Yesterday I asked YouTube what the “best argument for God” was; and I limited the results to those published within the last twelve months, and ranked them by view-counts (looking for the most viewed and thus most influential and thus most crucial to debunk). I skipped the ads and got a lot of impertinent hits, of course, but topping the real list was The BEST Argument for the Existence of God, a YouTube short posted by Ben Shapiro of his answer to that very question from an event Q&A he did a few years ago—so, evidently, even Ben thinks this is the best he’s got, even after years of it supposedly getting vetted by criticism (as any competent thinker would ensure before being this confident in it, given The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). The Internet agrees, apparently: it has achieved in under twelve months almost six million views and 290,000 “likes” (YouTube Shorts doesn’t show the dislike count to the public).

This was immediately destroyed on Rationality Rules, whose video critique I highly recommend (it’s tight, accurate, thorough, informative, and easy to follow). And among the 28,000 comments on Shapirio’s clip are some gems of masterful mockery, all of which spot on, from “This isn’t an argument…it’s a word salad” to a quote jokingly attributed to Albert Einstein, “If you can’t convince them, confuse them” (that is actually better known as Truman’s Law). One even recapitulated Shapiro’s argument as: “I don’t know how this works, therefore God.” I couldn’t skim thousands of comments; but I found none positive. I suspect Shapiro’s private creator screen is showing him a woundingly high “dislike” count.

The reason I started this kick is my observation of late that god-apologetics appears to be in decline. There are either no new arguments, and none improved, or we get truly harebrained novelties. “The best” at least the videonet has to point to now are the likes of Ben Shapiro, one of the most inept intellectuals of our generation. Indeed, number two on my list of hits was some unintelligible rigmarole from Jordan Peterson, itself with nearly a million views, illustrative of how bad apologetics has gotten. Nothing else listed breached even a hundred thousand views. To be fair, when I dropped “best” from my search string, I did find two others that did, which I’ll write about in a coming article. But note that even Peterson’s top-rated argument doesn’t contain an argument; he just asserts a premise, that “the reason you find meaning in the service to others is that it is one step on the ladder to the divine,” which he never defends with any evidence. It’s of course bollocks.

Shapiro’s clip also lacks any actual argument in the proper sense (as you’ll see); but it at least purports to sound like an argument is being given.

Shapiro’s “Argument”

The clip shows an audience member asking Ben Shapiro “What is your favorite argument for God’s existence, and why?” Shapiro then uploaded the video with the title (sic) “The BEST Argument for the Existence of God,” so we know he didn’t just pick a fave argument on some other criterion (like the whackiest or most interesting); he means this is what he believes to be the BEST argument for God. When theists pick really, truly terrible arguments to be their “best,” that tells us they are too incompetent to have a reliable opinion on the existence of God. No competent thinker would call this a good argument, much less the “best.” That means you don’t even know what a good argument is. Instead you are readily convinced by bad arguments—which means your beliefs are probably false.

Hence this is what we get. For Shapiro’s reply, the one he posted as his “BEST” argument for God, goes as follows (this is unedited, verbatim; although the clip itself may have been edited, that was the work of Shapiro, so it’s evidently how he wants it to go):

My favorite argument for God’s existence is that I believe in free will.

Okay, the reason that I think this is an argument for God’s existence is because, if you believe that human beings are essentially just balls of meat wandering around aimlessly in the universe, a kind of Spinoza’s Stone that thinks that it was moving of its own accord but actually was thrown, if you believe that, and you don’t believe in free will, then there’s an internal coherence and logic to it.

If you believe that you have the ability to make independent choices, that you can actually supersede your own biological drives, and the environment around you—to any extent, even to the smallest extent—this means that you believe in something that can’t actually be proved by science, but that you are living every single day.

And the notion that you have that will, and not only that you have that will but that that will is capable of comprehending the universe around you, that your will is sort of, your ideas, your ability to comprehend the universe is a reflection of a reality, of an objective truth, that is out there, that says to me that there is a God, that there is a common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth.

As Stephen Woodford of Rationality Rules put it in his concluding remarks (removing his evidencing soundbites from Shapiro):

To recap Ben’s favorite argument for God’s existence, his BEST argument for God’s existence, is that he believes in Libertarian Free Will. And after spending half his time setting up a reductio against non-Libertarian views, all while conflating non-Libertarian views with a form of Existential Nihilism, he dropped this completely. He did nothing with it.

From there he claims that if you believe in Libertarian Free Will, then you believe in something that can’t be scientifically proven. And of course he offered no justification for this claim.

And THEN he dropped free will altogether to claim that the existence of objective truth presupposes God.

Yeah. I’m…um…I’m not convinced. But to be fair, a large part of why I’m not convinced is because Ben didn’t give us any reason at all to buy any of his absurd views. … Why would you re-upload this?

That nails it in a nutshell. Shapiro has conflated several different arguments into an incoherent hash bordering on gibberish: the Free Will Argument, the Argument from Meaning, and the Argument from Reason. Charitably I will assume Shapiro is not so inept as to have intended that last as a deductive argument (better known as the Transcendental Argument, or just simply Presuppositionalism), rather than an inductive, C.S. Lewis-style Argument from Reason. But even still, he never completes a single one of these arguments—there is never at any actual point an argument in this clip.

As you’ll notice from my links in that last paragraph I’ve never analyzed the Free Will Argument here on my blog, so I’ll take this opportunity to do that, since Shapiro sort of claws at it ineptly, and what better occasion to lock it down? (Meanwhile, I have no interest in Presuppositionalism, not only because its proponents tend to be notorious bad-faith liars, illustrating what little worth that argument even has, but also because refuting the Argument from Reason already refutes Presuppositionalism, rendering it superfluous.)

A Real Argument from Free Will

In a coherent Argument from Free Will (what Shapiro should have argued, if he really meant to present this argument), the reasoning goes like this:

  1. Libertarian free will exists.
  2. Atheism cannot explain libertarian free will but the existence of God can.
  3. Therefore God exists.

Like most apologetics, every single premise of this argument is bullshit, and is never proved by any sufficient logic or evidence. But it’s at least a coherent argument. If the premises are true, the conclusion is true. It’s valid. It just needs also to be sound. And to get it to be sound, you have to convincingly prove each premise is probably true. More inept (or dishonest) versions of the argument will “forget” they have to specify “Libertarian” (as in contra-causal) Free Will in the first premise, because otherwise, then, the existence of Compatibilist Free Will disproves the second premise. But all scientific evidence is against the existence of Libertarian Free Will (supporting instead Compatibilism), and there is no other evidence for it; so getting Premise 1 to be probable is essentially impossible on current information.

That alone kills the argument. But Premise 2 is also a lost cause. Because if we are supposing Premise 1, which is a bizarro science fiction world in which we have proved contra-causal powers exist in human decision-making, all bets are off as to what could be causing it! In a world where such a power even can exist, then it could have lots of non-divine causes, which would be no more bizarre than that power itself would be. Maybe free will is an accident of quantum mechanics, preserved by evolution because it’s useful (look at all the things we can do with it!). Maybe the laws of physics just randomly include, besides the laws we know, other laws whereby ethereal souls are caused to exist by physical structures of sufficient complexity (like brains), and it just is an inalienable property of them that they have contra-causal free will—and therefore the reason we observe we have free will is because only in such universes will there be such consciously aware observations in the first place (observational selection bias). I think both explanations are bollocks. But they are logically possible. Which is sufficient to prevent arguing Premise 2 must be probable. One could in theory gather evidence that shows, despite the availability of these possibilities, that Premise 2 is nevertheless still probable, but no such evidence exists. (Sad face.) And no, you can’t get there by pointing out that these explanations are ad hoc or bizarre—because, in fact, they are less so than God, so you’d be tanking your own case in the very attempt to make it.

So the Argument from Free Will is a crap argument. It’s such sheit in fact that it almost rates as the Worst Argument for God. And I only say “almost” because I know of truly ridiculous arguments (and yet others quite bad); but even theists tend to steer clear of this one because it’s so bad. If you Google around trying to find examples of the argument even being made, you’ll struggle to find one. Most hits will reflect the opposite tack (how free will as a concept contradicts theism, for example), or dig up only the common resort to free will as a defense against the Argument from Evil (pro tip: that doesn’t work). But Shapiro never even makes this argument in his clip. He starts to, then blips around into something else, never completing it. The other arguments that Shapiro jumbles in confusingly are better arguments, even if not really that great; but he doesn’t defend or finish any of them either.

Just for reference as we proceed, the Argument from Meaning goes:

  1. Meaning exists.
  2. Atheists cannot explain the existence of meaning but the existence of God can.
  3. Therefore God exists.

This suffers from the singular problem that any definition of Premise 1 that would be true renders Premise 2 false; while any definition of Premise 1 that would get Premise 2 to be true leaves Premise 1 false at worst, and still wholly unsupported at best (see my Bayesian Counter assessment of this argument, and my discussion in Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life).

Likewise the Argument from Reason goes:

  1. Human reason is reliable.
  2. Atheists cannot explain the reliability of human reason but the existence of God can.
  3. Therefore God exists.

Any defense of this becomes a nightmare of conflated ideas, where one struggles to even articulate what the first premise means, much less how the second premise is supposed to be true. But it’s at least a sophisticated argument that, like the Fine Tuning Argument, requires some study and thought to get at why it fails. Ultimately, Premise 2 not only can’t be established, but abundant scientific evidence has already solidly refuted it from multiple converging angles (see my Bayesian Counter for a summary, and my detailed study in The Argument from Reason).

There is a version (a sub-variant) of the Argument from Reason that uses free will as a premise, which derives from C.S. Lewis (from his book Miracles; an argument on which he was so thoroughly trounced in a debate by Elizabeth Anscombe that some reports imagined him crying after). It occurs to me that maybe (?) Shapiro was attempting a hopelessly garbled form of this argument. After all, Lewis is popular with apologists (despite being one of the worst philosophers in history, beating out even Ayn Rand for the title), and it would explain Shapiro’s confused juxtaposition of “free will” and our mind’s access to “objective reality,” and could even explain how this might somehow have linked up in Shapiro’s confused mind to the human comprehension of “meaning” or “purpose.”

That argument goes like this:

  1. Atheism entails our logical operations are performed by a deterministic machine (the brain).
  2. Logical operations performed by a deterministic machine can never be known to be valid.
  3. We know our logical operations are valid.
  4. Therefore God exists.

It’s valid. But it is, again, unsound.

One can of course challenge Premise 1. It’s basically the same error as plagues the generic Argument from Free Will I noted above: this Premise 1 is like Premise 1 in the Free Will Argument; it is not necessarily true, you still have to argue for it, and it could yet be false. But we generally are happy to grant this Premise 1, not because atheism logically entails it (it doesn’t), but because vast quantities of independent converging lines of evidence prove its consequent condition true: our logical operations are performed by a deterministic machine (the brain).

One could even challenge Premise 3. If Premise 2 is true then we could not non-circularly know Premise 3 to be true. In other words, it could well simply be that Premise 2 is correct and our belief that Premise 3 is true is simply, indeed, false—by C.S. Lewis’s own reasoning. It is a fallacy fallacy to claim that because our conclusions are reached by fallacy that they are therefore false. We could be deceived in our belief that naturalism is true and naturalism could still be true. And in fact by C.S. Lewis’s own model, we should even expect that to be the case. We therefore can’t get any evidence here for God. That would simply be a non sequitur. The argument in effect refutes itself.

Really, what Lewis has done is snuck in a fallacious Appeal to Emotion here, to the effect of: “It would be horrifying if Premise 3 is false; horrifying things can’t be true (they just can’t!); therefore Premise 3 must be true.” The same problem capsizes the Argument from Free Will, since it really just plays on an emotional fear that something is true (“Shit! Then we’re all just Spinoza Stones! Nooooo! That can’t be! That’s impossssibble!”) and uses that as evidence it must not be true—which is not how reality works. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of thinking Lewis was afraid of: deterministic reasoning that doesn’t track logical reality, yet fools its operator into thinking it does. It is no accident that this folly characterizes godist thinking, not atheist. They are wrong and don’t even know it because none of their “logical operations” are actually sound; yet those fallacious operations continue to convince them that they are. Their belief in God is therefore false because of causal determinism. Ouch.

But the real problem is with this argument’s Premise 2: that simply isn’t even true. It’s actually quite easy to find out if a deterministic logical operation is getting you correct conclusions about the outside world: just interact with the outside world! In most cases you’ll know right quick if your logic is working or not; and in the remaining cases, if you maintain the effort, you’ll eventually find out. This is in fact how we fixed all our shit logic. Natural human reason is not reliable (which actually refutes any notion of God—he’d have built us better; indeed that’s the very premise the Argument of Reason is depending on!), but it’s also not completely un-reliable—it’s a jumble of ad hoc half-measures, which were good enough that, eventually, when we turned them toward the very question of reliability, we were able to invent software patches that fixed these firmware defects (and hence, after hundreds of thousands of years fumbling around with a bad product, we got formal mathematics and logics, and critical thinking and the scientific method). The way we found out that these software patches we ourselves invented were better than our naturally installed hardware was by testing their effectiveness against each other in contact with the external world. One got vastly better results than the other. And there is just no plausible way to get that difference in outcome by chance (see, again, The Argument from Reason; and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience).

In reality, you would never want what Lewis wanted. Logically sound reasoning must be deterministic. One set of premises should always only get you one and the same conclusion. Any system that worked differently than that would be less reliable, not more. Dumping “contra-causal free will” into a logical process could only destroy logic, resulting in its repeatedly spinning into failure. The same is therefore also true in moral reasoning: dumping “contra-causal free will” into any rational moral deliberation could only destroy its reliability, resulting in its repeatedly spinning into failure. If you want to reliably act on your reasons, knowledge, and character, the last thing you want is Libertarian Free Will! (And if you don’t get this, I’ve gone over it a dozen times.)

Analysis of Shapiro’s “Argument”

Okay. Now you’ve seen how all that works. Let’s now look at what Shapiro attempted to argue. Step one is to diagram its logic:

  • Conclusion to be demonstrated: My favorite [i.e. “the BEST”] argument for God’s existence is that I believe in free will.
  • Fact offered in demonstration: Because, if you believe that human beings are essentially just balls of meat wandering around aimlessly in the universe, a kind of Spinoza’s Stone that thinks that it was moving of its own accord but actually was thrown, if you believe that, and you don’t believe in free will, then there’s an internal coherence and logic to it.

Which we can formulate as:

  1. I believe in free will.
  2. It’s logical and coherent to not believe in free will.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

This is not valid and thus not even an argument. But nothing said in Premise 2 has any impact on the truth of Premise 1 anyway, except even to slightly undermine it. Because Shapiro just admitted that holding the opposite belief to his own is logical and coherent. And in fact that’s all he has said on the point—and all he will say. He never gets around to presenting an argument for his belief being more probably true than this one. So we have a premise asserted on no basis. Typical apologetics. He’s just saying “I believe in free will, therefore God exists,” which is a non sequitur. It’s like saying “I believe the earth is flat, therefore John Wick exists.” Not a good start.

One can maybe fuzzily see an implied-but-never-asserted Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion here, whereby somehow we are supposed to react with “bad feelings” toward descriptions of us as “balls of meat wandering around aimlessly” who merely “think” they are moving of their own accord, and because of those “bad feelings” we are supposed to “pooh pooh” this otherwise admittedly “logical and coherent” conclusion. That’s the most Shapiro ever offers as an argument—yet he never states this argument; and it’s fallacious anyway! Facts don’t care about your feelings. So how you “feel” about being “balls of meat wandering around aimlessly” who merely “think” they are moving of their own accord has no bearing on whether that’s what in fact you are. In short, Shapiro never defends the belief that he claims is a premise that gets him somehow to God.

And that’s just from a logical analysis. Factually, Shapiro is also in the shitter. In empirical fact, we are not “just balls of meat” (which is why Brad Pitt can survive a trip to Paris but not through a meat grinder) and we are not “wandering around aimlessly,” but quite conspicuously (unlike thrown stones) we can reason out what to do and do it—pursuing, uhem, aims. Shapiro is lost here (rather typically for a God-apologist) in a modo hoc fallacy (see Sense and Goodness without God, index), the belief that we are “just” one thing and not another, when in fact we are both (Brad Pitt in Paris has properties quite physically different from Brad Pitt at the other end of a meat grinder, even if both are composed of all the same atoms or even cells). Shapiro has also engaged an equivocation fallacy between being determined and being aimless. Indeed, aims are themselves causes, so his equivocation is even self-contradictory. It is logically impossible to simultaneously act in pursuit of aims and act uncaused. Hence his falling for the fallacy of Spinoza’s Stone only illustrates his incompetence (see Jack Call’s retort).

But that’s all moot really, because Shapiro still has not made any argument at all. He has strung together a bunch of claims (all dubious, and none defended). But he has made no argument from those claims to any conclusion. The most we can perceive is an affective fallacy: he wants his false claims to make us feel a certain way, and for us to believe a certain thing because of how we feel. But even that he never connects to “God.” So that’s a shit argument, twice over. And yet he still doesn’t actually even articulate this as his argument—nor anything as his argument. There is no argument.

Shapiro’s next sentence just continues the same implied but fallacious non-argument:

  • Fact offered in demonstration: If you believe that you have the ability to make independent choices, that you can actually supersede your own biological drives, and the environment around you—to any extent, even to the smallest extent—this means that you believe in something that can’t actually be proved by science, but that you are living every single day.

Which we can formulate as:

  1. You believe in free will.
  2. Your belief in free will can’t be proved by science.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

Still invalid. Also false. If Libertarian Free Will existed, it most definitely could be proved by science; and if it can’t be proved by science, it certainly can’t be proved by unmethodological appeals to personal experience—science routinely finds that unmethodological appeals to personal experience often turn out to be false. Thus the fact that science has found nothing of the kind, but quite the opposite, kills Premise 2 here. Science has in fact proved that we can “make independent choices and supersede our own biological drives and the environment around us,” without the magical power Shapiro is talking about, but instead using only straightforward Compatibilist Free Will. But since he never logically connects Premise 2 to the Conclusion anyway, who cares?

There simply isn’t any claim here that adds to the non sequitur he already just attempted. This is just a continuation of the “Feelings” fallacy. “The ability to make independent choices and supersede mere biological drives and the influences of my environment? Yay!! I like that! Therefore I must have specifically Libertarian Free Will!” There is no logical argument here either. He has not explained how our feelings about this make it true, or how this (or anything) entails specifically Libertarian Free Will.

It’s also a fail on the facts just as before: you do not need Libertarian Free Will to have the “ability to make independent choices and supersede mere biological drives and the influences of your environment.” Compatibilist Free Will does all that for you, and that’s by definition compatible with causal determinism. Because we can run logical operations, we can evaluate the relative importance of biological drives and different options and influences, and choose critically among them—all deterministically, which is fine: as I explained, logic, and therefore rational thought, must always be deterministic! To make an argument here, Shapiro needs to get around this defeater. Yet he doesn’t show any sign of even knowing he has to. He doesn’t seem to even know that Compatibilism exists! Yet (as Rationality Rules pointed out) it’s the dominant position of all professional philosophers today.

Shapiro then drops this—an argument he never completed or made any sense of (we’re never told why a mere belief in any kind of free will leads to God, much less why any particular thing he’s calling “free will” does exist, nor are we given any evidence that his specific belief is true)—and then convolutedly tumbles into a completely different argument whose opening premises he never set up (nor in this clip ever will):

  • Fact offered in demonstration: The notion that you have that will, and not only that you have that will but that that will is capable of comprehending the universe around you, that your will, is sort of, your ideas, your ability to comprehend the universe is a reflection of a reality, of an objective truth, that is out there…
  • Conclusion to be demonstrated: …that says to me that there is a God.

It’s hard to even parse the grammar of this sentence. Word salad, just as one commenter said.

The best we can do to diagram his logic:

  1. You have free will.
  2. You can comprehend an external reality.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

Nothing valid here either. It’s just random premises stacked atop a conclusion, with no connection sewn between them. He basically is saying here that “the notion” (his and his audience’s “belief”) that they have some particular kind of free will (that he never defined or defended as true) “sort of” (in some unspecified sense) is or causes or is needed for or relates in some way to (?) “your ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality,” and “that says to me that there is a God.”

Shapiro never explains by what argument “that says to me that there is a God.” There is again no argument here. And the “conclusion to be demonstrated” has now mysteriously changed mid-answer from “God exists because I believe in free will” to “God exists because I have an ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality.” So he has dropped free will, indeed even mid-sentence, and now is saying his “favorite” (and thus “BEST”) argument for God is “Objective reality exists and I can learn things about it; therefore God exists.” But he never explains what this argument is either. By what argument does he get from the premise (“Objective reality exists and I can learn things about it”) to the conclusion (that “God exists”)? And how did free will get him there? What does having free will have to do with having an “ability to comprehend that the universe is a reflection of a reality”? He never says.

One might think he does in his next and closing line, “that there is a common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth,” but nope. That is not a separate sentence but simply an expansion of his conclusion “that there is a God.” He is simply defining (unpacking) what he means by “God,” which is some “common source that stands behind that objective truth, and stands behind the mind that can comprehend that truth.” He never explains how, or why he or anyone is supposed to believe this. Nor does he connect this with anything prior (or even any more specific properties of God—like, “is an intelligent agent” or “still exists”).

There is no argument for how free will is supposed to prove this, or how our ability to comprehend an external reality is supposed to prove this, or what either of those things even have to do with each other—because you can have one of those things without the other. Libertarian Free Will can exist without an ability to comprehend reality; and an ability to comprehend reality can exist without Libertarian Free Will. So what we need is an argument that the one needs the other, and an argument that the most dubious of those (Libertarian Free Will) even exists at all. And still we don’t get to God. So now we need another argument that somehow gets from “we have these things” to “therefore probably there is a God.”

But there are no arguments in Shapiro’s shambles of a reply. So this can’t even logically possibly be the “BEST” argument for God; it’s not even an argument for God. Its like holding up a spoon and shouting, “Behold! John Wick exists!” And hundreds of thousands of stone-cold fools are, like, “Yes! Preach, brother!!” This is what has become of belief in God.

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