Over at a blog called An Atheist Debater is an author who attempted to tackle what he thoughtfully considers to be “one of the most useless and easily refutable” arguments for the existence of God: the Argument from Design. According to this gentleman, the teleological argument “is so ridiculously fallacious it’s laughable.” What I intend to explore here are two things. First, did he succeed at proving it commits a fallacy? And second, did his own argument commit a fallacy?

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Usually I don’t bother paying any attention to The Bahnsen Burner, a blog run by an Atheist named Dawson Bethrick, and it would take less than five minutes at his site for a person to see why. It has almost nothing to do with the actual merits of his arguments and everything to do with the fact that locating and identifying an argument within his landslide argumentum verbosium is just too laborious a task. I share the same view as Joshua Whipps over at Choosing Hats: until Bethrick decides to express arguments or criticisms with succinct perspicuity instead of proof-by-verbosity, [1] I simply can’t be bothered to engage his material. It requires more time than I have available.

The only reason that I am even aware Bethrick had recently tackled my “Arrogance of Atheism” articles [2] is because one of our staff members, Mathew Hamilton, directed me to it. I would have otherwise never known. And so for Hamilton’s sake alone I have reviewed Bethrick’s piece, shouldering the laborious task of locating and identifying his arguments in order to respond to them. I shall not repeat this endeavour (even though Bethrick will probably be unable to resist carving out an entertaining albeit verbose Chewbacca Defense), as this response will suffice to demonstrate that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the bankruptcy of Atheist objections.

And no, Bethrick, our staff will not publish your loquacious tomes in the Comments field to this (or any other) article. Comments must be composed with succinct perspicuity. If you want to do a verbal dump, there is always The Bahnsen Burner—where no one has to see it unless they masochistically want to. I will return to ignoring you, although you are free to continue directing traffic here by writing about our articles.

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Several years ago, long before this site ever existed and once hosted somewhere long since dead, I had written a very pointed and brief thought-piece about “The Arrogance of Atheism.” It had garnered the attention of Austin Reed Cline, a Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of the Atheism section of the About.com web portal, who had published an excoriating and profoundly inaccurate review of my article. Some time last year I decided to resurrect that piece and republish it here, and to include not only Cline’s rebuttal but my response to him as well.

Around that same time I extended an invitation for Cline to interact with me on the response I had composed. His response can be found in the comments to the relevant article at his portal here, and the remainder of this article is my answer to him.

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In the original article published at our web site, we had addressed the question, “How is God relevant anymore, now that we have science?” If you have not read that original article, it might be best that you do, since this follow-up article shall be addressing a rebuttal offered by someone from AtheistForums.org named Tavarish. (His real name is withheld out of respect for his privacy, as he has not disclosed it publically.)

Although Tavarish had a lot to say, he could have spared himself a significant amount of writing because, for some curious reason, nearly half of his rebuttal was devoted to articulating what the scientific method truly is and how it is engaged. He could have spared himself all that writing because not only do I understand the scientific method already but, more importantly, that had nothing to do with what my article had to say. In other words, he invested a tremendous amount of writing in describing what the flashlight is and how to properly use it, whereas my article simply took those sort of issues for granted in order to address an antecedent issue: the fact that the flashlight works in the first place and how to account for that. I think Tavarish was very forceful and clear in his rebuttal, but unfortunately he was rebutting something other than my article. If he wants to make his stand on when a theory is scientific and when it is not, he might be surprised to find me standing beside him. Quite simply, the issue was never the demarcation problem, despite his attempt to insist otherwise, but rather the foundations upon which science rests (taking for granted what science is).

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“Why do we need a God when we have science?” he asked.

My mind immediately responded with, “Because in God we find solid answers to a host of questions that science cannot even ask, much less answer.” That is not what I would say to him, though, because I expect that his question was a bit off the cuff, a little too hastily phrased. I expect that his question really was, “How is God relevant anymore, now that we have science?”

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So during a conversation on an Atheism message board I made a shocking statement which I thought would stir a hornet’s nest of activity, and yet surprisingly almost none of the participants gave it any attention. One atheist had said that science relies on the assumption of ‘materialism’, which he described as the view that only material things exist. I corrected him by pointing out that science, in as much as it is occupied with the study of natural causes and events, obviously relies on the assumption that material things exist, but not on the assumption that only material things exist. Even if it turns out that metaphysical naturalism is false, we would still have science because material things do exist. What I said next should have created a flurry of activity, and yet for some reason it didn’t: that metaphysical naturalism is already considered bollocks and for extremely good reasons, but science continues unabated (thus proving my point).

Yet of the atheists involved in that discussion, there was only one who took issue with my comment, an outcome which defied the predictions of my experiences. But at any rate, what I wish to share with you here is the conversation that occurred between me and that one atheist, the outcome of which was even more unexpected.

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I can state without any sense of reservation that I really admired Carl Sagan as a popularizer of science. I miss him terribly and still cherish his remarkable legacy. The television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, ignited my endless fascination with cosmology and astrophysics. Three of his books—Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot, and Contact—are among the most tattered books on my shelf because I have read them so many times, and the latter still remains one of my favourite science fiction novels. (Even though the 1996 movie was really good, it just could not compare since, for obvious reasons, the book was able to explore nuances and depths that no movie ever could. And the plot device he turned π into? Pure genius!)

But his dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” has come to irritate me something fierce, for no other reason than it ended up getting hijacked by parochial sycophants who are so remarkably irresponsible with it. It is inordinately popular with atheists because it feels in their hands like an impenetrable firewall shielding them against any and all theistic claims, but they wield the dictum horribly oblivious to a crucial handicap: they never bother to define univocal criteria for either what an extraordinary claim is or what extraordinary evidence looks like. The former is usually embellished with synonyms that never amount to a defining criterion, while the latter often gets positioned as anything that will not admit the supernatural. (For example, they usually posit circumstances or phenomena that never preclude possible natural explanations—e.g., God rearranging the stars to spell his name—being fenced in by Clarke’s Third Law on one side and Occam’s Razor on the other, for the evidence is always restricted to the empirical.) But also irritating is the audacious conceit of their demand, as if somehow their own intellectual sanction is a necessary instrument of validation for whatever claim was aired in their presence. “Without sufficient evidence to support your claim,” they usually say, “I am not able to believe it.” That may well be the case but, not to put too fine a point on it, what makes you think your belief is relevant or even required?

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Here is a deep thought to chew on: The will is not a cause; it is an effect, whose cause is conation. “Acts of the will cannot come to pass of themselves,” writes Arthur Pink. “To say they can is to postulate an uncaused effect.” John Frame concurs, saying, “The very idea of a ‘will’ which exists in some independence from the person, the intellect, and the emotions, is deeply problematic.” [1]

Choice is a term describing a circumstance appropriate to volition or acts of will, which are determined (causally necessitated) by the mental activity of conation. The term conative (desire) describes one of the three aspects of the human mind, the other two being cognitive (intellect) and affective (emotion); [2] as such, the conative consists of the cognitive and affective and causally produces how one acts on them. Therefore, as Arthur Pink astutely noted: if volition or the will is the effect of these causal faculties, then it is subject to them; if it is subject to them, then it is not sovereign; if it is not sovereign, then we cannot predicate freedom of it.

But freedom should not be predicated of faculties at any rate, but rather of agency. As John Locke wrote, “Liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or abstaining to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” [3] I reference him not as an authority but as having raised a very good point. As the agent is free and not his will, so we should reject ‘free will’ in favour of ‘free agency’.

References:

1. On Arthur Pink: see Chapter 7 of his The Sovereignty of God, under the heading “The nature of the human will.” On John Frame: see his answer to the question on “Agent Causation and Free Will,” as well as the article “Perspectivalism 101” by his friend Joseph Torres.
2. See the article on “Conation” at Wikipedia.
3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” which can be found in print in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources from Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, eds.

So here is a two-part philosophical question I would like to survey your thoughts on. And it is a two-part question because I am not sure if—or even how—it can be separated into distinct questions, so I’ll ask them together. (And this is a vitally important question to contemplate, for it possesses very serious ramifications for both ontology and epistemology together.)

1. Is there a difference between real and exist?
   1. Can something be real but not exist?
   2. Can something exist but not be real?

It almost seems as though there is no difference, that they are interchangeable terms; by saying that something is real we are saying that it exists, or by saying that it exists we are saying that it is real. That seems right. But is it? Is there no difference? What does it mean for X to be real?

Of course, we have to avoid the easy temptation of defining ‘real’ as correspondence to reality because, first of all, that would amount to an empty tautology which fails to impart any information and, more importantly, correspondence is widely recognized as a distinct theory of truth. (If reality is a predicate of truth, then ‘real’ and ‘true’ cannot be interchangeable terms. Think about it: if truth is that which corresponds to reality, and ‘real’ and ‘true’ both mean the same thing, then we are left with a theory that is not instructive. To say that “true is that which corresponds to truth” has about as much meaning as “real is that which corresponds to reality.”)

So if correspondence to reality is what it means for X to be true, then what does it mean for X to be real? Someone might suggest, “X is real when it has existence.” And therein lies the rub, calling upon the significance of my question. That statement seems to imply that if something does not exist then it is not real.

It’s an interesting question, and far deeper than it first appears. Should we understand that ‘real’ and ‘exist’ are two different things? But if ‘real’ and ‘exist’ don’t mean the same thing, then how can something be real but not exist, or exist but not be real?

If you have some insights or some probative questions that can help put this issue into gear, post your contribution in the Comments field. Or if you know a philosopher who has addressed this specific question, leave a recommendation.

LAST UPDATED: 7 September 2009

PREFACE: The following article was originally published in three different places, two which died internet deaths and one that still exists as an inactive blog. [1] Shortly after publication it caught the attention of Austin Reed Cline, a Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of the Atheism section of the About.com site, who published an excoriating and profoundly inaccurate review thereof. [2]

I invited Cline to interact with me on the subject because I intended to compose a rebuttal and wanted his input before publication; I also asked if he would be willing to provide a link to my rebuttal. On both counts he refused, and with some rather insulting remarks. So I had to complete my rebuttal without any input from Cline. Unfortunately that rebuttal was published at one of those now-dead locations, a web site that died when my hosting company went out of business.

I am republishing the original article here along with a new rebuttal against Cline (which I will finish by this weekend) for the thoughtful consideration of our readers and members. Please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on my original point, on Cline’s review, and on my rebuttal.

Original Article (27/Jan/2005):

The really frustrating thing about most atheists, at least those who enjoy debating against Christian theism, is that they presuppose the truth of their system of belief and then tacitly insist their Christian opponent work within the framework of that system. In other words, the Christian is expected to provide arguments in defense of Christian theism which accord with the atheist’s epistemology in particular and world view in general. This is implicitly demonstrated in challenges such as, "Provide evidence that God exists." The relevance of evidence, and even what constitutes evidence, are defined by his system of thought.

However, if it is permissible for the atheist to presuppose the truth of his system of thought and expect the Christian to work within the framework of that system, then it is also permissible for the inverse of that situation. Otherwise, the atheist would shoulder the epistemic responsibility for explaining why the only presuppositions permitted in the field of debate are his own—and I would not anticipate a rational argument for that.

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