Theists Aren't Stupid!

Is Rasmussen a moron? Was Scotus a Duns?

Lots of people on the internet seem to think I’m a credulous fool.

Not just me. Any theist. Pruss? Credulous fool, who somehow managed, despite that, to get a Ph.D in mathematics and philosophy. Rasmussen? Credulous fool. Scotus? Duns. (This is a hilarious pun that only the sharpest of people will get, or alternatively, those who happen to know what the full name of Scotus was).

Among atheists, there’s a quite common idea that theists are delusional fools. Sure, maybe some of them are smart, the same way that a particularly ingenious scientologist might be smart. But their worldview is delusion, they believe in magic from a celestial deity on the basis of nothing remotely resembling evidence, and they’ve been duped to believe a completely evidenceless obviously false doctrine. This seems to be a view adopted by around half of internet atheists, and it’s pretty popular among the Rationalist community. For instance, after a recent conversation with a fellow named Godless Engineer, many of the comments displayed that belief. For instance:

(That I was an atheist a year ago is, in fact, well-documented. Aquinas famously thought that material objects are a composite of essence and existence—this fellow thinks that theist arguments are a composite of desperation and fail (with a mysterious space before the word of)).

I recently had a debate with a fellow named TJump about the existence of God (very funny and worth watching)—a man who seemed to deny dark matter on a priori grounds (he denied that he denied it, but that’s just because he doesn’t understand what the word means, and claimed that alternatives to it like MOND are versions of it), claimed that we should reject using God to explain fine-tuning because most historians reject miraculous explanations, and that if Einstein had based his theory of relativity in the notion that he had a colorless green square circle in his pocket, it would subsequently be reasonable to think he actually did have a square circle in his pocket. His comments about historians rejecting miracles bearing on fine-tuning lead to the following meme (credit to blog commenter Mark for the idea):

But anyways, if you read the comments below the debate, they’re in near complete agreement that I—like all theists—am a delusional crazy person.

(This person admits that they reflectively tune out whenever they hear an argument for theism. This is a good way to never change your mind).

This sentiment is not at all unpopular. Even Richard Dawkins seems to adopt it—perhaps why he thought he could address Aquinas’s five ways all in the span of about 5 pages without doing any other reading about the argument. So now we come to the question: is it justified? Are theists, in fact, credulous fools?

No!!!

A sizeable chunk of philosophers are theists and the majority of philosophers of religion are. Some extremely intelligent and philosophically competent people like Dustin Crummett, Philip Swenson, Aron Wall, and Alexander Pruss believe in God. These people, rather than leaving confused YouTube comments without considering what a critic would say in response, are out writing papers and books that argue for the existence of God, often in ways that appeal to very minor premises.

Even atheist philosophers tend to think theism is an intellectually sophisticated position even when they don’t adopt it. Not all theists are Baptist grandmothers who conclude the primary demonstration of God’s existence is a suitable look at the trees. Some extremely intelligent people have come up with lots of quite powerful arguments for theism: fine-tuning, moral knowledge, psychophysical harmony, the anthropic argument, the nomological harmony argument, the contingency argument, and plenty of others. None of these arguments depend on ignorance of the natural sciences or blind adherence to religious dogma; they all depend on philosophical premises that are hard to poke holes in.

Could these arguments be wrong? Of course! There’s always a possibility that an argument is mistaken. But they’re not obviously braindead in the way that many internet atheists seem to assume. They don’t require severe mental incompetence to accept, and have won over many fair-minded atheists (my friend Amos, for instance, was an agnostic for a while, and I was an atheist before being convinced by many of these arguments).

These arguments often require severe contemplation so that you really see the force of them. If you just read about them for 5-seconds, don’t consider what critics would have to say in response, uncharitably assume that the creator of the argument is a complete imbecil, and do so without the philosophical competence to tell metaphysics from Metamucil, it’s no surprise that you’ll conclude that the arguments suck! But you should simply not do that. Before concluding that an argument is absurd, you should present your objection to it to a proponent of the argument and see what they have to say in response.

If you reflexively believe that despite extremely intelligent and thoughtful people believing a proposition, the proposition is obviously stupid so that you don’t even need to investigate the reasons people believe it, then that’s a recipe for severe error and dogmatism. The fact that lots of people believe something for a bad reason tells you nothing about whether there’s a good reason to believe it. Assuming, without giving their arguments a fair shake—and virtually none of the internet atheists that call theists stupid do give theistic arguments a fair shake, preferring to consider them for two seconds and then falsely claim that they commit a fallacious God of the gaps—that theistic arguments are stupid is just plainly irrational, and ought to be recognized as such.