Time for some traditional counter-apologetics this holiday season. Today I tackle a dumb Christian argument atheists often have a hard time even understanding (because it’s so dumb, they aren’t thinking dumbly enough to get it). Frank Turek (of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist fame—on which see Lowder) calls this The Strongest Argument for God, and recently presented a version of it from doctoral candidate Tricia Scribner at CrossExamined.org. His archived radio episode doesn’t get to it until minute 24:45, or about half-way through the transcript.

Turek teases it like this:

There is an argument for God that works even if the universe is eternal, even if macroevolution is true, even if a person believes that science is the supreme source of knowledge. It’s an argument that is as old as Aristotle, yet few talk about it today. Tricia Scribner, co-editor of the new book, Answering the Music Man, joins Frank for a fascinating discussion that unpacks this ancient argument in modern terms. Frank and Tricia show that science wouldn’t even work unless the premises of this argument were true.

Wow! That sounds pretty powerful. Scribner’s really kind of an arrogant hack who co-edited a snarky dumb book against Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. And I say co-edited, because she’s not even the lead editor, and hardly wrote any of it; apart from one rather silly chapter she writes on a variant of the Argument from Meaning (which doesn’t significantly differ from the version profferred by Timothey Keller), it’s otherwise mostly just a collection of essays by a bunch of dudes. All pushing tired old straw-man rhetoric atheists are bored of by now. But regardless, building her brand and selling her book is what Turek is actually promoting here. This is money-making corporate synergy under nonprofit guise, like the most of religion. This kind of apologetics is a six-figure profession built to fleece a fat pool of marks. But let’s pretend that’s not what’s happening and take this argument seriously.

The So-Called Argument to Final Causality

What is the argument? “It’s called Final Causality,” Turek says. And they go into the four Aristotelian causes, and…oh, right. Yep. Your eyes are rolling for a reason here. You heard right. Turek and Scribner are literally saying the Argument from Final Cause is the “most powerful,” literally “the strongest” argument for God. It’s hard to maintain a straight face here. You get to legitimately question their intelligence and judgement at this point. Anyone who thinks this is even a good argument clearly is far too incompetent to have any opinion worth listening to on this subject. I guess we have here an evident explanation for why they are believers: they are too incompetent to figure out their beliefs are false. (Assuming they are being sincere and not just selling all this knowing it’s a scam; though one can wonder about that, I won’t assume it here.)

Atheists can’t explain, you see, why “each thing moves towards its own fluorishing according to its own specific nature.” Nope. We can’t explain why pumpkin seeds grow sprouts that push through or weave around obstacles. Only God can explain that! Yes. That is literally an example Scribner gives, and the actual argument she makes from it. She even implies we can’t explain why a pumkin seed doesn’t grow into a cucumber. “It can’t cause itself!” Only an “ultimate cause” can explain this, you see, “and that’s God himself.” At this point you may be scratching your head and asking, “But they said their argument works even if you believe in macroevolution and thus can indeed explain every single one of these things, with the natural selection of DNA sequences over long durations?” Well, yeah. So, Turek has to jump in and rescue Scribner at this point with a redirect, adding, “Why do atoms do the particular things they do?” And he walks that back to, “Why do the fundamental forces do what they do?” And so on, all the way back to some necessary First Cause, whatever it is that “is sustaining all of nature as we speak,” without which we’d have no physics—and thus no pumpkin seed DNA in the first place—and that’s surely God! (For…reasons; he never actually explains how a god comes out of this.)

Turek knows Scribner’s argument was tanking in this interview; she’s hosed it and is sounding like a moronic Answers in Genesis looney. So he rides in to the rescue by interrupting her and returning to the actual argument she is supposed to be making, which is not about why pumpkin DNA won’t cascade into a cucumber but will cause sprouts to behave as observed, but rather, about what ultimately sustains all the laws of physics that continue this clockwork going (and yes, he admits he’s just talking about the ignorant Medieval claptrap of Aquinas’s Fifth Way). He isn’t as clear on the point of how this is compatible with an eternal world. But he means, even if the world has always existed, there still has to have been (or recently enough arrived) some ontological first cause keeping it all going, keeping it all from dissolving and falling apart, just spinning off into random chaos (on the difference between ontological and chronological first causes, see Sense and Goodness without God, index, “first cause”). And that’s why you supposedly “have to believe” in this First Cause. And so…handwave handwave hadwave…God exists!

It’s important to get right what they are saying here. They do not mean this as a chronological First Cause argument (that sometime in the past there had to be someone who got everything started), nor as a Design argument (that someone had to choose a specific arrangement of things to get anything like us to exist). Yes, those are arguments for God that Turek mentions he also endorses. But his point is that this particular argument, the “most powerful” argument, is not either of those arguments. It is, rather, the argument that without someone to ‘hold it all together’, then the fundamental forces, and thus the atoms they form, and thus the DNA they form, and thus the pumpkin seeds and sprouts they form, would not continue following the specific rules they do; that basically the laws of physics would stop working. He’s talking about what I call the Ontological Whatsit argument akin to what Edward Feser has tried to incoherently push of late (see my series on that beginning with Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Debunked!). In short, there has to be some “ontological whatsit” that underlies all reality that keeps reality acting in the specific ways that it does, hence a reason why the laws of physics remain as they are.

There is no logical step from that premise to “God.” That’s why neither Turek nor Scribner ever mention one. They just guffaw and dance around with statements of incredulity over it being anything else. They aren’t even taking seriously alternative ontological grounds of all being; they don’t even mention any. They act like none has ever been proposed. Which is Standard Christian Apologetics: leave data out, to get the argument to work; because, put that data back in, and the argument reverses to the opposite conclusion again. Thus all Christian apologetics is based on leaving evidence out. Here we could teach them about variations of string theory, quantum field theory, and so on, which set the ground of all being at what the evidence far more supports being the case: some form of geometric or topological fact about the structure of spacetime and/or the objects or fields we find residing in it.

For example, as I have argued, it’s entirely credible that the fundamental ground of all being—what Turek and Scribner mean by the Final First Cause of everything—is simply spacetime itself. Spacetime could be self-sustaining (it simply being its nature to exist, in the same way they’d say of God), and every object in spacetime (particles or field quanta or whatever) is simply spacetime twisted up a certain way, as per string theory, which with this posit can explain every peculiar property of every particle we know, including its existence and behavior (and the non-existence of any others we should have observed by now). Some other geometric fact about spacetime would have to obtain to un-twist spacetime, otherwise it will go on behaving as it does. Nothing exists otherwise to unwind it and thus “stop” particles having the existence and properties they do, and thus causally interacting as they do, and thus producing the forces and laws of physics they do. It’s all just geometrically inevitable. Once you get spacetime arranged a certain way, its geometry does all the work there on out. (And yes, we also have god-free ideas about how it came to be arranged that certain way too. But we aren’t discussing cosmological or design arguments here.)

As Victor Stenger lays out in Comprehensible Cosmos, you can explain pretty much everything by simply asking, “What if nothing exists to decide what happens?” The answer is always: what we observe happening. You can show this, for example, for inverse square laws in three open spatial dimensions: unless something intervenes to prevent it, there is no other way a random, unguided radiation of particles would unfold. Likewise any other physical law. In other words, you’d need an intelligent intervention to prevent things from turning out that way; rather than the other way around. Turek and Scribner then might say, “Okay, but there must still be some underlying something, unsupported by anything else, something self-sustaining, that underlies all that and thus keeps it from petering out or something.” And Stenger would say, “Yeah. Quantum fields.” (As I know from personal conversations I had with him about this when he was alive.) I would myself say, “Yeah. Spacetime.” (Because I’m fairly convinced string theory is on the right track on this.) But either could be the case. Or anything else the like.

To grasp the point, imagine the question the other way around: “What keeps your God from flying apart into a chaos, and thus just petering out or something? What keeps him all perfectly organized from one moment to the next? What grounds his structure?” This is actually a much harder question to answer, because by definition (God being devoid of any material or substance that could hold even his thoughts together much less his abilities), there is nothing we know of that’s capable of doing that (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism and The God Impossible). Theists will nevertheless answer this question with, “Because that’s just God’s nature; he just is self-sustaining.” But that actually isn’t an answer; it is quite conspicuously the lack of one. “I don’t know. It just is.” “But why?” Blank stare. Okay. Sure. But…problem.

If we accept that something can be self-sustaining for no reason (and the theist is hereby admitting we can), then anything can be self-sustaining for no reason. Like, quantum fields, or spacetime manifolds. How do you get from, “There has to be something self-sustaining that sustains everything else as its bedrock or scaffolding as it were,” which we can grant, to “That something is intelligent and thoughtful and knows everything and has a specific kind of moral character and bizarre magical powers”? The answer is: you don’t. All that shit is Occam’s-Razor-violating crapola that theists just pile on. But if you want to conceive of what the simplest possible thing meeting that description could be, with no unnecessary add-ons, what you get is something more like spacetime: everything, to exist, must exist somewhere and sometime (otherwise it never exists and exists nowhere); therefore everything to exist requires spacetime to exist (notably, even God; for if God does not exist everywhere and at every time, then there are places and times he did not exist, and so if God does not exist anywhere or at any time, God never exists); but spacetime itself is time and location and therefore does not require any extra somewhere or sometime to be.

Spacetime is therefore the only thing that can exist by itself. That seems a pretty good candidate, then, for the ground of all being. What evidence is there that it has to also be intelligent, conscious, compassionate, and magically empowered? None. So as they say, you can’t get there from here.

Where This Gets Hosed

They both banter about how most people don’t get this argument, even Christians, and how to “get it” you really need some background knowledge. What background knowledge you might ask? Evolutionary biology? Physics? No. They mean, you need to have certain obscure words explained to you, so you understand Aristotle’s four causes; then it will all become clear. Yes. This is what they argue. Rather than, “to really understand this argument about fundamental physics, and ultimately how seeds grow into things, you need some basic groundwork in physics and chemistry and biology.” Nope. The actual study of the actual things they are talking about? Completely irrelevant. Don’t go there! No. You just need to understand some words coined by this guy twenty three hundred years ago who was wildly ignorant of all modern science and never advanced this particular version of the argument we are trying to sell you on. This is what passes for “the strongest argument for God.”

Which is where this all gets hosed at the most abstract level: they simply aren’t interested in asking any scientist about this stuff or learning any pertinent science whatever. It’s all just, “can we make up some words and twist ourselves with rhetoric into landing where we want.” This is the difference between sound reasoning, and bullshit reasoning—aka, apologetics, aka, religion. We really don’t need to hear any more arguments from these people, because they have already made quite clear they not only have no idea what they are talking about (which is fundamental physics, biochemistry, and evolutionary biology), but they have no interest in ever having any idea what they are talking about. Which reveals a harsh truth: shows and books (and arguments) like this do not exist, are not made, to persuade atheists, most of whom will immediately register this as bullshit, or quickly discover that fact the moment they ask any informed atheist about it. This shit is made to silo fellow Christians and keep them in the fold, by curating what information they are given, and browbeating them into agreeing something substantive has been said…when it hasn’t.

A good tell for this is what Lowder notes is characteristic of Turek’s apologetical style generally, as evinced in his co-written book I cited in the leader. As Lowder puts it, “The basic approach seems to be the following,” sic:

1. Present and defend the author’s preferred view as favorably as possible.
2. Represent opposing views as unfavorably as possible.
3. Reach the remarkable conclusion that—surprise, surprise—the author’s view is true.
4. Suggest that anyone who disagrees is ignorant, irrational, or has ulterior (non-rational) motives.

Turek repeatedly notes Scribner has been teaching his Don’t Have Enough Faith curriculum for years. So it is no surprise they both parrot exactly this four-pronged rhetoric in this show, indeed even in sequential order; indeed, on cue, Scribner closes with a disingenuous rant about how Dan Barker and all atheists like him are incompetent, ignorant, irrational, and dishonest about their real reasons. These would be valid reasons to dismiss someone; that is why these defamations are uttered. They want their listeners to not check anything they are saying, to not go read what Barker has actually written, to not find out what atheists actually say to the shit these two are peddling. So they falsely accuse Barker of all these things, to demonize atheists and dissuade anyone from trusting them (or—take note—choosing to be like them). It would be different if they actually gave evidence for any of these accusations; but they don’t. I’ve written all about this tactic before (and why well-meaning Christians need to understand this is happening and start joining us in denouncing it) in Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People.

But it would not be sufficient or proper to dismiss their argument on this analysis. All this does is explain why they are peddling a fake argument to the masses; it does not establish that they are pedding a fake argument to the masses. Unlike them, I don’t make unevidenced assertions. I’ve already adequately shown they have no actual argument here—at no point do they ever make any logical step from “there must be a ground of all being” to “it’s intelligent, righteous, well-informed, and a sorcerer.” But the question remains as to how they do get from A to B here. Where does the sleight of hand occur? It’s harder to get the answer from Scribner here, as all she does is keep repeating her loonytoons Answers in Genesis argument about pumpkins not becoming cucumbers (“How do they know!?”), which betrays a total ignorance of DNA and biochemical causation (a sad stupidity still to have for a lifelong nurse).

In case I have to explain this (!), the reason a pumpkin seed does not become a cucumber is that the blind, deterministic, billiards-ball-style chemical causation from the specific string of molecules of DNA in the nuclei of its cells leads to a pumpkin. It contains no structure that would ever cause a cucumber instead; only a pumpkin. And this all operates like a clock: no one needs to be directing any of this like a traffic cop. Once the first domino is pushed, every step inevitably unfolds, exactly as the dominoes were set up. If they are set up for a pumpkin (as pumpkinseed DNA is), you get a pumpkin. Period. Scribner seemed obsessed with not knowing this. Which is why Turek had to keep stepping in and fixing it by substituting what she said (which is empirically false, and indeed scientifically ignorant) with the actual argument he wants her to be making, which is about how, for this to work, one needs the laws of physics to keep working as they do, and so that’s what we are supposed to be talking about: who keeps “the laws of physics” running. But Turek never connected that, with any claim that something intelligent had to be doing that. Indeed, at the only time he comes close, he reverts to even using himself her scientifically illiterate claim about seeds magically knowing what they will become. So I think he realizes the trick being pulled here, and only hopes that, by spending only five seconds on it in a quick blurt in the middle of a longer sentence, no one will notice the legerdemain.

This Is Basically Lying

In that brief moment, Turek asks “how does” a cucumber seed “know” to become a cucumber, or an acorn an oak, as “there’s no brain in an acorn”—when of course we know there relevantly is: the DNA in the acorn’s nucleus is a computer specifically arranged to mechanically produce an oak like clockwork. Whack-a-mole logic will compel a Christian at this point to barge in and say, “Yeah, but who arranged that clockwork computer?” But this would be admitting the game. Because that’s the Design argument, not the Final Cause argument. You’ve switched the mole from one hole to the next, and duly forgotten we just punched the first mole right bloody down. Remember, Turek said his argument would work even if we accept macroevolution. Well, macroeveolution fully explains “what arranged the clockwork computer,” it was evolution by natural selection. No intelligence needed; nowhere at any point. So you can’t rescue Turek with this escape. If you accept evolution explains how that DNA computer was arranged, Turek’s argument is refuted. That’s why he only blurts this out briefly, and surrounds it with all that other bullshit about grounding the laws of physics. But “the laws of physics” don’t “know” how to make an oak. You need all those other contingencies (accumulated molecule chains, natural selection, evolution, time). So nothing like “how do the laws of physics know how to make an oak” can work here either. The whole argument just doesn’t work.

What you have here is a classic sales trick called “bait and switch.” You set up one thing you are selling (“You can’t explain how a pumpkin seed knows how to become a pumpkin and not a cucumber”), which is factually false (science explained this almost a century ago), then you steer the customer toward a completely different thing you are selling (“Something has to sustain the laws of physics in order for the scientific explanation of DNA-driven growth to work”), which is true (or at least hard to argue with), and you hope the customer hasn’t noticed that while they were roped in by a seemingly good but actually bogus deal (“science can’t explain seeds; and a godlike intelligence is the only remaining explanation,” whose minor premise is false: science actually has explained seeds) but then they got sold on a completely different bogus deal (“science hasn’t established why laws of physics stay the same; and a godlike intelligence is the only remaining explanation,” whose major premise is false: because now an intelligence is not the only remaining explanation). The hope is that you get confused and accept the true major premise of the rope-a-dope argument and the true minor premise of the closer argument, and then not notice that those don’t go together to make any good argument. Which is an easily exploited cognitive bias in any grift: people tend to remember the hits and forget the misses. That’s how spirit mediums trick people into thinking they can talk to the dead. And it’s the same trick being pulled here.

What’s being presented to us is basically:

1. If science couldn’t explain seeds; then a godlike intelligence is the only remaining explanation.
2. Science hasn’t established why the laws of physics stay the same.
3. Therefore, a godlike intelligence is the only remaining explanation.

This is a non sequitur. The second premise is the wrong one for completing the syllogism. Line one does not lead to line three via line two. One could try to “fix” this by replacing line one with, “If science hasn’t established why the laws of physics stay the same; then a godlike intelligence is the only remaining explanation,” but then line one would actually be false, even as a hypothetical. Because though science has not “established” the answer about physical laws, as it has for seeds, science has offered numerous entirely plausible hypotheses, none of which have been ruled out or indeed even contradicted by any evidence, nor involve any intelligences. Turek is hoping you don’t realize he has garbled two different arguments, each based on a different false premise, but tried to mislead you into thinking their respective remaining true premises go together and thus carry home “the argument.” It’s a trick. A shameless violation of logic. But his audience are likely a bunch of rubes. They’ll never noticed the bamboozle.

Turek and Scribner might be so delusional that they are lying to themselves here, and by publishing and broadcasting this only roping in innocent dupes unintentionally. They might be bamboozling themselves, as many a loony concpiracy theorist has, who traps themelves in labyrinths of similarly convoluted bad logic. But it’s also possible one or both of them knows this is a scam, and they are deliberately intending to dupe the innocent; their target: dumb Christians. After all, they well know there are rebuttals available to everything they just said—yet they never mention there even are any, much less reply to them, which is not the behavior of an honest educator. But it doesn’t matter. Lying to themselves, or everyone else: neither possibility recommends their judgment to us. They clearly can’t do logic; so nothing they say can be trusted to be logical. Welcome to pop apologetics.

Conclusions

The argument from Final Cause is therfore bullshit. So now you know why that’s false. And the trick they are pulling (on themselves, or us, or both) is fully revealed. So now you know to look for similar “bait and switch” logic tricks from them or other apologists. But there is one more point to carry home here because it overlaps with so much other Christian ignorance and rhetoric: Turek’s attempt to use his conclusion to argue that scientists have to believe in God even to do science. Hardly any scientist will fall for this argument, as they’ll readily recognize he has no idea how science actually works (or is hoping his audience doesn’t). So I think this is again another attempt to bamboozle fellow Christians so as to keep them from defecting (and thus, worse, stop sending donations and buying the books he promotes). “Wow! Even scientists would have to agree God exists! This really is a powerful argument!” Never mind no data has been presented of any meaningful fraction of scientists falling for this argument; Turek just made that up. But now it’s “data” in the minds of his rubes, who come away feeling like they were just shown that scientists must have been convinced.

But the error that underlies this sham is one you find all across Christian apologetics: that, as Turek puts it, the entire natural world is directed toward an end (no evidence has been presented of this), and if it wasn’t, we couldn’t detect cause and effect (which doesn’t even make logical sense; obviously cause and effect are simply observed, so no presumption is needed as to whether those causes are being directed toward anything), and therefore we couldn’t do science (a conclusion we now see is wholly unsound, as neither of those premises is established or even plausible). Scribner plays the fool in their punch-and-judy show by saying the idea that substances move toward “a kind-specific end” is fundamental to science. Turek doesn’t correct her, though I suspect he knew he should have; but the grift was too good at that point. He couldn’t break the illusion.

In no way is the idea that substances move toward “a kind-specific end” fundamental to science. It’s not even science. And indeed, that idea has been refuted as such since Aristotle himself, who specifically denounced the idea that objects fall because they “desire” to be at the bottom; and even more decisively since Newton, who proved Aristotle in turn was wrong that certain objects are simply naturally impelled to the center, that they instead are actually pulled by a measurable mechanical force; and now we know that force is most likely caused by a sea of gravitons bouncing around among other particles in an unavoidable fashion. Two protons do not exchange gravitons, pulling them together in proportion to the energy exchanged, because gravitons “want” to be exchanged or because some little gremlin (or cosmic ghost) carries them across so as to make sure the protons get closer. The exchange is a blindly inevitable causal process. The protons and gravitons do not have any knowledge of what they are doing and they are doing it for no purpose. And scientists do not even think to pretend otherwise. They can observe the cause and effect and fully document it as a fact without ever positing or requiring any purpose to have driven it. And indeed, that’s how all science has proceeded for hundreds of years. Its success only proves the merit in its having abandoned Scribner and Turek’s “superstitious thinking” about effects being the “purposes” of causes. That’s not been a component of scientific thinking since Gilbert and Galileo

The same goes for their nonsense that, as Turek quotes Scribner, “biological processes demonstrate purpose; they don’t create purpose.” Science has conclusively proved the contrary: once brains evolved and started making intelligent decisions rather than the blind ones of brainless physics, there was indeed then a biological organ that could create purposes. Their statement here is thus as asinine as if they’d said “biological processes don’t build dams or create anthills.” Um. Yes they do. Ants and beavers are doing it all the time. No God is helping them out at this. They do it all on their own—because they have an organ, called a brain, that evolved into and is capable of doing it. Humans, meanwhile, are consumate purpose generators, and nothing but their biology explains this. And the same can be said of Turek’s closing five minutes or so when he repeats C.S. Lewis’s equally asinine (and repeatedly refuted) Argument from Reason (see Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience and my Critique of Reppert). No, God is not needed to explain why minds exist and are intelligent, or why you can trust your thoughts. Your mind isn’t some random pile of goo. It is the product of literally hundreds of millions of years of natural selection that has honed it to be very good at modeling its circumstances, conceiving and solving problems, and using symbolic language. Not for any purpose, but as the inevitable outcome of all the random causes that bounced into each other. The rest is inevitable. Errors and all—which reminds us it’s the proven defects in our ability to reason naturally that completely refute Turek and Lewis: no responsible intelligent mind made ours.

Oh. And that right there? That’s what happens when you put the evidence back in, that they left out. That’s how you can expose their con. Every time.

-:-

I’ve here refuted the argument that God must exist to ground all reality. See also my refutation of the claim that God must exist to ground all reason.