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.

Tilting at windmills

Although Bethrick claims to value the capacity for distinguishing the real world from an imagined one, he nevertheless demonstrates an ironic quixotism in his sophisticated and eloquent attempt at rebutting my piece on the arrogance of Atheism. He takes my argument and builds a straw-filled caricature of it before launching into his rebuttal. For some reason this imagined argument is preferable to the real one; but then if you examine the real argument I presented and compare it to his pretend version, maybe you could see why he made that choice. It seems the capacity to distinguish the real from the imagined doesn’t necessarily mean the person will prefer the real.

Bethrick pretends that the arrogance is found in the Atheist presupposing the truth of his system of thought and expecting the Christian to work within the framework of that system, and then turns to wonder why it is not arrogant when the Christian does the very same thing.

Of course, that’s not even close to what my argument said.

The “arrogance of atheism” is manifest by those Atheists who presuppose the truth of their system of thought and expect the Christian to work within the framework of that system, all the while denying for the Christian the inverse thereof because the only presuppositions the Atheist permits in the field of debate are his own. Again, the issue is not about Atheists insisting that theistic claims be supported, but rather how they insist those claims get supported.

Where the Atheist errs is when he demands that Christians support their view using the presuppositions and epistemological criteria of the Atheist’s world view, an error that is readily apparent if the Atheist gave it a moment’s thought: he should consider trying to support his world view using the presuppositions and epistemological criteria of the Christian world view (e.g., the normative role of Scriptures in both metaphysics and epistemology). “But such a system inherently precludes an atheistic world view,” he might protest. Indeed, and so perhaps the point begins to sink in? We can hope.

Bethrick himself might object on a slightly different point: “But the Christian’s system of thought allows for an imaginary X as if it were real,” forgetting that X is imaginary only by the presuppositions and criteria he employs! The issue is not about distinguishing between the real and the imaginary—both Bethrick and I recognize that some things are real and other things are imaginary, after all—but about the criteria employed in making that distinction. Under both his view and mine, some things are just not real, while other things plainly are real. How do we decide? There’s the rub—which so many Atheists, like Bethrick here, simply will not grasp.

When it comes to Christian apologetics, there are basically two camps: on the one hand is evidentialism, and presuppositionalism on the other. Please notice that neither of these two systems deny the Atheist his presuppositions and epistemological criteria! (To charge either with the arrogance I speak of requires ignoring the facts.) The evidentialists tend to argue from the same epistemic axioms and criteria as the Atheist, starting from this common ground toward defeating the Atheist’s metaphysical presuppositions (to their peril, as they forget that ontology grounds epistemology). And the presuppositionalists actually enjoy granting the Atheist his presuppositions and epistemic criteria because it’s the very means by which they achieve their end, the self-stultifying death of any non-Christian world view (q.v. the TAG). When a Christian employs either apologetic approach when confronting Atheism, he is not guilty of the same arrogance which so many Atheists are because he does allow the inverse—especially presuppositionalists, who purposefully allow the inverse.

When an Atheist makes a moral judgment, for instance, and the Christian asks that he support his claim, is he denied the use of his system of thought for discharging that burden? No. In fact, that is the very means by which we prove the bankruptcy of the Atheist’s argument. What about the reverse of this scenario? When a Christian makes a moral judgment and is asked to support it, does the Atheist deny him the use of his Christian system of thought (e.g., the norms of Scriptures) for discharging his burden? Yes. In fact, he is told that the Scriptures are not any sort of evidence, a conclusion that is produced by the Atheist’s own presuppositions and criteria.

Hence, the arrogance of Atheism.

Miscellaneous post-script

“If I may make a few observations,” Bethrick said, “let me state the following.” It was ironic, then, to notice that what followed did not contain one single observation. Not a single one. He issued a long series of vituperative assertions about the motivations and feelings of the theist, informed by nothing but Bethrick’s own prejudices. He presumes to disclose “the real cause” behind my “choice to accuse an atheist of arrogance,” which he so charitably identifies as “a deep-seated resentment of the atheist’s certainty,” that I envy the Atheist who knows that God is nothing more than “a frightening concoction of the imagination”—and on and on. “The real agenda behind the charge of arrogance is much simpler,” he suspects. “It is to smear and discredit non-believers.” The reader might note that there is not one single observation contained in any of this.

He also seemed to think that if he did adopt the system of thought behind the Christian world view, in order to work within the framework of that system, he might conceive of the universe as being the product of a conscious activity that is altogether different from the Christian God—“infinitarian in nature” as opposed to trinitarian, for example. By trying on the shoes of Christian theism, he claimed, it would be possible to conceive of a metanarrative vastly different from the Christian one; he could freely “imagine any scenario and, on the premise of the primacy of consciousness, accept it as true.” All of this is frank nonsense, of course, because the Christian world view does not operate from “the premise of the primacy of consciousness.” Bethrick confuses the mysticism of eastern systems of thought (e.g., Buddhism) with Christianity, which operates from a very different premise: the primacy of Scriptures. If Bethrick did adopt the system of thought behind the Christian world view, not one of those scenarios would follow, given the normative role of Scriptures using responsible exegesis. His supposed conceptions do not work “within the framework of that system,” but in fact utterly defy it.

But perhaps Bethrick not only presumes to tell Christians what their motivations are and what they feel and think, but also what the contents of their system of thought is, their operating presuppositions and governing criteria. If you’re going to construct a bunch of straw men, why not make it a battalion? Go big or go home, right? If you get to fabricate everything about your opponent, your triumph is more readily assured.

Remember, Bethrick does not “confuse his imagination with reality,” he claims.

References:

  1. “Proof by verbosity” is a rhetorical sophistry whereby someone publishes a very long-winded and complex argument that overwhelms interlocutors and readers with such a volume of material that the argument sounds plausible, appears to be well-researched, and is so laborious to untangle and check that the argument is allowed to slide by unchallenged. See the satirical “Cogno-Intellectualism, Rhetorical Logic, and the Craske-Trump Theorem” by Michael Wilkinson [PDF].
  2. “The Arrogance of Atheism” and “The (Ongoing) Arrogance of Atheism.”

Other related Aristophrenium articles: