FAQ
I’m kind of annoyed that I have to post this. It means Substack has attracted the same sort of person that used to abound on Twitter back in the old days—the dreaded Social Media Atheist (SMA).
A similar FAQ is a pinned post on my X profile. It’s been there for several years, warding off hordes of SMAs, who typically respond to my posts and articles with the same objections and questions.
So, if you’re an atheist who wants to respond to an article or a post, please read through this FAQ first. You’ll probably find that your objection or question has already been addressed.
If you’re reading my stuff because you’re curious about Christianity and genuinely interested in what I’m saying, I appreciate it—really—and I hope you stick around.
If you want to ask me a sincere question, the best way to get my attention is to respond to a relevant post and ask one question in a direct way.
However, if you think you have original and devastating objections to God or Christianity, keep the following in mind:
You don’t.
Seriously, you don’t.
Go ahead and give it your best shot if you like, but after doing this for many years on many platforms, I doubt very much you have anything I haven’t already seen.
Don’t waste my time
I enjoy interacting with people here and on X, but I don’t have the time or energy to spend on comments and questions from people who are not truly seeking answers. Among other things, I’ll know you’re a time-waster if you use phrases like:
“sky daddy”
“sky fairy”
“imaginary friend”
“invisible friend”
“your god”
“there’s no evidence for god”
“where’s your proof of your god?”
“the burden of proof is on you”
anything that smacks of scientism
any dial-a-fallacy nonsense
etc.
or if you engage in sarcasm, mockery, insults, posturing, tone-policing, or if you offer advice on how I should post here. If that’s you, you’re most likely going to end up muted, blocked, or have your comments deleted. Please just save everyone the time and don’t bother.
The FAQ
Okay, on to the FAQ. These are the questions and objections I’ve been presented the most often by SMAs over the many years I’ve been writing on the Internet.
1. You’re a scientist and you believe in God and Jesus Christ?
Yes. You can read the story of how I converted from atheism to Christianity here.
2. Were you really an atheist?
Yes.
I’m often informed that I “wasn’t really an atheist,” because I changed my mind. I don’t know what it takes to qualify as having been a Real Atheist, but I was raised atheist by ex-Catholic, socialist, political-activist, atheist parents in a secular country (Canada), and I really hated religion. Seems like that should qualify.
3. Are you a young earth creationist?
No. Given the multiple lines of evidence, I believe the universe and the Earth are billions of years old.
4. What is your repeatable, scientific evidence for God?
What is your repeatable, scientific evidence for your objective existence as a human being? Seriously. On what basis do you assert your own existence as a person reading these words as opposed to a brain in a vat hallucinating all of this as “real”? When you figure out why I’m asking this, you’ll know why this is not a legitimate question.
5. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Astronomer Carl Sagan popularized this statement decades ago. Atheists like to repeat it in reference to the supernatural, because it sounds right. However, there are two major problems with it.
1. It’s a statement about believability, not about proof.
You realize this when you see how people try to defend ECREE. I had a fellow explain it to me this way. “Tell me you have a red car,” he said, “and I’ll believe it without question. Tell me you have a flying red car, and I’m going to need to see it.”
People who believe ECREE are really talking about their own personal baseline for believability. It has little to nothing to do with establishing the truth of a claim.
If you needed to establish the truth that you have a red car—say, for a court case—you’d need to produce the same evidence as for the flying red car. You wouldn’t respond to a request for proof from the judge with, “Well, Your Honor, the claim that I own a red car is ordinary, so you should just believe it.” You’d produce the document proving it. Probably an official, verified government document stating that you own the car in question. The amusing thing is, if someone produced such a document for the ownership of a flying red car, most of you would probably consider that “extraordinary,” despite the fact that it’s of the exact same nature as the proof of ownership for the ordinary red car. And, the question would be unequivocally settled in either case by simply showing the judge the car.
This is why I like to distinguish between casual belief and actual belief. If someone whom I have no reason to mistrust tells me he has a red car, and it doesn’t really matter whether the claim is true or not, I’ll probably casually believe it. If it matters for some reason, then I’d need proof before I would actually believe him. I guarantee it’s the same for you.
2. How do you determine what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary?
Extraordinary means “out of the ordinary.” So, what makes a claim “ordinary”? If we define ordinary as normal, usual, or commonplace, then that’s a problem. Even if we accept the illogic of Sagan’s statement, it works against the atheist saying ECREE. Why? Because the vast majority of people who have ever lived and who are currently living claim the supernatural exists. Therefore, by definition, this is an ordinary claim, and whoever is saying the supernatural doesn’t exist is the one making an extraordinary claim.
6. So, why do you believe in God?
I came to believe in God mostly through my work in science. I was convinced by:
1. The teleological argument. The universe seemed to me far too logical and intelligible to be the product of a random cause. (Twenty demerits to anyone who falsely claims this is an argument from incredulity.)
2. The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) combined with a logical inference that the cause of the universe must be personal led me to belief in the Abrahamic God.
I was also convinced by:
3. Objective morality and justice. God is the most philosophically satisfying basis for morality and justice in the world.
None of this proves God exists, but it’s a rational basis for belief in God.
These arguments are why I gave up on atheism and accepted the existence of God. If this evidence doesn’t convince you of God’s existence, that’s okay. If you’d like to talk about the details, that’s fine. But if you think these arguments don’t count as evidence for God, I’m sorry to say that you and I have nothing to discuss.
7. There’s no evidence for God.
See #6. There are other compelling evidences for God, including:
The fine-tuning argument
The argument from existence
Life / consciousness
Near-death experiences
The accounts of Jesus Christ
8. Why the God of the Bible and not some other god?
See #6 and #7. The KCA + personal cause ruled out everything except for the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Not long after I dropped my atheism, I came across a book called The Science of God by Orthodox Jewish theologian and physicist, Gerald Schroeder. It inspired me to pick up a Bible and start reading. I spent the next few years reading and studying. I also found Lee Strobel’s book, The Case for Christ, helpful in this process. When I found the evidence for the Bible’s truth compelling, I realized the most honest thing to do was to accept it. And since I wanted what Jesus Christ offers, I decided to become Christian.
I didn’t realize at the time that the KCA + personal cause also included Zoroastrianism and Sikhism. Zoroastrianism is an ancient and relatively obscure religion of Iran. Sikhism is a relatively young religion (15th century) from the Punjab region of India, and is the ninth largest religion in the world. Both are intriguingly similar to Christianity in some ways, but differ significantly in others. Had I known that these two religions also hold to a transcendent, immaterial, and timeless God, it would have changed nothing in terms of my trajectory towards Christianity. I was persuaded that Christianity is not only supported by evidence and reason, but that it’s the best explanation for evil in the world. That has not changed.
9. So, if you believe the universe and Earth are billions of years old, do you think Genesis is figurative?
I hesitate to use the words literal and figurative in this context, because they miss so much. Genesis, for all its economy of prose, is actually quite nuanced, layered, and complex. Nevertheless, I think Genesis is ultimately telling us a straightforward narrative about God’s creation and development of the universe, meaning God did these things or caused them to happen, and they were done in the order described by Genesis.
10. If God created the universe, who or what created God?
God is eternal and uncreated. When Christians say this, atheists sometimes raise an eyebrow and call it special pleading. But is it really? For thousands of years, people believed the universe was eternal. It just was, so it needed no explanation. That idea held sway until the 20th century, when, starting in the 1920s, evidence began piling up showing the universe had a beginning in time. By the 1960s, when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the cosmic background radiation, the Big Bang theory had pretty much destroyed the idea of an eternal universe.
This was a huge deal, and it bothered a lot of scientists, especially those who leaned atheist. Why? A universe with a beginning is philosophically untidy—it leaves a giant loose end that science can never tie up. Even worse, it echoes the Bible’s opening line: “In the beginning, God…”
If the universe began to exist, something caused it. Could it be the multiverse? I have very strong doubts about that, but even if it were a tenable idea, then we’re stuck with the problem of what caused the multiverse. And what caused the cause of the multiverse. You can’t avoid the problem of an endless stack of causes—a metaphysical turtles all the way down.
When people thought the universe was eternal, this wasn’t an issue. The universe just was, no explanation needed. But now, with the best evidence pointing to a universe that began to exist, we need an explanation. Philosophically, the best explanation is that something eternal, which is its own explanation and has the power to create universes, caused it to exist. That sounds a lot like God. If God caused the universe to begin, it’s perfectly valid to say that He is eternal and uncreated.
It comes down to a choice: do you believe in an infinite chain of causes, a never-ending turtle stack, or an eternal something with the power to create and that is its own explanation? Which one makes more sense to you?
11. How do you square a ‘straightforward’ Genesis with a universe that’s billions of years old?
Read Chapters 3 and 4 of Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God or go through my slide show here.
12. Do you write scientific papers about God’s involvement in the universe?
No. As far as my scientific work goes, I agree with Laplace, who famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” (It doesn’t mean what you think it means.) I don’t need to invoke God to explain why black holes and galaxies behave the way they do. I invoke physical laws to do that. But if I’m talking about the origin of those laws and the universe described by them, that’s a different matter.
13. Everyone is born an atheist … babies are atheists until they’re indoctrinated.
I never understood why this is supposed to be a compelling argument, even when I was an atheist. First, we have no idea what babies believe until they can tell us. But we do know they’re illiterate and incontinent little savages until they’re indoctrinated to read, use a toilet, and treat other people with respect. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good.
If hard indoctrination was really required to force people out of their natural atheism, most people on earth would be atheist, and atheists in secular countries would never produce religious children. But consider how easy it is for most people to overcome their “innate” atheism. More than 90% of the world’s population believes in the supernatural, even though it supposedly doesn’t exist. The prevalence of religious belief is such a problem for people who use this argument that they’ve had to come up with peculiar evolutionary tics to explain it away. The law of parsimony applies here.
14. Religion is a product of where you were born, your family, etc.
Many, if not most, people adopt the dominant belief system of their family, community, university, or society. So what? That number certainly includes atheists, who adopt atheism because of where they were born, where they went to university, and the communities they live in. That’s why I was an atheist until I was in my 20s.
15. We’re all atheists, I just believe in one less god than you.
The rest of the quote goes, “When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss yours.”
The first part is a nonsense statement. It’s like telling a computer programmer that there’s no difference between 1s and 0s, it’s just that 0 is 1 less than 1. As atheists frequently point out, there’s a world of difference between theism and atheism.
The second part of the statement shows a failure to understand the nature of God vs. gods. God is held by those of the Abrahamic religions to be the creator of the universe. He is therefore the creator of all things. If God exists, he must necessarily be outside of his own creation, which means he is outside of space, time, and material existence. God is therefore by definition transcendent, timeless, and immaterial.
To my knowledge, the only religions that believe in a transcendent, timeless, and immaterial God are the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), their offshoots (e.g. the Bahá’í Faith), Zoroastrianism, and Sikhism. All other religions hold to very different deities, none of which are creators. You can read through the various pagan mythologies to see that they invariably skirt the issue of the creation of the universe and deal instead with the establishment of the divinity of earthly rulers or the creation of a new world, land, or empire within an eternal cosmos. Such is the case with the Mesopotamian and Egyptian creation myths that predate the writings of Moses, as well as others like the Greek, Roman, and Viking myths.
For more discussion:
16. Which of the thousands of gods do you believe in and why?
This might surprise you, but the answer is: most of them. I strongly suspect that many of the pagan gods actually exist in some form, as lesser divine beings created by God. See the work of the late Old Testament scholar, Michael Heiser, to understand why. And see #15 to know why I only worship and obey the God of the Bible.
17. Atheism is just a lack of belief.
There are only two possibilities: God exists or God doesn’t exist. If you reject the former, you implicitly accept the latter.
If you’re not sure and lean towards disbelief, you’re more appropriately referred to as as an agnostic. However, if “atheist” is in your profile bio, if you make it part of your identity, if you lurk on social media looking for religious discussions, it’s not just a lack of belief for you. You’re not fooling anyone if you say otherwise.
18. Atheism isn’t a positive position. Whoever makes the claim that something exists has the burden of proof.
See #16. If you say “God doesn’t exist,” you’re still making a positive statement.
Don’t confuse positive statements with affirmative statements. “Positive” (philosophy) and “affirmative” (grammar) are not the same thing. “God doesn’t exist” is not an affirmative statement, but it is a positive one. If you make this statement, then the burden of proof is on you.
Or is it?
Have you actually thought about the origin of the claim about who has the BOP? Who or what dictates with whom the BOP lies? See here for a compelling discussion on why, in dialectical matters, the burden of proof lies with no one.
For more discussion:
If you’ve read this far and I still haven’t addressed your question or objection, go ahead and comment. Just be civil, or you and your comment will end up here ↓
