The Atheist’s Supposedly Grim Explanatory Burden

And why religious folks have it much worse

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Does atheism entail such absurdities that atheists end up having an enormous burden of proof?

According to Alan Shlemon’s article on the apologetics website Stand to Reason, called “Atheism’s Burden of Proof,” atheism “entails at least three incredible assertions that require a lot of explaining.”

Yet Shlemon’s case is so clumsy and wrongheaded, it’s hard to imagine it was written in good faith. The point of writing his article must have been not to think critically to get to the truth, but to strawman atheism to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes. What else is new in Christian propaganda?

Purely for the fun of it, then, and not because Shlemon’s article warrants a serious response, let’s look at his three arguments.

Did the universe come from nothing?

First, he says, atheists “explain how the universe came into existence by itself.” Shlemon goes on to say, “Without a personal agent (like God) causing the universe to begin to exist, the atheist must explain how all of space, time, and matter created itself.”

Now just ponder those two statements for a moment. Supposedly, it’s “incredible” for the atheist to imply that “the universe came into existence by itself,” but the theist is spared that problem because the theist posits “a personal agent (like God)” who caused the universe to exist. But of course, God is supposed to be eternal and uncreated, so how is theism supposed to improve on naturalistic atheism? Shlemon thinks God solves the atheist’s problem since God creates the universe, but positing God obviously just creates a problem at least as big, so there’s no progress here.

Did God somehow create himself? By being more faithful to the analogy with human societies than monotheism, the polytheistic version of theism made more sense in this respect since there was supposedly a society of gods, each generation giving birth to the next. But although the monotheistic deity may create angels or quasi-gods, this supreme being has no parents, in which case God’s existence must be at least as baffling to theists as nature’s is to atheists.