In this episode Trent shows how modern atheism commits one of the fallacies it claims is typical among arguments for the existence of God.
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. Today I want to talk about Atheism, or a part of Atheism that I think has a fundamental flaw, but to understand why I need to talk about something else called the God-of-the-gaps objection. So basically it goes like this, God-of-the-gaps objection claims that arguments for the existence of God, they all fail because they all essentially say the same thing. Here’s something we can’t explain, or here is a gap in our knowledge. God explains the gap in our knowledge, therefore God exists. In other words, you can’t argue in this way, “I don’t know what caused X, therefore God exists.” That’s a bad argument. Now the unexplained thing, it might be morality or the beginning of the universe or the existence of something rather than nothing, whatever it is Atheists say, we don’t want to rush to a supernatural explanation because we might miss an undiscovered or unknown natural explanation.
Trent Horn:
And actually a lot of Christians feel the same way. The Lutheran pastor and Holocaust victim, Dietrich, Bonhoeffer, once wrote this. He wrote, “How wrong it is to use God as a stop gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back, and that is bound to be the case, then God is being pushed back with them and is, therefore, continually in retreat.” On the one hand, I agree that arguments for God should start not from what we don’t know, but from what we do know. They should start with effects we observe, and then reason to a cause for those effects, and then show that that cause must have divine attributes. We shouldn’t just act like Bill O’Reilly in this clip in a conversation he had with atheist, David Silverman.
Bill O’Reilly:
I’ll tell you why it’s not a scam in my opinion, right? Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in …
David Silverman:
Tide goes in, tide goes out.
Bill O’Reilly:
See the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman.
David Silverman:
Maybe it’s Thor …
Bill O’Reilly:
It always comes in, and then goes out.
David Silverman:
On top of Mount Olympus who’s making the tides go in and out.
Bill O’Reilly:
No, but you can’t explain that. [crosstalk 00:02:33]
David Silverman:
In a myth …
Bill O’Reilly:
You can’t explain it.
Trent Horn:
On the other hand, I worry that Atheists who lean too much into the God-of-the-gaps objection, they’ll end up making Atheism as unfalsifiable as some religions, or they won’t be able to answer this question. What would prove God exists? A few examples I’ve heard from Atheists include healing an amputated limb through prayer, rearranging the stars to say God exists, or discovering on the human genetic code that our genetic code says made by Yahweh on it. [Evan Vail 00:03:14] says that if all the stars realigned to spell the words “mene mene tekel upharsin,” which is what God wrote on the wall at Belshazzar’s Feast in the Book of Daniel, then quote, “That would convince me of Theism or Polytheism. No other explanation is remotely plausible.” Doug from the Pine Creek Channel says that since the prophet Elijah could call down fire to light a soaked sacrifice in the Book of Kings, and he could one-up the prophets of Baal by doing that, then Christians should be able to prove Christianity is true by just setting a wet napkin on fire through prayer.
Trent Horn:
Now, some of the examples are better than others, but they all share the same flaw. I would ask the non-believers who offer these examples, why would these particular things convince you that God exists? I suspect ultimately this is the reasoning. I don’t know what caused a limb to be healed or the stars to move, or the napkin to catch fire. I can’t imagine a natural cause. Therefore, God must have done it. In other words, they commit the God-of-the-gaps fallacy in their hypothetical evidence. “I don’t know what caused X, therefore God exists.” Here’s a blatant example of this from my debate with Atheist Dan Barker. When I asked Barker, what would convince him to give up Atheism? He said that if I prayed and told him what was written inside an envelope he had on stage with him, then he would believe God exists. He also claimed that since God is all-knowing, I could pray to God and God would tell me what’s written on the card. Here is my reply.
Trent Horn:
Let me understand. We have 15 seconds left. If Jesus appeared and performed a miracle for you, you would ask God to apologize. But if I could do a magic trick, you would become a Christian.
Dan Barker:
It’s not a magic trick. It’s not a magic trick, Trent.
Trent Horn:
I mean suppose I really did guess what was written on the envelope, inside the envelope? Would Dan Barker convert? No way. He’d think maybe it was a lucky guess, or maybe before the debate, when he was distracted, I opened the envelope. I read it and then I resealed it. That would be way more likely than a miracle. I mean, look, what happened when actor Harrison Ford picked a card out of a deck from magician David Blaine, and Blaine then pulled that card out of an orange in Ford’s kitchen. Did Harrison Ford say, “Oh my gosh, you’re divine” or “Oh my gosh, God exists.” No. He said this.
Harrison Ford:
Get the (beep) out of my house.
Trent Horn:
Or at best, Dan would think that I have some unknown, natural or supernatural power to read hidden messages, but not that God exists. In that debate, it was amazing to me that Dan Barker just hand waved away my philosophical arguments for the existence of God.
Dan Barker:
So there was only one real evidence that Trent offered tonight. The rest is just words, and I think, you know what that is. The rest is just philosophy and talk and words.
Trent Horn:
But then he said that if I could perform a magic trick, he’d believe that God exists. So I think this shows we have a double standard among some Atheists, specifically among those who dismiss classical arguments for God as essentially saying, “I don’t know, therefore, God.” They dismiss all the classic proofs. “I don’t know, therefore, God,” but then they say you could prove God exists through one of their hypothetical examples, like guessing a card in an envelope, which is also a case of, “I don’t know, therefore, God. I mean, what’s the difference between an amputated limb coming into existence from nothing, proving God exists, and a universe coming into being from nothing. Wouldn’t that also prove God exists, if that’s what happened? The bottom line is that no matter what wildly, fantastic scenario an Atheist proposes, that would allegedly prove God exists, you could always ask him, how do you know that there isn’t an unknown natural explanation for that scenario? This is illustrated well on the following exchange between the Protestant philosopher, William Lane Craig, and the Atheist philosopher, Keith Parsons.
William Lane Craig:
When you say extraordinary, really what you’re saying is no amount of evidence would convince me of these extraordinary claims.
Keith Parsons:
Sure it would! If tomorrow morning, immediately after breakfast, suddenly there was an earthquake. A silvery light shone in the sky, and the leaves dropped from the trees and I dashed outside and there, towering over us like a hundred [inaudible 00:08:00] was this giant figure with lightning playing around his Michelangeloid face, and he pointed down saying, “Be assured Keith M. Parsons that I do, in fact, exist! And I’m sick of your logic chopping. Dr. Craig, I would join you in the pew of the church, in the front pew of the church the next Sunday.
Trent Horn:
But earlier in the debate, Keith Parsons said it would always be more reasonable to think the disciples hallucinated when they thought Jesus rose from the dead, than that Jesus actually did rise from the dead.
Keith Parsons:
Why do you believe that it could not have been a hallucination? Surely you know from the things I’ve said, and from the extent literature on the nature of hallucinations, which I assume you’ve been investigated, that hallucinations, as I’ve said repeatedly this evening, are often experienced by people as being extremely real.
Trent Horn:
And William Lane Craig brings up the perfect rejoinder.
Keith Parsons:
In the front pew of the church the next Sunday.
William Lane Craig:
You don’t think that you would’ve said, “Boy, I was having a hallucination.”
Trent Horn:
What’s interesting is that some Atheists have even conceded that nothing could prove God exists, since you could always imagine another unknown explanation being the cause of whatever thing you observe.
Speaker 9:
So in principle, it’s impossible to ever persuade you that God exists.
Speaker 10:
I didn’t quite say that.
Speaker 11:
What would persuade you?
Speaker 10:
I can’t conceive of … I suppose, even if I died and was confronted with some Peter saying, “Welcome to heaven,” I’d probably think I was dreaming.
Trent Horn:
So it seems like you can either have an extreme God-of-the-gaps view towards the arguments for God and write them off, or be open to God existing, but you can’t be both. Instead Atheists, they should just be open to the classical arguments for the existence of God, and if they’re not convinced by those arguments, be able to explain either which premise in the argument they don’t think is true, or what fallacy specific logical fallacy, the argument commits. Now let me address a few objections to this argument that I’m offering. One objection is that Theists, all they have to do to prove God exists is just offer repeatable, testable predictions of the God hypothesis, and that would prove God exists. This is basically saying, “Well, if you can scientifically prove God exists, then Atheists would change their minds. But what is science? What is science?
Trent Horn:
Science is the search for natural explanations of observed phenomena. If we could show something was testable, predictable, part of our world, whatever effect that might be. Let’s say only Catholic priests can change water into wine when they say certain words. Say we do show that. Why wouldn’t we conclude this is just an unexplained part of nature? This objection is basically saying, “I’ll believe a supernatural being exists if you can prove it is a regular part of the natural world that we observe,” but that’s a contradiction. You’re saying that you’ll believe in the supernatural when you can show me it is a part of nature because science provides natural explanations for the things that we observe.
Trent Horn:
The point is you cannot prove God exists with science. Science studies material causes, effects, and forces. God’s existence is something you would demonstrate philosophically like other immaterial things you would demonstrate philosophically, such as the existence of minds, moral truths, or numbers and other abstract objects. An Atheist might say, “Well, God is all-knowing.” So even if an Atheist personally doesn’t know what would convince him, God knows what would convince him, and, therefore, God could just show that person the evidence he needs and he won’t be ignorant about God anymore.
Speaker 12:
I have no idea specifically what would change my mind about the existence of a God? But if there is such a being as a God, then one would think that that God knows exactly what would change my mind and should be capable of taking the action to present the case that would change my mind, and this hasn’t happened.
Trent Horn:
I think one way to address these objections is to shift the question away from “What evidence would convince you that God exists?” to “What evidence would make it reasonable for someone to believe God exists?” You see, being convinced of something. Being convinced seems to be almost a matter of personal taste. For example, I could ask Matt Dillahunty, “How would you know that what convinced you that God exists actually gave you a good reason to believe God exists?” I mean, people are often convinced of false things, so the fact that something convinces Matt Dillahunty to believe, it doesn’t mean it’s a good reason. Saying that what would convince Matt Dillahunty to believe is just what would convince him is circular. It reduces the debate over God’s existence to whether certain external observations merely cause us to have convincing internal feelings, rather than following a process of reasoning.
Trent Horn:
That’s why I think it’s better to ask whether certain beliefs are reasonable or unreasonable, and then use our reason to follow the arguments made in favor of those beliefs to see if either one of the premises is not true, or we have no good reason to think it’s true, or there’s been an error in the reasoning or a fallacy. After all, you can think something is reasonable, even if it doesn’t convince you. And that seems to take us more into the domain of reason than the domain of feelings. For example, in his conversation with fellow Atheist, Alex O’Connor, Matt Dillahunty said that even though he isn’t convinced to become an ethical vegan, he thinks there’s nothing unreasonable in Alex adopting ethical veganism. Although, that’s not quite a how Matt put it when I asked him about it in our recent debate on the resurrection of Jesus.
Trent Horn:
Do you think ethical veganism that Alex endorses is unreasonable?
Matt Dillahunty:
Yes. I don’t have a problem with veganism, which is one of the reasons why this keeps coming up, as a matter of fact.
Trent Horn:
Do you think ethical veganism that Alex endorses is unreasonable?
Matt Dillahunty:
Yes.
Alex O’Connor:
I think you said at one point that you do consider it to be a moral virtue. You think it is a good thing.
Matt Dillahunty:
I am convinced that it’s likely a moral virtue. I know people who do it for health reasons. I know people who do it for ethical reasons, and I don’t have any objection. My lone objection was to ethical vegans who say, “If you eat meat, you are an immoral person.”
Alex O’Connor:
Yeah. And for the record, I don’t think you’re an immoral person for eating meat. I just think that what you’re doing is immoral.
Matt Dillahunty:
That I can see.
Trent Horn:
Do you think ethical veganism that Alex endorses is unreasonable?
Matt Dillahunty:
Yes.
Trent Horn:
So I’d ask an Atheist, could it ever be reasonable for someone to believe God exists? And if you ask Atheistic philosophers, many of them will say, “Yeah!” For example, Graham Oppy writes in his book, Arguing Against Gods, that quote, “There can be reasonable Theists, Atheists, and Agnostics, for after all, there are undeniably sensitive, thoughtful and intelligent people who fall into all three camps.” The philosopher Thomas Nagel writes the following. “I want Atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religiously believers.” So let me return to the title of this video, which I admit it’s a bit of a generalization, but video titles can kind of be that way. I said, there’s one question Atheists can’t answer and that’s, “What would prove God exists?” I said it’s not helpful to frame the question as, “What would convince you God exists?” since that’s more about feelings than rational discourse.
Trent Horn:
I’d rather ask an Atheist, “Can a person rationally believe in God, and if so, under what circumstances could that take place?” It’s not helpful to say, “Well under this miracle, this specific miracle, or that specific miracle, it’d be reasonable to believe,” because those are just examples of sufficient evidence, subjective examples. They aren’t objective definitions of what level of evidence would be sufficient for anyone to believe, even if that level of evidence is not convincing to everyone. For example, in a Q&A session after my debate with Ben Watkins on the existence of God, Ben said that he’d be open to believing God exists if he personally had an authentic religious experience. He and the Real Atheology team admit that there can be rational believers who come to believe God exists either through religious experience, or the force of logical arguments.
Trent Horn:
Of course another person’s interior religious experience, it’s not going to be very convincing to someone who can’t directly see that experience. So in those cases, what might be more helpful are philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Now, another objection might be that if these philosophical arguments work, Kalam, fine tuning, different moral arguments, contingency, whatever, if they work, well why doesn’t everyone believe God exists? The problem with this objection is that philosophical questions can’t be answered with something like an experiment that’s easily replicated. Even some scientific questions can’t be answered this way. So you’re never going to get a 100% consensus on these philosophical questions. We see this in the recent PhilPapers survey, surveyed hundreds of philosophers, and it shows that a lot of them are evenly divided on some issues, but that doesn’t mean that the fact that they don’t reach a consensus, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a position on these important philosophical questions if we’ve done our homework and researched it.
Trent Horn:
So here’s my new question then for an Atheist, and one you could ask an Atheist or an Agnostic or non-believing friend. It’d be this. What is the best argument for the existence of God, and what’s wrong with it? Or what is the least problematic argument for God, and what’s specifically wrong with it? Remember, to show something is wrong with an argument, you need to point out either an untrue premise in the argument or some kind of fallacy in the reasoning, specific fallacy, not just like it’s God-of-the-gaps. What specific logical fallacy is being committed?
Trent Horn:
In that spirit, I hope both Atheists and Theists will critically examine the reasons that are given for the existence of God, these philosophical arguments that have been presented in different forms over time, you can find them in a lot of different resources. I have some in my book answering Atheism, I would also recommend the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne, and also Five Proofs for the Existence of God by the Catholic philosopher Ed Feser, among many others. Another book would be How Reason Can Show That God Exists, I think that’s a rough title, by Josh Rasmussen. So look at the arguments on either side, see how they work and try to point out specifically where you think they don’t work. Both believers and non-believers should do this, that way we can journey closer to the truth together. I hope that’s helpful for you all, and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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