God: The Failed Hypothesis

From Neoredemptive

Book by Victor J. Stenger.

See an outline here: http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Summary.htm

First, it is worth noting that God is not a hypothesis, but a self-existing being; we may have failed hypotheses about God, but to call him a "failed hypothesis" is a categorical fallacy.

Contents 1 Calling "Bullshit" 2 Refutations of the "Impossibility Proofs" 2.1 An All-Virtuous Being Cannot Exist 2.2 Worship and Moral Agency 2.3 The Problem of Evil 2.4 A Perfect Creator Cannot Exist 2.5 A Transcendent Being Cannot Be Omnipresent 2.6 A Personal Being Cannot be Nonphysical 2.7 The Paradox of Omnipotence 3 Refutation of the Book's Principal Arguments 3.1 The "Generic Argument" 3.2 The "Higher Good" Argument 3.3 The Argument from Evil 3.4 The Illusion of Design 3.5 Matter and Soul 3.6 The Failures of Revelation 3.7 Cosmic Evidence 3.8 The Uncongenial Universe 3.9 The Origin Of Physical Law 3.10 Possible and Impossible Gods 3.11 What If? 3.12 The Hiddenness Argument 3.13 The Argument from Nonbelief

Calling "Bullshit"

Before I begin, I think it's important to preface everything I say below with the observation that this book, both in premise and execution, is unmitigated Bullshit (in the technical sense). While the title establishes a pretense to science, the vast majority of the book's subject matter is not at all scientific, but rather theological. I am not here using theology in the broad sense in which I usually use it, but in a fairly narrow and academic sense: that the author is seeking to systematize, formalize, and evaluate claims regarding divinity, its nature, and its possessor(s). That the book is mostly an exercise in doing theology is, frankly, beyond dispute; what is only slightly more open to debate is whether he is doing theology well or not. What is similarly hard-to-avoid is the observation that this distinction is patently unimportant to the author, his fans, or his co-thinkers, and even bothering to recognize it could only serve to lessen their desired outcome: an impression in readers that he knows what he is talking about and, as such, should be believed.

Refutations of the "Impossibility Proofs"

First and foremost, we must call into question the legitimacy of an atheistic appeal to reason or logic as a means to the proof (whether conclusively or beyond a reasonable doubt) of anything. Logic is a system for modeling the interrelationship of non-material precepts, premises, and syllogisms. But the legitimacy of this system cannot simply float in the air; it must rest upon something, otherwise it (by its own rules) must be arbitrary, subjective, and therefore non-authoritative. That it seems to have worked well so far is no argument, unless we accept on faith that past performance necessarily implies future results (thank you David Hume). That it is a component of our genetic survival and success is likewise no argument, as any practicing psychologist can tell you that useful delusions are not only possible but commonplace. And even if we grant the legitimacy of logic within itself ad arguendo, we still have not established that a person is under any moral or ethical obligation to have his thoughts and actions shaped by its conclusions (again, thank you David Hume). If any position is logically defensible of its own merits, it is the kind of radical skepticism that will grant the scientists' dogmas of reason, evidence, repeatability, and regularity no more quarter than the Christian's of transcendence and an existential moral order.

Having said that, let's consider the "Impossibility Proofs" referenced in the above page.

An All-Virtuous Being Cannot Exist

The argument breaks down at "But virtue involves overcoming pains and danger"; while virtue in general may entail the virtue of overcoming pains and danger in particular, it need not necessarily do so. Said another way, the "proof" is a word-game and not a good-faith effort to represent the actual substance of Christian theology.

Worship and Moral Agency

The argument breaks down at "No being could possibly be a fitting object of worship, since worship requires the abandonment of one's role as an autonomous moral agent", as this definition of "worship" is faulty.

The Problem of Evil

The argument breaks down in several interrelated ways.

First, it treats evil as an existential reality, which is anything but a forgone conclusion; see, for example, C.S.Lewis's concept of evil as the category describing any absence, deficiency, or shortfall relative to the fullness of God's goodness. In this sense evil cannot be said to "exist"; rather, we can only say that creation does not fully and perfectly reflect the goodness of its Creator.

But even granting ad arguendo that evil can be said to exist, the argument rests upon a false second statement, "the attributes of God are not consistent with the existence of evil". The attributes of God are not consistent with the ultimate dominion and victory of evil, but his attributes - particularly that of His nature as a creator who separates and distinguishes himself from creation and grants agency to actors in that creation - allows for the possibility (but not necessarily the necessity) of evil.

A Perfect Creator Cannot Exist

The argument fails on multiple grounds. First, the word "perfect" must be defined carefully; theologians speak of God's particular "perfections" because simple "perfection" without an object is not a meaningful attribute.

Even so, the argument's third and fourth statements are each fundamentally flawed. What particular definition of "perfection" necessitates the statement "if a being is perfect, then whatever he creates must be perfect"? We may as well make patently false statements like "if a being is sentient, then whatever he creates must be sentient" or "if a being is carbon-based, then whatever he creates must be carbon-based".

But an even more important question must be raised about the fourth statement: if we are to say "but the universe is not perfect", we must first establish what standard of perfection we are measuring the universe against. It by no means follows that entropy and perfection are antithetical, or that perfection implies human ease or comfort. Christians believe that the universe is broken, but in that we are saying something very different from the fourth claim (unless a more suitable definition of perfection which can function correctly in both the third and fourth statements simultaneously be proposed).

A Transcendent Being Cannot Be Omnipresent

This argument fails in definitions, specifically its first: "If God exists, then he is transcendent (i.e., outside space and time)". But "outside space and time" is certainly not what Christians mean by the transcendence of God. Indeed, the argument tries to conflate God's ontological attributes with spatial reasoning. For this reason, it is far more common to see God's transcendence spoken of as "beyond" than "outside" precisely to avoid this kind of wrong-headed spatial inference.

A Personal Being Cannot be Nonphysical

Let us not forget, first, that in Jesus Christ God did become not merely physical, but fully human.

Having said that, the third statement, "a person (or personal being) needs to be physical" is patently absurd unless you mean by "personal" something which theologians do not mean when they refer to God as personal.

The Paradox of Omnipotence

This "paradox" is well-studied, well-deconstructed, and widely recognized as resting upon a small constellation of false premises, the failure of any one of which is sufficient to refute the paradox. For example, the second and third claims ("If God can create a stone that he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent" and "If God cannot create a stone that he cannot lift, then he is not omnipotent") rest upon a frankly ham-fisted definition of omnipotence which is not the one offered by most thoughtful Christian theologians. A slightly less cartoonish version of the Christian doctrine of God's omnipotence is that He is able to do anything which an exertion of power or authority over creation is able to do. Berkhof's treatment of God's omnipotence is particularly useful here, noting both that God's omnipotence cannot be divorced from His other perfections (hence "He cannot lie") and that His actions need not reach the full extent of His capabilities; in light of the latter, He may well be capable of bringing universe-warping contradictions into existence by making "this statement is false" a true statement and making the numeric values of 1 and 2 equivalent in all places and times, but in His grace and patience toward us He does not desire to subject us to the necessary consequences of such a thing.

Refutation of the Book's Principal Arguments

It is worth noting that few, if any, of these arguments are properly "scientific". They do not rest upon empirical measures and common definition, but subjective and purpose-chosen ones. Instead, what we find is a recurring thread of straw-men producing irrefutable but ultimately irrelevant tautologies.

The "Generic Argument"

The "Scientific God Model" is not a faithful model of the Christian God, Jesus Christ. It is an interesting philosophical starting point, but claim 3 is misleading at best (the "laws of nature" are all subsidiary expressions of God's providential grace, as are his suspensions, amplifications, and modifications of those laws at various times) and claim 8 (that God does not hide himself) implies patently false conclusions unless it is properly modulated by simultaneous claims about the nature of human understanding vis a vis sin, which relate to the contradiction between claim 8 and the Biblical witness.

Having said that, the "Generic Argument" fails precisely because (by the author's own admission that he has not required the "3 O's") it makes entirely too little of God. The notion of "evidence" is, frankly, subjective; all evidence is relative to a standard of measure. But posit the god (I decapitalize deliberately) of this argument; said being has chosen to subject itself to a standard of evidence chosen arbitrarily by the "looker" of step 3. That god has then subjected itself, not to its own perfections, but to the whims of rebellious, thick-skulled, morally foolish, finite beings; this is not a God who can be trusted, let alone worshiped, and it most certainly is not Jesus Christ the God of Creation who told us that "a wicked generation seeks a sign".

The "Higher Good" Argument

The argument goes very well up until point 8, where it falls upon its face. Claim 8 is actually the weaker of two prongs of a dilemma. Having not only conceded claims 3 through 7 but being willing to emphasize and amplify them, I then claim "Observable human and societal behaviors are wholly and precisely consistent with the Christian doctrines of human sin and of God's common grace." Instead, the argument makes a far less-supported claim that "Observable human and societal behaviors look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God"; but precisely what materialist theory of human and social behaviors gives rise not only to the possibility but the specific expectation of claims 3 through 7?

Having already gone off the tracks, claim 9 offers a different and unrelated set of non sequitors: "Because of the contradictions between commonly accepted morals and values and the scriptures and other religious teachings, we conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that a god who has defined good, evil, and human values accepted by most humans and made that knowledge available to us in scriptures and other religious teachings, does not exist." This is a valid inference so far as it goes, which is not very far because the author has changed the subject from a "God [who] has made knowledge of those principles available to us in scriptures and other revelations" to a "god who has defined good, evil, and human values accepted by most humans", which is not the God of Christian theology. That He has, through general revelation, made His perfections known (or perhaps simply knowable) in no way implies that they are "accepted by most humans", and indeed in light of the doctrine of sin it is shocking just how little difference exists in these matters (which lack of difference we account for as common grace).

The Argument from Evil

The argument stumbles at the very beginning. "It is empirical fact that unnecessary suffering exists in the world" is a useless claim until we define "unnecessary" (and, by extension, "necessary"). In a fundamental sense (H/T Karl Barth), all suffering is unnecessary in the same sense that all existence apart from God's own self-existence is unnecessary, because creation itself is likewise an unnecessary product of God's willful act of self-giving and not some necessity arising out of some attribute or lack in His own being. In another sense, all suffering is unnecessary in the same sense that all pleasure is unnecessary; on what grounds should the exclusivity, prevalence, or even existence of either be a necessity? In yet another sense, we must again ask what the implications of the doctrine of sin entail with respect to the necessity of human suffering.

Having thus demonstrated the uselessness of this argument's definition to any consideration of the truth of the claims of Jesus Christ, it seems unnecessary to continue. However, the presumptive illogic of the argument is laid on so thick that at least one other point must be called out: that claim 5 asserts that the mere existence of "unnecessary suffering" (again, granting its existence only ad arguendo) disproves the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God, when the necessary predicates to this leap assert only that such a God be able and desirous to alleviate "at least some of the unnecessary suffering"; but at what point has it been demonstrated that said god has not done precisely that, and that the amount of "unnecessary suffering" in the world is not in fact a tiny fraction of what it would be apart from that god's action? Not to sound like a broken record, but the doctrine of common grace is significant here.

Stenger's critiques of common patterns in theodicy are similarly flawed. The twice-indented sections are from Michael Huemer (see the referenced page), the once-indented sections are Stenger.

Per Michael Huemer: 1. "Evil is a product of human free will. God gave us free will because free will is a very valuable thing. But he cannot both give us free will and prevent us from doing evil."

Not all evil is the product of human free will, for example, natural disasters. If you redefine evil to include only human-caused ills, you still have to deal with the unnecessary suffering of natural disasters that are under God's control.

We still lack a usable definition of "unnecessary". It can't mean physical necessity, since most of the effects (and the suffering they produce) are necessary direct and indirect consequences of the physical configuration of people with respect to vehicles, buildings, oceans, and natural structures at the time of the event. But in a materialist universe physical necessity is the only kind of necessity; the notion of moral necessity is groundless; thus, the argument is, at best, resting upon a branch of the tree it tries to cut down. None the less, I simply do not grant that the suffering caused by natural disasters is necessarily "unnecessary" given the existence of the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

"Some amount of suffering is necessary for humans to develop important moral virtues. Some moral virtues can only exist in response to suffering or other bad things. Examples: courage, charity, strength of will."

This could be accomplished with a whole lot less suffering than exists in the world.

Again, this argument presumes too much. How does one know how much suffering is actually necessary to produce the ends which God has chosen? For that matter, how certain are you that you understand the moral ends to which God is acting fully enough to make such a categorical judgement?

"Good and evil exist only as contrasts to each other. Therefore, if evil were eliminated, good would automatically be eliminated as well."

Good can exist independent of evil. Winning a race is good, but losing it is not evil. Buying a toy for your granddaughter is good, but not doing so is not evil when she already has a playroom full of toys.

Oddly enough, Stenger's position on this is roughly the Christian one (at least per C.S.Lewis); the statement he is answering is dualism, which has been rejected by Christian thinkers from almost the day it was introduced into theological debate.

"Slightly different from #3: If evil were eliminated, then we wouldn't know that everything was good, because we can only perceive things when there is contrast."

Even if we did not identify something as good, it still can be good. And it still can be good even if we have no experience of bad. My granddaughters know that having toys is good, although they have never had no toys and so have not had the opposing experience.

Again, the position Stenger is answering is not a Christian one.

"Perhaps God has a different conception of evil from ours. Maybe what we think of evil is good."

We trust our own judgment on the evil of gratuitous suffering. No one can conceive of a reason God could have for allowing so much suffering. Why should we worship a God who allows acts that we regard as unspeakable? If God has a different conception of evil from ours, then so much the worse for God. He is then nothing more than an evil potentate. He might have power, but he has no moral authority and no one should worship him. "Good" and "evil" are our words and they name our concepts. It is confused thinking to suppose that some God's opinion would make any difference in our concepts.

Here Stenger shows his philosophical cards plainly; he is unwilling to concede that his own conception of "evil" may in fact be hopelessly distorted by his own evil desire for autonomy (literally "a law unto himself"), and that as such he may be impaired from making the necessary distinction between "a good" and "perfect goodness".

Indeed, these sorts of rants are inherently self-refuting. How, pray tell, did Stenger find this little bit of moral high ground from which he stands as he passes judgement upon the creator of everything as evil, and exactly what structural support does he think stands beneath it? In the materialist world, there is and can be none; evil is not ontologically or even existentially quantifiable, but only a subjective categorization of experience, and no individual's so-categorizing can claim and preferential, superior, or privileged status with respect to any other. Stenger wishes very much to be indignant at the evils of God, but fails to recognize that in the process he has castrated indignity and robbed it of any significance beyond the incoherent rantings of a no-count nobody. What he in fact wishes to do is take Christian notions of "good" and, ripping them out of the context of the worship of God as the Highest Good, turn them around and use them to critique the only giver capable of offering a legitimate ground for a truly objective indignation.

Here we also see an example of why Stenger's theologizing is so catastrophically (if unintentionally) awful. It is, indeed, the height of "confused thinking" to deny that The "God's opinion [sh]ould make any difference in our concepts", particularly when one reflects upon the utter shipwreck that is humanity's pursuit of "good and evil".

"Perhaps there is some underlying purpose served by all the evil in the world, but we humans are not smart enough to comprehend it. Have faith."

What could that possibly be? Again, why should we blindly accept acts that go against our very nature? Why would God give us a nature that finds his actions so reprehensible?

I'm beginning to feel like a broker record, but that's because we've seen these fallacies many times before. As a materialist, the use of phrases like "our very nature", particularly in the context of moral outrage, must be defined and justified. An utter lack of epistemological modesty has also come to the fore; he is unwilling even to conceive of the possibility that our own conception of good evil cannot perfectly encompass, comprehend, and map to and from that of an infinitely-wise and infinitely-knowledgeable God? He systemically refuses to account for the place sin must necessarily play, both in the experience of the person suffering because of evil and in the perspective of the man who wishes to evaluate said suffering while preserving his own self-image as "not part of the problem".

"God is not responsible for evil. The Devil is.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is stronger than the Devil and so still ultimately responsible.

The Book of Job makes it clear that much suffering is instigated by the Devil with God's permission and subject to God's control and constraint. As Luther rightly said, he is "God's Satan". And here the doctrines of grace again come to the fore, that God in His wisdom and goodness and power is able to take even the evil and suffering which we rightly deserve and out of it produce beauty and virtue and goodness for those whom He chooses.

"If we simply weaken the definition of God, then the existence of God may be compatible with the existence of evil. This, for example, he might be unable to instantly eliminate all the evil."

While the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God described in scriptures is hardly benevolent, the faithful of these religions are far more likely to ignore unpleasant scriptural passages than abandon belief in a benevolent God.

Again, the answered position is not a Christian one and as such its answer is not worth answering. My own take is that the weaknesses of most of the argument thus-far has not been that their definitions have been too strong, but that they have been far too weak, bearing too little resemblance to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to be of any use discussing Him.

The Illusion of Design

This argument falls over in all of the normal places when the philosophically ignorant or inept attempt it. For example, Claim 3 fails to specify what kinds of evidence would be expected to exist for "continuous outside action", fails to articulate what evidence for "purpose" would even look like, and refuses to account for well-established existing arguments for "design" (specifically, information content), and for this reason Claim 4 (that there is "no such evidence") is vacuous in that the kinds of evidences which claims 1 and 2 as applied to Jesus Christ lead us to expect are either implicitly or specifically excluded or de-emphasized in skeptical circles. This calls into question the usual debate about the philosophy of science and what sort of epistemology the current scientific orthodoxy can actually support.

Claim 5 (that "Science provides a purely material explanation for the development of those structures by mindless natural processes") is itself an inverse straw-man, posturing current materialist thinking as being far more conclusive, well-developed, and well-supported than it, in fact, is. Thus, the lack of differential power asserted in claim 6 is falsely stated, and the conclusions drawn therefrom in 6 and 7 lack sufficient justification.

Matter and Soul

Here the argument fails in more subtle ways, which still reduce to bald-faced scientific hubris. Specifically, there is an unspoken assumption between Claims 3 and 4 that we have a fairly thorough comprehension of "the capabilities of purely material bodies", which is then made explicit in Claim 6 that "Science provides a purely material explanation for those activities that are traditionally associated with the soul". Were this even remotely true, there might be an interesting topic for discussion here, but is it not. Intelligence, memory, awareness, thought, conceptualization, and consciousness all stand far beyond our ability to even imagine explanations for through material bodies (I say this having done graduate-level study and research into neuroscience and neurophilosophy), and the rising thought trends in neuroscience are for, not against, the hypothesis of an immaterial or super-material mind. As such the desire of Claims 4 and 5 for "empirical evidence" is unreasonable since there exists no standard by which one can compare "purely material" capabilities with the capabilities that human beings do, in fact, have; this lack of a proper differential discriminator similarly demolishes Claim 7's "just as they can be expected to look" assertion. Returning to Claim 4, it's also important to note that no affirmative grounds are offered for the expectation of evidence for the "survival of human personalities beyond death" beyond the author's own wish that it be so, let alone any systematic notion of what such evidence should look like in light of the specifically Christian teachings about death.

The Failures of Revelation

On this point, it is clear that Stenger is either being deliberately obtuse with the meaning of words, unintentionally oblivious to the substance and history of the Old and New Testaments, or willfully thick in his assessment of the same.

It would be interesting to go head-to-head on Claims 5 and 6. Claim 5 is demonstrably false in light of the substantial body of specifically-historic prophecy in the Old and New Testaments which has been archaeologically demonstrated. While part of me is curious what specific inaccuracies Claim 6 has in mind, I doubt that any of them were not well-answered centuries ago by Christians smarter than myself responding to skeptics craftier than any of the New Atheists.

Claim 7 has been raised before, so I will again ask: what reasonable expectation is there of the kind of independent confirmation that seems to be desired, and what level of such independent confirmation would be deemed sufficient?

Claim 8 is another demonstration of pidgin theologizing. "The information and insights contained in scriptures and other revelations just as they can be expected to look if there is no God" may account for Scientology, but not the texts of the Christian canon.

Cosmic Evidence

As usual, the argument trips over its own unfounded expectations. On precisely what grounds should we "expect that empirical evidence should exist", and what should we expect said evidence to look like? And, more to the point, on what grounds should we expect the supernatural to occur predictably, observably, and repeatably so as to satisfy a scientist? Why should the intention and disposition of the observer not itself have some bearing on the observability of such phenomena? (Chesterton noted that a panel of psychologists who refuse to believe that Mrs Jones calls her husband a periwinkle while in bed with him unless she say it in broad daylight in front of them are likely to come to the wrong conclusion.)

And, again, the origins thing. Let's assume the big bang ad arguendo; the laws of physics weren't violated in the very beginning because we don't have any laws to describe anything that heavy, dense, hot, or fast. There is rampant speculation about the beginning, but to pretend that "science" as such has anything to say about it beyond "something very different from anything we can observe, measure, infer, or even speculate about" is disingenuous.

The Uncongenial Universe

I have often held forth that I have never heard, read, or met a materialist who didn't suck at teleology, and Claim 3 is precisely the kind of irrational balderdash which reinforces that belief. Claims 1 and 2 offer, frankly, no logical grounds (beyond the arguer's own wishful preference) that "we can reasonably expect that the universe as a whole and the laws and parameters of physics should be congenial to human life". First, we will note that the "universe as a whole" has been introduced by some unspoken premise. Second, we will note that the existence and preservation of human life may in fact be furthered by the non-optimality of its environment. One would think that a well-versed Darwinist would grasp this almost intuitively, because his own model of biological emergence relies upon environmental stressors to drive genetic selection; instead, somehow the notion that an amplified finitude and physical adversity may serve purposes of moral guidance and instruction in the same way they drive biological refinement has completely escaped him. And that's to say nothing of the titanic intellectual presumption of Claim 4 ("The universe as a whole and the laws and parameters of physics are not congenial to human life"), which is and shall remain unmitigated speculation until such time as we gain access to a set of universes in which we can control and demonstrate a set of physical laws and parameters which are better suited to both the human and spiritual life of humanity. Indeed, much popular scientific speculation in our own day is driven by the difficulty of reckoning with the particularly well-tuned parameters (speed of light, weight of a proton, gravitational constant, etc) of the universe which we do have; its spontaneous emergence within the tolerances that make life as we know it even the slimmest of possibilities are so astonishingly low as to turn physicists into muttering mystics who spin tales of other universes completely beyond reckoning, observation, or detection; such needless multiplication of entities is enough to make brother Occam turn over in his grave.

The Origin Of Physical Law

This argument is unapologetically theological, clothing itself in only the sheerest of scientific pretenses. There is so much to say, I must take it point-by-point.

Claim 1: "Hypothesize a God who is the creator of the universe, the architect of its structure, and the author of the laws of physics." As far as it goes, this is a usable caricature, although one can already see multiple ways that its sloppiness will lead to straw men and vain conjecture: "architect" must be understood and treated as a metaphor, "structure" may refer to any of several layers of being, and "laws of physics" refers to our abstract models of nature whereas the subject God must be thought of as the author of the actual properties and processes which our "laws of physics" approximate.

And so it goes in Claim 2, "The laws of physics are elements of theoretical models that physicists develop to describe observations." But this is an argumentative rabbit-hole. While the Christian certainly recognizes God's common grace at work in helping humans to recognize and formalize the laws of physics as we understand them, this must not be misunderstood as diminishing His role in creating the subject of the physics, the things themselves which we measure and observe and model.

From here, things take a curiously Zen twist for an avowed rationalist. /TODO/ 3. The global laws of physics can be seen to follow from the requirement that our theoretical models be independent of any particular point of view. They correspond to the symmetries of a structureless void. /TODO/ 4. Complex structure in the universe can be understood to follow from spontaneous (random) broken symmetries. /TODO/

Claim 5 is baldfaced nonsense religion of the worst kind. "'Nothing' is unstable; we expect something rather than nothing" may apply to a vacuum with respect to a non-vacuous context, but it is meaningless to refer to a true "nothingness" as unstable because there is, literally, nothing with respect to which it can be said to be stable or unstable; what's more, the introduction of an expectation with respect to being is similar nonsense, since only being can beget expectation; if we assume a true nothing, there is no subject to expect and no object to be expected.

Claim 6 is a recurrence of the nonsensical non-statement that "The laws of physics look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God"; first, because we still have no atheistic justification for any ground of expectation to be meaningful, and second, because a much stronger contradiction, "The existence of a regular universe and our ability to abstractly model it are not only consistent with the existence of a God, but highly unlikely apart from predicates which defy scientific reason, exploration, or inquisition."

Possible and Impossible Gods

I will take each of these in turn.

A god who is the source of humanity's commonly accepted notions of morals and values fails to agree with the empirical fact that most religious believers act on these morals and values in ways that contradict the traditional teachings of their faiths as found in scriptures and other sacred writings. It also disagrees with the empirical act that many of the morals and values of humanity are common to believer and nonbelievers alike and have a plausible natural explanation.

That many people disobey revelation and others obey it without knowing they are doing so are accounted for by the Christian doctrines of sin and common grace. Indeed, were either of these observations (disobedient believers and virtuous unbelievers), we would have much more cause to doubt the Christian faith.

A god who has given humans immortal and immaterial souls fails to agree with the empirical facts that human memories and thoughts are affected by physical processes, no nonphysical powers of the mind can be found, and no evidence exists for an afterlife.

This is a simple overstatement which misses the point of doctrines of the "soul". On the one hand, a soul need not be the exclusive vessel of the human experience, nor need its capabilities (whatever they may be -- after all, it is hardly clear that memory would be the most important one) while attached to a body be completely unmediated or unmodulated by flaws, damages, and illnesses of that body. On the other, our conception of mind is being constantly stretched by the study and practice of neurology, neuroscience, and neurosurgery; just the other day a doctor on NPR was discussing cases in which essentially flatlined EEGs (brain-death) were able to make substantial recoveries, to the point of being able to return to an everyday life.

A god who is responsible for the complex structure of the world, especially living things, fails to agree with empirical fact that that structure can be understood to arise from natural processes and shows none of the expected signs of design. Indeed, the universe exhibits a clear lack of design.

/TODO/ Ballocks /TODO/

A god who reveals himself to humans by means of a nonphysical channel of communication called revelation fails to agree with the fact that no revelation has ever been confirmed empirically. No claimed revelation contains information that could not have been already in the head of the person reporting the revelation.

/TODO/ The criterion proffered is a null discriminator. /TODO/

A god whose interactions with humans, including miraculous interventions, have been reported in scriptures is contradicted by the lack of independent evidence that these miraculous events took place and the fact that physical evidence rules out some of the most important narratives.

/TODO/ Is the hypothesis that mastadons mated just as modern elephants do contradicted by the lack of independent evidence of this particular happening? And wait - what physical evidence are we talking about here? That a fish in the hands of a scientist doesn't feed thousands of people doesn't suggest that a fish in the hands of its Maker could not. /TODO/

A god who miraculously and supernaturally created the universe fails to agree with the empirical fact that no violations of physical law were required to produce the universe. It also fails to agree with established theories, based on empirical facts, which indicate that the universe began with maximum entropy and so retains no memory of a creator.

/TODO/ Faulty presumption that we actually understand physics of themselves. All we have are useful abstract approximations; we do not know what actual "physical laws" operate under the covers, and we certainly have no idea what kinds of processes and structures were present and operative in the early stages of the universe's emergence (or from what it emerged). /TODO/

A god who fine-tuned the laws and constants of physics for life, in particular human life, fails to agree with the fact that universe is not congenial to human life, being tremendously wasteful of time, space, and matter. It also fails to agree with the fact that the universe is mostly composed of particles in random motion, with complex structures forming less than four percent of the mass and less than one particle out of a billion.

/TODO/ Simply stated, the fact that human life exists flatly contradicts this argument. Were the universe truly hostile to our existence in any universal sense, we would not exist, period. /TODO/

The god who created the laws of physics fails to agree with the fact that these laws, and the corresponding mathematical models, are human contrivances that can be shown to arise from the very lack of the special point of view required by the god model.

First, this argument confuses "laws" as in our abstract models with the actual, existential, ontological existences and mechanisms which those laws try to reflect. An assumption that SPOV precludes God implies a rejection of omnipresence. Lack of particularity of perspective and omni-perspective are not functionally distinguishable.

What If?

/TODO/ Pick up from here... /TODO/

Empirical facts that, had they been observed, could have proved the existence of God:

1. If most religious believers were observed to act on the highest morals and values taught by their faiths (assuming those faiths renounced the literal reading of their scriptures). If believers were paragons of society—nonviolent, charitable, and tolerant. If nonbelievers were found to exhibit no such moral behavior—to start wars, to abuse their families, and fill the prisons.

/TODO/ Such an observation would precisely disprove Christianity /TODO/

2. If human memories and thoughts were found to have some aspects that are not limited by physical processes. If science were to confirm exceptional powers of the mind that it could not explain physically and were to uncover evidence for an afterlife.

3. If it were found that the complex structure of the world cannot possibly have resulted from purely natural processes and exhibited the expected signs of design.

/TODO/ Such evidences exist /TODO/

4. If a nonphysical channel of communication were empirically confirmed by revelations containing information that could not have been already in the head of the person reporting the revelation.

/TODO/ Prophecies of which empires will fall to which others, virgins giving birth. and a man raising himself from the dead don't count, I take it? On what grounds? Ultimately, your standard here translates to "could not conceivably have been already in the head of the person reporting the revelation" renders everything a prophet could possibly say "invalid" by definition, so the standard cannot be a useful discriminator /TODO/

5. If independent physical and historical evidence were found for the miraculous events and the important narratives of the scriptures.

/TODO/ Precisely what kind of physical evidence would you expect of a leper being healed, of a small number of men rising from their graves, or of a few thousand people getting a free lunch? /TODO/

6. If science were to show that violations of physical law were required to produce the universe. If the universe were shown to have begun in a state of predetermined order.

/TODO/ Even for materialists the universe's beginning is shrouded in the total breakdown of physical laws as we know them. What's more, all plausible models of pre-biological scenarios demonstrate a strong hostility to the formation of the primitive components of biological life; this strongly implies the impossibility of the current order apart from a super-material infusion of information. /TODO/

7. If the universe were found to be so congenial to human life that its must have been created with human life in mind.

/TODO/ Teleological humility. /TODO/

8. If the laws of physics and the corresponding mathematical models were shown not to be human contrivances but necessarily the product of a divine lawgiver.

/TODO/ Going around backwards -- are the laws and models purely "human contrivances", or do they have some relationship to reality, and if so, to what do you attribute their ability to be so-correlated? /TODO/

The Hiddenness Argument

1. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such a relationship that is, able to do so just by trying to.

2. No one can be in a position to participate in such relationship without believing that God exists.

3. If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists (from 1 and 2).

4. It is not the case that all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God believe that God exists: there is non-resistant nonbelief; “God is hidden.”

5. It is not the case that there is a perfectly loving God (from 3 and 4).

6. If God exists, God is perfectly loving.

7. It is not the case that God exists (from 5 and 6).[10]

The Argument from Nonbelief

1. If God were to exist, then there would be no avoidable nontheism in the world.

2. But there is avoidable nontheism in the world.

3. Therefore, God does not exist.[11]

This, as many arguments that came before, is answered by the arguer's lack of teleological imagination, and has been deftly demolished by Alvin Plantinga who points out that the statement "We can see no good reason for God to do X" only implies "There is no good reason for God to do X" on the assumption that "If there were a good reason for God to do X, we would be able to see it", the third statement being certainly false in light of the content of the Biblical witness.