Second Rebuttal

THE BURDEN OF PROOF

Concerning the issue of the burden of proof, Adams is still mistaken as to the proper applicability of such a device. Adams remarks, "Mr Guthrie tries to use the example of death as a case where the burden of proof lies upon the negative claimant." In this statement, we are led to believe that I am advocating the full burden of proof on the atheist. This is not the case at all. I mentioned in my opening statement that both sides ought to share equally in the burden of proof. In regard to my example on "Death," he then adds, "Death, like God, must be proven to exist before it can be accepted." But the point is that negative statements do, indeed, carry the burden of proof based upon prior probability. This is assumed in Adams' statement, "We have good evidence that death exists, and can therefore accept the positive claim 'death exists'." Exactly. We have a general consensus of the ontological status of "Death" and, as such, any opposition to the claim "Death exists" now carries the burden of proof. But we must not also forget that there are those statements that are positive that also carry the burden of proof like the one brought up by Adams about the infinite, pink gnome.

Secondly, Mr. Adams suggests that his example about the person being indicted on rape charges shows that the burden of proof always falls on the positive claimant. He states:

"We must question why Mr Guthrie wishes to apply a different set of rules to the debate over God than he would himself wish to use in a court of law. Logic is logic, whether it is used in a court of law or in a debate."

Now, I was not giving an argument here. It is structurally true that the scenario envisaged in a court of law is different than that of issues in academia. We are not debating meta-logical claims here since they are already universal. That is, one cannot have even a cogent conversation without first assuming the laws of logic. But we are dealing with epistemology in this analogy. I had then proceeded to explain that court room scenarios are about the deprivation of civil liberties thereby making a radical distinction between courtroom battles and academia, and he did not bother to respond on this point.

Thirdly, Adams continues to defend the burden of proof for the positive claimant only by attacking the claim, "[Prior probability] states quite simply that if lots of people believe something, it must be true.." But this is not what I had said. Again, the issue is whether or not a claim has prior probability, not whether or not a consensus makes it true. Just think about the geocentric universe that enjoyed a consensus of adherents. Thus, he attacking a straw man. He then clarifies, "Since the widespread opinion is that God exists . . . it is up to me, the atheist, to prove otherwise." But I had given the benefit of the doubt by assuming that the claim "God exists" enjoys equal opposition and support. So I was not shifting the burden of proof toward him alone but onto both of us since we are each making claims to know something. Atheist Wesley Salmon states:

"We shall regard assertions as unsupported unless evidence is actually given to support them, whether or not anyone has evidence for them . . . An argument consists of more than just a statement; it consists of a conclusion along with supporting evidence" (Logic 3E, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1984, p. 2).

Therefore, it is unequivocally false that "Mr Guthrie essentially says that it doesn't matter whether you actually have any evidence to back up your claim or not, if enough people believe it, it must be true." Nonetheless, this has become somewhat of a moot point since Mr. Adams has now attempted to fulfill what I just quoted as Wesley Salmon's criteria for assertions and the burden of proving them.

(1) NO GOOD EVIDENCE TO FAVOR ATHEISM AS TRUE

It appears that Mr. Adams has now advanced one more tactic toward the disproving of God's existence. He now states that assertions about God's existence are insusceptible to evidence. He claims, "If Mr Guthrie can prove to me that there does not exist a giant, pink, invisible, infinitely powerful gnome, then I will be more than happy to in turn prove to him that God does not exist, because whatever arguments are used to disprove the existence of the gnome may be equally well used to disprove the existence of God." There are essentially two mistakes committed here and one reason to discredit the gnome story. (i) He did not qualify the gnome's characteristics as "invisible" until this last rebuttal. Instead, he just declared that the gnome was "infinite." As such, there are no repercussions for empiricists if the gnome is said to be a physical object with infinite power. As for other realists, such as me, I do not think that this is a problem. Consider that Mr. Adams himself, I'm sure, does not believe in the gnome. If he does not, then he must have some evidence to support that assertion, right? So it is not beyond evidential reasoning to discredit the gnome's existence. (ii) The effeat academic skepticism instituted by Adams, namely that God is unobservable, is a very trivial objection to God's existence. He forgets about the distinction between physical objects and theoretical objects. On this basis, he would do away not just with "gnome" claims but with claims about quantum mechanics, aesthetics, morals, and other high-level theoretical entities. This is just not the avenue epistemologists pursue in evidence and reasoning. (iii) The gnome story is discredited because there is no evidence to support a claim that has a low prior probability. Further, there is no historical context surrounding the existence of the gnome (an example of a historical context would be that gnomes are not claimed to be the sources of the universe and absolute moral values).

Adams then suggests that the problem of evil is still good evidence for disproving God's existence. He stated that evil contradicts God's nature either as (a) omnipotent, or (b) omnibenevolent. I then suggested that there is no logical incompatibility between the statements "God exists" and "evil exists." Now he states:

"Mr Guthrie appears to imply that God exists and has 'imaginable reason' for allowing pain and death to continue, when he could prevent it. I am intrigued, God has 'imaginable reason' to allow 12-year old girls to be raped? God has 'imaginable reason' to make five-year old children in Africa step on landmines. I am sure that I am not alone in wishing to hear these reasons, for my own imagination fails me."

But the answer is relatively simple. If we take two statements that appear to contradict each other:

(1) Sam is faster than a cheetah.

(2) A cheetah is faster than Sam.

then we would probably suspect that both (1) and (2) are mutually exclusive or contradictory if true simultaneously. But if I can at least imagine how statements (1) and (2) could be true at the same time, then they are not contradictory. Notice first that the object in (1) and the subject in (2) is "a cheetah" and not any one particular cheetah. So we could say:

(1') Sam is faster than a cheetah with a broken leg.

(2') A fully healthy cheetah is faster than Sam.

Now we have logical reconciliation. The same is true concerning evil. If God has a reason for allowing evil to exist then there is no contradiction.

But Adams tries to discredit the incompatibility defense by making claims that are emotionally charged. He says, "God has 'imaginable reason' to allow 12-year old girls to be raped?" So if I can come up with any possible reason whatsoever, the incompatibility argument is then dissolved. Consider that a 12-year-old girl is permitted to be raped in order to cause her to seek spiritual salvation in Jesus Christ. The assailant, having witnessed the conversion of the little girl, then becomes apologetic and also receives Christ as his spiritual savior. Otherwise, perhaps, if both assailant and victim were never to cross paths, then there would never be the conversion of either one of them. This makes God more benevolent in the allowance of such a heinous act. God rewards those who have been subjected to moral and natural evils by granting them an everlasting life of bliss. But it need only be true that God have a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil to exist.

Secondly, how does Adams justify his claim to know that something is "evil"? Does he believe in objective moral values? The late University of Oxford atheist J. L. Mackie poignantly observed, "If . . . there are . . . objective values, they make the existence of a God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have a . . . defensible . . . argument from morality to the existence of a God" (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 115-16). The late theologian and philosopher Hastings Rashdall also states, "Our moral ideal can only claim objective validity in so far as it can rationally be regarded as the revelation of a moral ideal eternally existing in the mind of God" (The Theory of Good and Evil, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1907, pp. 212-13). The reader must understand that what I am suggesting here is not that non-theists cannot recognize moral values, but that non-theists simply have no objective basis upon which to ground such values. If Mackie and Rashdall are right, then Adams has to deal with:

(A) If objective moral values exists, then God exists.

(B) Evil exists.

(D) [from (A) and (C)] Therefore, God exists.

So, in addition to the argument from a first cause of the universe, we now have the argument from evil whereby it is demonstrated that God exists.

(2) ONE GOOD REASON TO SUGGEST THAT THEISM IS TRUE

In this section, I suggested that God's existence is evident in a universe that began. Adams failed to respond to this argument in his last rebuttal but now says, "if Mr Guthrie argues that everything must have been created we are led to the apparently inescapable conclusion that God too must have been created. Which begs the question 'who created God'." But this is not what I had implied. Instead, the implication of the cosmological argument I advanced is composed of these three statements:

(1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.

(2) The universe began to exist.

(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.

No one is suggesting that everything that exists has a cause for its existence and, as such, God would need a cause. Instead, I have argued that only those things which begin to exist need a cause. Thus Adams makes a category mistake by asking who or what created God, much like asking what color the note C is. Worse than that, this objection does nothing to explain what I initially argued: What caused the beginning of the universe? Where did it come from and why does it exist instead of nothing? The evidence points to a timeless, changeless being.

Therefore, we have not seen any good evidence to support the atheist thesis and we have seen that the cosmological argument still employs the existence of God. In addition, Mr. Adams now has to contend with the argument from evil, which he himself has provided, that leads to the existence of God.