Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed

Bayesian counter-apologetics is the method of using Bayesian logic to turn every argument for God into an argument against God, simply by understanding how the logic of evidence works, and then reintroducing all the evidence theists always leave out when they attempt to make an argument for God. Which reveals the fact that all arguments for God, are really just exercises in hiding evidence.

I’ll illustrate this here with a brief application to ten of the most common arguments for God; after a brief survey of the applicable principles of Bayesian logic. All of which will serve as a handy guide in general. But it will also prepare you for a critical review of a leading apologetics book I’m planning for later this month. I noticed, as I read through that book, that two common tricks are being pulled, over and over again, to scam their readers: leaving evidence out; and ignoring how the debate is actually about what best explains the evidence, reframing the debate instead as about something else. Just so much hand-waving to distract the reader from not noticing everything that’s been hidden from them. A pernicious form of lying.

• Conclusion

Ten Arguments for God

Applying these principles to the ten most common arguments for God gets you these results:

(1) The Cosmological Argument: “Everything that begins has a cause” and “all existence began” and “only disembodied minds can precede the beginning of time” are all hypotheses. Not one of them ever proven likely. We don’t know if time is the sort of thing that can even have a cause; the notion is not even intelligible. If it began, time in fact seems necessarily causeless, since a cause is by definition what precedes an effect in time. Many other things may well be causeless, too. We only know how things we’ve seen in this universe, within time behave. We cannot infer from that how things behave outside this universe, or outside time.

Similarly, we only know this universe began. But we have no evidence that this universe is everything that exists (and theism already presupposes that it is not), or that time itself began with our universe. And we don’t even have any evidence that disembodied minds can exist, much less that they could exist before time began, any more than anything else could. And if we suppose God created time simultaneously with the beginning of time rather than ever existing before time began, then anything could do that, even something embodied, or mindless.

In other words, reduced to hypotheses, cosmological arguments get us nowhere, other than up the ass of random guessers pretending to be scientists, without a single iota of relevant data. Except that the only causes we’ve ever confirmed for anything for hundreds of years now have been godless physics. Which leaves us with extremely high prior odds that that’s what it is all the way down the line. Only evidence can change that conclusion.

(2) (3) Arguments from Design (Fine Tuning & Biogenesis): I show how to turn these arguments on their head as arguments against the existence of God in my chapter on design arguments in The End of Christianity. In short, if (a) we exist and (b) God did not design the universe, then (c) we should expect to observe several things, and lo and behold, those are exactly the things we observe; yet we do not expect to observe those things if God did design the universe. By definition that which is expected on x is probable on x; that which is unexpected on x is improbable on x. So if the evidence is probable if God does not exist and improbable if God exists, then that evidence argues against God, not for God.

As I explain in Merry Chrismas, God is Still a Delusion and 20 Questions, the only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely improbable chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe; theism does not (without fabricating excuses—a bankrupt procedure, as I already explained above).

Similarly, the only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely long process of evolution by natural selection, beginning from a single molecule, through hundreds of millions of years of single cells, through hundreds of millions of years of cooperating cells, to hundreds of millions of years of multicellular organisms; so atheism predicts essentially that; theism does not (without, again, piling on excuses).

Likewise, if chance produced this universe, we should expect it to be only barely conducive to life, not almost entirely lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe perfectly suited to life throughout (indeed, among all possible universes that can be chosen at random, barely conducive universes exceed perfectly suited universes by countlessly many trillions to one). Design predicts exactly the opposite (again, without a parade of convenient excuses).

Even if we grant fine tuning exists, there are two ways it can happen: chance accident, or intelligent design. And what theists don’t want to admit, is that all the evidence actually points to chance accident. Quite simply, the universe and the history we observe is 100% expected to look that way if chance accident caused it; but its looking that way is not at all probable on design. So here we find that not only do the prior odds strongly support atheism (since, as I just mentioned previously and will further explain in a moment, all the way up to now we’ve only ever found natural and chance causes of anything), but from the evidence of life and the cosmos, the Bayes’ factor also strongly establishes atheism. (In fact, all this is far better evidence for multiverse theory than for monotheism.)

(4) Argument from Consciousness: I also dispatch this in Bayesian terms in TEC (pp. 298-302). Theists try to focus just on the fact that conscious phenomena is weird and not yet scientifically explained, “therefore” God is the best explanation of it. But that’s a non sequitur. When we don’t know an explanation, the most likely explanation will be the one that has most commonly succeeded before when we thought something couldn’t be explained. And that’s always turned out to be physics, not God. Prior odds thus strongly favor physics, not theism, for anything as yet unexplained. We need evidence to conclude otherwise. And that’s where theists try to ignore all the pertinent evidence. When we bring all that ignored evidence back in, atheism, not theism, ends up most likely.

For example, that we need brains to generate conscious phenomena is quite unexpected if God exists. Because if God exists, disembodied minds can exist, and are the best minds to have, therefore we should also have disembodied minds. Indeed, there is no inherent reason it would even occur to a god to make our minds out of brains at all (without, again, a pile of convenient excuses). Whereas if God does not exist, the only way minds could exist is as the output of a complex physical machine that evolved slowly by natural selection over hundreds of millions of years from ultra-simple worm-brains to fish-brains, lizard-brains, mammal-brains, monkey-brains, ape-brains, hominid-brains, and eventually human brains. Just as we observe.

Therefore, the fact that thought is dependent on complex evolved brains, which are physical machines, and which also inefficiently exhaust oxygen and energy, and place us in needless risk of injury and death, and intellectual malfunction, due to their delicate vulnerability and badly organized structure, is exactly what we expect if there is no God, but not at all what we expect if there is. The Bayes’ Factor once again supports atheism, not theism. (For a formalization of this point, see AMBD. I also discuss six points in its favor in Sense and Goodness without God.)

(5) Argument from Reason: I also cover this in TEC (ibid.), and elsewhere I have exhaustively refuted every version of it. But it all reduces to a simple Bayesian case against God: if God did not design us, our innate reasoning abilities should be shoddy and ad hoc and only ever improved upon by what are in essence culturally (not biologically) installed software patches (like the scientific method, logic and mathematics, and so on), which corrected our reasoning abilities only after thousands of years of humans trying out different fixes, fixes that were only discovered through human trial and error, and not communicated in any divine revelation or scripture. But if God did design us, our brains should have worked properly from the start and required no software patches, much less software patches that took thousands of years to figure out, and are completely missing from all supposed communications from God.

Thus, observation confirms that the actual evidence of human reason is far more probable if God did not exist than if he does. Thus, even the Christian’s own Argument from Reason argues that God does not exist, rather than that he does. Because once again, when we bring in all the evidence, the Bayes’ Factor strongly supports atheism.

(6) Argument from Religious Experience: This goes the same way. By falsely selecting and ignoring evidence, the believer tries to turn their religious experience into evidence for (their own) God, while ignoring everyone else’s religious experience that contradicts theirs. Hence when we actually bring back in all the evidence, the conclusion goes the other way. (This is superbly argued from every angle and against nearly every possible excuse by John Loftus in The Outsider Test for Faith, with an excellent response to his remaining critics in The Christian Delusion, Chapter 4.)

We have evidence of divine communications going back tens of thousands of years (in shamanic cave art, the crafting of religious icons, ritual burials, and eventually shrines, temples, and actual writing, on stone and clay, then parchment, papyrus and paper). Theism without added excuses predicts that all communications from the divine would be consistently the same at all times in history and across all geographical regions, and presciently in line with the true facts of the world and human existence, right from the start. Atheism predicts, instead, that these communications will be pervasively inconsistent across time and space, and full of factual errors about the world and human existence, exactly matching the ignorance of the culture “experiencing the divine” at that time. And guess what? We observe exactly what atheism predicts; not at all what theism predicts. And again, adding excuses for that, only makes theism even more improbable.

Thus, the actual evidence of religious experience is highly probable on atheism, and highly improbable on theism. This disparity in probabilities entails the evidence of religious experience argues God does not exist, not that he does.

(7) Argument from Miracles: This works the same way, too. Atheism predicts random good luck and bad luck will be observed, and therefore anything we can confirm happened that seems miraculous will be physically explicable (because, not really miraculous) and rare (because, random). Without a parade of excuses, theism predicts miracles will be commonplace and physically inexplicable (e.g. Christian healing wings in hospitals would exist where amputees have their limbs restored by prayer, or anything like that; yet we observe not a single thing like that). Likewise, atheism predicts the only miracle claims that will “survive scrutiny,” are claims that are never reliably investigated; and that every time a miracle claim gets proper scrutiny, it dissolves. And lo and behold, that is also what we see. Thus, again, what we observe is exactly what is expected on atheism, not at all what we expect on theism. So even the evidence of miracles refutes theism and confirms atheism.

(8) The Moral Argument: If atheism is true, it is still true that: (a) we all want to live in a just and kind and honest world, which desire is sufficient reason for us to try and create one (basically, if you don’t want the world to be amoral, then you already have sufficient reason to be moral); (b) we are social animals, and social animals need to be just and kind and honest to work together well, and they need to work together well to optimize survival and realize their goals (indeed, one need only compare moral societies with immoral societies to see the difference, which observation is more than sufficient reason to be moral); and (c) more and deeper joy and satisfaction comes from feeling compassion with others (and thus sharing their joys) and loving truth (loving falsity and falsehood, by contrast, will always result in embracing self-defeating or self-frustrating behaviors; while compassion is necessary to vicariously experience the joy and happiness of others).

Thus, atheism predicts three motivating reasons for people to develop a common morality centered around compassion, honesty, justice, and cooperation. But more importantly, atheism predicts that moral rules will only come from human beings, and thus will begin deeply flawed, and will be improved by experiment (after empirically observing the social discomfort and dissatisfaction and waste that comes from flawed moral systems), and consequently that will happen only slowly over thousands of years. And that is exactly what we observe. Just look at the examples of slavery and the subordination of women in Bible.

By contrast, theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship, or the enacting and teaching of divine justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start. But we observe no such laws built into the universe, and no stewards or law enforcers but us, and no perfect moral code has existed anywhere throughout history; the best moralities have always just slowly evolved from human trial and error (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature and Shermer’s The Moral Arc). Thus, the evidence of human morality (it’s starting abysmal and being slowly improved by humans over thousands of years in the direction that would make their societies better for them) is evidence against God, not evidence for God.

(9) Argument from Meaning of Life: “It would be better if I had a million dollars; therefore I have a million dollars” is not even a logically valid argument to start with. So the only way to get from “life must have some meaning” to “therefore God exists” is with two hypotheses: that life does have some meaning; and that only a god could provide it. But there is no evidence that second hypothesis is true—we readily and easily assign meaning to things all the time, by ourselves, with no help from anyone. And if you define “meaning” as “cosmic external meaning,” and not “what we as individuals value about our lives and the lives of others,” in an attempt to get that second hypothesis to be true, there is then no evidence the first hypothesis is true. Either way, you can’t get to the conclusion.

All the evidence of history and science weighs heavily for the conclusion that we are mortal, and that we actually value our lives because of that, and not because we are immortal—which would actually render this life cheap as dirt (since death would cost us nothing, and life is better and vastly longer on the other side of it). Life would still be valuable if we are immortal, but not because we are immortal. It only has value because it can be lived. Which even a mortal can do.

In fact, the Prior Odds and all Bayes’ Factors render only one conclusion probable for those who want to live forever: only future  human-made technology is likely to get you that outcome. In the meantime, life only has meaning because you value it, and because of the things you value about it. It’s meaning comes from you. That being so, does not increase the probability of a god one whit. To the contrary, that we are mortal, and throughout history have always invented our own meaning for life, and always different people have valued different things about it, is exactly what we expect if there is no god. Whereas, excuses aside, it’s not all all what we expect if there is a god.

(10) Argument from Superman: Every religion has its own Superman argument. Moroni, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Buddha, even Lao Tzu, are all claimed to have proved their religious teachings supernaturally true by miraculous demonstrations of their power. “Our Superman exists; therefore our God exists.” All these arguments collapse the same way: when you put all the evidence back in, the Bayes’ Factor and Prior Odds both guarantee they are all just made up stories. And not being true, they fail as arguments. A real God would not produce stories that look just like they were made up, and then present no adequate evidence for them being true. I illustrate the Bayesian logic of this in detail for Christianity in The Christian Delusion (“Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable”) and even more so in The End of Christianity (“Christianity’s Success Was Not Incredible”).

Conclusion

You can see by now how any argument for God can be turned around into an argument against God by (a) including all the evidence the theist is conspicuously ignoring and then (b) showing how this entails a strong Bayes’ Factor against the existence of God (or, or also, a strong Prior Odds against). Theism is built on hiding evidence. Hiding the evidence of history, that makes gods the least likely explanation of anything, and then hiding the specific evidence that refutes each and every reason to believe in God. Bayesian counter-apologetics exposes and corrects all this.