Closing Statement
THE BURDEN OF PROOF
In this debate, Adams had maintained that he need not prove atheism since the burden of proof falls automatically on the positive claimant. I demonstrated through two citations from logic handbooks and two random examples that this is not the case a priori. Although this claim has been inconsequential to the issue of God's existence, it has been adequately established that Adams errs on the issue of the burden of proof notwithstanding his Opening Statement and subsequent remarks.
SOME RED HERRINGS ABOUT THEISM
Adams has also accused me of failing to prove God's existence by appealing to the Bible and by ignoring the supposed incongruous information included in the Bible. In review, I see no reason to think that any of Adams' concluding remarks on the issues about the Bible compel us to a disbelief in God. In his last statement he states, "Mr Guthrie noticeably did not respond to my argument that the bible could not be used to prove the existence of God." But there is no explicit or implicit indication of my having espoused a proof for God's existence based on the Bible in the first place. Instead, I have tried to show how a claim is given initial credibility based on a literary frame of reference in conjunction with outside information. I even gave an example about a war in Australia over koala bears where added credence is given by a second frame of reference with which to match it. Unfortunately, Adams has declined a response to this point. Concerning the question-begging of citing the Bible as proof for God's existence instead of as simply viewing it as a frame of reference is simply vacant in any rebuttal I set forth in this debate and stands only as a straw man. But even if he were correct in believing that I gave such an argument, then I simply suggest that he throw it out. The other two points I gave defending theism are adequate enough to disconfirm atheism.
He then mentioned that there are two positions governing biblical interpretation: (1) A model based on complete literalism, and (2) a model based on allegory. I responded by noting that neither hermeneutical view disproves God's existence since both positions can be maintained in Christian theism. He now responds with, "they are simply an aside which shows that it is not possible to use the bible . . . to prove that God exists." (i) It is not true that I used the Bible to prove God's existence. Adams is the one to wrongly equate proof with a frame of reference. (ii) Varying interpretations of the Bible does nothing to disprove God's existence. How he gets the non-existence of God from the existence of various interpretations of the Bible is beyond me. This would be like saying that the universe does not exist because there are various interpretations as to the nature of it.
So Adams concludes that the various interpretations of the Bible, far from disproving God's existence, perhaps imply that ad hoc hypotheses are continuously added to keep the evidence from touching the original hypothesis "God exists" much like the gnome hypothesis has done. Regarding this, Adams believes that "we can interpret the bible any way we please." Of course this is non-sequitur to the two competing models of biblical interpretation. Just because there is one more option to biblical interpretation does not mean that any interpretation including these and beyond is permissible. Adams then comments:
"It allows Christians to cut and paste which bits of the bible they believe to get around the sticky fact that a large part of it has been proven to be untrue. And that is a big thing for a Christian to admit about a book that is meant to be infallible."
But it is not true that Christians have evolved their biblical concept of God in order to accommodate current beliefs about our world. Nothing I had said about God is either disconfirmed or denied by the writers of the Old and New Testaments and by the early Church Fathers (I even cited St. Augustine, who lived in the 300's A.D. - 1,500 years before Darwin, about believing in an old universe to show that no retreat by modern evidence exists). In fact, it is atheism that has evolved its concept of the world in order to accommodate atheism itself. For example, it was generally believed by atheists that the universe was eternal. But, given the evidence and speculation (ever since the Einstein-de Sitter model) that the universe began to exist, atheists have now tried to appeal to quantum physics (a theoretical science that has not been agreed to be a description of reality) in order to come up with incredible claims about how something pops into existence uncaused out of nothing. If you ask me, I think the atheist is desperately looking for an exit!
Further, Adams maintains that evolution is threatening to Christianity when he declares:
"Considering the fact that all evidence so far supports evolution, I fail to see the problem. To deny evolution is to deny logic itself. At its core, evolution makes only two statements.
(i) MUTATION - one generation is different from its ancestors genetically.
(ii) SELECTION - whichever of the new generation is best at surviving will survive and produce offspring."
But I see no reason to think that evolution disconfirms the existence of God. In fact, some Christians have maintained that God used evolution to create human life. I pointed out that Genesis allowed for this sort of move, even though I do not hold this position myself. Secondly, it is not true that (i) and (ii) are the sole elements of evolutionary theory. Creationists have no difficulty with maintaining the veracity of mutation and selection as long as they are confined to the selfsame species. The problem of evolution arises when such genetic alterations yield separate and distinct species. This is not "to deny logic itself" but shows how Adams makes non-sequiturs out of fragmented claims (for those who are interested in my refutation of evolutionary theory can consult my essay "A Response to Ed Brayton's Defense of Evolution: Creationism is the Best Explanation of the Scientific Evidence" at http://members.aol.com/berean7/repbrayton.html).
NO GOOD EVIDENCE TO FAVOR ATHEISM AS TRUE
Throughout this debate Adams has continually added to his case for atheism. Although I think that he has not been successful at providing any convincing evidence for his position, I think that even his new arguments can be easily dismissed as well. First, Adams writes:
"The word agnostic comes from the Greek a-gnostos [sic], meaning 'without knowledge'. An agnostic is simply somebody who maintains that it is not possible ever to know for sure whether God exists. This is not what I am maintaining. I am saying that it is not reasonable to believe in God until reasonable evidence is shown for his existence."
I understand that Adams is trying to assert a form of atheism adopted by today's standards (explained by contemporary atheists as Boston University's Michael Martin). But I had demonstrated that atheism implies more than just the mere lack of belief in God as stated in the standard work on the subject of philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Adams never bothered to defend his definition. As such, the issue remains undefended by Adams. He also adds, "I am saying that it is not reasonable to believe in God until reasonable evidence is shown for his existence." But this is also misguided since people, like Karl Barth (d. 1968), maintain that it is unreasonable to believe in God and yet do. Barth thinks that belief in God is incomprehensible but it would be ridiculous to think that he were a non-theist.
Adams originally began his apologetic of atheism with the problem of evil. In subsequent postings I had refuted the notion that the presence of evil had any affect on the existence of God. His response to this was to alter the focus of the argument to imply gratuitous evil instead of moral evil. I noted that in order for evil to be gratuitous it has to be antecedently true that God does not exist, and this is clearly question-begging. Again, this was not addressed either and changed the argument again. Now Adams makes another alteration to suggest that God is responsible for evil (presumably regardless of whether or not it is moral or neutral) when he states:
"If God exists, we must accept that he created everything that exists in the Universe. We must accept that he created murderers and rapists and cot-deaths with the explicit knowledge of what would happen. An all-knowing God would, if he existed, know with absolute certainty that creating Man X would cause 12 people to be shot and killed twenty years later. He could have prevented this very simply by making the man so that he didn't shoot anybody."
Aside from somehow showing that evil is gratuitous, Adams is now trying to show that, upon the interpretation of God as being omnibenevolent, for God to create evil would imply that He is directly responsible for it. But I do not think that God created evil. In fact, evil is not a "thing" that somehow possesses a positive ontological status in the world like Plato's Forms. Evil, as defined by Augustine, is an "absence of good . . . [that is] not a substance" (St. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, tr. J. F. Shaw, ed. Henry Paolucci, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961, pp. 12-13). Further, the Bible affirms that God created everything good (Genesis 1:31) and that even if God did create evil, everything God does and allows is ultimately for good final results (Romans 8:28). Thirdly, I had already challenged Adams to provide us with a better possible world than the one actualized and he never bothered to sufficiently answer this (Adams did try to use heaven as an example of a possible world and then I responded by noting that heaven is only the outcome of a possible world, and he never replied to it).
So Adams then retreats back to his original argument when he states, "Mr Guthrie insists that there exists a God who is all-loving and wants to 'remove suffering' and is omnipotent, thus having the power to carry out the removal of suffering. Yet, puzzlingly, there is still suffering. The two are clearly incompatible." But I had already gone to great lengths to show why the two statements "God exists" and "evil exists" are not logically incompatible. So far, he has not provided one reason to believe that they are incompatible. Therefore, the radix of his argument from pain and suffering intended to imply that God has no morally sufficient reason to allow it ("He does not just 'allow' evil to exist, he created it. I can think of no morally sufficient reason why a supposedly all-loving being would purposefully create suffering.") is disconfirmed (to see why it is impossible to accuse God of lacking any morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, see William Alston, "The Inductive Problem of Evil", Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 5, 1991, p. 65).
Adams then includes an additional argument against God's existence by reasoning as follows:
(1) If God exists and is all-powerful then He would make His existence evident without question.
(2) God does not make His existence evident without question.
(3) Therefore, either God does not exist or He is not all-powerful.
One could easily dismiss the conclusion (3) altogether by noting that Adams' argument is inconclusive. The eminent philosopher of religion, John Hick, has pointed out that God may employ a necessary "epistemic distance" from knowledge of God to the evidence. The late French philosopher Blaise Pascal had also argued that to make God's existence absolutely convincing is the same as forcing everyone to believe in His existence. By contrast, it would be unjust to be so hidden that sincere seekers of Him could not find Him (see Blaise Pascal, Pensees, tr. W. F. Trotter, London, J. M. Dent., 1932, no. 430, p. 118). In this case, everyone's intellects are compelled to do no other option but to accept God's existence or to be kept from ever knowing Him. So Pascal added that God may wish, in order to maintain ultimate rationality, to provide good evidence for the sincere seeker in God and to allow the atheist to remain comfortable in his refusal to pursue such evidence. On this basis it seems that premise (1) is not necessarily true and would be destructive of true rationality.
Finally, Adams attacks the credibility of God's existence in the idea that a lack of intelligence is linked to belief in God's existence when he states, "To cut a long story short, 39 of these studies show that there is a positive correlation between intelligence and religious belief. It appears that either you have to be stupid to believe in God, or else a belief in God subsequently makes you stupid." Frankly, this is a weak causal argument. One is not committed to the idea that a lack of intelligence is indicative of a belief in God or that a belief in God creates a lack of intelligence. Instead, it simply shows that variety of people accept the existence of God without appealing to evidence for such support. This actually strengthens the theistic hypothesis since it appears that the existence of God is even evident to the simpleminded. The Bible quite naturally states that if one will "come near to God" then "he will come near to you" (James 4:8; NIV) regardless of one's intellectual capacity. Adams' implied insult here only weakens atheism's outlandish world view.
In retrospect, we have seen no compelling reason to believe that God does not exist. In fact, Adams' desperate arsenal of new arguments goes to show that even some atheists still resort to such ad hominem attacks as linking intelligence with a belief in God. I had hoped that a good case would have been made for God's non-existence, but this has clearly not been the case in this debate.
TWO GOOD REASONS TO SUGGEST THAT THEISM IS TRUE
From the beginning of the debate to the very end, I had maintained that the cosmological structure of the universe's origin implied the existence of a cause and that the theistic model best answered the questions of where the universe came from andy why it exists instead of nothing. Adams made two attempts at a refutation but never bothered to address the issue. In regard to where the universe came from, Adams now states that "our knowledge of this event is far from complete, but the Doppler effect amongst other things points towards this solution." As is true for many atheists, it is true for Adams. He is going to remain hidden behind the chasm if ignorance because he knows he would have to deal with the universe's origin in God should he decide to address it. But does the Doppler effect explain where the universe came from? Not at all. The Doppler effect only shows that light and sound waves have a lower frequency when the object is moving away from an observer (hence the presence of redshift in our universe). This is why the sound of an ambulance's siren is higher when it is arriving then when it is leaving (it then sounds like the siren is "running out of batteries"). Instead, based upon the Doppler effect, we understand that the universe is expanding away from a centralized location (the notable singularity said to be the source of the Big Bang). As to where it came from, Adams has left that question alone in order to avoid the implication envisaged by theism.
Secondly, Adams answers the question as to why the universe exists instead of nothing by throwing up his hands and declaring, "I believe the current reply is 'Who knows'. Certainly, though, this has nothing whatsoever to do with a debate on the existence of God." Again, ignorance is the hiding place for Adams. But is it true that it has nothing to do with the existence of God? Not at all. Since God is the best explanation of why the universe exists instead of nothing it goes to show that atheism is dwarfed by its rival. Adams' unwillingness to address the cosmological argument makes atheism intellectually untenable.
Thirdly, Adams retreats to his old arguments against the cosmological argument I advanced when he states, "If we are to state that God created the Universe, we must in turn ask 'What created God?', to which Mr Guthrie has not given a satisfactory reply." But the reader of this debate no doubt already aware that I had already explained this objection by noting that this is a category mistake since God (as the causal agent prior to physical time) did not begin to exist. Again, he has not commented on this objection.
Finally, Adams responds to William Paley's Teleological Argument (one that I never alluded to) when he states, "Yet we can show the absurdity of the argument using their own analogy, for the existence of a watch does more than just imply the existence of a watchmaker, it implies the existence of an industrial society, a planet of people, a planet of Gods. Who presumably believe in a meta-God, or rather a planet of meta-Gods, who in turn believe in a planet of meta-meta-Gods......etc ad infinitum." But his attempt at abusing the teleological structure of Paley's Watchmaker argument does not imply the things that Adams asserts. Aristotle called those things that were not inherent in the ontological nature of something accidents. These accidents were attributes inconsequential to the concept of an object's essence. For example, a chair is abstractly something with legs that supports the seating of someone. The fact that a particular chair is metal or wood does not compromise the essence of the chair itself. In the same manner, we see that Paley's argument is designed to show the essence of its origin and not the accidents of it. The essence includes intelligence and, perhaps, efficiency. The added accidents about a society of people who have a belief in a "meta-God" does nothing to invalidate the teleological argument Paley had presented.
Adams may wish to remain comfortable with his claim that "we simply do not know all there is to know about the creation of the Universe, about how we came to be", but the truth is that should we pursue such issues I think that theism becomes evident to the one who seeks those answers. I guess Adams will rest with his case for atheism being a position of ignorance while the common sense cosmological argument will remain the pillar by which we can adequately affirm that God exists.
The second argument for God's existence was courtesy of Adams himself when he asserted the problem of evil. I then explained that evil actually demonstrated God's existence and he simply avoided it by redefining his argument. Adams' disinterest in addressing such an argument that compels one who believes in objective moral values (like evil) to believe in God leads me to believe that it is too strong to be sufficiently critiqued.
Therefore, God exists.
CONCLUSION
I certainly enjoyed this debate and I encourage others to pursue the issues that were brought out in this exchange. On my web site, I offer some essays that elaborate on some of the issues this debate has centered on:
On the cosmological argument, see "Russell, Infinity, and the Tristram Shandy Paradox", "Atheism On Trial: An Atheism vs. Christianity Debate" (a transcribed radio mock-debate that aired on KKVV AM 1060 in Las Vegas, Nevada), and "A Response to Taner Edis' Criticism of William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument."
On the problem of evil, see "Assessing the Problem of Evil and the Existence of God."
Concerning the empty world view that atheism implies, see "Theistic Existentialism and the Human Predicament" (all of these essays are at http://members.tripod.com/~sguthrie/officeslg.htm).
For those of you who are reading this debate, I hope that you ask yourselves whether or not God really does exist. When I heard the Gospel message for the first time I was a skeptic myself. But when I began investigating the claims of the New Testament with the evidence extant in various disciplines, I became attracted to the life and ministry of this man Jesus of Nazareth. This remarkable person had brought me out of an irrational, skeptical world view that did nothing but cause dissension in the depths of my soul. My subsequent acknowledgment of God's existence and His special revelation in Jesus turned my life around and spawned a hope and a love for life knowing that my home would be in the communion of the One who cares for me and loves me enough to send His Son into the world and sacrifice His life so that I may be with Him. Until the reader makes this decision, I pray that God's special revelation and love take you by storm!
For more information about Christianity or if you just need someone to talk to, e-mail me at sguthrie@lvdi.net.
-Shandon L. Guthrie, B.A., A.A.S.
Las Vegas, Nevada