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.


Asking someone to support their claims leaves open for discussion how their claims may be supported. It doesn’t necessarily presuppose any particular way is the only acceptable way.

Yes, it does—evidenced quite sharply by the response of the Atheist when the Christian opens the Bible to support their claims. Rather immediately the Bible is denounced as any sort of acceptable method of supporting claims, precisely because it fails to satisfy the Atheist’s presupposed criteria.

There is no single “atheist” belief system.

Since I never claimed there was, this is an extraordinarily pointless remark. I have no idea what it is doing in a response to me.

Everyone presupposes the truth of their beliefs. Believing something means thinking it is true, after all.

This brutally misses the entire point and force of my argument, which was that 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 equally permissible for

  • the Christian to presuppose the truth of his system of thought and expect the Atheist to work within the framework of that system.

As I had said, if an Atheist disagrees with this (Cline included), then he shoulders the epistemic responsibility for explaining why the only presuppositions permitted in the field of debate are his own—for which no valid argument can be anticipated, as such a position can be sustained only by the Special Pleading fallacy.

The fact is, you are attributing to others an attitude which you made up in your own mind, then call that a sign of arrogance. The only arrogance is your presumption to speak for others.

That he thinks I am attributing to others an attitude which I made up in my own mind further underscores that he completely misunderstands the issue. I am characterizing the nature of their response in itself, which always speaks quite adequately for itself. This criticism applies only to those Atheist responses which deny for the Christian the very principle the Atheist allows for himself. Such a response is a one-way street that exhibits an arrogance that cannot be defended except by fallacy. (The attitude is being attributed to the response, not to the person. And it is the product of logical evaluation, not something contrived out of thin air.)

Why don’t you point to someone actually doing that [shoving their beliefs down my throat] before whining that this is your “true” argument.

I had already done so. When an Atheist presupposes the truth of his system of thought and expects the Christian to work within the framework of that system, but denies for the Christian the inverse thereof because the only presuppositions the Atheist permits in the field of debate are his own, he is precisely shoving his beliefs down my throat.

If what Cline desires is a clear example of a specific Atheist doing this, he only needs to engage me on some particular truth claim and he will provide the example in himself. As I said, I’m characterizing an Atheist’s response; who that Atheist happens to be is of zero consequence to my argument.

And although ‘the choir’ might applaud him when he casts aspersions like describing his opponent as “whining,” does he really think supercilious invective is possessed of intellectual merit?

Feel free to describe that “epistemic structure” [of Christian theism] and demonstrate how/why it has “equal validity,” whatever that means.

The nature of that epistemic structure, while certainly an interesting subject in its own right, has zero relevance to the point my argument makes, and I have no interest in pursuing irrelevancies. And the issue referred to by ‘equal validity’ was indicated already and numerous times—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 equally permissible for

  • the Christian to presuppose the truth of his system of thought and expect the Atheist to work within the framework of that system.

I would love to hear you explain how the Christian system comes with no empirical claims.

Cline simply does not grasp the issue, which is not the nature of the claims being made by either party but how the Atheist presupposes the truth of his system of thought and expects the Christian to work within the framework of that system, but denies for the Christian the inverse thereof because the only presuppositions the Atheist permits in the field of debate are his own. As I said before, the issue is not about Atheists insisting that theistic claims be supported, but rather how they insist the claims get supported.

Unless and until you can [justify that your God-claims are not empirical in any way], you are indeed committing the Special Pleading fallacy—because you have not established the existence of a characteristic that “defines” your alleged “exception.”

And how do I establish the existence of that characteristic? What criteria must I satisfy in order to establish a thing? Criteria that is informed by Cline’s world view or criteria that is informed by my world view? Unless one properly satisfies some criteria, a thing is not established so much as asserted. The rub, here, is that if Cline requires that my task must satisfy his criteria, he ends up proving my whole point.

Cline makes reference to “a standard used pretty much all the rest of the time in other situations” without any obvious indication that he sees and understands that the point is about whose standard is being called upon for establishing a thing.

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