In this episode Trent reveals how some arguments for atheism unintentionally refute more than most atheists are willing to give up about reality.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist and speaker, Trent Horn, and today we’re talking about five ways atheism becomes a universal acid. So, what do I mean by universal acid? I’ll tell you. But first, I want to remind you, if you like these podcast episodes, if you like our rebuttal videos, consider supporting us at trenthornpodcast.com. If you become a subscriber there, you get access to our 18-hour catechism study series, all the lessons immediately available, the 18-hour New Testament study series. It’s video lectures. I go through the whole catechism, the whole New Testament. You can submit ideas for future episodes and rebuttals. If you’re a gold level subscriber or higher, you get a fancy mug with The Counsel of Trent logo on it. That’s always a lot of fun. So, all of that and more. Check it out at trenthornpodcast.com.
Trent Horn:
Now, onto the top topic of today’s episode, five ways atheism becomes a universal acid. If you go back to the Middle Ages, alchemists proposed there might be a solvent that is a universal acid; it eats through everything. No container could hold it, right? What if there was a substance that it always changed everything it touched. Daniel Dennett, a new atheist philosopher, applies that idea in a metaphorical way to evolution, saying that evolution changes everything it touches. That’s in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
Trent Horn:
But what I want to focus on is there’s some atheistic arguments and slogans that you would think, “Oh, this refutes Christianity. It’s a good argument against God.” But you have to be careful because it turns into a universal acid. It would also eat away at many other things you would like to believe in. So that would show it’s not a very good argument in the first place if it undermines many things you do consider to be true, or you want to believe in.
Trent Horn:
Let me give you a few examples, okay? First one: if God told you to kill me, would you? This is supposed to show that God has no relationship to morality. Christians have a lot of different ways of understanding how God might be related to morality. A very, very simplistic divine command theory might say, “Good is whatever God says is good, and bad is whatever God says is bad.” But hardly any Christians hold to such a simplistic view, at least once they start thinking about morality. If morality were just dependent on God’s will, then God would be a cosmic tyrant. The catechism even says this in paragraph 271, “God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary. In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing, therefore, can be in God’s power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect.”
Trent Horn:
So, we would say that morality doesn’t come solely from God’s will, it comes from God in whom the will, like what you choose to do, and intellect and goodness and being, it’s all one. So God is just perfection itself, then naturally what He commands us to do will be perfect. The moral law will flow from God’s perfect nature.
Trent Horn:
But this objection tries to say, “All right, if God is a source of morality for you,” and as I said that it’s cashed out in different ways, “but if God is a source of morality and God told you to kill me, would you do it?” If you say, no, it sounds like you don’t really think God is a source of morality. If you say yes, you sound like a fanatic or a religious zealot. Well, this becomes a universal acid against morality itself. Because I could just change the question, swap out God and put in this, ultimate standard of morality, that this same question would eat away at any ultimate standard of morality because I could ask, “Well, if your ultimate standard of morality told you to kill me or to rape somebody or to commit genocide, would you do it?”
Trent Horn:
So I could say this to an atheist. Do you have an ultimate standard of morality? If you do, and that standard told you to do something evil, what would you do? Now an atheist might say, “Well, my standard would never tell me to do that.” And I would say, “Well, how do you know that?” Because a Christian could say the same thing about God. Because God is all good, he would not command intrinsically evil things.
Trent Horn:
The other problem for an atheist is how do you know? You’re just so certain your ultimate standard of morality would entail these things. So yeah, if you believe that morality is just about maximizing utility or desire, satisfaction, I mean, there’s a lot of different ways you can cash out morality. But I’ve spoken to many atheists who can’t say that some things just are absolutely wrong or intrinsically wrong. And I think that that’s a difficulty for atheism.
Trent Horn:
My point is that if an atheist tries to say, “Oh, if God told you to do this horrible evil thing, clearly you would say, no, God can’t be the source of morality.” Well then by your standard, you can’t have any ultimate source of morality. You could put reason, evolution, social contract, whatever you want, you could always tack onto it after. If your ultimate standard told you to do something terrible, would you do it? And if the reply is, “Well, my ultimate standard would never tell me to do that,” then the Christian can say the same thing about God.
Trent Horn:
So I think that this question, this gotcha question. If God told you to kill me, would you, it could be used to undermine any ultimate standard of morality. So with it, as an atheist, if you’re willing to have an ultimate standard of morality, then you’ve got to have built in defense mechanisms against questions like this. And a Christian could apply that to God as well.
Trent Horn:
All right, here’s another one: You shouldn’t believe in the Bible because, and there’s lots of different criteria put forward to say, well, you shouldn’t consider the Bible reliable or trustworthy because of these different features in it. The problem here is that all of these features can also be found in many other books of antiquity and even in modern books and writings.
Trent Horn:
And so if you disqualify the Bible, you will destroy ancient history. You’ll destroy ancient literature. We wouldn’t be able to know anything really about the past or what happened. And so in an attempt to show the Bible to be historically unreliable and that we can’t trust it, we’d have a weird agnosticism about ancient history in general. Some of this would include you can’t believe in Bible because it contains miracles. Well, most other accounts in the ancient world also claim miracles have taken place.
Trent Horn:
And if you were an atheist, I would say, look, don’t throw out the whole Bible. If you’re not sold on miracles yet at the very least you can say, “Hey, was there a man named Jesus? Did he have a preaching ministry? Did people sincerely think he performed miracles? Was he crucified? Did people sincerely think he rose from the dead? What explains all of that?” Now you don’t throw out Josephus, Tacitus, Herodotus, these other ancient historians. They also say miracles happened, but you don’t throw them all out and say that they’re all completely unreliable.
Trent Horn:
The Bible has contradictions. You can find differing accounts, contradictory accounts in, once again, other ancient historians. You look at Tacitus, Dio Cassius and Suetonius, they all disagree about Nero and the great fire at Rome. Doesn’t mean there was no great fire. Doesn’t mean Nero did do specific things at that time.
Trent Horn:
The idea that I don’t believe that the Bible has error in it, I do believe the Bible has differing descriptions of events. And so if you’re going to be that rigid to say, “Oh, you can’t trust the Bible because look at these contradictory accounts,” you’re going to throw out most of ancient history.
Trent Horn:
That it’s not an eyewitness account or it doesn’t name its own sources, this came up in dialogue with the godless engineer. We talked about whether Luke’s gospel was reliable. He said Luke wasn’t reliable because Luke doesn’t name the sources that he used for his gospel. But as I showed in that dialogue, you can watch it I’ll link to it below. I cited many ancient writers, non-biblical writers, who also did not name the sources for their accounts. I would also say that Luke does include his sources, at least implicitly, like what he knows about Mary.
Trent Horn:
He writes that what Mary said, “She kept and pondered these things in her heart. That seems to be evidence that Mary was a source for Luke when it comes to things like the infancy narrative. But regardless, there’s a lots of ancient historians that they don’t use a direct eyewitness account. They’re quoting what somebody else said decades, maybe hundreds of years earlier. Or they wrote that something happened and they don’t cite a source. Even today in modern biographies, people don’t necessarily cite, they don’t footnote every single factor of their biography, but they record from the general knowledge that they’ve received.
Trent Horn:
So my point is that if you have this very critical attitude towards the Bible, it’s not reliable because of X, you’ll find out many other forms of literature also share that same feature and you would have to get rid of it. We couldn’t know, as an example I brought up before, that it’s extraordinary to say that Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants. Historians still don’t know what exact route he took. The historical data for it is long after the fact to describe it. And yet that’s something that we believe. So I’m not saying that’s the same thing as believing in a miracle or something like that. My point is if you approach the Bible with an overdose of historical skepticism, that’s going to be a universal acid that will eat away at history in general. Okay?
Trent Horn:
Number three, if everything needs a cause then what caused God? Now I’ve never heard a Christian philosopher put an argument forward like this: Christians don’t believe everything needs a cause. We’d say if something begins to exist, it needs a cause. If something does not have to exist, there needs to be a reason for why it does exist instead of not existing. So things that begin, contingent things, they need a cause. It’s not the case that everything needs a cause, because you’re right. That would apply to God as well. But if you have this idea that, “Oh, well everything needs a cause,” if you’re just saying, well, what caused God, and that’s supposed to show Christians don’t have a good explanation of reality. Then now you have another universal acid that will eat away against any ultimate explanation for reality.
Trent Horn:
Because if you think about it, there are only three explanations for reality itself. Either there is no explanation for reality. There are an infinite series of explanations. Or there is an ultimate explanation. Right? It’s got to be one of these three. I mean you could maybe say some kind of circular… Well, no, the ultimate explanation, if it’s a circular one, you could say reality explains itself. But there would be an ultimacy, a final stopping point where you could not say what caused that.
Trent Horn:
And I would ask an atheist, could there be a non-divine ultimate explanation of reality? And there are atheists who say the universe is necessary. You can’t have ultimate explanations. But if you’re really focused on, oh well what caused God then as your Trump card against the cosmological argument, then that can become a universal acid. So that you can never say, you know, what’s the ultimate explanation. Well it’s the big bang. Well, what caused the big bang? Well, it’s the multiverse. What caused the multiverse? You know, the omega point. Well, what caused that?
Trent Horn:
As an atheist if you have that universal acid, you’ll never be able to settle. You’ll either have to pick between infinite explanations, which I would say becomes paradoxical very quickly, and no explanation, which is incredibly unsatisfying. Now you could say, “Well, I don’t know.” Of course it’s not an explanation. That’s just sitting back and wondering about the explanations. But if you’re willing to venture into explanatory territory, then pressing what caused God a bunch, you could end up eating away at any possible ultimate explanation.
Trent Horn:
So what I would say to flip it around is does an ultimate explanation make sense? As an atheist, you could believe in an ultimate explanation of reality. And if you do, then we would discuss, does that ultimate explanation have divine attributes or not? And I think that’d be a fruitful discussion to have.
Trent Horn:
All right, here’s the next one. I just believe in one less God than you. This is supposed to say that atheism is nothing special. It doesn’t have to be defended, right? Christians don’t believe in Zeus, don’t believe in Thor, don’t believe in Allah. They don’t believe in Krishna. They don’t believe in other gods. And for whatever reason you have to not believe in them, I just don’t believe in your God. I just believe in one less God than you.
Trent Horn:
So the idea here is that those same reasons you have for rejecting the other gods, that’s my reason for rejecting your God. So I don’t need to offer any other reasons. Or I don’t have to offer a positive defense of atheism. I just believe even one less God than you. But this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of belief and why Christians believe in God.
Trent Horn:
Like for me, when people ask me, “Why don’t you believe in these other gods?”, my first retort is, “They’re not God.” I don’t believe in those gods because they don’t even meet the definition of God. God is the ultimate ground of reality. So God by definition is infinite, perfect, necessary, would not be composed of matter, would not be subject to time. And so omnipotent, omniscient, all good, all knowing, all powerful. It would have all these properties and all the other gods, especially of mythology and of older polytheistic religions, don’t come anywhere close to that definition. So I don’t believe in them because they’re not God. They don’t meet the definition.
Trent Horn:
Now of course there’s other conceptions of God that are the omni-god, that have all these infinite properties that I don’t believe in either. And I can offer different reasons for why I believe in the particular conception of God that I do, just like other philosophers can offer reasons for a particular point of view that they hold in other controversial areas, such as politics or morality or value. So this, “I just believe in one less God than you,” can become the universal acid that says that we should start with the negation of important areas that people dispute. And it could lead to a really lazy defense of highly controversial opinions.
Trent Horn:
I’ll give you three examples. The first would be being amoral. Imagine someone said, “Well, we should be amoral. There is no know such thing as morality. There is no true moral system.” Well, why should I believe something like that? If the person said, “Well, look, there’s moral systems you don’t believe in. There’s virtue ethics. There’s Kantian ethics. There’s consequentialism. There’s all different kinds of ethical theories. And nobody believes in all of them. You don’t believe in this theory or that theory. I just believe in one less moral system than you do.”
Trent Horn:
No, you can’t just say that, because that’s a very controversial view to say moral realism is false, there is no true moral system. You have to make a case for that. And many people will say, “Well, no, I have a particular moral system and it works. And I have good reasons to not believe in competing systems.” I’d say the same thing for God and competing conceptions of God.
Trent Horn:
You could do the same thing with nihilism. Nihilism doesn’t need to be defended. Life has no meaning. People have lots of different meanings of life. I just believe in one less meaning you. Well that’s not very satisfying. Or what if someone defended anarchy this way, “We should be anarchists.” “Why should I be an anarchist? Why should I think we shouldn’t have any government?” “Well, there’s lots of governments you don’t believe in. You don’t believe in communism. You don’t believe in oligarchy. You don’t believe in true democracy, true Republic. I just believe in one less government than you.”
Trent Horn:
But that’s just kind of a cop out. We would say no. Anarchy is a very controversial belief that there ought to be no government whatsoever. You need to defend that. You can’t just point out that political scientists disagree about what the best form of government should be. Much the same way, atheism is the view that God does not exist. That’s the classical view. I’ve defined it in other videos. So you can’t say atheism is true just because people disagree about what concept of God is best. You have to engage the concepts and one may indeed be better than the others. So this view, “I just believe in one less God than you,” could end up eating away at other moral and political disputes and allow for lazy defenses of controversial positions like moral skepticism, nihilism, anarchy, things like that.
Trent Horn:
Number five is, “You only believe in God because of brain chemistry,” and some atheists will point to experiments that were done, I think by Michael Persinger is his name, with something called the God helmet. That if you put this helmet on, you turn on these magnetic fields, it’s supposed to stimulate a near death experience, or a feeling of being in the presence of God, or a feeling that someone else is with you in a room, a disembodied person, even though they’re not there. And so people will say, “Look, your brain just plays tricks on you. And see, we can use a helmet to make you think God exists, or God is here when he really isn’t. So belief in God, it’s just brain chemistry run amok.”
Trent Horn:
This can also be a universal acid. The atheist John Shook, in his book The God Question, this is what he writes. He says, “If science did try to conclude logically that nothing divine could be involved in a religious experience only because it could induce religious experiences by natural methods, that logical argument could be equally applied to human experiences of everything else,” i.e. a universal acid. He goes on to say, “Could a powerful brain science figure out how to induce a visual experience of your friend. If so, does that henceforth mean that your friend never really exists when you think you have contact with her, by seeing her?”
Trent Horn:
You could do stuff to my brain, to stimulate a false reality. You could create hallucinations. You could create a false perception of reality. It doesn’t mean that reality doesn’t really exist just because you could make a hallucination in my brain much the same way. So yeah, Shook is right here. Just because you could create a false perception of object X in the brain, it doesn’t mean I never have true perceptions of object X, be it a friend, be it God, whoever that might be.
Trent Horn:
Oh, by the way, later studies of the God helmet, there was one published in 2005 called “sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields.” Whew, that’s a long title. The point is in this follow up study, researchers took the God helmet and had people sit with it, but they didn’t turn the magnets on. And people still thought that they heard voices or felt God, even when the magnets weren’t on. So the fact that you’re given a helmet telling you, “Hey, it might make you think God is there,” you might start to play tricks on your own mind. It doesn’t mean that religious belief is simply the result of magnetic fluctuations in the brain.
Trent Horn:
So those were five arguments or slogans I’ve heard from atheism that I believe can have the unintended consequence of becoming a universal acid that would refute other things we do believe. And if it refutes things that we know are true, it’s probably not the most reliable argument that one should have in the debates about God’s existence.
Trent Horn:
So hey, I hope that was helpful for you. If you want more on this, my book answering atheism covers more of these topics and there’s a lot of other great resources. You can check them out at catholic.com. Thank you guys so much. I hope you have a very blessed day.
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