Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer responds to the popular “one less God” argument for atheism, showing how it fails on many fronts.
Transcription:
There’s an argument that I see atheists put forward against Christianity that I do not understand why they make it. And it’s the argument that as atheists, they just disbelieve in one more God than Christians disbelieve in. Or to put it another way, they believe in one less God or one fewer God. It’s super confusing as to which one to use. Normally you’d say fewer, but in the case of one, it might be less. I dunno, grammatically the more I think about it, the fewer I understand it. But in any case, the question of just like, oh, well you’re 99% atheist, and I just go a little further than you, is a claim that you find made all the time as if atheism and theism are really close rather than opposites. So for instance, here’s Ricky Gervais making a form of this argument to Stephen Colbert.
You believe in one God, I assume
In three persons, but go
Ahead. Okay. Okay. But there are about 3000 to choose from that have been people that believe in, I’ve got some reading. Yeah. Okay. So basically you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 Gods, and I don’t believe in just one more,
But it’s not just popular figures like Dravet, it’s also academic figures like Lawrence Kraus who makes the argument like this.
It’s been by one estimate, over a thousand different gods throughout human history. Mars got a war up beside and Thor all the rest. And the really important thing is that all of you, or almost all of you, probably are now atheists regarding those gods. The only difference is it’s just one that we may disagree about, but 999 we all agree have been thrown out. And the reason they’ve been thrown out is they’ve been buried by the rise of our physical understanding science works and the fact that science works has buried the gods of the wind and the sun and the moon farmers now, as I was just saying, when it doesn’t rain, they don’t pray for rain anymore. They go see a meteorologist, and that’s a good
Thing. Now, I’m going to spend most of this video explaining why the one fewer argument or one less argument is a bad one. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that everything Lawrence Kraus said there is false. I don’t just mean that there’s a discrepancy about the numbers, whether you take 3000 gods or 1000 gods, and this form of the equation is being put very differently by the two different people presenting it. I mean, basic things like he says, farmers don’t pray for rain anymore. That’s not true either in America or around the world. And there’s plenty of data to show that. But moreover, the reason we don’t pray to Mars or Poseidon or Egyptian Gods like Alman raw or Thor, the North gods has nothing to do with the triumph of science and everything to do with the triumph of Christianity. As Bart Airman puts it in his book about how the Roman Empire became Christian.
Now, if you’ve heard kind of popular versions of this, you might imagine that there was a thriving paganism that became Christian because the emperor Constantine just forced it upon people. And indeed that’s what some scholars have claimed, but that’s not really true and it doesn’t really explain the evidence, and we can say it’s not true for a few reasons. Now, remember Bart Airman, he’s not a Christian, he’s an ex Christian, a critic of Christianity, a pretty prominent skeptic in his own right, but he points out that look, the coercion as the explanation doesn’t really work, doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. As he says, other scholars have maintained that this view is inherently implausible. Coercion rarely succeeds in forcing people to change their minds, even if it compels them to alter their patterns of behavior, right? I might coerce you into doing something you don’t want to do, but that’s unlikely to persuade you that I’m right and you’re wrong.
And in fact, we have great examples of this from the Roman Empire in this time. In the late two hundreds, there were massive persecutions of Christians and it didn’t make Christianity go away. It sometimes made Christians deny their Christianity publicly, but they didn’t actually become dissuaded. It wasn’t convincing to be coerced. But moreover, as airman points out, there actually wasn’t widespread coercion that we know of in the Roman Empire after it became Christian. Now, to be sure there were instances of it, but this is not, we don’t find any kind of widespread coercion, which is why Michel Renee Salzman focusing on the Western Empire has argued that it is hard to accept the interpretation advanced by certain scholars that physical violence coercion was a central factor in explaining the spread of Christianity. So what was, well, quite simply conversion that you have, if not mass conversions, you have relationships in which small groups of people converted people that they knew and more and more people became Christian, and this had a cascading effect, particularly once the upper classes became Christian.
Why? Because the upper classes were the ones who traditionally financially supported the local pagan temples and the local pagan cults. Obviously, the cults aren’t getting the money anymore. They’re not getting money to the temples. The temples become run down, fewer people are attracted to them, and it has a sort of cyclical effect. Instead, the money is going to the churches, not because it’s a top down state thing, but because that’s where people are directing their time and energy and money. And so as Bart Airman concludes, it was not just in converts, but also in cash that traditional religions experienced a massive collapse over time with the Christian Church experiencing a growth that was literally exponential. Paganism did not have to be destroyed by violent acts of Christian intolerance. It could and did die, a natural death cut off from resources and abandoned by popular opinion. That’s the real reason, not.
Oh, we have meteorology now. And so now we’re going to get rid of the temple of Mars. Lawrence Kraus, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he’s not talking about any actual history. Likewise with North Religion, Olaf Squiz of the University of Stockholm, I believe, and his book, the Demise of North Religion talks about this, that as with the example of the Roman Empire, what you have here, conversions that people come in and converts are made, and this is sometimes slow going, but eventually you have a massive number of people who convert to Christianity. And only then do you have the conversion of kings and legislative assemblies in the case of Iceland. All that’s to say it had nothing to do with the advent of meteorology or whatever in the world Lawrence Kraus is putting forward is how science defeated these 999 gods.
It simply didn’t. But admittedly, all of that’s an aside. I just mean to say everything he’s saying about farming, about history is all false. And so we should recognize as well that his philosophical arguments about one fewer God are also false. Why do we know they’re false? Well, in two ways, number one, the core premise is false. In other words, it’s not true that if there are a thousand Gods out there that as a Christian, I’m obliged to disbelieve in the existence of 999 of them. So the best book on this subject that I know of is David Bentley, Hart’s 2013 book, the Experience of God being Consciousness, bliss. And when she points out that there are actually two senses in which the word God, capital G God, or lowercase G God can properly be used, and that most modern languages distinguish it between them in something like the way that he’s done there, lowercase versus uppercase God, most of us understand that capital G God or its equivalent means the one God that is the source of all things.
Whereas the lowercase G God or the Gods indicates one or another of a plurality of divine beings who inhabit the cosmos and reign over its various regions. In other words, if you want to talk about angels and demons or genies or spirits or whatever as gods, that’s not the same thing as saying the one God who made all things. That’s an important distinction that whatever you want to call them, if you want to call them gods or angels or spirits or demons, that is a secondary question to the question of is there one creator of everything that exists? And Hart points out or Bentley Hart points out. This is not merely distinction in numbering between monotheism and polytheism as if we were just determining exactly how many divine entities there are. That’s how Lawrence Kraus and Ricky dva have framed the matter. But that is actually a categorical error.
It is rather a distinction between two entirely different kinds of reality belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders like whether or not they exist. The lowercase g gods, whether it’s an archangel or Thor, are understood to be powerful, created spiritual beings, not the uncreated infinite God of the universe. So whether Thor or St. Michael exists is a secondary question because the idea of monotheism is consistent with the existence or non-existence of either of them and both of them. I hope that’s clear. When we talk about God and Gods, we actually mean two very different things, and this creates this kind of category error between the way we think about monotheism and polytheism. Several of the religious cultures that we sometimes inaccurately describe as polytheistic are actually much closer to the traditional conception be why? Because they believe in an absolute differentiation between the one transcendent Godhead from whom all being flows and the various divine beings who indwell and govern the heavens and the earth.
So for instance, looking at Vedantic and Bik Hinduism, he points out that only the one God is uncreated the various gods, those supernatural belong among the creatures. They’re like the Christian angels much nearer to man than they are to God. Now, that is not the opinion necessarily of all Hindus. Hinduism is famously extremely diverse, but the point here is that a lot of the Hindu conception of God and the gods is actually much closer to what a Christian could say yes to in terms of the basic conception of there is one uncreated God of the entire universe, and then there are lesser spiritual beings. Conversely, David Bentley Hart points out many creeds we correctly speak of as monotheistic like the Sikh creed embrace the exact same distinction because the Sikhs describe the one God as the creator of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. In truth, he argues this comparison to Christianity’s angels is more apt than many Christians even realize.
And he puts it like this. He says, late Hellenistic pagan thought often tend to draw a really clear demarcation between the one transcendent gods, which is the God and any particular or local God, just theos no the who might super intend this or that people or nation or aspect of the natural world. In other words, you’ve got the God, Jupiter de Potter God, the Father, and then you’ve got lower gods who aren’t that at the same time, late Hellenistic Jews and Christians recognized a multitude of angelic powers and principalities, right? Some obedient to the one transcendent God and some in rebellion who governed the elements of nature and the peoples of the earth. And so someone looking in on this situation from the outside doesn’t see these two radically different conceptions, one called monotheism and one called polytheism, but actually a great deal of overlap so that he argues maybe over argues here, that’d be all but indistinguishable between the Jewish and Christian conception of the spiritual nature of reality and the Roman one.
Now, I think that might go too far, but I think the distinction he’s making there about the one uncreated God and the various gods in marks is completely apt, and it’s in fact reflected in how we see the way scripture speaks of this. So we sometimes see God among the Gods Elohim that this notion of like God and the council of the Gods, meaning the angels, but also the way that it speaks about other religions and their gods is really striking. So for instance, in Deuteronomy 32, in God’s condemnation of Israel for strain, he says they sacrificed to demons which were no gods, to gods. They had never known to new gods that had come in of late whom your fathers had never dreaded. So there is, in other words, a distinction here, even between novelties, just like you invented this devotion and you were actually serving demons here under the guise of Gods.
And St. Paul ref reflects this in one Corinthians when he says that, I imply that would pagan sacrifice the offer to demons and not to God. So in other words, a Christian like St. Paul could easily say, yeah, that God you’re describing that really exists. I don’t call him a God. I call him a demon, but that doesn’t mean I have to deny the existence. I’m not an atheist in relation to him. It might be a powerful spiritual being that you’re serving just not a good one, just not the uncreated God of the universe. Now, Paul doesn’t treat all forms of paganism as equally worshiping demons any more than Deuteronomy does. In fact, in Acts 17, Paul stands in the middle of the Areopagus, the temple to Mars and says, men of Athens. I perceive that in every way you’re very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an alter this inscription to an unknown God.
What therefore you worship is unknown. This I proclaimed to you. So notice what he’s done here. He’s introduced a third category. Though what you have here in this apparently pagan expression of worship, this pagan temple to an unknown God was in fact a worship of the true God in ignorance. So there’s actually three possibilities. Number one, that the gods in question are really existing lesser spiritual beings like angels or demons. Number two, that the God in question is the true God, but only partially known or understood like in the case of Athens number three, that the Gods are entirely fictional, they’re imaginary, they’re socially constructed. So we don’t have to affirm number three, and in many cases we wouldn’t. So the basic premise of the argument is in fact wrong, but nevertheless, let’s move on to the second problem with it. These kind of one less or one fewer arguments don’t make any sense. I mean, try to apply this kind of argumentation to virtually anything else. I’m going to give you one example that some people are going to find in bad taste. That’s all right. And then I’ll give you a better taste example. So the bad taste example is the no bullet theory of the Kennedy assassination. This is a scene from the 1997, I believe movie the wrong guy.
You know how many assassins it took to kill JFK one? Oh, there were no gunmen at all. Kennedy’s head just did that. Really, I call it the no bullet theory.
Now, if you think about it in that clip, they only disagree about one on 99% of the possible candidates of who killed Kennedy. They’re in total agreement. The crazy guy just denies one more than Dave Foley’s character. And that makes a world of difference because it’s absurd to deny that one more. Likewise, if you want a less maybe a bad taste example, you can take the debate over Shakespeare authorship. While most scholars would say, William Shakespeare wrote the works of William Shakespeare, you’ll find folks who claim it’s somebody else like Francis Bacon or Thomas Marlowe. And if you said, well, I deny just one more author than you do, I don’t think anybody wrote them. I think they’re brute facts of the universe. That is an absurd and ridiculous claim, and we can think about it in this way because what all of those people have in common, whether you think JFK was assassinated by the CCIA or Lee Harvey Oswald or the Illuminati or whoever you think you at least believe, he was assassinated.
Whereas the ridiculous view would be to say, well, this had just did that with the William Shakespeare debate. Whether you think the work of Romeo and Juliet was written by Shakespeare or Marlow or Bacon or Oxford or whoever you believe it was authored. And if someone just said, well, it’s a brute fact of the universe, it just exists for no reason. Well, that’s absurd. Well, likewise with the universe, whether you’re Christian or Buddhist or any number of other world religions, there’s a really good chance you believe the universe exists. It was author, it was created. We might disagree about the authorship, but if someone said, well, I just deny one more author than you do, I think it just exists as a brute fact that’s equally ridiculous. And so just making the numeric argument that you deny one more author is silly. Speaking of authors, if you want more on this subject and other common slogans and atheist arguments, the brains behind the Classical Theism podcast, John Diosa wrote a book, fittingly titled One Less God Than You, how to Answer the Slogans, cliches, and Fallacies that Atheists use to Challenge your faith. And I would refer you to that book, which I found very helpful in preparing this episode. Alright, thank you very much for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.