I appreciate the effort you put into your response to my article. Indeed, yours is the only one that’s focussed on the ten arguments. Your comment is a little suspicious, though. Your profile says you’re a former skeptic turned Christian, but you don’t sound like you have much background knowledge of skepticism. Many of your criticisms strawman the positions at issue.
For example, you say the quantum mechanical aspect of the Big Bang theory is “merely speculation” rather than an explanation. What you mean is that science doesn’t supply an absolute explanation since science naturalizes all phenomena, positing, as you suggest, an initial condition together with some laws, forces, and so on. I’d agree with you there, and I’ve written about that limitation of naturalistic explanations (in “Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation”).
But you’re missing two key points, which you should have known if you were any kind of skeptic. First, philosophy steps in where science ends. So philosophy can supply an absolute atheistic explanation to challenge religious myths. Second, “explanation” is defined by the principles of critical thinking, epistemology, and scientific practice, in which case theistic stories necessarily fail as explanations. The more philosophical those myths become, as in Scholastic theology, the more they naturalize the first cause and entail atheism.
Or you suggest that the secularist can say only that the emergence of life is “an incredibly lucky fluke.” But that doesn’t sound like anything a former skeptic would say. If you’re familiar with how science works, you should know that scientists explain things by positing natural regularities and laws. That’s the opposite of saying something is just a fluke. Scientists don’t understand yet how life arise but saying that God created life by a miracle is doubly empty as an explanation. God would be alive, so that would mean that life came from life. What, then, caused the life in God to emerge? And positing a miracle is the opposite of increasing our understanding, which is what an explanation is supposed to do.
You repeatedly appeal to the popularity of theism, which of course is indeed fallacious. You say it’s not, but you don’t show how it’s not. You want to point out that most people don’t agree with me, but that’s not what’s in dispute. The issue is whether most people can justify their religious beliefs and show what’s wrong with my criticisms of Foster’s ten arguments. Just stating that more people are theists than are atheists is fallacious in this context because that statistic has no bearing on which side is more rationally justified in its thinking. It’s possible that theism is popular for nonrational reasons.
Foster didn’t talk about “fine-tuning” specifically, but he did raise the argument from intelligent design. The problem with fine-tuning is that it’s meaningless to talk about the probability of a whole universe forming. What’s the prior distribution of odds? No one knows because if the universe had a cause, the cause was supernatural so it wouldn’t work like anything we’re familiar with, and “probability,” like “cause,” is a concept that makes sense only in the context of dealing rationally with the familiar, natural world.
So you say, rather, that “The whole universe is improbable.” Yet that statement is meaningless. The reason we can say that flipping a dime so it lands heads up fifty times in a row is highly improbable is that we can proceed by trial and error. Have you ever tried to create a universe? If not, how can you possibly know what the odds are?
You appeal to the Bible to justify your Christian beliefs, which is indeed the way you should go, assuming it matters to you whether your religion is rational. But I wonder why you think Foster didn’t push that line of argument, and why instead he damned it with faint praise, as I said in the article. I suspect it’s because he’s familiar with the historical-critical approach to the Bible which falsifies all the pious interpretations that used to back up your religious traditions.
You say, for example, that parts of the New Testament are written “by 3 first-hand witnesses.” But no critical scholar thinks that. The gospels are written anonymously, and there’s lots of internal evidence in them to indicate they weren’t written by eyewitnesses. Paul didn’t know the historical Jesus.
The extra-biblical accounts are all problematic, as I explain elsewhere. But even if Jesus existed in history, that doesn’t mean any of the NT’s hagiography of him is warranted. Just because a man challenged the Roman Empire on spiritual grounds and was killed for it doesn’t mean he was God’s only begotten Son or that he performed miracles and rose from the dead.
The claim that Jesus’s life and death were predicted by Jewish prophecies is vacuous. The so-called prophecies were mostly not prophecies at all, or they were about Israel or about events from much earlier periods than Jesus’s. And it’s much more likely that the NT stories were shaped by the propagandists who wrote them to conform to Jewish expectations than that Jesus’s life was miraculously preordained.
You don’t seem to understand the relevance of my point about how most of the universe is amoral. Yes, only conscious beings can be moral. But the question was why conscious beings should be moral or why we think God is preoccupied with justice and morality when most of what he would have created has nothing to do with life, justice, or morality.
You say that to create life, God had to create a humungous universe, but how do you know what would constrain God? Most religious people in history have presumed that the universe extends no further than our solar system. If God cares so much about us, why would he create such an insane number of stars and galaxies, most of which we can have nothing to do with? If God’s omnipotent, how could he be forced to create such a vast universe as the means of creating life? What could force a God that can perform miracles?
I’ll leave it there. You can go on believing what you like, of course. I don’t say that every defense of Christian theism is as weak as that of Foster’s article. Instead of defending Foster, you presented your own mini version of that article, which suggests to me that you agree his ten arguments are weak.
