibility and necessity.”) While most versions of the ontological argument, if successful, would seem to prove that God exists necessarily (could not possibly have not existed), Platinga’s argument is slightly unusual in the way it makes ideas of possibility and necessity central to the argument by assuming, from the start, that God is by definition a necessary being. Plantinga’s central claim is that if it’s possible that a God, so defined, exists, then God must exist.

This claim seems very odd to non-philosophers, but it’s important to see here that Plantinga is talking about genuine possibility, not just possibility in the sense of “possible for all we know.” While many logicians had doubts about the logically validity this pattern of inference (possibly necessarily p, therefore p), it seems to me just obvious that they are valid. If God is supposed to be the sort of being who couldn’t possibly have not existed, then it can’t be that he doesn’t exist but might have. If God, so defined, doesn’t exist, then the concept of God isn’t the concept of a possible being. But that means that if there is in a fact a genuine possibility that God exists, then God must in fact exist.

Now while the pattern of inference here may be logically valid, on the face of it we have good reason not to take arguments in this form seriously. In particular, it’s widely thought that mathematical statements are the sorts of things that are, if true, necessarily true, and so a Plantinga-style modal argument could be made on behalf of any statement in mathematics, but nobody would take seriously a “proof” of a mathematical claim of this form. The trouble is that when we understand the initial possibility claim as genuine possibility and not just “for all we know” possibility, we have no reason to accept that initial claim.

I think Plantinga is sensitive to this sort of work, makes only modest claims for his argument: he says only that, because it’s reasonable to accept the premise, it’s reasonable to accept the conclusion. Even that seems to go to far–even if the premise is reasonable, I don’t see how this enhances the reasonableness of the conclusion. If it did, then it would seem that anyone could become more reasonable in their mathematical conjectures simply by reflecting on modal logic.

Craig’s, on the other hand displays none of Plantinga’s modesty. In Philosophical Foundations (p. 497), Craig proudly quotes Plantinga saying that he believes his ontological is as strong “as any serious philosophical argument for any important philosophical conclusion,” and follows this up with a quote from George Mavrodes asking why, then Plantinga’s argument doesn’t amount to a proof.

The answer to Mavrodes’ question should be obviouis: one might think that proofs are nowhere to be found in philosophy. Theistic philosopher Peter van Inwagen, for example, has claimed the problem of evil is a “philosophical failure,” but qualifies this by explaining he thinks that no philosophical argument is really successful. It would be a mistake to report that, since van Inwagen doesn’t claim the problem of evil is any worse off than any other argument, van Inwagen accepts it as a disproof of God’s existence! Plantinga himself seems to think that all philosophical arguments ever do is establish the rationality of believing the conclusion, and if he’s right about that it would be a mistake to describe any philosophical argument as a proof.

In attempting to build up the modal argument for theism into a compelling argument, Craig claims that we must accept that a necessary God is possible unless the notion is incoherent, and to defend that claim, he argues that other concepts of necessary beings–say a necessarily existent lion–are incoherent. But to argue that, he just says that it seems there are possible situations in which no lion could exist. Here, Craig can be understood as using the inference “possibly, there is no necessarily existent lion, therefore there is no necessarily existent lion.” For this to prove what Craig wants, he needs the further assumption that impossibility entails incoherence, which I doubt, but the really interesting thing is that Craig’s argument against a necessarily existent lion follows the same patter as Plantinga’s modal argument, only run in reverse.

Thus, Craig backs up his claim that the modal argument for the existence of God is successful by claiming that modal arguments against things like necessarily existent lions are also successful. Also, just one can make a modal argument against necessary lions, one can make a modal argument against a necessary God. This means Craig must simultaneously affirm that it’s obvious that there might be a necessary God, and it’s obvious that there might not be any lions, but it’s not obvious that there might not have been a God. I simply don’t understand why anyone would find that conjunction of claims obvious.

Finally, Craig does address one of the most obvious objections that arises with most ontological arguments–the fact that they seem to prove the existence of various quasi-gods, beings with many but not all the properties of god, whose existence the theist doesn’t want to accept. Craig’s response is that a quasi-god would be incompatible with the existence of God, so ontological arguments for quasi-gods beg the question against the existence of God. I can only see this as a non-sequitur.

Traditionally, “begging the question” has meant assuming what is to be proved, and ontological arguments for quasi-gods don’t do this. What Craig means, I suspect, is “uses a premise that no one who rejected the conclusion would accept,” but I don’t see why doing that is a problem. Anytime a premise indisputably entails a conclusion, those who are committed to rejecting the conclusion can be counted on to reject the premise. But this will happen even when the premise seems obviously true. Thus, I don’t see how Craig can find fault with such “question begging” arguments, especially since he himself disparages people who reject a premise simply because they don’t like the conclusion it points to (Reasonable Faith p. 55).

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument

Craig states the Leibnizian cosmological argument as folloows:

1) Anything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2) If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3) The universe exists.
4) Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence. (from 1,3)
5) Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God. (from 2, 4)

Surprisingly, Craig’s primary defense of premise (2) is claiming that atheists already accept it! According to Craig, “Atheists typically assert that, since there is no God, it is false that everything has an explanation of its existence, for the universe, in this case, just exists,” and this is equivalent to accepting premise (2) (Reasonable Faith p. 108). While many atheists don’t find the claim that everything has an explanation of its existence convincing, I know if no atheist who says it is false because there is no God, and Craig doesn’t cite a single example. My own view is that, while the Leibnizian claim that there must be some necessary explanation of contingent things (things that might not have existed) seems initially tempting, on reflection there isn’t any reason to think any candidate for the necessary explanation more plausible than any other, and since some candidates are obviously implausible, we should think that there is no necessary explanation of things’ existence.

Craig does have a second argument for (2), that the universe is by definition all of physical reality, so its cause must be non-physical, and therefore would have to be mental. But this seems to assume that there are non-physical minds, or at least that the idea of non-physical minds is more plausible than non-physical, non-mental forces. I don’t see why anyone would think that, though. Craig sometimes talks as if it’s just obvious that the human mind is non physical (see Philosophical Foundations p. 238, for example). While this claim probably serves him well in public debates when he often wants to patch up his arguments as quickly as possible and then move on, intellectually it is unconvincing.

What prompted this post is seeing how, in his essay for the anthology God is Great, God is Good, Craig that this statement from Dawkins’ position on the cosmological argument can be summarized by saying “Dawkins doesn’t dispute that the argument proves the existence of an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful personal Creator of the universe.” This is based on the following passage from The God Delusion, which Craig quotes:

Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving ti a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.

Dawkins “doesn’t dispute” that the cosmological argument proves a “personal Creator of the universe” insofar as he doesn’t explicitly mention it in his list of properties normally ascribed to God, but obviously it’s in the general category, and Dawkins would have listed it if he thought anyone would have made much of it. I won’t say any more–I don’t want to be impolite.

Presentation and General Thoughts

Though this has nothing to do with the ideas in the book, from a book-recommender’s point of view the book does have a serious flaw that would prevent me from really recommending it: the book is written as a letter exchange between Zach (an author stand-in) and Thomas (a doubter). And the execution is awful. Much of the book consists only of little bits intended to make it sound “conversational,” but which generally just waste space on the page and don’t even make it sound like a real letter exchange. The “letters” tend to be short; Thomas’ are often only a sentence or two. This increases the percentage of space spent on conversational niceties, and is part of what keeps it from sounding like a real letter exchange: in a normal letter exchange, if you have something to say, you don’t put off saying it until you’ve gotten an “uh huh” from the person you’re writing too. Also, the course of the conversational back-and-forth often sounds a lot like Plato’s proof that p.

That said, the book isn’t a total loss. In particular, there’s a real effort to avoid common pitfalls of theistic arguments. The results aren’t great, but if you wade through the bad presentation, you can find arguments with some improvements over the ones heard most often in debates about God–even arguments presented by apparently sharp defenders of theism like William Lane Craig. But this feature of the book isn’t strong enough for me to recommend it over Craig’s Reasonable Faith, which I still think, in spite of its flaws, is probably the best single book defending theism and traditional Christianity currently available.

Theism and Naturalism

The first chapter, which sets up the frame work for rest of the book, proposes understanding the question about the existence of God as a contest between Theism and Naturalism. The justifications for this framework, however, are extremely flimsy. For example, Layman asks “what do you see as the main positive alternative to the belief that God exists? I mean, if we deny that God exists, what should we affirm?” (p. 11) Well, if we deny that God exists, we should affirm all kinds of things, such as, for example, that the sky is blue. Layman’s question may sound important, but doesn’t actually have anything to do with anything. You can have an opinion on the existence of the Christian god, or fairies, or the validity of astrology, or whether extraterrestrials have visited Earth, without taking up a grand philosophical thesis as a replacement for these ideas.

Similarly, Layman argues that:

…for those of us living in a culture heavily influenced by science, the most serious rival to traditional Theism is probably not some other form of Theism, but Naturalism. The really big metaphysical dispute of the day, in our culture, is surely the dispute between traditional Theism and Naturalism. So I think that the rivalry between Theism and Naturalism should be our central concern. (p. 16)

The problem with this line of thinking is that it invites the fallacy of thinking that any troubles with naturalism are reasons to accept theism. After all, if there had ever been a point in Greek history where most people were either believers in anthropomorphic gods like those in Homer, or Democritean atomism, it wouldn’t follow that problems with Democritiean atomism would be reason to accept Homeric polytheism.

Finally, consider Layman’s repeated contention that naturalism is supposed to explain things. Certainly, many naturalists have defended various naturalistic hypotheses about why this or that feature of the world is the way it is. But naturalism itself is an extraordinarily vague idea that doesn’t look like a good candidate for a hypothesis to explain anything. If there’s a good reason to be a naturalist, it’s because our most successful explanations are naturalistic, not because naturalism itself is a successful explanation.

In practice, the problems with the book’s framework don’t completely cripple it, because Layman often is willing to consider hypotheses more specific than the extraordinarily vague notion of “naturalism.” Still, the confusions in the theism vs. naturalism set up hint at the confusions that appear later in the book.

Necessity and Contingency

Layman’s discussion of the cosmological argument for the existence of God makes an extraordinarily modest claim for the argument: the argument only erases any initial improbability theism has due to postulating things, kinds of things, and so on not found in naturalism. Layman’s claim is that it seems like we need a necessary being (one that couldn’t have not existed) to explain the existence of contingent things (ones that might not have existed). Layman concedes that we can’t simply assume that any necessary being would have to be the god of traditional theism, but he thinks that if we postulate a necessary, naturalistic entity to explain contingent things, we end up with a version of naturalism that has no advantage, simplicity-wise, over theism.

I admit the claim that there must be a necessary being seems initially tempting, but on reflection, I seriously doubt that there could be any such thing. As many defenders of the cosmological argument have pointed out, it seems very implausible to suppose I could be a necessary being. The same goes for my parents, my grand parents, and in fact the whole chain of things leading from me back to the big bang. And it seems implausible that the big bang could have happened of necessity. This doesn’t lead us to God, though, because it’s not clear God is an especially good candidate for a necessary being–that much Layman concedes. But furthermore, it’s not clear what would make any candidate for the necessary being role better than any other. That realization, combined with the fact that some candidates for necessary beings (like Chris Hallquist) are awful candidates, suggests there are plausible candidates for being a necessary being.

This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that there seems to be a genuine possibility of there being no god of any kind–yet if something is supposed to be a necessary being, then it can’t be that it exists, but might not have. If it’s even possible that there might not have been any god of any kind, then there couldn’t possibly have been a necessarily existing god. The same goes for any other candidate for the necessarily-existing explanation of contingent things. So, I think we just have to leave the existence of contingent things unexplained.

Layman’s reasons for thinking we need an explanation of contingent things is very weak. One, he says that the existence of contingent things seems in principle explicable, and therefore can’t be a brute fact, because brute facts are by definition facts that cannot be explained. (p. 92) But what if we define brute fact as one that happens not to have an explanation? Certainly the whole collection of actually existing contingent things might have had an explanation–consider a hypothetical in which there is some other contingent thing that caused the collection. That doesn’t justify the assumption that there must be some thing that caused the collection, and I think we should reject that assumption, because it seems to lead us to the idea of a necessary being, but we have good reasons to reject the idea of a necessary being.

Layman also says:

Naturalists can stick with Basic Naturalism [naturalism without commitment to a necessarily existing natural entity] if they so desire. But the cost is failure to explain the presence of contingent beings. How great is that cost? The best way to ascertain the cost is to do what we have just done: Determine what needs to be added to Naturalism to enable to explain the presence of contingent beings.

What Layman is implying with his cost-determining proposal is that the cost of leaving something unexplained is equal to whatever you need to explain it, so naturalism is no better or worse off with or without some necessary cause of contingent things. But this is wrong–sometimes adding to a hypothesis to fill an explanatory gap makes things worse. Prior to Newton’s explanation of Kepler’s laws in terms of gravity, it wouldn’t have made sense to add angels to your astronomical hypotheses to explain why the planets move in accordance with Kepler’s laws. Not only would it not have been an improvement, it would have made a theory worse off. Sometimes, it’s better to just accept that you don’t have any good explanation for something, and the existence of contingent things seems to be such a case.

This has been a fairly long discussion of an argument Layman doesn’t seem to put much stock it, but it makes the point that sometimes, we may have to accept that there is no good explanation for something, and that a bad explanation can be worse than no explanation at all.

Explaining Us

Layman’s main argument, divided into several bits over the course of chapters 5, 6, and 8 but really condensable into one argument, runs as follows: If God existed, we would expect him to do good things. It’s good for there to be living, sentient, free-willed beings. So if God existed, we would expect there to be such beings, but naturalism doesn’t give us any particular reason to expect the existence of such beings. Therefore, theism has a significant explanatory edge over naturalism in explaining why we exist. And that’s all I really think there is to Layman’s argument in the largest chunk of the book. There are occasional gestures in the direction of possibly-relevant scientific findings, but Layman generally ends up saying they’re not important–for example, in chapter 5, to deflect the possibility of future scientific explanations for the phenomenon of interest, he stipulates that what he cares about is explaining why the most basic physical structures of the universe are life-supporting (p. 112).

This way of putting the argument saves Layman the trouble of having to rely on any dubious claims about what the scientific evidence says (and current discussions of design-type arguments tend to be full of those). But Layman’s statement of the argument, cut down to the core with out all the back and forth fluff of his fictional dialog, also makes prominent why this style of argument is unconvincing. You may feel that, if there is no story to tell about why our universe is the sort of universe that makes the emergence of life likely, then we got extraordinarily lucky. But the appeal to God doesn’t really solve this problem, because you can also ask how we got so lucky to find ourselves in a universe with a benevolent God in it. And unlike any good scientific hypothesis, the “predictions” that Layman claims for the God hypothesis are extraordinarily vague. Theism isn’t supposed to predict any particular details of how life exists or came to be in the universe, it’s just supposed to predict some kind of life-containing universe or other. It’s like the angels-pushing-the-planets hypothesis: utterly useless.

The Problem of Evil

My final verdict on Layman’s discussion the problem of evil is: it’s bad, but not necessarily any worse than most other discussions of the problem that have been written. The trouble is this: people who think the problem of evil is a really seriously good reason not to believe in God generally think of it in terms like “How could a loving God have allowed the Holocaust to happen?” or “How could a loving God have allowed the 2004 Asian Tsunami to happen?” But such statements are usually only made in popular venues where there isn’t much emphasis on logically tidy arguments. In philosophical circles, though, while there’s a laudable concern for logically tidy arguments, discussion of the problem of evil usually takes the form of questions like “what is the conditional probability of X units of evil existing in the world on the hypothesis that God exists?”–questions don’t at all intuitively sound like they could create a serious challenge to theism.

Layman’s discussion clearly follows the more academic approach to the problem of evil–it’s representative of what a typical theistic philosopher says about evil these days. For a first-rate example a more popular approach, consider the opening words of Sam Harris’ “Atheist Manifesto”:

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

No.

From a philosophy professor’s point of view, these hundred and four words contain one serious defect: they don’t address the question of whether God exists. They deny that it is right or good for people in a particular situation to believe a particular claim, but they don’t directly address whether the claim is true.

This problem is easy to remedy, though. We can instead ask: would a being who had all the traditional attributes of God except (maybe) moral perfection, who chose not intervene in the rape, torture, and murder of a little girl, have behaved in a way compatible with moral perfection? If the answer is no, God, as usually defined in philosophical theology, doesn’t exist. To me, it seems obvious that the answer to that question is no. And while most people probably haven’t thought of the question in quite those terms, if you feel the pull of popular statements of the problem of evil, then probably when you think about this particular question, you’ll realize that you, too, think the answer is “no.”

Do we have any business taking such judgments as just obvious? It would be extremely awkward for most philosophers of religion deny to deny that we do, because philosophers make such moves all the time. For example, Peter Singer famously pointed out that we would think someone who chose not to save a drowning child because he didn’t want to get his shoes wet would be thought morally callous, and argued that we should extend this judgment to the question of how much we should sacrifice to help the world’s poor. While many reject Singer’s conclusion, few reject his premise.

Outside academia, everyone was shocked when it was reported in the 60’s that a New York woman, Kitty Genovese, had been raped and murdered outside her apartment while her neighbors listened, doing nothing. What was wrong with them? Such moral judgments are entirely natural. Why suddenly be suspicious of them when made of a hypothetical omnipotent being?

Notice, furthermore, that for this sort of argument against the existence of God doesn’t depend on any general conclusions about, say, the required action on all rapes and murders. If there is any actual case where we are confident that divine inaction is incompatible with perfection, then we must conclude that God does not exist.

This is important when it comes to evaluating proposed explanations for why God allows evil (such as respect for free will, Layman’s favored explanation). However plausible such explanations may seem in the abstract, if they fail in a particular case, they just fail period. In the Kitty Genovese case, for example, no one would think respect for the murder’s free will a good reason for not calling the police, so glib mentions of free will in that case are at best incomplete–they don’t tell us why free will is a bad reason for humans to intervene, but a bad reason for God to intervene.

The question of where to draw the line in demanding God prevent evil (another point pressed by Layman) is similarly irrelevant: one can agree it would be wrong for humans to prevent crime through a Brave New World dystopia and admit not knowing where to draw the line on the cost of crime prevention, and still confidently think Genovese’s neighbors should have called the police.

I don’t know that the way of presenting the problem of evil given here will catch on among professional philosophers of religion. These days, philosophers (and academics in general) sometimes seem to think that the only arguments worth considering are subtle and hard to evaluate (perhaps because this policy helps us know who the impressive minds are). And in a sense the argument I’ve presented is very easy to respond to: all the theist has to say is “I don’t find it obvious that a god-like being who failed to intervene in the Kitty Genovese case would be morally imperfect.” Indeed, it’s obvious that this is the best response. The theist doesn’t have many other choices. It makes the debate boring–my argument isn’t going to spawn a vast philosophical literature.

But my argument has these virtues: it follows logically, and appeals to only down-to-earth assumptions that seem obvious to many people. I’m not sure what more one can ask of a philosophical argument. It won’t convince committed religious apologists, but what criticism of religion ever has? On the other hand, by providing a tidy logical statement of common-sense worries about God and evil, this argument will probably sway a lot of people who find the problem of evil obviously troublesome, but are tempted to buy the line that it is merely an emotional worry.

With all due respect, this characterization of my spiritual journey is selective, misleading and inaccurate. To suggest that I was so emotionally enthralled by a visit to church that I then simply read Christian apologists “to assure [myself] it was all true” is to simply rewrite history. My “Unchurched Harry and Mary” and “Case” books are entirely consistent, as any fair reading of them will establish. I was an atheist who thoroughly investigated both sides of the issue and concluded that the weight of the evidence supports Christianity. My “Case” books focus on experts whose arguments I ultimately found to be the most persuasive. Please don’t inadvertently misrepresent what happened. Many thanks, Lee Strobel

Here’s the comment I left there:

Lee,

The first thing I’d like to say is that I agree that the stories you tell in Inside the Mind… and Case for… are consistent. However, I still feel that your Case for… books are written in such a way that anyone who reads them, but doesn’t read them extremely closely, is almost guaranteed to come away with a false impression of your experience. I’ve heard some of your fans describe your books as a literal record of your conversion experience–don’t you agree that it’s worth your while to try to correct such misunderstandings?

If you’re reading this, maybe you could clear up some things I’ve been curious about. In particular, what books defending atheism did you read in the year or so after you started going to church? What books defending non-Christian religions?

Thanks,
Chris

Pigliucci’s position actually isn’t all that different from that of his targets, though: he thinks that there are good, scientifically informed reasons to be an atheist, it’s just that science doesn’t absolutely determine the God question. But even then, he’s trying to make a pretty dubious distinction. There’s a weird, disparaging comment about the idea that particular religious claims, at least, can be disproven, which is “funny,” because Karl Popper’s falsificationism is no longer widely accepted in philosophy of science. That’s a weird argument: the idea that science can sometimes show an idea is wrong doesn’t depend on any particular theory of how science works.

Then Pigliucci gives a more substantial argument that particular religious claims are never disproved by science: there’s always the possibility that God rigged the world to look one way, even though it really is some other way. The trouble with this response is it can be used to undermine any scientific claim, not just alleged refutations of religious doctrine. If Pigliucci’s argument shows that science doesn’t determine the answer to any religious questions, it also shows that it doesn’t determine the answer to any scientific questions.

That sounds wrong, but on the other hand there’s a sense in which we should embrace the conclusion: scientific ideas are always vulnerable to goofy objections that can’t be answered just by quoting an experimental result, objections that require you to think in broader ways about what makes an idea good or bad. So in a sense, science doesn’t determine the answer to scientific questions. But if that’s true, the fact that it doesn’t determine the answer to religious questions doesn’t make religion especially safe from science–even if it’s not as vulnerable as one might think, it’s still as vulnerable as any scientific claim.

In other news, a member of Obama’s administration is being attacked as an “anti-Catholic biggot.” Because he criticized the Pope over the Pope’s claim that condoms spread AIDS, and criticized the Knights of Columbus for supporting Prop 8. The only question I have about this story is why anybody thinks throwing out the word “bigot” is a good response to criticisms of things Catholics do. My best guess is that for many years in this country, the loudest critics of the Catholic Church were Jack Chick-style whackjobs who thought the Catholic Church was a Satanic conspiracy. But the reason Jack Chick is crazy is that Satan doesn’t exist, not that the Catholic Church is perfect.

Vic Reppert is fond of suggesting that while Christians may have emotional motivations for their beliefs, atheists do to. Repperts comments sometimes border on suggesting it’s dishonest to deny that Christians and atheists are anything but mirror-images of each other on this point. Last month, he accused atheists who suggest otherwise of nominating themselves for intellectual sainthood.

Vic doesn’t have any real arguments for thinking this, as far as I can see. His rhetoric tends to fall into the category of “we must believe this because it’s polite to believe it.” And the evidence tends to point in the other direction. There are lots of atheist who can tell you, in detail, how they left religion for intellectual reasons. Emotion usually plays a role, but the opposite of the role that Vic would claim: lots of people who leave Christianity for intellectual reasons describe doing this in spite of a strong emotional desire to go on believing. There’s a strong tendency for the medium-sized names in the atheist community–Dan Barker, John W. Loftus, Lukeprog, and so on–to fall into this category. I definitely fit it: though I hadn’t done anywhere near the reading some people have done before giving up religion, it was nevertheless true that for me, becoming an atheist was a matter of realizing I desperately wanted to believe, because I thought without God the universe would be amoral and meaningless. (Don’t ask me why I believed that. I have no idea.) I also felt extremely isolated immediately after becoming an atheist, a feeling that seems pretty common, given that Hitchens once said that about half the people showing up for his debates were people who, previously, had thought they were the only atheist in town.

Admittedly people like me are probably over-represented in the class of people who invest big chunks of their time in debating religion. Lukeprog has mention going to see the movie Religulous and noticing that almost the entire audience was gay, from which he inferred that they were probably there because they had been hurt, personally, by religion.

What, then, is the significance of the people, possibly in the minority, who leave religion for intellectual reasons, against what they want emotionally? Maybe not very big, but I think it’s significant that such atheists have no clear counterparts in the Christian world. That point brings me back to the post title: some prominent Christian figures–notably Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell–have risen to fame by painting self-portraits in which intellectual considerations dragged them kicking and screaming into belief. Notice what they’re doing: they’re essentially claiming to be Christian versions of Lukeprog et al. But if you look at what Strobel says in his pre-Case for… book Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary, you get a somewhat different picture: Strobel started going to church because his wife wanted him to, found it emotionally moving, and then started reading Christian apologetics to assure himself it was all true. It’s unclear Strobel read any non-Christian books in his “journalist’s investigation.” More on that here, see especially my comments on McDowell’s even more dubious story.

Are there any other good candidates for being Lee Strobel, other than Strobel? In a discussion at Ed Feser’s blog, one commenter suggested Joshua Rasmussen and Trent Doughtery as examples of people became theists because of arguments, but based on scanning online for things Joshua and Trent have written about that, as well as exchanging a few e-mails with them, it’s pretty clear to me their situation wasn’t quite what the commenter made to sound like: both started out as fairly serious believers, wavered towards agnosticism, and report going back for intellectual reasons.

Here’s my tentative conclusion, based on this and other considerations: there are a fair amount of people who, after finding some initial motivation to convert to Christianity, use Christian apologetics to convince themselves. There are also people who are prevented from falling away from Christianity, or get reeled back after brief wavering, by intellectual arguments. However, there seem to be few if any people who can legitimately claim to be Christian counterparts of Lukeprog, who had strong emotional reasons for not wanting to accept Christianity but felt forced to do so because of the arguments.

These sorts of meta-considerations shouldn’t generally be the most important thing we consider in any debate, including atheist-Christian debates. But it at least tells you something about the psychology of religion, and the fact that a lot of people make claims about this subject is reason enough to try to get the facts right.