The sixth (and seventh) in my ongoing list of truly bad arguments offered by atheists comes courtesy of the Society of Edmonton Atheists website which provided a review of the Edmonton God or Godless debate. This is how it concludes:
Overall, many of the arguments were all things we’ve heard before from the religious side. Quite deist in their leanings, the arguments included the ever popular argument of moral objectivity, mathematics and natural laws proving a designer, and transcendent love being proof of a higher power. Obviously these arguments could be used to prove any of the thousands of gods throughout our history. At the end of the evening after a conversation with a Christian in the room who asked me to ”keep seeking for god” I was left with one main question from the presented arguments and the discussions that happened afterwards.
”Which god?”
This brings me to the sixth bad argument. The writer, Karen Kerr, seems to think her parting question is profound somehow. And given that I have heard similar quips from atheists in the past, apparently some other folk think this is profound as well. However, I explained in my talk that I was providing evidence for the existence of a necessary agent cause of great power and the source of moral goodness. So that’s the God I’m talking about. The topic was clearly defined, so what is the complaint?
Karen’s objection seems to be that this description is compatible with more than one complete theistic description of God. But hasn’t Karen heard of underdetermination of data? The arguments I presented may not be sufficient to show that Christian theism is true, but they are sufficient to show that atheism is false. And that’s what the topic of debate was: theism or atheism? I argued theism.
(Incidentally Karen is incorrect to call this description deistic. Deism is quite different from the minimal theistic description of God I defended.)
And now we can turn to the seventh bad argument to confound Christians: make the observation that you’ve heard their argument(s) before. I remember raising a form of the moral argument to a friend close to twenty years ago. His response was “That argument is so old!” As if saying an argument is old, or that one has heard it before, itself constitutes some sort of rebuttal to the argument. (Hint: it doesn’t. But the Christian doesn’t need to know that!)
Karen has a similar response here. “Many of the arguments were all things we’ve heard before…” she says. Notice there is no rebuttal here; rather, there is only the observation that Karen has heard these arguments before, as if past familiarity is itself some sort of rebuttal. Perhaps the claim is “If these arguments were any good I would have changed my mind by now.”
