A Flaw in Matt Dillahunty’s Atheism
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Christianity, Religion, Atheism, God, Philosophy

Dillahunty’s Case Against Christian Apologetics

You can find Dillahunty’s go-to argument in this online debate. (Jump to his opening statement at the 16:00 minute mark.) The question that’s usually at issue for him, since he often debates Evangelical preachers and amateur Christian apologists, is whether Christianity is rational or indeed whether this religion makes for the most rational worldview.

Again, this is because Dillahunty’s opponents are often fundamentalists or conservative Evangelicals, meaning their interpretations of the Bible are literalistic and they believe theirs is the only legitimate form of spirituality. More importantly, some centuries ago, science reset the standards of intellectual authority, so these ambitious Evangelicals need to present their religious beliefs as being at least as meritorious as a scientific theory or as a philosophical argument.

Thus, Dillahunty typically disposes of this Christian impudence by saying that for Christianity to be rational, the Christian would have to produce an argument that points to strong evidence in support of the core Christian propositions. Alas, there’s no such evidence.

For example, as Dillahunty says in that debate, the appeal to anything in the Bible is an appeal to “propaganda from anonymous, altered, ancient accounts.” This means biblical claims are less reliable even than eyewitness testimony, and that testimony is problematic in trials in which lawyers routinely impeach a witness’s credibility.

A claim based on hearsay or on anonymous copies of copies adds another level of dubiousness. Then comes the ancientness of the biblical claims, which is problematic because ancient writers were less scrupulous than modern academics and intellectuals about reporting what we would call the cold, hard facts. Finally, the New Testament authors weren’t even trying to be historians, since they were religious partisans writing propaganda for their cause.

So rather than being strong evidence for Christianity, an appeal to what Jesus supposedly said or did, according to the gospels, provides especially weak evidence at best. Thus, the Christian creed isn’t rational, and Christians should retreat to the freedom to worship in the privacy of their homes to which they’re entitled in the modern age, thanks to the largesse of secular liberalism.

I added that last part about liberalism, but you get the gist. Dillahunty simply challenges the Christian to present strong evidence for the truth of her religious beliefs. That must be evidence not just that there’s a gap in our scientific knowledge or even that there must be some necessary being or eternal source of nature, but specifically strong evidence that points to the existence of the Christian’s deity or that shows Christianity is the best or the only viable religion.

Dillahunty proceeds to shoot to pieces the lame “proofs” and fallacious arguments the average Evangelical Christian has on offer. Dillahunty points out that far from having strong evidence, Christians have an absent God — and that’s so even in the Christian tradition, since Christian theism posits Creation as being separate from God. God is allegedly immanent in the universe he created, but he also transcends it. That’s why Jesus supposedly had to arrive on Earth, to bridge the divide between God and the part of his handiwork that he favours.

So Christians ought to concede they have to grasp at straws or have access, at best, to equivocal or to weak evidence, to arbitrary interpretations, specious reasoning, and indeed to acts of faith. Those theists who are brazen and underhanded enough to disguise their religion as a rational representation of the world, on par with science or philosophy, deserve to be exposed by the likes of Dillahunty as impertinent or confused.

(Note that perhaps the strongest or at least the most relevant Christian answers to Dillahunty’s criticism that have been given would be something like William Lane Craig’s evidentiary arguments, such as his empty tomb argument for Jesus’s resurrection, which I refute at length elsewhere.)