Last time I analyzed YouTube’s “best” argument for God: Ben Shapiro’s, which tops the YouTube “influence” list with six million views. I also briefed a really terrible argument for God second on that list by Jordan Peterson, at under a million views. Nothing else even reached a hundred thousand views. But when I took “best” out of my search string and just looked for the most viewed arguments for God published within the last twelve months, two hits did breach that amount, though still coming nowhere near Shapiro’s: one cringeworthy entry by Ray Comfort (How To EASILY Prove God To An Atheist, at nearly half a million views and 25,000 likes), and one tedious entry by the antiquatedly conservative Hoover Institute (Does God Exist? A Conversation with Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer, and Douglas Murray, at a million views and 11,000 likes). Let’s take a look!

Ray Comfort: Huckster

As most atheists already know, Ray Comfort is just a huckster. He will pick on completely uninformed randos, try to boonswoggle them with rigmarole they aren’t given any opportunity to logic-test or fact-check, and then markets this as having “destroyed atheism in nine minutes” or whatever. It’s a con. That Comfort doesn’t know what he is doing from a genuine intellectual perspective (or, being a grifter, doesn’t want to, because he knows that’s tedious and generally fails to persuade) you can see from my debate with him years ago on the Moral Argument (My Debate with Ray Comfort: Can Moral Facts Exist without a God?). Comfort thus falls in the category of the “Harbingers of Decline” in Christian apologetics (Addressing the New Christian Apologetics: The Embarrassing Follies of Conway and Ferrer).

Comfort probably goes this line because he thinks he sees immediate results, and can “market” that with its sensationalism (the strategy of any other snake oil salesman), but we all know any results he gets will be short lived. The poor girl in this video will hit the internet and check his arguments soon after cut and find out she was swindled, and all his gains will evaporate overnight. The rest of us have already been through this and thus know his entire argument is eye-rolling bollocks. Once you put the evidence back in that he is leaving out, it all collapses into bullshit. Like pretty much all Christian apologetics.

Comfort even admits his argument operates on emotional rather than evidential reasoning: at the third minute mark he says his intent is to get the woman he’s grifting on camera to stop thinking about facts, and start thinking about moral judgment, a standard Christian Ad Baculum Fallacy. Up to then he deployed the following steps:

• He briefs to her a laughable version of Paley’s Design Argument that completely ignores what we’ve learned about evolution (we’ve proved design can arise without a designer in the right conditions; and all the things he lists are things we’ve proved arose in those conditions, an unlikely coincidence) and the law of large numbers (chance accident becomes a credible cause the more opportunities there are; and the universe is so absurdly old and large and full of stuff, the opportunities have been uncountable) and cosmology (most leading theories in the actual science are or entail multiverse theory, another opportunities effect; and all cosmologists agree all current observations remain consistent with a past eternal reality that never had a beginning, and simply debate whether it had one or not; and either way God is not accepted as a great solution). He also ignores the Argument from Evil, which is the failure mode of all Design Arguments, another example of evidence left out that when put back in gets the opposite conclusion: the universe actually does not look intelligently designed (it’s mostly murderously lifeless garbage, and it’s entirely devoid of moral structure or government—and even communication).
• He lies to her, claiming it’s “scientifically impossible” that “everything was created by nothing.” In fact there are peer-reviewed scientific theories that get everything from, essentially, nothing; and all other theories get everything from something far simpler in construction and supposition than God (and far better evidenced in present science as possible, too: see A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism). He also lies to her by claiming atheism entails everything started from nothing, when in fact numerous godless past-eternal cosmological models exist in the science of cosmology.
• He pivots to quoting the Bible as evidence (the Insult Psalm, on which see Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People), which is both a circular argument (it presupposes he has already proved God exists and that God endorsed that verse and for the reasons Comfort alleges, in order to get to the conclusion that God exists and endorsed that verse and for the reasons Comfort alleges) and a Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion (“We think you’re a fool! You don’t want to be a fool, do you? Therefore you should agree God exists.”)
• She interrupts to ask him who created God, forcing him to pivot to his script on that. Then he lies to her again—claiming atheists always resort only to that response to his argument, rather than, as more frequently happens, appealing to evolution, the law of large numbers, and the actual status of the science of cosmology.
• Then he tries to boondoggle her with bullshit—making a bunch of illogical, un-evidenced claims that God is an exception to his own rule somehow. Where did all the amazing design in God come from, if amazing design can only come from a designer? And if God can just exist uncaused, why can’t the rest of existence, or any simpler starting point like a dimensionless quantum vacuum? She isn’t given a chance to ask. Of course, we can tell she is someone who doesn’t know all this stuff, and hence is an easy mark. That’s why this is who Comfort has on camera. Not, say, Sean Carroll or Daniel Dennett. Or even any atheist YouTuber.
• And that is where he uses this point to pivot to his Ad Baculum fallacy, trying to sell her instead now on Hell. Note that nothing before this provided any evidence whatever for Hell. And in the rest of this video, he never will. “God exists” in no way entails or even implies “Hell exists.” But he has created the emotional impression that somehow that logical move has occurred somewhere in his blather. It hasn’t.

After this key target pivot (from bullshit facts to emotional blackmail), Comfort goes on with his infamously stellar bullshit about how anything even remotely possibly imagined as bad behavior by the terms of the Ten Commandments justifies you being chucked into an eternal hell-prison, “therefore” there is a God, and that hell-prison, and he will chuck you there (one bullshit leap of reasoning without evidence after another), and “therefore” you should agree Jesus died for your sins and join our book club. From this point on he has no arguments, just assertions, all directed toward emotional manipulation rather than factual demonstration.

Which is typical of street apologetics—and of course is all crazy talk, as I already noted in Christianity Is a Conspiracy Theory. “Evil bumpkins are conspiring to trap your soul forever in a dark box made of kidney sinews, so you need to buy Bumpkin Juice™ right now because this could happen any second!” That’s Comfort’s argument. Christian apologetics is dead.

Hoover Institute: Old Dead Things

The Hoover Institution was founded in 1919 by soon-to-be President Herbert Hoover to promote all the conservative ideology and policies immediately proved catastrophically inept by the Great Depression. Today it’s a hundred years old and smells like it.

Last October, it produced an hour-long video (part of their show Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson) in which “a historian, a scientist, and a journalist talk it over and reveal new threads in the debate around science and theism” that supposedly will overthrow atheism once and for all.

• Tom Holland isn’t even a historian (he has zero graduate degrees in the matter, and so far as I can tell, no peer reviewed works in the field); he’s just a quasi-conservative demagogue who’s not that stellar at doing history.
• Stephen Meyer isn’t even a scientist (he’s just a geoscience undergrad, and only has a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science, which, um, so do I, so I guess I’m a scientist now?); and he’s infamously a pseudoscientific crank, hardly someone to be promoting as a respectable intellectual.
• One can at least say Douglas Murray is a “journalist,” if one means that in the least rigorous sense (he’s really just a right wing pundit; he’ll sort of do research if it’s a book); in the video itself they just call him “an author,” which is hardly a claim to any relevant expertise.

The very fact that Hoover couldn’t get a real historian, scientist, or journalist to weigh in on God already tells you Christianity is dead. It’s just a zombie cult now, trodding along on momentum rather than sense. Ironically, this is actually what Holland and Murray will themselves actually argue in this video! They wouldn’t dare put it that way, because they think this false religion is still somehow “necessary.” But to Meyer’s visible chagrin, Holland and Murray essentially (if not explicitly) argue that Christianity is not objectively believable and is only coasting on a kind of cultural momentum. And in the process Holland essentially identifies as an atheist, and Murray as an agnostic. And yet, importantly, at no point in this 67-minute video do they ever debate the existence of God.

This video is also a bit boring. It starts by having each author discuss their advertised books. Holland simply reiterates his false claims that Christians invented everything that I’ve already debunked (in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West). There is no argument for God in this—he doesn’t even attempt one. Robinson then quotes Murray’s assertion that we should ignore the evils that generated the cash to build medieval cathedrals and just blank our minds and admire their beauty (as if “beautiful buildings” are uniquely Christian or can’t be funded morally). Orwell would be amused. But there is still no argument for God in this. Murray is then prompted to claim we “need” Christianity culturally whether it’s true or false. Pro tip: we don’t; to the contrary, we desperately need to get that abusive, irrational millstone off of our neck (see Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity). But Murray never advances any actual argument for this side-claim anyway (nor does Holland, who occasionally steps in to act as Murray’s hype man). All wasted clock. And it’s still not an argument for God.

A third in, around minute 20, Meyer finally gets a word in, and starts claiming humanity didn’t lose faith in God for lack of evidence (when of course they did; everywhere on the planet, as soon as people are legally, culturally, and economically free to believe what they want, they begin abandoning unevidenced beliefs), but because of some sort of vague loss of faith in themselves and their institutions or something. He never backs this up as a causal theory. Nor do the others. And it’s still not an argument for God. He then segues to calling atheist arguments “facile” and “very weak” but gives no example. He only mentions Hume on miracles, which wasn’t an argument against God, and he gets Hume wrong anyway: we are not arguing miracles are impossible; we’re arguing they’re improbable. And on that Hume has been thoroughly vindicated. Science has failed to find miracles are a thing despite every opportunity over the span of centuries. And now less than a third of philosophers believe in God (and we know fewer believe God performs miracles). Though to be fair, there are inept atheists who clumsily sound like Meyer thinks, but only someone who didn’t look for the steel man, as in fact one ought to do, would think that was what qualified philosophers argue.

But Meyer now at least mentions an argument for God: the Fine Tuning Argument. Which is bogus. But he never defends it. Indeed Murray even shuts him down by denouncing its effectiveness as an argument, declaring that in fact we can’t know what causes apparent fine-tuning! Believers won’t want to hear that. Meyer wants to harrumph but Robinson cuts him off and pivots the conversation back to the Neoconservative angle the whole video has been pushing up until now, that it doesn’t matter whether religion is true, all that matters (per Plato’s manual for fascism The Republic) is whether we need religion functionally—that we should promote it anyway even if it’s false, in order to maintain public morality. Of course we know the answer is “No” (secular societies actually trend more moral than religious ones, not the other way around: see This Is How We Know Christianity Is a Delusion; and rational, evidence-based philosophy does a better job of building true moralities: see The Real Basis of a Moral World and Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider).

Indeed I think this can just be a Trojan horse for “we want people to follow Biblical morality, i.e. to be conservatives, and not a progressive Humanist morality, because we abhor gay and women’s liberation!” (and questioning authority, and socialism, and everything else). Because only then the answer is “Yes,” the only way to get people to follow that oppressive false morality is to try and con them into believing in a particular religion’s truth—which means eventually, because the con can’t succeed in a free society, you will have to nix the “free society” part. Exactly as Plato said: to do anything like that you must force a myth on the people and imprison or kill anyone who tries to challenge it. There simply is no other way. Conservatives banned from doing this have had to resort to inadequate half-measures as a substitute, like social and political shunning and censorship and other extralegal “soft coercion” (see, for example, Randal Rauser on Treating Atheists Like People and Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist; and, again, That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation)).

We get some unproductive or irrelevant wingeing about the Nazis after this. Still no argument for God. Murray in one brief moment midway mentions (but never argues for) the claim that “all the evidence shows you’re happier if you’re a believer” (which is false). Still not an argument for God. Murray then argues for cultural Christianity. But we already have that—and it doesn’t require the religion even to exist (any more than we have to keep worshiping Saturn to start our weekends on Saturday). Meyer gets uneasy with Murray’s now-apparent agnosticism and barges in to try and reframe the discussion to be about “angry atheists” and laments why we can’t have atheists who “like” Christianity. Still not an argument for God.

By minute 35 we get one more mention, at least, of an argument for God, again from Meyer (the only one who seems interested in the subject), who asserts:

The materialists lack the intellectual framework to account for the extraordinary evidence that we have of design in the universe and for the creation of the universe; and these fundamental questions that we have assumed science has already adjudicated are, I think, being reopened by discoveries that have frankly shocked us.

Which is of course false—in fact theism lacks the intellectual framework to explain any of this (not a single bit of which was predicted in the Bible or by theology, but quite the contrary; nor does any of it actually make sense on theism), while atheism does quite fine here, certainly better than theism has (see my links in my discussion of Ray Comfort above). Even just the fact that he’s still calling naturalists by the antiquated word “materialists” says a lot about how out of touch Meyer is.

But Meyer still never makes any case for this here, nor develops any argument for God from this. He instead just lies about Richard Dawkins, implying he admitted we can’t explain the intricate design of cellular machinery (in fact in the tweet in question Dawkins said he was “knocked sideways with wonder” by how science has in fact explained it; see John Perry’s interview with Richard Dawkins). Of course, creationists tend to be liars, and the most common form of lies they tell are lies of omission. And here Meyer is also hiding from his audience the fact that cellular machinery is millions of times more evolved than the animals they comprise; which lends no basis for being surprised that it’s so complex (see Three Common Confusions of Creationists).

Around minute 36 Robinson turns the conversation toward the resurrection of Jesus, quoting 1 Corinthians 15, and Meyer goes on about how that’s en empirical claim because it appeals to witnesses (as if we didn’t invent the scientific method precisely to correct for exactly that error—of assuming what people say they saw is ontologically true). They don’t build any argument for God out of this, and they certainly don’t address any of the actual objections (it is of course an entirely bogus argument: see Resurrection: Faith or Fact?). Meyer again instead chooses to claim the only objections are those same errors about Hume and materialism that he pushed earlier, never mentioning the truth, that Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them, and still that fact only establishes that miracles are an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence—which, conspicuously, we never get. It’s not that they “are impossible” in some a priori sense. It’s not that their epistemic probability is zero, as Meyer falsely claims. It’s that the evidence for them is just bad.

By minute 39 Meyer is complaining about Multiverse theory being “weird,” but he never gives any evidence for it being any weirder than God or even improbable. And as usual, he dishonestly represents it as the only response atheists have to the fine-tuning problem—but that’s simply false. Meyer then claims scientists have not come up with any explanations for the origin of “information” in DNA. Which is another lie (see the series of articles at Talk.Origins, Information Theory and Creationism, and my articles on Biogenesis). And he claims the only answer atheists have is panspermia. Which is another lie (almost no atheists, much less scientists, explain the rise of replicating molecules that way).

Robinson is annoyed now, so he stops Meyer and asks him to explain how even this being the case (that the discovery of the Big Bang, Fine Tuning, and the complexity of cellular machinery makes God plausible again) makes the resurrection of Jesus at all credible. Meyer tries to reply that because they make God probable, that raises “the prior probability” that God would effect the resurrection of Jesus, which is trivially true (establishing an agent exists who could do it is better than not having that), but raising a prior from, say, 1 in 10^40 to 1 in 10^30 still leaves you in the shitter as far as plausible theories of the evidence goes. Christianity is wildly illogical, which is why proving God exists gets you nowhere near proving Christianity is true (all the evidence indicates it isn’t). To get that to be respectable requires getting a prior probability based on observed frequencies of like phenomena, and that weird action (raising Jesus) bears no resemblance to the others—to the contrary, resurrection-like miracles suffer from an extraordinary lack of evidence as being anything God is interested in.

To this point still no one in this show has given any argument for that conclusion anyway—they mention arguments (“Fine Tuning, therefore God”)—well, really, only one of them does (Meyer)—but they never spell any out, so we never get how the conclusion follows from the premise, nor do we get any defense against long-known refutations of these tired old arguments. Instead Meyer struggles to explain how “Fine Tuning, therefore God” (an argument he never defends, he just declares it) gets him to “the resurrection of Jesus is plausible.” And he can only do it by leaning entirely on a false claim. This time (around minute 40) Meyer repeats his mistaken view that the only thing preventing atheists from realizing that the Bible proves Jesus rose from the dead is their “presupposition” that miracles are impossible. Which is false two times over—it’s not a presupposition, and even establishing “those kinds of miracles” existed (that they are the kind of thing God is interested in) would still not rescue the resurrection as plausible, because the evidence is not only catastrophically poor, it actually trends against the conclusion rather than for it (see The False Trichotomy of Lord, Liar, or Lunatic). But none of this is mentioned, and no defense against it is forthcoming—and all of this is moot because Meyer’s entire case for Jesus hinges on first making an argument for the existence of God, which he has not done. (Again, merely mentioning arguments is not making arguments, much less defending them as correct.)

So now we’re two thirds into an hour long slog and we’ve heard no actual arguments that God exists. None have been articulated, from premise to conclusion; none have been defended (despite these being so old they’ve been refuted for decades). A few have been mentioned, but only by Meyer. And they’ve all been based on errors and lies (which no one on the show challenges, which means no one on the show actually knows what they are talking about—or they do, and are choosing to be complicit).

Robinson then asks Holland if he buys anything Meyer is saying (because Murray had already implied he didn’t), and Holland dodges the question, pivoting instead to the argument that “the idea that people have human rights” is “weird,” that “human rights don’t exist objectively,” and believing in human rights “is as ridiculous as believing in angels,” whereas their origins “are rooted very specifically in Christianity.” This is all false. Human rights were a development of pre-Christian pagan philosophy; they were already then derivable from secular models of human society; and they are nowhere ever mentioned in the Bible (see, again, That Christian Nation Nonsense). To the contrary, they are condemned in the Bible. For example, 1 Timothy bans women’s rights, just as Jesus bans the right to divorce and Paul bans gay rights; while the Old Testament even commands into law the violation of virtually every human right that exists, including commanding slavery and prohibiting interracial marriage. The notion that humans have rights does not come up in the Bible because it is completely foreign to its moral or political thought. Medieval and modern ideas about laws and rights arose from pagan legal philosophy, not Biblical.

Although kudos to Holland for falsely claiming “human rights” were invented as socialist rights of the poor to welfare support from the rich (in minute 41)—American Christian conservatives will be very unpleased. This suggests to me that Holland is conflating “invented human rights” with “expanded human rights to include socialist rights to welfare.” Holland is also wrong about this (the Right to Food didn’t develop the way he claims; the truth is more complicated, as the real historian Richard Helmholz explains in his 2001 Fulton Lecture Fundamental Human Rights in Medieval Law). But Holland would still be wrong even if he was right—as this would only be an expansion of the already extant notion of human rights developed in ancient philosophy and political theory. Whether this expansion can be grounded then depends on whether the same secular arguments grounding more basic rights can be extended to those. And I do think it can, if we define “human rights” as those privileges that are necessary to human happiness (see Sense and Goodness without God, index; see also my discussion of the United Nation’ stated ground for the existence of rights in response to Justin Brierley). For example, the right to life requires a right to food; and happiness is literally impossible if you are not alive (as also if society will become dysfunctional without that right). This is not ridiculous to believe. There are no angels here. Just facts and logic. (And Roman food welfare policy already reflected it.)

At any rate, at this point Holland admits to being a Secular Humanist who doesn’t really believe in God—at which Murray (who seems to be representing himself as an agnostic quasi-theist) and Meyer (who is openly a devout Christian) want to argue him out of that position, but he demurs—and so we don’t get to hear an argument for God even when they were just about to finally debate one! The very thing this video is supposed to be about gets trashed right here, and crashes into a ditch. Meyer tries to get it back in over Holland’s pivot away by chiming in with the claim that the Romans would never have cared about injustices inflicted by the powerful on the innocent, that that was a notion invented by Christians—which is wildly false: the unacceptable injustice of that is a common theme across ancient Roman pagan literature (and Greek and even Chinese and beyond). Meyer’s claim is patently absurd. But no one corrects him. Which is fine, I guess. Because it’s still not an argument for God.

Then by minute 49 Robinson is pushing a Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion (“But don’t we feel there is something more?”), which Holland tanks immediately by pointing out that a pagan who believed in river nymphs could make exactly the same statement—it’s therefore ineffectual as an argument for God. Murray tries to rescue this disaster by saying we should at least admit we don’t know. But we really have to call his bluff here: No, we should not act like that. There is plenty of science on how human emotions are triggered and why. We don’t need to appeal to ridiculous conspiracies about hidden virtual realities.

Finally an Argument

It is at this point, after tons of boring beating around the bush in which numerous unchallenged falsehoods have been uttered, along with countless irrelevancies, finally we get to hear an argument for God: and, hilariously, it’s the same bullshit argument from C.S. Lewis that Ben Shapiro hopelessly garbled (and that I wrote about last time: see Ben Shapiro’s Worst Argument for God). So when Meyer finally gets to making (rather than merely mentioning) an argument, it is this:

Secular materialist thought has been unable to provide a justification for belief in the reliability of the human mind and and that has led to this radical relativism that has expressed itself both philosophically and in the culture. And one of the best reasons to believe in the reliability of the mind which was one of the reasons that led to the Scientific Revolution was that our minds are made in the image of God.

This is all false. There is no “radical relativism” plaguing modern knowledge fields, and certainly none plaguing atheists or physicalists or scientists—we are to a clear super-plurality all realists, not relativists, regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world. And secular science has provided extensive justifications for belief in the reliability of the human mind—to the extent that it actually is reliable. Remember, without those installed software fixes, of formal logics and mathematics and critical thinking and the scientific method, it’s actually pretty un-reliable. So there is no reason to believe that any of this comes from God—to the contrary, that inborn human reasoning is so terrible proves it cannot come from God. That reliable reasoning had to be invented entirely by humans proves God does not exist. Indeed, even worse for Meyer, this doesn’t even appear in any Holy Books, so none of them can come from God either—as surely, by Meyer’s own reasoning, God would want to send us that software fix! So the fact that no book purported to be God’s communications contains that crucial information means no such book actually contains God’s communications.

So what we get, finally, almost at the end of this hour long video, is this:

1. Human reasoning works.
2. Atheism can’t explain why human reasoning works but theism can.
3. Therefore God exists.

Premise 2 is simply stone-cold false. The argument thus fails.

And that’s it. That’s the topmost rated argument on YouTube.

They go back and forth about this and come to another not-quite-argument, which is that Christianity could be true (not is true, but could be) because it has a great explanatory power—but it doesn’t; it fails catastrophically on likelihoods and priors. In the midst of this Meyer throws in the usual “atheists just want to sin” argument for their dismissing all those facts, but he neither backs that up as even a real motive, or as sufficient to dismiss all the evidence atheists actually cite that he is ignoring or leaving out. Likewise Holland throws in an undefended remark that Christianity has a good explanation for global suffering, which is exactly the opposite of true. But then Meyer closes by…yeah, complaining about
“wokeness” and social welfare, and the need of Christianity to defeat them (just like I saw consumes most pop apologetics now). Classic conservative delusion. Plato’s Republic realized.

Conclusion

There is a final closing remark by Murray, which is merely that we hope for something transcendent to be true, though it will not necessarily be Christianity, but, rather, the problem we face is if we drop Christianity, what remains as the foundation for our beliefs, in such things as meaning and purpose and human rights? He claims there is no answer, and they all agree. But the answer, of course, is readily available in philosophy and science. But these men never discuss it. They simply deny that these answers all exist already. They thus never think to argue against them. But that’s all still not an argument for God. Which leaves us with just that one bad argument from C.S. Lewis, that Meyer alone defended, and that quite poorly—all he had to offer for it were undefended falsehoods. And that’s simply all that Christian apologetics has left. That’s why it’s a zombie religion now—quite dead, just not yet buried.

-:-

For more on how atheistic naturalism actually compares to Christianity as an explanatory theory, the discussion that these men never once actually had on this 67 minute show, see:

• Unbelievable: Justin Brierley’s Epistemic Failure

• The Carrier-Marshall Debate

• The Carrier-McDurmon Debate