Expert: Vincent M. Wales - 3/24/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear Vincent,
A theist friend of mine e-mailed these to me...how can I respond without looking like a fool? Thanks!
Respectfully, Augustine

If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions… … Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water, And Nothing Else!
         --Douglas Wilson

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts - i.e., Materialism and Astronomy - are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It's like expecting the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.          --C.S. Lewis

ANSWER: Both of these arguments share the same fallacy, which is the idea that it's "all or nothing."  Wilson and Lewis are essentially saying that without God, there is nothing but absolute chaos at all levels.

But unfortunately, that's how many theists think.

For example, if Wilson were to say these things directly to me, I would respond by saying, "Doug, dude, you're ignoring all the order that we humans place on things.  We impose - individually and as societies - meaning and significance on a whole host of things.  If we didn't, we'd all be wandering around like zombies, and would never have achieved anything in the world."

To which Wilson would inevitably say, "But it's God that gave us the ability to do that."

Lewis's argument is even worse, because he's denying any sort of guidance other than God.  Evolution is not guided by accident, but by natural selection.  Thoughts are not accidents, but shaped by a million different things.  It's either God or an accident.  Never mind other forces.  Never mind human influence.  What rubbish.

There's really no winning with folks like this.  They think in terms of radical extremes.  Either God is in charge, or madness reigns.  There's no in-between for them.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Dear Vincent,
I asked you a question some time ago, and I used your argument against theist friends...they say there can be no in-between. So in atheist belief, what is in between?
I want to thank you for past help, and any you could give me here would be appreciated! Augustine Li

Answer
It's not so much a matter of "in-between," as a matter of "a third option."  To say that something is "in-between" (in the matters we spoke of before) would be to say that something was caused PARTLY by God and PARTLY by some other specific thing.  And yeah... they're right.  That's not an option.  The "third option" would be that something was caused by neither of those things, but something else entirely.

Take Wilson's argument above.  He says, essentially, that if there's no God, then "X" MUST BE TRUE... where "X" is his own opinion.  This is logically bunk, because there's no reason to accept that his "X" is, in fact, true.  It doesn't stand up, logically.  

What I'm getting at is that people like Wilson see things in black and white.  "In-between" would be gray.  I'm saying there's a whole slew of colors out there, totally unrelated to black or white.  

Your theist friends, it seems to me, are like Wilson... arguing that without God, nothing has meaning.  And that, I have to say, is a position that has no evidence... just opinion.