Polemics

Is the definition of atheism “a lack of belief in God”?

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First, let’s see check with the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

‘Atheism’ means the negation of theism, the denial of the existence of God.

Stanford University is one of the top 5 universities in the United States, so that’s a solid definition. To be an atheist is to be a person who makes the claim that, as a matter of FACT, there is no intelligent agent who created the universe. Atheists think that there is no God, and theists think that there is a God. Both claims are objective claims about the way the world is out there, and so both sides must furnish forth arguments and evidence as to how they are able to know what they are each claiming.

Philosopher William Lane Craig has some thoughts on atheism, atheists and lacking belief in God in this reply to a questioner.

Question:

In my discussions with atheists, they  are using the term that they “lack belief in God”. They claim that this is different from not believing in God or from saying that God does not exist. I’m not sure how to respond to this. It seems to me that its a silly word-play and is logically the same as saying that you do not believe in God.
What would be a good response to this?
Thank you for your time,

Steven

And here is Dr. Craig’s full response:

Your atheist friends are right that there is an important logical difference between believing that there is no God and not believing that there is a God.  Compare my saying, “I believe that there is no gold on Mars” with my saying “I do not believe that there is gold on Mars.”   If I have no opinion on the matter, then I do not believe that there is gold on Mars, and I do not believe that there is no gold on Mars.  There’s a difference between saying, “I do not believe (p)” and “I believe (not-p).”   Logically where you place the negation makes a world of difference.

But where your atheist friends err is in claiming that atheism involves only not believing that there is a God rather than believing that there is no God.

There’s a history behind this.  Certain atheists in the mid-twentieth century were promoting the so-called “presumption of atheism.” At face value, this would appear to be the claim that in the absence of evidence for the existence of God, we should presume that God does not exist.  Atheism is a sort of default position, and the theist bears a special burden of proof with regard to his belief that God exists.

So understood, such an alleged presumption is clearly mistaken.  For the assertion that “There is no God” is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that “There is a God.”  Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does.  It is the agnostic who makes no knowledge claim at all with respect to God’s existence.  He confesses that he doesn’t know whether there is a God or whether there is no God.

But when you look more closely at how protagonists of the presumption of atheism used the term “atheist,” you discover that they were defining the word in a non-standard way, synonymous with “non-theist.”  So understood the term would encompass agnostics and traditional atheists, along with those who think the question meaningless (verificationists).  As Antony Flew confesses,

the word ‘atheist’ has in the present context to be construed in an unusual way.  Nowadays it is normally taken to mean someone who explicitly denies the existence . . . of God . . . But here it has to be understood not positively but negatively, with the originally Greek prefix ‘a-’ being read in this same way in ‘atheist’ as it customarily is in . . . words as ‘amoral’ . . . . In this interpretation an atheist becomes not someone who positively asserts the non-existence of God, but someone who is simply not a theist. (A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro [Oxford:  Blackwell, 1997], s.v. “The Presumption of Atheism,” by Antony Flew)

Such a re-definition of the word “atheist” trivializes the claim of the presumption of atheism, for on this definition, atheism ceases to be a view.  It is merely a psychological state which is shared by people who hold various views or no view at all.  On this re-definition, even babies, who hold no opinion at all on the matter, count as atheists!  In fact, our cat Muff counts as an atheist on this definition, since she has (to my knowledge) no belief in God.

One would still require justification in order to know either that God exists or that He does not exist, which is the question we’re really interested in.

So why, you might wonder, would atheists be anxious to so trivialize their position?  Here I agree with you that a deceptive game is being played by many atheists.  If atheism is taken to be a view, namely the view that there is no God, then atheists must shoulder their share of the burden of proof to support this view.  But many atheists admit freely that they cannot sustain such a burden of proof.  So they try to shirk their epistemic responsibility by re-defining atheism so that it is no longer a view but just a psychological condition which as such makes no assertions.  They are really closet agnostics who want to claim the mantle of atheism without shouldering its responsibilities.

This is disingenuous and still leaves us asking, “So is there a God or not?”

So there you have it. We are interested in what both sides know and what reasons and evidence they have to justify their claim to know. We are interested in talking to people who make claims about objective reality, not about themselves, and who then go on to give reasons and evidence to support their claims about objective reality. There are atheists out there that do make an objective claim that God does not exist, and then support that claim with arguments and evidence. Those are good atheists, and we should engage in rational conversations with them. But clearly there are some atheists who are not like that. How should we deal with these “subjective atheists”?

Dealing with subjective atheists

How should theists respond to people who just want to talk about their psychological state? Well, my advice is to avoid them. They are approaching religion irrationally and non-cognitively – like the person who enters a physics class and says “I lack a belief in the gravitational force!”.  When you engage in serious discussions with people about God’s existence, you only care about what people know and what they can show to be true. We don’t care about a person’s psychology.

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Evaluating William Lane Craig’s views on Genesis, Adam and Eve

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I found a wonderful series of articles by someone I really trust on origins issues: Dr. Casey Luskin. He has a long history with the intelligent design movement, starting from when he was a college student. He has a BS and MS in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, a PhD in Geology from the University of Johannesburg, and a JD from the University of San Diego.

He has a series of articles up at Evolution News, about Dr. William Lane Craig’s new book “In Quest of the Historical Adam”. I’m not sure if he is done with the series, but I thought that it was a good time to look over what he’s already written.

In the first article he notes that “Craig convincingly argues that mainstream science can be reconciled with a traditional view of Adam and Eve” and “argues that Adam and Eve were real people who could have been members of Homo heidelbergensis”. Craig’s conclusion is that “it’s not scientifically problematic to take a truly “traditional” view of Adam and Eve”.

But Luskin has criticisms of Craig’s views on rival interpretations of Genesis, “As an old earther myself, I was concerned that Craig did not adequately engage with old earth interpretations” and “I believe that young earth creationists will feel that Craig badly misrepresents the scientific claims of their models”.

Craig’s handling of the science:

Craig’s book provides highly informed discussions of the paleoanthropological, archaeological, neurological, and genetic evidence regarding human origins, but his arguments often incorporate evolutionary assumptions which are doubtful. For example, Craig is too credulous towards evolutionary explanations of the origin of the human mind which amount to miracle mutations, as well as common evolutionary notions that pseudogenes are “junk DNA” that support common ancestry. He misses a key deficiency in evolutionary explanations: a conspicuous gap between the genus Homo and our supposed ape-like australopithecine ancestors in the hominid fossil record. Although Craig does not recognize it, key neurogenetic evidence raised in his book actually suggests a potent mathematical challenge to the Darwinian evolution of humans. I also believe he sells Homo erectus short as a potential candidate for Adam and Eve.

[…]Craig continues to rely upon BioLogos arguments that pseudogenes are “broken” and non-functional junk DNA that we share with apes, thereby demonstrating our common ancestry. Those arguments are increasingly contradicted by evidence presented in highly authoritative scientific papers which find that pseudogenes are commonly functional, and they ought not be assumed to be genetic “junk.” In relying upon dubious evolutionary arguments that are increasingly refuted by the technical literature, Craig may be repeating the very mistake that led previous evangelicals to think Adam and Eve did not exist.

There are 6 parts to the review. Here are the links to parts 2 through 6:

If you’re interested in the topics of Christianity and science, this is a great series to read. I love when someone trustworthy reads through a lot of stuff I don’t have time for (I have a day job as a software engineer!) and gives me an accurate summary of the strengths and weaknesses.

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Trump’s freezing of USAID might be the best thing he’s done so far

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It’s hard to to make a ranking of which actions are the best for Christians and conservatives. There have been so many. But this one really draws a line between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. The most common complaint I heard from Trump supporters after his first term was that he didn’t do enough to drain the swamp. Well, this new Trump action is the most Swamp-Draining one yet.

This is from Daily Signal:

The Trump administration is putting a stick of dynamite under the deep state, and Democrats are apoplectic.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump put nearly all District of Columbia-based employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave. According to Politico, this amounts to about 1,400 people in addition to 600 employees who were put on leave starting Sunday.

This comes after the Trump administration put a 90-day freeze on all foreign assistance.

New Secretary of State Marco Rubio “noted that embassies around the world complain that USAID is not only uncooperative but that it undermines the governments the U.S. wants to work with. Rubio said that the agency operates as if its master is the “globe” and not the U.S., which is a departure from the intent of the original statute that created it.”

And this is just crazy:

Rubio, who is putting the operation of USAID under his authority, said the goal has been to reform the agency, but right now, there is “rank insubordination.” The attitude of the employees, Rubio said, is that they work for themselves, not the American people or their elected officials.

This is why the administration had to take dramatic steps to temporarily freeze the agency, Rubio explained.

[…]Organizations like USAID became enlisted in what can be described as no less than the creation of a global leftist empire… a conduit to siphon U.S. taxpayer dollars to various leftist projects, many of which are deeply resented by other nations.

It became, at minimum, a jobs program for hordes of American left-wing activists.

The Democrats are not going to take this one lying down, as this is their whole global secular leftist network. But, all that Trump has to do to beat them is to show the American public what USAID has been spending their money on.

Here are some examples:

For instance, The Washington Free Beacon reported that in 2023 under President Joe Biden, USAID spent $1 million “on a project to help disabled people in the Central Asian country of Tajikistan become ‘climate leaders.’”

For instance, according to The Wall Street Journal, the State Department was funding “culture grants” to promote drag queen performances in Ecuador. Meanwhile, China was investing heavily in the country’s copper mining production.

The Free Beacon also reported that USAID spent millions of dollars on various diversity, equity, and inclusion projects, including a program created to “engage with indigenous-led institutions to implement an indigenous language technology program” in Guatemala where over 95% of people speak Spanish.

[…]“In November 2022, USAID sent $78,000 to the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute (CDCEI), a Palestinian activist group based in the West Bank. Its leaders praised a terrorist who murdered a U.S. military attaché as a ‘hero fighter,’” the Free Beacon reported.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., sent a letter to USAID in October 2024 saying that some of the more than a billion dollars being used for humanitarian relief in Gaza was likely being funneled to terrorists.

[…]Under Biden, USAID even spent money funding abortions in Africa through programs billed as AIDS relief, Fox News reported.

This is what happens when you give secular leftists access to taxpayer money. They just go crazy with it, and that’s why they shouldn’t have any money at all.

And if that’s not enough for you, check out this story from Breitbart, about how the Trump administration wants to tackle corruption in the FBI and DOJ:

FBI officials acknowledged over 5,000 employees worked on investigations related to January 6, CNN reported Tuesday.

The numbers reveal for the first time the scope of the federal government’s resources devoted to the J6 investigations, which took place while violent crime in urban America soared 40 percent from 2019 to 2023 under the Biden administration, according to the federal government’s own numbers.

The Department of Justice asked the FBI Friday to provide by Tuesday at noon the details of all its employees who worked on January 6 investigations.

But of course these agents don’t want to be held accountable for their actions under the previous (fascist) administration:

FBI employees have fought to hide their roles in J6 investigations.

Just fire them all right now! Or ship them to prisons in El Salvador if they resist.