Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.

Now we are focusing on a broadly cast Argument from Evil, or as I prefer to call it, Argument from Indifference. Marshall is here responding to my seventh reply.


That the Evidence Points to God (VII)

by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.

After doubling down on his question-begging in our exchange on the Kalam, Dr. Carrier now doubles down on his intemperate assertion that there is no evidence whatever for the existence of God.

Perhaps this is due to a persistent confusion about what constitutes “evidence.” Even if it were true (which I don’t for a moment grant) that every piece of evidence is either “equally likely” on the hypothesis of God or atheism, or “never more likely on theism,” it wouldn’t follow that there is no evidence for theism. For a particular fact to count as evidence for theism, it isn’t necessary that that fact should be more probable on theism than on atheism, but only that it make theism more probable (or less improbable) than it would be in the absence of that fact.

In my last entry, I pointed out that in “most if not all significant issues people debate,” there is at least some evidence on both sides of the question. Rather than conceding this prosaic observation, Dr. Carrier’s counterposes the entirely insignificant question of “whether gremlins cause plane crashes.”

In fact it is a non-question, for I doubt whether there is a single sane person in the world who believes gremlins cause plane crashes, whereas most of the world, and many great minds, believe or have believed in God. Whether mind or matter lies at the foundation of existence is, if not the most significant question one could ask, certainly among the most significant.

Why doesn’t Dr. Carrier counterpose some other significant question that people debate concerning say, ethics, politics or philosophy? Clearly it is because if he did so, it would be obvious that most if not all such questions have at least some evidence on each side.

The ten features of “Carrier-world” that I laid out are all either explicit, or clearly implicit, in Dr. Carrier’s delineation of the features of the world he believes are inconsistent with the existence of God. He claims to have been misrepresented but does little to change the picture other than to say that there would, after all, be some natural evils, but that none of these would be “serious.”

I affirm that natural evils are indeed serious, but Dr. Carrier makes no response to my point that as serious as these natural evils are, they are less than the moral evils in the world, and are therefore consistent with divine justice.

Dr. Carrier expects God to have equipped “all human cultures from the dawn of history with the same simple gospel message of kindness, honesty, and reasonableness.” Why should human beings need a “gospel” to inform them of these virtues? Everyone knows, and has always known, that they are virtues, as plainly evidenced by their anger when someone treats them in an unkind, dishonest, or unreasonable way. The wickedness of the human race is that despite this knowledge, they go on to do these very things that anger them when they are on the receiving end.

Asked to explain why his tit-for-tat vision of divine justice would make man a better, nobler species, Dr. Carrier declines any response and instead demands that the theist explain why Carrier-world is not the best world! Besides refusing to shoulder his burden of proof (for what is, after all, his own argument), this is again indicative of Dr. Carrier’s difficulty in seeing the other side of a question, in this case a rather obvious one.

A one-to-one correlation between God’s justice and our moral actions wouldn’t do much to form our inward moral character. Suppose God arranged things so that every time we gossiped, we lost a little clump of hair. People would quickly figure out the connection, and unless they cared nothing about their appearance or wanted to be bald, most would stop gossiping. But this police-state discipline would do little to cure the pride and malevolence from which the vice of gossip proceeds.

Dr. Carrier claims that since God, if he existed, “could be co-eternal with the universe,” it makes no difference to the case for theism whether the universe is past-eternal. If Dr. Carrier really believed this, why did he labor so strenuously to deny the plain preponderance of scientific evidence for the past-finitude of the universe? Why not just grant the point and say, “but it makes no difference, adds not a whit of evidence for God”?

I’ll respond to Carrier’s fine-tuning claims when I present that argument. Here I will just note the poverty of imagination that can’t see a reason why God would create a world with such an exquisite mathematical structure merely because, on account of his omnipotence, he doesn’t have to!

Dr. Carrier exhibits a philistine dullness when he claims that the transcendent beauty and sweetness human beings enjoy on this earth (notwithstanding their bad actions) also amount to “no evidence” for God’s existence, because if God didn’t exist, human beings would still have evolved “aesthetic responses to their environment.”

Never mind that Carrier provides no argument for this claim, not even a bare outline of one. The thing to be explained is not a bare “aesthetic response,” which from an evolutionary perspective wouldn’t need to perform anything more than helping a species survive and reproduce; but rather the superabundance of beauty, riches of art, and joy of human relationships that go far beyond the insipid “aesthetic response.”

My claim is hardly that “but for God, we would find ourselves on a planet resembling the surface of the moon,” and it should be too obvious to need stating that life requires a biosphere of sufficient complexity to sustain life. But it is by no means necessary that our planet should be as staggeringly beautiful as it is, and the fact that it is so constitutes at least some evidence for God, since if God exists, we would expect him to create a staggeringly beautiful world.

If Dr. Carrier counters that by the same token, we would not expect God to allow evil and suffering in the world, I grant the point fully, and will hardly be so unfair as not to concede that this constitutes at least some evidence for atheism. As I said in my opening entry and repeated in my previous, it should be obvious that there is at least some evidence on both sides. It is a pity that we should have to waste so much ink debating this basic and uncontroversial point, instead of focusing on the interesting question of where the weight or preponderance of evidence lies.

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Such is Dr. Marshall’s response on the Argument from Indifference. 

Continue on to Dr. Carrier’s reply.

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