Eric Anderson and the tired old ‘you don’t know God’ argument

At UD, Eric Anderson has a new OP entitled

No-one Knows the Mind of God… Except the Committed Atheist

It’s the same argument we’ve heard so many times before.  Here are a few excerpts:

Coyne’s thinks he finds “strong evidence for no God.”  Yet his argument, when we cut through the clutter, is essentially as follows:

1. God, if He existed, would be like X.

2. Evidence shows God is not like X.

3. Therefore, God does not exist.

And:

This exchange highlights the fact that the anti-religious zealot so often approaches the matter with a very concrete God in mind, a concept of how they think God should be (if only there were such a being).  Then when the facts don’t seem to align with that superficial and hypothetical image they have created in their own minds, they proclaim that God must not exist.

And:

No-one seems so cock-sure of exactly what God is like, exactly what God’s characteristics are, exactly how to understand God, than the anti-religious zealot.  He is convinced he knows just how God is and how God should act in particular situations . . . if, of course, such a being existed.

None of this is correct, of course. As atheists, we don’t have any particular idea of what a nonexistent God must be like.  Instead, we play Whack A Mole with whatever gods the theists come up with.

In his essay, Coyne was addressing the Abrahamic God worshipped by billions of people.  You’ll hear this God described as omnipotent and perfectly loving, and Coyne, like many of us, sees belief in such a God as absurd.  The world, and the Bible itself, are not compatible with such a view of God.

The problem is not with what atheists say about God. It’s what believers say about God that clashes with the evidence.

IDers, for all their bluster about “following the evidence where it leads”, are notoriously reluctant to do so when it comes to God.

Eric Anderson has swung and missed.

69 thoughts on “Eric Anderson and the tired old ‘you don’t know God’ argument

  1. No answers, eh, Steve?

    Out of curiosity — what do you make of the fact that God never grants you a knock-down argument to use against us infidels?

    He’s either very mean to his followers, or else he just doesn’t exist.

    I vote for (b).

  2. keiths,

    I would say no one knows all of God’s mind. Since we take it upon faith that we are made in God’s image, I would disagree with Eric if he insists that we cannot know any part of God’s mind.

    To back up the faith claim that we are made in God’s image we can observe numerous cases that are uncannily design like; the flagellum being one famous example. Others are reproduction, interlocking systems, endo-symbiosis, DNA error detection/repair. They all speak to design, not darwinian evolution.

    IOW, design concepts precede our discovery of them in ourselves.

    Score several for design.

    Next stop, figuring out design ‘rules’. Definitely doable.

    Stay tuned.

  3. Steve: To back up the faith claim that we are made in God’s image we can observe numerous cases that are uncannily design like; the flagellum being one famous example. Others are reproduction, interlocking systems, endo-symbiosis, DNA error detection/repair. They all speak to design, not darwinian evolution.

    This strikes me as an extremely strange argument, Steve, even by the standards we have come to expect from IDists. You appear to be saying that these observed attributes are evidence that we are made in God’s image. So God is the result of an endo-symbiotic event, His DNA polymerase makes copying errors, and He has a penis. From which *you* would therefore conclude that God is, himself, designed. By Whom?
    It’s Turtles all the way down.

  4. Steve: Stay tuned.

    Do you have a prediction for when you’ll be able to produce some actual science, rather then just saying “we can observe numerous cases that are uncannily design like”?

    What’s “design-like” about the parasitic wasp?

  5. Steve: I guess everyone is a closet theist at some point. Like a nagging cough you can’t shake.

    Speaking for myself, I can’t recall a time when the idea of God (the rather obscure and vague Church-of-England God – I presume everyone realises God is English 🙂 ) made any sense to me. Also I don’t personally feel any innate desire or hunger for some entity such as the Christian god. On the other hand, it is none of my business what other people wish to believe. It only becomes my business when religious groups claim religious entitlement that allows them affect the lives of those that don’t share their beliefs or indeed to oppress others (women and Islam, for example) within their group..

  6. OMagain: Do you have a prediction for when you’ll be able to produce some actual science, rather then just saying “we can observe numerous cases that are uncannily design like”?
    What’s “design-like” about the parasitic wasp?

    It seems you didn’t get Steve’s “argument”. He says these features show design “in god’s image”, not darwinian evolution. No reason or basis was given, just the bare assertion. I guess that settles it.

    Praise the lawd!

  7. Rumraket: It seems you didn’t get Steve’s “argument”. He says these features show design “in god’s image”, not darwinian evolution. No reason or basis was given, just the bare assertion. I guess that settles it.

    Praise the lawd!

    You just don’t know God Designer Design.

    Science will never be the same once it realizes that all you need to do is to look and know a cause immediately, sans further knowledge.

    Glen Davidson

  8. Steve,

    I would say no one knows all of God’s mind. Since we take it upon faith that we are made in God’s image, I would disagree with Eric if he insists that we cannot know any part of God’s mind.

    Coyne was pointing out the obvious contradictions between

    1) the Christian claim that God is omnipotent, perfectly good, and perfectly loving; and
    2) the behavior of God as described in the Bible and in the actual world that he supposedly created.

    It’s a huge problem for Christians. How do you, personally, resolve it?

  9. keiths: Coyne was pointing out the obvious contradictions between

    1) the Christian claim that God is omnipotent, perfectly good, and perfectly loving; and
    2) the behavior of God as described in the Bible and in the actual world that he supposedly created.

    It’s a huge problem for Christians. How do you, personally, resolve it?

    It’s an interesting problem that gets generated by the fact that the Old Testament was written in a culture that was just as tribalistic and ethnocentric as any other ancient Near Eastern civilization, and the New Testament was written in a culture that was struggling mightily with the Greco-Roman heritage of univeralistic ethics and cosmopolitan politics.

    Put otherwise, the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible is perfectly at home with Zeus and Osiris, and the God the Father of the Gospels is much more like the God of Plato, Aristotle, or Epictetus. There’s a fundamental transformation in how we conceive of the divine that begins with Xenophanes’s criticisms of anthropocentrism, continues through Plato’s criticism of the poets, and leads to Aristotle and Epictetus. The philosophical conception of the divine gets taken up by Hellenistic Jews and Jew-friendly philosophers (e.g. Philo Judaeus), and that in turn has a huge impact on Paul and the Gospel writers.

    So the problem of the Bible here is, in part, the problem of how to reconcile the pre-Platonic Old Testament and the post-Platonic New Testament. It’s not for nothing that the Gnostics held that they are in fact two different gods, and that Yahweh is actually Satan. (Of course, this led the Gnostics to become a major source of Christian anti-Semitism over the centuries, even though Gnosticism was deemed a heresy in the 3rd century A.D.)

    And this isn’t just a problem for Christians, since Jews have a similar problem — we’re not exactly thrilled with all the massacres and sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible. But we have a different way of handling it, because we never insisted that it be taken “literally” — just seriously.

  10. KN,

    It’s not for nothing that the Gnostics held that they are in fact two different gods, and that Yahweh is actually Satan.

    And the Marcionists, too. It actually makes a certain diabolical sense.

    And this isn’t just a problem for Christians, since Jews have a similar problem — we’re not exactly thrilled with all the massacres and sacrifices in the Hebrew Bible. But we have a different way of handling it, because we never insisted that it be taken “literally” — just seriously.

    Which leads to vexing questions about which parts to take literally, and whether there are consistent and defensible criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.

    I give the literalists and the inerrantists credit for one thing: they realize that once you admit that scripture can’t be taken at face value, you open it up to all kinds of doubts.

  11. keiths: Which leads to vexing questions about which parts to take literally, and whether there are consistent and defensible criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.

    I was never taught to take any of it literally. I don’t know if “literal” interpretation is a thing among Orthodox Jews. I suspect that it’s a very Christian thing, though, because it’s a lot harder to figure out what the “literal” meaning is when there aren’t any written vowels and even figuring which consonants mean which words is dependent on context.

  12. Kantian Naturalist: I was never taught to take any of it literally.I don’t know if “literal” interpretation is a thing among Orthodox Jews.I suspect that it’s a very Christian thing, though, because it’s a lot harder to figure out what the “literal” meaning is when there aren’t any written vowels and even figuring which consonants mean which words is dependent on context.

    Consonants and vowels aside, it used to be said that Orthodox Judaism had a more subtle approach than Christian fundamentalism, and could accommodate evolution. However, that is mostly no longer true. I have heard members of the Seattle Kollel parrot Christian creationist talking points, and we have seen extreme Orthodox types (including Shmuley Boteach, David Klinghoffer, and the self-proclaimed “Maverick” Moshe Averick) snuggle up to the Discovery Institute as if they were Jewish versions of Harun Yahya. Sic transit subtlety.

  13. Orthodox Jews are also sticklers about every jot and tittle of the Law, right? I think that qualifies as a kind of literalism.

    I remember reading about a great kerfuffle within Judaism caused by the serving of shrimp at some sort of rabbinical banquet, contrary to the Torah. The liberals were fine with it but the conservatives were outraged.

    ETA: Bless you, Google. The Trefa Banquet

  14. Joe Felsenstein: I have heard members of the Seattle Kollel parrot Christian creationist talking points, and we have seen extreme Orthodox types (including Shmuley Boteach, David Klinghoffer, and the self-proclaimed “Maverick” Moshe Averick) snuggle up to the Discovery Institute as if they were Jewish versions of Harun Yahya. Sic transit subtlety.

    Skeptical Inquirer (or maybe it was Skeptic) found that anti-evolution was common among Orthodox Jews.

    Dare I call this a shibboleth?

    Dare I point out that we tend to operate as if these disagreements could be bridged by logic, when they seem to operate more as tribal identifiers?

  15. petrushka:

    Dare I point out that we tend to operate as if these disagreements could be bridged by logic, when they seem to operate more as tribal identifiers?

    Depends on what the “tribe” is. In this case not Christians, Jews, or Muslims, but a common alliance of fundamentalists of all religions. These folks have far more in common with each other than any of them does with the folks down at our local Reform temple.

    The common tribal identifier is rejection of science.

  16. Joe Felsenstein: The common tribal identifier is rejection of science.

    Agreed.

    Christian fundamentalists are more politically aligned to Israeli politics than are American Jews. Politics and religion make for strange bedfellows.

  17. For a while at Panda’s Thumb there was a Carol Clouser who was shilling for some kind of apologetics for Genesis that supposedly made evolution compatible with Genesis. So she didn’t go for any strict creationism, while she was apparently an Orthodox Jew. But her literalistic excuses for the genocide and other atrocities in the “Old Testament” sounded as bad as just about any Xian fundamentalist’s, denying or justifying however it sounded best to do.

    A long series of posts where she argues for righteous genocide

    That’s about all that I know about Orthodox treatment of Biblical atrocities, and she could be representative of the whole or of only some small part of Jewish Orthodox thought (possibly only herself). She took the accounts quite literally, including whatever excuses there were in the text, and it all had to be holy and wonderful. Yet she may be exceptional in that respect, for all that I know.

    Glen Davidson

  18. Glen,

    For a while at Panda’s Thumb there was a Carol Clouser who was shilling for some kind of apologetics for Genesis that supposedly made evolution compatible with Genesis. So she didn’t go for any strict creationism, while she was apparently an Orthodox Jew. But her literalistic excuses for the genocide and other atrocities in the “Old Testament” sounded as bad as just about any Xian fundamentalist’s, denying or justifying however it sounded best to do.

    Barb is the UD equivalent of Carol Clouser. Posting as ‘champignon’, I quoted this at her…

    11 If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, 12 you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.

    Deuteronomy 25:11-12, NIV

    …and asked how Christians could justify such an unfair and Draconian punishment:

    It’s fortunate for Christianity that most Christians don’t read the entire Bible. Here’s an experiment you can try: tell some Christians (preferably evangelicals) about how the Taliban will cut off a woman’s hand if she grabs the genitals of a man who is trying to kill her husband. Listen to their outrage and indignation at this heinous evil. Then show them Deuteronomy 25:11-12 and watch their faces.

    Here is her elaborate and ridiculous defense of this barbarity:

    Again, let’s examine the context, which you again blatantly ignore. These scriptures concern what we term today as sterilization. Remember, you’re dealing with an agricultural society that values parenthood and marriage.

    God is the Giver of reproductive powers to human creatures; he set the example by making laws for the protection of these powers. His law stated: “Soul will be for soul, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deut. 19:21) But now suppose a woman’s husband got into a fight with another man. In order to protect her husband and keep him from being whipped or defeated, she reached out and grabbed hold of the other man’s private parts in order to put him out of action!

    By doing this, the woman doubtless ruined the man’s reproductive powers; here’s the point, champignon: she violated God’s law that was against the crushing of a man’s testicles and made this man unfit for God’s congregation. This woman could not argue that she was using jujitsu and acting in defense of her husband and thus for her own self-protection. She had to be punished.

    Notice, though, that God allows her to reproduce although she has taken that right away from the man she injured. God’s law respected her and her husband’s reproductive powers, for it said: “You must then amputate her hand. Your eye must feel no sorrow.” (Deut. 25:11, 12)

    God’s law said this thing right after it had approved of brother-in-law marriage within a family. This law specified that the man who refused to perform brother-in-law marriage toward his dead brother’s widow should be publicly disgraced, for refusing to give his brother’s widow a child in the name of his dead brother (Deut. 25:5-10).

    All this gives us some idea of how God feels when a person or a nation dedicated to him tampers with the reproductive organs, preventing their normal function. It is true that the Mosaic law containing the above provisions was done away with in Christ.

  19. What I like most about Barb’s “defense” is that she uses one ridiculous law (the exclusion of men with damaged genitals from the temple) to justify another (the amputation of a woman’s hand for the ‘crime’ of defending her husband).

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