Standard Phases of a Debate with a Theist

I've been debating with fundamentalist theists for a while now, and I've started to notice some interesting trends. In this blog, I'll describe the standard tactics theists use when attempting to squash dissent. I believe many of these illuminate pervasive beliefs among the more conservative believers. Many of them strike me as a defense mechanism or a childish black-and-white view where truth is established by authority rather than evidence.

Denial

This tact seems to me like the believer needs comfort that they couldn't become atheists. Every time I see it, it seems to me like the theist is desperately trying to hold on to a belief that's impossible to validate.  All these denialist tactics will come off as an accusation that you're lying. Try to remember that the theist just wants to feel better about the security of their own fragile faith.

You're not actually atheist

It's insulting when a someone accuses you of lying -- especially when they don't even know you.  Try not to take this tact personally. There are several factors at play here. First, the Christian Bible clearly states that all men know god is real. The most thoroughly indoctrinated fundamentalist believers are taught to accept the claims in that book regardless of the world they observe. Since the book must be true, you must be lying.

• "You're just angry with God, you know God is real. You just want to sin without being punished."
• "You know god is real. It says so in Romans 1:20."
• Nope. I really don't believe it's real.
• "You can't unknow something after you've known it"
• But some of us can realize and admit that we were mistaken
• "You just want to sin so you pretend God isn't real. But he's gonna getcha' in the end." 
• OK. I added that last sentence. But the assertion is ridiculous. It's like saying I can rob a bank if I close my eyes and pretend the police aren't there. It's also a claim to know my mind and an accusation that I'm lying. This is treading awfully close to the block button. I don't take kindly to being accused of dishonesty by someone who doesn't know me.

It Can't Happen to Me!

• "You were never really Christian if you stopped believing. 1 John 2:18-21 and Luke 8:13 predicted this"
• As if people weren't leaving religions back then too.  It didn't take a genius to make that prophecy. Just look around.

Finding Bearings Without Absolutes

It's pretty disorienting to let go of a core belief. I once thought all my moral values were based in Christian doctrine.  When the Christian doctrine started to crumble, I was left wondering how I would make ethical choices in my life. Turns out this wasn't very hard, but before I thought it through it felt terrifying.

Morality

• "For morality to be absolute, there must be an ultimate lawgiver."
• Neither true nor a valid reason for an 'ultimate lawgiver' to exist. 
• This whole line of questioning seems to imply that we are either guaranteed absolute morality or that "absolute morality" is somehow inherently obvious. 
• "Where do morals come from in a godless universe?"
• This question is obvious to someone who understands that genes are common within a tribe, so supporting the tribe reinforces the reproduction of genes. Successful tribes are those where the individuals within the tribe demonstrate  empathy for other tribe members.
• Unfortunately, many of the Christians I talk with haven't got the first clue how evolution actually works, so short of a repeat of high school biology class, they're just not going to understand.
• "Mere humans are not capable of understanding, but it's moral for God to XXX (insert horrific Bible story here)." This is the usual response to the assertion that a bible story is immoral. 

Good and Evil

• "Without a reference of absolute good, there's no way to judge anything as good or evil"
• "Evil must exist so that we can recognize good" (response to the problem of evil)

Science Is Unreliable

Many (not all) atheists accept that the scientific method is the most reliable method for knowing and understanding our world. Some theists feel a need to try to tear down science in order to feel like faith is somehow reliable or at the very least, just as good as science.

• "Science isn't capable of detecting God"
• Science is a process for measuring anything that's objective, verifiable, and logical.  Which of these is your god unable to satisfy?
• 'Scientific "facts" are always changing '
• A distortion of the truth. Interpretation of facts can change.  Repeatable objective measurements do not change.
• "It takes Faith to do science!" Followed by an attempt to label imagination and foresight as the same as religious faith. 
• This is equivocation, a sign of poor arguments. Imagination and creativity are an ability to envision that something might work or might be true.  Faith is concluding that a belief must be true.
• "Great scientists believed in God". this is typically followed with specific examples of famous scientists who believed in God in ancient times. 
• It's worth remembering that people didn't have a choice in what they professed to believe back then. The punishment for apostasy is death in the Bible. Thank God we've moved past that!

Proselytizing

Sadly, many theists aren't really in it for the discussion. They are used to a preaching style of communication and they think it'll help you find Jesus. 

My Version of Christianity Will Fix You

• "How many times have you read the Bible cover-to-cover"
• This one is both a dick-measuring contest and a challenge to believe their special religion.
• "You need to really READ the Bible."
• Many of the atheists I know are former Bible scholars.

Quoting Scripture When Things Get Rough

This is like some sort of incantation.  The specific verses vary, but it's like they're trying to reinforce their own beliefs and ward of Satan when you say something that makes them doubt. It's rather amusing when it happens.  I tend to infer that I've likely struck a nerve.

Thinly veiled hell threats

I think these are a good opportunity to ask the believer if they think it's ethical for their God to torture people based on sincere beliefs. It's often a last-resort tactic when the believer needs to make themselves feel better about the fact that they're completely unable to justify their stated beliefs.

• Every knee will bow
• Some day, you'll be sorry for what you're saying

Begging the Question

When it's clear they can't possibly demonstrate any of their claims to be true, they'll start working their baseless assumptions as presuppositions to comments and questions. 

• You can ask him some day when you meet him

@tristancrockett @isobelletomkins @AtheistEngineer @biblestudies517 The right question would be, who is our Creator? pic.twitter.com/C9rKa17Vw2

— Daughter of God (@WifeNMotherOf3) February 14, 2016

@matthewshute07 @LinuxGal @AtheistEngineer If you're going to deny the lawgiver you need to be consistent and deny a moral law.

— Caleb (@caleb_D_vaughn) February 13, 2016

@AtheistEngineer @LinuxGal Are the explanations as robust as the God who created the minds that were involved is constructing them?

— Polycarp 2016 (@nofury12) October 29, 2015

It's like they're incapable of even recognizing the places where they've made assumptions. Repeatedly asserting as if it's obvious doesn't make it real.

You Are Not Spiritually Blind, The Emperor Has No Clothes

Have you been called "spiritually blind" or told that you "wouldn't believe in god if it stood in front of you?"  It's insulting, right? These phrases and tactics are common in religious and other cultures which Religious culture shames doubters. Whether the language and culture is intentionally designed in that way or simply arose out of cultural evolution can be debated, but the fact remains that it happens.

In some churches, the shaming is overt and explicit, but it's pervasive in the culture and language of even the most liberal and open churches. After over a year of debating on Twitter with theists, this tactic has stood out as a clear and consistent technique that's used in an attempt to shame those who question or doubt.

Responses to Questions

The shaming of in-group versus out-group doubt seems different.  Members of the faith are treated much more friendly than non-believers. The tactic is very effective at stifling open and honest discussion of the most fragile aspects of theism. Depending on their perspective and congregation, many theists will tell you that their church encourages questioning. 

However even in these cases, there exists strong and persistent shaming of a specific type of questions: Those which question the fragile foundation of theistic belief.  These are things like:

• Does a god exist?
• How can a just and loving God condemn anyone to hell for torture?
• Why does God punish an innocent child for the sins of mankind? (A logical follow-up to an attempt to explain away the "Problem of Evil" by saying we live in a fallen world or man's free-will causes suffering)
• Has God ever told you something you didn't already know?
• Any challenge or doubt of the divinity of Jesus (e.g. How do we know jesus really did the miracles in the Bible? None of them left a trace.)

Common responses designed to shut down further questions:

• You're overthinking it (one of my personal favorites)
• Questioner's fault.
• You just have to have faith.
• Implies that the doubt or question is a failure on the questioner's part.
• God has a plan which we are not capable of understanding.
• Rather than specifically insulting the questioner, this one says all humanity is incapable of understanding God's perfect plan.
• Trust the Bible. God wouldn't lie / is not the Deceiver (a reference to Satan)

Responses to Outside Doubt

The most common response to shut down challenges from someone outside theism is to attack their personal character or insult their to imply that god is so obvious that the nonbeliever must be handicapped (e.g. "spiritually blind").

• You're unable to see your own bias against Christianity
• Rather than address the question, the theist charges a doubter with bias and bigotry.
• You must be struggling with faith.
• You and those on your side are completely biased to oppose every argument for Christianity
• You're not really an atheist. You're rebelling against a god you really know exists
• This one is an insult to personal character -- calling the opponent a liar.  It's also based in scripture (Romans 1:20). To a believer who thinks the Bible is infallible, there's no way to even address this belief. You MUST be lying because no part of their Bible could possibly be wrong.

• You are invincibly blind to your own arrogance, hatred and hypocrisy (all this for asking hard questions or expressing reasonable doubt)

• You actually hate god. You're "swine" and I won't cast my brilliant "pearls" in front of you. 
• Also: I'm a good person for attacking you now in the hopes my god won't torture you later.

• You're just like the doubters and haters Paul described in Romans 1 & 18. So your doubt and refusal to accept my claims means my book made a prophecy and is therefore true in its entirety.

Stupid Challenges to Atheists

• You have no morals
• Without God, what is the meaning to life?
• [Insert despot here] was atheist 

I'm not sure any of these even justify a response, but I've got a couple gems:

Authenticating God

1.0 Introduction

How many times have you heard a Christian, Muslim, or other theist say something like:

I know I'm right because my beliefs are grounded in the ultimate truth of the Word of God.

There are a couple assumptions implicit to this claim:

1. Identification: That the claimant has proven beyond any doubt that his particular "Word of God" are actually words of god. There's a long list things which people claim to be the word of a god:
1. The Torah
2. The Christian Bible
3. The Quran
4. The Book of Mormon
5. Personal Revelation
6. A wide range of ramblings from people suffering mental disorders
In my experience, most theists will look at this list and beam with pride over their book, yet scoff at or mock the others as though they're no different from option "f". In short I have yet to meet a theist who can address this problem.   Most don't even seem to understand the issue.
2. Honesty: That the particular god they've authenticated is incapable of lying or  for some reason will never chose to lie.
3. Knowledge: That the particular god they've authenticated possesses or defines "ultimate truth". For example, is it possible that their god resides within a universe governed by another god? Their god might be completely unaware of this fact.  It could be that it knows everything about our universe, but is limited in its knowledge of the god's super-universe.

Complex infrastructure is used to authenticate users
on the internet

Authentication methods have been studied extensively in recent years. It turns out it's not trivial to authenticate a user.  It requires a common trusted agent (the Certificate  Authority or CA), a Registration Authority, which is trusted to store the registered certificates, and complex mathematics. It relies on algorithms which are easy to run in one direction, but difficult to run in reverse.  Specifically, two very large prime numbers can be multiplied together to form the digital key. It's secure because factoring that key essentially requires checking every possible number -- computationally prohibitive at least for the next several centuries.

Authentication is not easy, but it's possible. And even absent a trusted certificate authority, there are plausible mechanisms by which a god could have given evidence that authenticated itself in a holy book. None are present.

2.0 Identification

There's not a long list of ways that a text could authenticate. The most common method theists point to is prophecy. There might be others.

2.1 Prophecy!

The theists among you are no-doubt shouting, "But there's prophecy! That's proof that the Bible is divine." It isn't.  Not even close.  

• Suppose I could successfully predict a set of 5 of two digit numbers that will be drawn at random from a set of two-digit numbers. Millions of people try to do this each day, motivated by the potential to win money and they nearly all fail, but I have succeeded and won the lottery. Is that prophecy?
  No. It's luck. It may seem to ME like it's a prophecy, but it happens to someone regularly.
• Suppose I said that in 2016, there would be wars and storms and floods around the world.  Is that prophecy?
  No. There have always been wars and storms and floods. A person could make this claim about any year in human history and be correct.
• Suppose I said that the country Israel would exist. Is that prophecy?
  No. Israel exists now, it has existed at many times in the past, and will likely continue to exist in varying forms throughout much of human future. (much like the book of Revelation)

But let's imagine that before it happened, I predicted that a meteor would strike Russia in the Winter of 2015. This is an unusual event, I had no means of fore-knowledge. It would sure seem that this is a prophecy.  If I had managed to make that prophecy, would you presume they're god-like? Or would you assume I just got lucky? Or maybe it's just a trick. Maybe I bribed people to say I made the claim earlier but actually made it AFTER. Regardless, does this one astonishing prediction in any imply that every word I say is true?

2.2 Other Options

We often seem to be confined in our thinking to methods which were available to barely-literate authors of the original Bible.  There are lots of other ways that a god could demonstrate its supernatural powers. These are:

• Properly and accurately explain the origins of species and the beginning of the observable universe long before it was knowable
• Be made of an unobtainable material (maybe even not atomic) and readable by all humans
• Be present in all cultures and tribes around the world
• Be unalterable, incorruptible, impossible to deface.
• Be objectively clear and consistent throughout
• Not endorse slavery or genocide.
• Teach a morality where people are responsible for their own actions.   Not their great-great-great-…-grandmother's actions, and not excused by third-party torture.
• Not borrow from earlier myths

These are just some examples I could easily think of.  (I know. The last couple are jabs at the Bible.)

]Finally, the best way that Yaweh could authenticate himself is simply by introducing himself. Now. To all humanity. Maybe a bit like the Vogons did in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

3.0 Honesty

In a relationship of approximately equal peers, it takes time to establish trust in honesty.  It's not something that can be simply declared by one party and accepted by the other. In the Abrahamic mythologies, we are expected to simply accept that Yaweh is always honest. No reason or justification for this is presented.  It's simply part of the traditional beliefs which people are expected to accept without cause.

4.0 Knowledge

The original claim was that god knows all things. This became problematic because if Yaweh knows the future, then it's not possible to do something he hasn't foreseen and free-will becomes an illusion. This result renders original sin even more problematic than it already was since Adam and Eve had essentially no other choice than to commit the sin God had foreseen. 

Worse still, there are problems like:

• Can god know all possible things about himself or just his creation? 
• Is it possible that god (who claims to have all knowledge) is simply deceived? A lot of people seem to fall into this category.

In the end, nobody I'm aware of has validated the claim that Yaweh is all-knowing. I'm not even sure such a thing is possible. If the god is NOT all-knowing, it's possible that this fact is not known to him.

5.0 Conclusion

It's  a long and up-hill battle to demonstrate the "divine and inerrant"  natures of the Bible. In the 2000 years of Christianity's existence no such demonstration has been shown. 

The Holy Spirit told me God isn't real

Read the Bible to find a God

The Holy Spirit told me he God isn't real. "How can that be?," you might ask. Let's begin by discussing what people mean by "the Holy Spirit".
What is the Holy Spirit, and how can we know when it's talking to us?
I was going to share my personal opinions based on my experiences as a Christian, but that would only lead to charges that I'm wrong. Instead, I'll use some GotQuestions "answers" [Emphasis is my own]:

But how do we recognize the Spirit’s guidance? How do we discern between our own thoughts and His leading? After all, the Holy Spirit does not speak with audible words. Rather, He guides us through our own consciences (Romans 9:1) and other quiet, subtle ways. 

One of the most important ways to recognize the Holy Spirit’s guidance is to be familiar with God’s Word. The Bible is the ultimate source of wisdom about how we should live (2 Timothy 3:16), and believers are to search the Scriptures, meditate on them, and commit them to memory (Ephesians 6:17).

So what do I mean when I say "The Holy Spirit sold me God isn't real"? I mean that:

• It's knowledge of the Bible that emerged from my conscience,
• This knowledge was revealed to me over the course of months or years of routine study of the Bible as a believing Christian, and 
• The revelation occurred as a series of smaller revelations, such that the entire faith was internally consistent at any one time.

1. An loving and ethical God wouldn't punish me for thinking for myself. God is loving and ethical, so it's safe to think for myself. (This was the key to freedom)
2. A fair assessment of biblical stories must include all reasonable explanations
1. One potential explanation is that the people who wrote the bible were sincere but deceived
2. Another explanation is that they were insincere
3. Another is that the message was corrupted or manipulated during canonization
4. Finally, there's a chance that a god with the omni's wrote it.
3. There are a great many serious problems with that final hypothesis::
1. If a God wrote the Bible, it really ought to be in agreement with the emerging discoveries of science rather than conflicting with them.
2. A just and loving God wouldn't chose to ban shellfish and permit slavery
3. An intelligent god would understand that we are rational creatures and require reasonable evidence to accept a claim.
4. There are many reasons to believe the Bible could be sincere yet false
1. Even in the modern era, it's common for people to interpret events inaccurately
2. Much of the Bible (especially OT) is known to be pre-literate Jewish oral tradition.
3. Even many of the NT Books are of unknown authorship or are written generations after the alleged events.
5. When I stopped to reflect on the communications I'd had with God / Jesus, I realized
1. They were never specific enough to make a prediction of an outcome
2. They never provided me with objective insight which I didn't already have. 
3. In these VERY REAL ways, my communications with "god" were not possible to distinguish from my own imagination.

Of course, there's also this gem:

Knowledge of God’s Word can help us to discern whether or not our desires come from the Holy Spirit. We must test our inclinations against Scripture—the Holy Spirit will never prod us to do anything contrary to God’s Word. If it conflicts with the Bible, then it is not from the Holy Spirit and should be ignored. 

But what is "God's Word"? Obviously, they think it's the Bible (which version)? Other people think it's the Quran or the Book of Mormon or some other book.  But we all have seen how the Bible contradicts itself. A cursory review of the breadth of Christian denominations proves that one can read anything one wants into the Bible. It's like a Rorschach Test for believers. In any case, that's not a rational way to approach any test. Reasonable people recognize that the Bible they were handed was handled by men in the following chain from their hands:

• Store
• Delivery
• Printer
• Editor
• Many hundreds of years (in some cases)
• Translator
• Many hundreds of years
• Canon selection (allegedly divine, impossible to verify)
• Original Author (mostly anonymous)
• Source material (allegedly divine, impossible to verify)

So when it comes down to it, we realize that the book we hold in our hands could have been corrupted in ANY of the preceding steps (some more likely than others). Two of the steps are so fraught with potential error that theists are taught to believe divine intervention somehow protected the Biblical word.  Returning to GotQuestions:

... he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will” (Romans 8:26–27).

In any case, the end result is that we know it's god or the holy spirit because you're studying scripture, or praying, it feels real, and it agrees with scripture -- something poetic and open to many interpretations. In talking to many Christians, it came across that God or the Holy Spirit were talking when things were suddenly clear and understandable.  This was the measure Christians seem to tend actually to use.
As I reached the age of reason, I studied the Christian teachings I'd been taught as a child. I searched my soul to understand the ethics of the God / Jesus model I had been taught. Some things became clear:

• A just God wouldn't torture for disbelief due to missing evidence. In a just system, deeds must be the basis of reward and punishment, not beliefs.
• The Jesus I was taught to believe in was not hateful or discriminatory, and certainly didn't lash out for honest mistakes. The fire and brimstone preachers were caught up in their own personal anger and projecting it onto their version of god.

The clarity of these personal revelations was convincing evidence of their divinity to my Christian self. They made it possible for me to think openly about the strength of the evidence for the things I was taught to believe as a child.  I didn't need to worry about torture because God is just and wouldn't torture without reasonable cause. 

In short, a rational review of the reasons for by beliefs helped me recognize the circular logic and simple collection of human cognitive frailties which lead to and reinforce superstitious beliefs. Central to those are the power of community belief, and confirmation bias. But surely there must be evidence of god which stands up to scrutiny that accounts for these cognitive biases!

There wasn't. I looked and didn't find it in any of the places I expected to. Of course, I heard that "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but given the superstitious nature of early people, I couldn't shake the possibility that my religion was just as much a superstition as all the others.
I was atheist for decades before I really even knew the word, much less found authors or community.  There wasn't a sudden switch, but a gradual increase in my doubt for god. Example after example showed that God was no more likely than other mythical creatures.  

• Intercessory Prayer (Prayer for others) [FAIL]
• Better health of believers [FAIL]
• Trustworthy clergy [FAIL]
• Miracles [FAIL]
• Firmament and heaven up in the sky [FAIL]
• Genetics or archeology to confirm any ancient books [FAIL]

One by one, the loving interventionist god I'd been raised to trust fell to the cold hart facts of reality: These things don't happen. People interpret any little positive thing as god, and ignore the negatives. True interventions that align with any objective and intelligent purpose simply don't happen.
If God is real, it has no detectable interaction with reality which I've been able to uncover. And belief without reason is unhealthy.
Maybe I'll meet a  god some day.  I doubt it, but if I do and it's ethical and benevolent, it will understand and accept my nonbelief.

Thoughts on the Problem of Evil

Note:  This work is reproduced from my post in a discussion thread here. 

I've never really felt like the Problem of Evil explicitly disproves god. Merely that it's one of many observations of the world which serves to make "god" a less plausible explanation of how we came to be. So I'll cede the point that a valid argument could be made wherein it's possible for a deity with the omnis to exist while it allows purposeless suffering or "suffering whose purpose is beyond our mortal comprehension" to persist.

sschlichter's logical argument starts with the supposition that a god exists and it has the traditional three omni's. I reject that starting premise and instead consider the likelihood of a god existing or not existing based on the things I can directly observe. One of those things I can observe is that people are permitted to suffer and die with no apparent purpose. While it's possible that there could be a purpose, it's rather presumptuous to claim that such a higher purpose must exist.

At the original poster's request, I'll address the philosophical solution proposed by Alvin Plantinga, repeated here for convenience:

1. A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. 
2. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. 
3. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so.
4. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. 
5. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

Free will analogy meme

It makes the false dichotomy of absolute free will or absolute slavery in [2 and 3]. It's apparent from the threat / reward system developed in Christian doctrine that we are in fact not given complete free will. In the same way that a mugger might hold a gun to our head and demand our wallet, "god" threatens hell and demands love and respect. We are "free" to reject god in the same way the mugging victim is free to refuse to give his mugger his wallet. Removing this false "free-will" dichotomy, it becomes clear that god could easily prevent child rape simply by inflicting mortal wound on the attacker once he has chosen to commit the crime. Judgement can be had, the rapist had free will, and the child needn't suffer. 

As for other issues with Plantinga's argument (as presented here), that "He must create creatures capable of moral evil" does not follow (non-sequitur) from the preceding discussion. Finally, this whole argument turns a blind eye to issues like drought, famine, disease, earthquakes, miscarriage, tsunamis, and all manner of other natural disasters which cause extensive human and animal suffering yet have no discernable connection to "free-will".

So to conclude, I find the argument wholly unconvincing, but even if it were convincing, the mere possibility that a god could be forced to allow evil in order to grant free will  doesn't make it so. It's still tremendously unlikely.