Here are two posts demonstrating how to “argue” with a skeptic who doubts the existence of God. I don’t believe argument is a good tactic. A relaxed, friendly conversation is better. The points I make can be brought into a friendly conversation. However, for the sake of ease and brevity, I have formatted my posts in the context of a hypothetical debate against a hypothetical skeptic named Mr. Smith. This first post is my opening statement. The second post is a response to Mr. Smith’s first argument.

*****

I would like to thank Mr. Smith for being willing to have such an important discussion with me. I hope this discussion can be open and friendly. I would like to begin by laying out four challenges to Mr. Smith. These challenges are problems or obstacles that any skeptic must sidestep or surmount in order to deny the existence of God. I would like to challenge Mr. Smith to present arguments against the existence of God that overcome or avoid these problems.

The first challenge is what I might call the wrong God problem. Most arguments against the existence of God are more generic. The argument may be against a generic idea of a deity or against a philosophical concept of God (e.g., the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover). The assumption of these types of arguments is that they will work against any God. However, I find that these arguments fail when they encounter a specific, particular God. I am not interested in defending a generic or philosophic God. I am only interested in defending the biblical God, and he is generally immune to generic arguments.

There are other wrong-God arguments besides the generic. Some arguments are counteracting concepts or God from pop culture or other religions. Some arguments target the concept of God in a particular denomination or from a particular theologian. Regrettably, some arguments are mere straw man arguments responding to the skeptic’s own reconstruction of what he thinks God might be like. The most outrageous of such arguments are when the skeptic dismisses God using silly, insulting descriptions. For example, the skeptic might call God “the old man in the sky” or “the great sky fairy” or “an overgrown Santa” or such like.

I have no interest in defending other concepts of God or even responding to straw man reconstructions of a fake God. After all, I too find the idea of a “great sky fairy” to be rather ridiculous. In this debate, I will only point out where the biblical God differs from the God being described by my opponent and how those differences render my opponent’s arguments moot. I challenge Mr. Smith to argue only against the existence of the biblical God.

The second challenge is what I might call the self-deification problem. It is nearly impossible to argue against the existence of God without claiming to be God yourself. For one thing, it is very hard to argue that something does not exist without claiming to have universal knowledge. For another, many arguments against the existence of God put the skeptic in the position of God in order to make the argument. For example, if you try to use the problem of evil as an argument, you can only do so by putting yourself in the position of the moral judge of the universe. I challenge Mr. Smith to argue against the existence of God without putting himself in the position of God.

The third challenge is what I might call the pantheon problem. Mr. Smith may find it difficult to argue against the existence of God without appealing to a pantheon of lesser deities, so to speak. In order to argue against the existence of God, Mr. Smith may have to appeal to things like reason and rationality, natural law and an orderly universe, the existence of human minds, the existence of something rather than nothing, etc. Mr. Smith will accept these realities without explanation. He will use them to explain other things, but he will not explain the realities themselves. Unexplained explanations sound an awful lot like generic, philosophical concepts of deities. Instead of one God, Mr. Smith will put forward a pantheon of lesser godlike realities. He will claim that it is easier to believe in a plethora of unexplained explanations rather than a single God. But he has not solved anything. He has merely spread the problem around. I challenge Mr. Smith to argue against the existence of God without clinging to his own pantheon.

The fourth challenge is what I might call non-neutrality problem. The Bible teaches that there is no neutral ground. God is the creator and designer of the universe. This means any true understanding of the universe must begin with God as the starting point – as the epistemological and ontological ground. In other words, the existence of the biblical God is the linchpin of wisdom and reason. If you remove him, rationality disintegrates.

Mr. Smith will try to argue against the existence of God on the basis of some kind of neutrality. If Mr. Smith claims to be some kind of neutral reasoner himself, then he is claiming to be God. If he appeals to a set of assumed neutral principles, then those neutral principles become his unexplained pantheon. Furthermore, if he claims that he is starting from a set of assumptions that does not include the existence of God, then he has started out by claiming without proof that God is not a basic assumption of epistemology and ontology. In other words, he is assuming what he is supposed to be proving.

The Bible claims that God is so foundational to knowledge and reality that there is no neutral territory. To claim there is neutral territory is to begin by assuming the nonexistence of the biblical God. I challenge Mr. Smith to produce an argument against the existence of God that does not start from the assumption that God is unnecessary for understanding and existence.

These four challenges demonstrate two main issues with arguing against the existence of God. First, arguing against the existence of God is difficult, even impossible. So often people argue against the wrong God, and people usually resort to assuming atheism as a starting point. Second, many arguments against the existence of God really serve as arguments for the existence of God. The skeptic often unwittingly claims to be God himself or relies on a pantheon of lesser unexplained realities. Certainly, I could say some words positively arguing for the existence of God, but I think it will become clear through our discussion that all attempts to disprove the existence of God work well to prove God’s existence.