The Limits of Doubt: Higher and Lower Knowledge and Adventures in Epistemology

Epistemology: A branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods,and limits of human knowledge.

A few weeks ago in my post on Dan Barker's book Godless I mentioned a theory that atheism and Christianity (or theism in general) were based on two different epistemologies (perspectives on truth), one human-centric and one God-centric. Through reading, study, and conversations with atheists and skeptics I have refined this theory considerably to the point where it has begun making surprising amounts of sense as an explanation.

I just retook the Strengths Finder test last week for the first time in over two years. My number-one strength is now apparently "Input", new since last time, which means I love collecting and mentally organizing information. In keeping with this, I have been in several online conversations with skeptics, trying to get a fuller, more coherent picture of how they approach epistemology. You have to understand something before you can critique it. (Which is why I feel much more confident critiquing Christianity)

Scientific Inquiry and Materialistic Epistemology

The atheists I talked to espoused the method referred to as "scientific inquiry" or "skeptical inquiry" as our only reliable way of gaining objective knowledge about the universe. (Not ruling out ways of subjectively gaining knowledge, but those can't be shared with others or serve as a sound basis for action) This method entails the systematic gathering of evidence, then building knowledge out of this evidence using the scientific method and valid logical reasoning. As such, scientific tests of truth are applied to all truth, such as:

Occam's Razor: The simplest possible theory that explains the evidence should be chosen over more complex ones.

Falsifiability: A theory is worthless if there is no conceivable way it could be conclusively disproven.

This process is also somewhat analogous to what goes on in a courtroom. One poster in an online discussion wrote (emphasis added):

To put it another way: If someone has a way of explaining something that allows me to understand the universe. Something observable, understandable, repeatable, demonstrable (We call that the scientific method); It would be vastly dishonest and silly of me to then go off of something I cannot confirm, cannot show to be demonstrable, to not be understandable, to not be observable. In other words, I would need to throw away my logical thinking and skeptical way of looking at things to adopt a lot of bullcrap.
In the court of law we have a system that allows us to determine whether or not an eye witness is a credible witness to something. If the person cannot be correctly placed there as a witness (confirmed or as no way to confirm), has personal bias or gain in the matter or knowingly misrepresents data they can be disqualified. Now here's the fun part, in the court of law a witness can be make or bust in a case. They are responsible for an eye witness account for something, something crucial.
Many times people get thrown out as a credible witness if it's found they have a bias, or if they cannot be placed at the scene, or if the witness is strictly hearsay.
So if we will toss people out of the court of law for something as simple as a bias, or personal gain, or even hearsay evidence... WHY would a person base their ENTIRE LIFE on a book that is full of hearsay accounts, anonymous authors, biased accounts and data that cannot be accounted for nor confirmed. In other words, random people, no credibility, hearsay evidence and tons of bias to gain from it.

From this analogy we get some criteria for allowable evidence:

• Empirically observable
• Understandable/meaningful/coherent
• Repeatable/demonstrable (presumably not necessary, as in the case of evolution)

And for a valid witness:

• Correctly placed as a witness
• Unbiased
• Doesn't color or misrepresent the data

If this is the method by which all truth is to be gained and agreed upon, it is obvious that there is no room for anything Christians would call "faith", and no one is more aware of this than atheists and skeptics. In this system, faith is the drawing of unwarranted, arbitrary, unnecessarily complex conclusions from insufficient, highly subjective, and biased evidence.

Arguments Against Faith and God

In fact, atheists seem to see "blind faith" as the antithesis to sound knowledge of actual truth; if you try to use it to know what is true, you have strayed outside the bounds of rationality and can simply believe anything you want with no justification. In his scathing review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God, Sam Harris says, "If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything." Similarly, Dan Barker's refrain when he is arguing for reason instead of faith is, "With faith, anything goes." If you listen to faith instead of evidence and reason, you're believing whatever nonsense you want.

Christians often try to play this game and bring evidence or logical arguments for God's existence to bear, but this evidence either doesn't point to God, is counterbalanced by evidence against God, or ignores simpler, more likely explanations than God. An example of this first argument is the "argument from design", which may have worked hundreds of years ago when we had no idea where the complexity of the universe came from, but now evolution has conclusively shown us how order and apparent design can come from chaos by very simple rules. The best example of the second argument is the existence of pain and suffering in the world: what kind of God, especially one supposedly worthy of "love" and "worship", would create that? The third argument contradicts, for example, the cosmological argument, which makes an enormous leap to God as the explanation of the beginning of the universe as well as logical mistakes like forgetting that, by the same logic, a dynamic being such as God also had to have had a beginning.

Back to falsifiability: atheists accuse Christians of ad hoc arguments or special pleading to explain how evidence like the existence of suffering or God not providing concrete evidence for His existence (a simple "Hi! Here I am, worship Me!" would suffice) doesn't really weigh against their beliefs. Christians' constant qualifications of God ("He works in mysterious ways", "He wants us to have faith") to account for this evidence only add more complexity to the God hypothesis, making it an even less tenable explanation. With all this explaining away of evidence, atheists ask what, if any, evidence would actually cause Christians to stop believing in God. They suspect that nothing would fit the bill; that is, the God hypothesis is nonfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

Some examples of this are Russell's teapot and, more recently, the parodic Flying Spaghetti Monster, an invisible, undetectable, noodly deity said to have created the universe. Like God, neither of these entites' existences can be falsified, but of course it would be absurd to go around arguing for their existence and teaching others to believe likewise. This demonstrates how the burden of proof rests on people making arbitrary claims that can't be verified or falsified by empirical methods, not on those arguing against them who are making their case from common sense and visible data that we can all agree on.

Similarly, historical claims like "Jesus actually rose from the dead" are unfounded because of the extreme improbability of miracles, according to what we know of the regularity of nature, compared to other, more plausible explanations like Jesus' disciples stealing His body and starting a cult saying He rose from the dead, or the whole Jesus thing simply being a premodern myth.

One last way atheists love to poke holes in theism (especially Christianity) is by challenging the possibility of having a coherent definition of God in the first place. Dan Barker, in his book, goes through God's various "omni-" attributes and explains why they are logically contradictory and impossible. For example, an omniscient being, perfectly knowing all things, would have to perfectly know itself, which would mean having a complete mental image of itself, which would also include a nested copy of this image, and so on to infinity--a contradiction. Or the very definition of God has a "supernatural, spiritual" being has never really been explained or nailed down in a satisfactory sense and until it has, there's no point arguing over it.

Two Levels of Knowledge

That was a distilled, more neutral form of the arguments I have been processing over the last few weeks. It's what I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks, both to understand and to answer. Here is a somewhat parodic summary of how I had been trying to answer it:

You're getting the burden of proof wrong. The starting point is not the nonexistence of God, it's ignorance of the existence or nonexistence of God. From there, the evidence for the existence of God (any god, at least) greatly outweighs the evidence against. Faith that looks arbitrary to you is not arbitrary to us Christians, it's a relationship with a higher being. You're creating a mental image of what you want or expect God to be like, then disbelieving in Him because He doesn't fit that image--that box you've put Him in. How do you know, scientifically, that science is the only source of truth?

If I wrote all of that well enough, you might be worried that I've become an atheist, or am well on my way. This has never been farther from the truth. The more I've made sense of these arguments, the less persuasive they have become. Here is the epistemology I arrived at. (And where it starts getting highly speculative)

The empirical kind of knowledge that is gained by skeptical inquiry and knowledge that comes by faith are of two different kinds. I refer to them as "bottom-up" and "top-down" knowledge, or the terms I will use, "lower" and "higher" knowledge. (These should not be taken as value judgments) Let me explain.

Lower knowledge is basically what I just described as the object of this "materialistic epistemology". It is gained through empirical observation and reasoning, the scientific method being the best modern example of this. Simple, atomic facts are gathered and theories are formed, refined, and tested to explain them. This process is hardly limited to scientific knowledge, though; it is generally the process of starting from oneself and building a body of knowledge outward from what is immediately observable. Descartes' one-liner, "I think, therefore I am" is a pithy statement of the most basic empirically observable truth: the existence of oneself.

Higher knowledge is different. I call it that because it is not built out from ourselves but places itself over and above us, relating what we know and who we are to some external point of reference outside ourselves. Higher knowledge isn't proved by evidence but transforms and determines how we view and interpret the evidence, subordinating it to some higher, teleological (purposeful) value or goal. It isn't uncovered by endlessly dividing and analyzing but unites the facts under something of greater importance to us. It answers the question of "why", not "what" or "how". This method of assigning significance to pieces of lower knowledge by their relation to your system of higher knowledge, I will call "meaning".

I argue that the human need for meaning is universal. No one, no one, is content to live a "purposeless" life. We need to "matter" to someone or something outside ourselves. With our western individualism and existentialism we might find the idea of being the "captain of your own destiny" appealing, but if we are free to decide what is of ultimate importance in life, unstable and fallible creatures that we are, that decision is worthless. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes so far as to write, "But, rightly understood, the deification of man is the proclamation of nihilism. With the destruction of the biblical faith in God and of all divine commands and ordinances, man destroys himself." In fact, the universality of "man's search for meaning" would indicate that people are truly incapable of manufacturing meaning for themselves; they must search for it outside themselves. If you deny this fact, it only means you are blind to the specifics of your own system of higher knowledge. There is apparently something lacking in each of us that needs filling; Christians might call it the "God-shaped hole".

A Higher Apologetic

Higher knowledge also answers questions that lower knowledge can', questions that science can't answer--not the facts, but what those facts mean. "What is the meaning of life?", the perennial question goes. I wonder, why does everyone want to know? Why are we such a race of philosophers? Higher knowledge is prepared to answer questions such as:

• The existence of anything: "Why does the universe exist?"
• The ordered nature of nature/correspondence with mathematical thinking: "Why does nature appear to be so regular and predictable by mathematics in a way that aligns with our thinking?"
• All the striking coincidences that led to our existence (cosmic "fine-tuning", abiogenesis): "Were we 'meant' to exist?"
• The existence of external moral law and internal conscience/need for meaning: "Why do I exist?"
• Human consciousness: "Why and how do I (as a "self") exist?"
• The problem of pain: "Why is there suffering? What is the point? Is there a point?"
• Or the meta-question: "Why do humans have this insatiable need for meaning?"

When the above questions are used in the context of apologetics, atheists will often get defensive and deny that these questions reasonably point to God, without answering them for themselves--effectively denying that they need answers. Jumping outside what we can empirically sense and agree on is unjustified, arbitrary, and foolish when materialism has already made sense of these questions for us. But the only answer it can give is the impenetrable randomness and purposelessness of the universe according to science. So our sense of morality, desire for meaning, and "consciousness" are naturally selected, arising by chance, merely chemical phenomena in our brains, and we are free to do with them what we will. In doing so, it elevates science from a system of lower knowledge to a comprehensive system, a task for which science was never meant and at which it performs miserably. Elsewhere in Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes (not from his own position):

All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything is now drawn into the process of disunion. Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things.

But it gets worse. The claim implicit here is that no system of higher knowledge needs to (or should) be assumed because you can empirically, objectively arrive at the "correct" one by observation and rational thinking, i.e. the generalized scientific method. But in fact, in the scientific method you are already using a system of higher knowledge (assuming that nature really is regular, predictable, and follows mathematical/logical laws) to interpret the data "scientifically". The usefulness of the scientific method as a system for gaining lower knowledge already depends on presumptions in your higher knowledge. The materialistic attempt to arrive at a system of higher knowledge from nothing has failed; it couldn't avoid assuming one first. Everyone has a system of higher knowledge--aware or unaware, simple or complex. Without one, life is meaningless.

Back to my comments on Dan Barker's use of the burden of proof. He asserted that the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim to truth that is not "obvious" or empirically falsifiable. But this is confusing the epistemology of lower knowledge with that of higher knowledge. Everyone assumes some system of higher knowledge without rigorously proving it, even if they may apply the laws of rationality to refine and extend it later. At the very least, in questions of higher knowledge the burden of proof lies on all parties involved to explain why their system makes better sense of questions of meaning and purpose like those above. In fact, considering how "normal" and "obvious" belief in the supernatural has been for most of human history, it could even be argued that the burden of proof lies on the relatively recent thinkers who rule out supernatural explanations in favor of materialistic ones--or, at least, that the definition of "obvious" is not obvious.

So, if higher knowledge can't be empirically derived, ask skeptics, isn't whatever system of higher knowledge we choose just arbitrary, at least as much a product of our origins and wishful thinking as of whether or not it's true? What's to stop people from just believing in whatever they want--God, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.? Nothing. But I think people will choose the system of higher knowledge that they feel effectively answers their questions of meaning. C.S. Lewis calls this the "fitness" of a belief system--fitness for making sense of our existence. If the system they grew up in fails at this task, they will look elsewhere. No one sincerely believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because the Flying Spaghetti Monster, besides being consciously made-up, makes little or no coherent, satisfactory sense of "life, the universe, and everything" and raises far more questions than it answers.

In contrast, through Christian theology I get the sense that I'm exploring something that really is "other" than myself, even "other" than humanity in general, just as much as I did as a math major. The very fact that God doesn't make immediate sense to me and isn't perfectly explainable, yet makes sense in a deeper way that I explore rather than invent in a process that forces me to grow as a person in His image, in love, joy, and wisdom, gives me an unshakable assurance that my faith is well-placed. Skeptics, of course, will demand detailed explanations for things that Christians are happy to accept as mysteries and use their unexplainability prima facie as proof that it's all nonsense. Theoretical physicists truly believe they are exploring a system of truths and rules that objectively exists "out there" and so take mysteries like the bizarreness of quantum mechanics or relativity as invitations to dig deeper, not as excuses to write the whole thing off. I think something similar, but deeper and more fulfilling, is going on between a Christian and his Christ.

Again, higher knowledge is not "proven" in the scientific sense; it makes no sense to apply probability to it and you can't be led to it purely by evidence because your higher knowledge controls how you view and interpret the evidence. This is why the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the Son of God to Francis Collins, but not to Sam Harris. This is also why, in rationalistic parlance, Christianity is "nonfalsifiable": no evidence can disprove a Christian's faith (or so we hope) because the Christian's faith makes sense of that evidence in a different way than the skeptic is hoping. In order to move outside your own paradigm and begin to understand a different one, you have to want to understand, to stop writing it off as nonsense and open yourself up to it.

One qualification for Christian readers: I am well aware that I seem to be putting Christianity on the same level as other world religions, even making it seem like nothing more than a more fulfilling way of looking at life, doing nothing that couldn't be done by taking a yoga class or improving your diet. Of course I believe it is far more than this. I believe that Christianity is based on important realities both historical and spiritual--namely the death and resurrection of Christ--and that the point of the higher knowledge it teaches it to shift the focus of our lives outside ourselves to God--the importance of this change can't be overstated. I am only treating Christianity and other faiths as a coherent bloc by what they have in common, namely their claim to offer revelatory answers to metaphysical questions like the ones I voiced above, in contrast to materialism, which asserts that these questions either don't matter, don't have meaningful answers, or can be answered empirically. I am arguing that skeptics really do carry a priori higher-knowledge assumptions just like the religious; we see this every time they make a moral or value judgment. They are just unaware of these assumptions because they categorically deny their validity.

The Dark Room

An analogy is in order. Imagine you are inspecting a room with a fellow detective. There are no windows or light sources, but the room is inexplicably, uniformly lit somehow; nonetheless, it is quite dim. You are walking around looking the whole room over; your partner is crawling on his hands and knees, closely poring over every object and floorboard with a magnifying glass. You comment, "This room is dark". Your partner responds, "No it isn't. I can see everything in it just fine. Every object, every detail, I've come across, I've been able to resolve just fine with my magnifying glass. Do you mean that the ceiling is dark? I may not be able to inspect it yet, but I will be able to once I get a stepladder. Point to your evidence that the room is actually dark." How would you respond, if not by taking away the magnifying glass and imploring him to look at the room as you do? What specific object could you possibly point to as proof that the room is dark on his terms? Would not your partner, dependent on the magnifying glass as he seems to be, respond to your efforts to persuade him to lay it aside as invitations to become blind and despair of any effort to make sense of the room?

I know it's a bit of a contrived example. The magnifying glass is scientific inquiry and the darkness of the room is the existence of God. No specific bit of evidence "proves" that the room is dark, but from your perspective the claim "the room is dark" has great explanatory power for the difficulty in seeing anything clearly. By trying to fit your claim into his system of discovering and evaluating truth, your partner makes it unintelligible and unbelievable to himself. Different belief (or nonbelief) systems change how you view the evidence. Every worldview looks consistent and sensible to itself while the others look unfounded and false; if you refuse to look outside your own, you will never consider or understand others.

Dan Barker asserts that while Christianity, with its claims of higher knowledge not based on any specific evidence, is unfalsifiable, while atheism is exquisitely falsifiable. He says that he would believe in God if, say, someone predicted to him the exact time of impact, trajectory, and composition of a meteorite. Would you, Dan? Or would you believe in radically powerful telescopes and computer simulations, or that time travel will be invented someday? Aren't those more likely than the existence of God? Jesus said that if someone won't listen to the scriptures, even someone rising from the dead wouldn't be enough to convince them (Luke 16:31). And He was right! (Matthew 28:15 and all the present-day atheological explanations for the resurrection)

For fairness' sake, there are also abundant examples today of the opposite error, subjugating the realm of lower knowledge to the higher. Consider the dichotomy often thrown around in more conservative Christian circles along the lines of: "What do you believe: your experience or the Word of God?" As if you had to deny one for the other! As I've argued, the Bible should shape how we interpret our experience, not simply contradict it; the one is constructive and leads to growth, the other is destructive and leads to frustration. This assumption is one of the foundations for the submerged anti-intellectualism that exists in much of popular Christianity. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash aptly explains the frustration critical thinkers have with this: "Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in most Christian churches has nothing to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all realize this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in peoples' minds."

Applications for Conversation

In light of all this, I have some modest proposals for how conversations between believers and skeptics in the modern, western world can be improved. First, for Christians, because I feel more comfortable critiquing my own faith:

1. Apologists, keep in mind the limitations of logical "proofs" and arguments for the existence of God. As I stated above, your system of higher knowledge--your explanatory "worldview" determines what you make of things like the Big Bang, abiogenesis, "fine-tuning", and other such pieces of evidence. If there really were an airtight, universally understandable proof for God, everyone would believe by now. And seriously, the ontological argument is pretty ridiculous.
2. More generally, realize that apologetics is about more than logic, reason, evidence, and argument. It seems from these emphases like we have largely allowed skeptics to set the terms and format for how the dialogue between us and them plays out. At the core of it, I think apologetics is really about conversation, relationship, and showing nonbelievers the character of Christ--to attract people to Jesus, not to argue them to Him. If I really respect and admire someone's character, I am highly inclined to listen to and consider what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. For people to understand the gospel, they have to first want to understand it. This was true for Jesus and certainly true for us.
3. Don't assume things about nonbelievers' reasons for their views, and don't claim to know "the truth" about what's going on. Dan Barker was rather indignant about this. People would tell him that he just didn't want to believe, needed to have more faith, ask the reason he stopped believing (as if there was just one), said God was testing him, etc. When you know Someone who professes to be "the Truth" and meet someone who doesn't, it's easy to let it go to your head. Paul's speech in Acts 17 is an excellent (albeit culturally contextualized) example of what it looks like to address nonbelievers from "where they're at", not where you're at.
4. Make every effort to understand nonbelievers and build relationships. Realize that atheists aren't God-hating, baby-eating, child-corrupting monsters from out east; by and large, they are intelligent, thoughtful people quite capable of living (by "Christian" standards) upright lives. They aren't amoral, they don't just refuse to believe, and they may not consciously dislike Jesus. Humanism doesn't just mean believing whatever you want, and throwing Romans 1:21 or Colossians 2:8 out there is not a good way to refute it.
5. This is a big one: do not minimize or dismiss honest questions and doubts people are having about God. (Distinguishing honest doubts from theological potshots takes wisdom) Countless ex-Christians became so because their questions about God, the Bible, or the church were met by "You just have to have faith", "Don't question God", or "God works in mysterious ways" instead of by honest answers. We are failing these people and it burdens me. Once you get those relationships and dialogues with skeptics going, you can start actually listening to their questions and doubts and addressing them. God doesn't need us to protect the truth, He wants us to question and investigate it for ourselves, and skeptics can teach us a thing or two about this process if we will listen.

And for skeptics:

1. Realize that your epistemological approach of subjecting everything to rational inquiry and demands for evidence is not the "obvious", "sensible", "logical", or "default" approach that everyone else needs to conform to. Something can be true without being fully explainable or provable empirically. (Consider looking for examples of things you believe without proof)
2. Logical fallacies can be helpful guides to truth, but they can also be tools for short-circuiting debates and "winning" them without convincing anyone but yourself. Their application is subjective: what looks to a Christian like you are arguing against a straw representation of their beliefs might look to you like a "no true Christian" fallacy or ad hoc sophistry on their part. If a belief isn't explainable in your system of truth, could true attempts to explain it look to you like logical fallacies?
3. Realize that there are options in between believing only what can be empirically/rationally proven and making up whatever garbage you want. I've found that perceived dichotomies between my position and the "wrong" one like this can indicate that I'm thinking in too few dimensions. Some Christians hold a similar view, only with basing all knowledge on the Bible.
4. If you must insist that witnesses for truth be rational and unbiased, practice what you preach. Stop caricaturing the beliefs you are arguing against, using dismissive language, and in general acting just as much like you have a monopoly on truth as Christian fundamentalists. Having my intelligence insulted and my faith called a "cult" offhand does not make me more disposed to take you seriously. When you say, "God/Christianity is incoherent and meaningless", I get that you aren't inclined to look into what Christians really believe and how it is coherent to them.
5. Be willing to take seriously the fact that many professing Christians are highly educated, even in the same fields (biology, philosophy, physics, Biblical criticism, history...) you are using to argue against Christianity, and that most Christians don't feel a need to read up on all the evidence on these things because they trust the word of these experts. For example, some atheists I've talked to act like there is no debate at all on the "fact" that the gospels are embellished second-century forgeries, even though I am inclined to side with Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger who argue convincingly and substantively to the contrary. If the experts don't all agree, why do we need to? If I said that because Einstein, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, believed the theory of relativity, it was true, you would rightly point of that I was making an appeal to authority. But most people do believe the theory of relativity is true because of the expert witness of scientists like Einstein rather than by consulting the evidence and reading the papers themselves, and no one really questions it. There is a difference between justified belief and objective truth.

The Limits of Doubt

I used to be afraid to read books or talk to people that were critical of or hostile towards Christianity, as many of you may be. I was afraid they would lead me to doubt or even walk away from my faith--but after I'd already struggled so much with my own doubt, they ended up having the opposite effect. Mainly by presenting me with what appeared to be the logical conclusion of doubting and questioning, and compelling me to figure out why I yet disagreed with it. And, as a counterbalancing force to my doubt, came a deeper satisfaction in what and Who I believe and the admission that He has all the answers, not me. So, on top of everything else, I started questioning my doubts. I realized that sometimes to answer questions, it's myself, not just my understanding, that needs to change. As I hope I've shown in this post, that questioning has led to a richer, more encompassing, more intellectually satisfied faith.

Two Parables

One of the most common ways Jesus taught was by parable. ("Parabolic", instead of "hyperbolic" speech, though He certainly used that too) Parables are extended analogies used to make a point about a subject that may be hard to grasp when talked about normally (such as the kingdom of God) in plain, everyday speech. Though the format can seem similar, they are not allegories where every character and story element has a spiritual analog. The Bible says Jesus spoke in parables rather than plainly when teaching so only those who actively sought to understand His teaching would be able to do so. Another reason, I think, is that parables are good at catching people "off guard" by getting them to consider a subject from a perspective that they normally wouldn't. At least, that's my hope with this post.

As I argued in my response to Dan Barker's book, the interface between Christians and atheists can't simply be argumentation and debate. Actual, mutual understanding is needed (and atheists can't simply claim to already have this understanding by virtue of formerly being Christians). Christian "apologetics" should not simply be studying how to craft the perfect argument to persuade skeptics and detractors; it should be the pursuit of dialogue and real relationships with people of different beliefs than yourself. Promoting understanding, not persuasion, is the goal of the following two parables.

Disclaimer: The following parable requires some basic knowledge of calculus to fully appreciate. If you're feeling rusty, please review the basics of differentiation and integration.

Dedifferentiated

Suppose, in some kind of alternate reality, mathematics was not pursued by science and engineering but by religion. Specifically, you have been raised in the holy faith of calculus. which believes that the culmination of all mathematics is the laws laid down by the great mathematician Isaac Newton. At your church, the preaching, teaching, and fellowship all revolve around the proclamation of the following eight laws, which you have been taught from childhood and which are supposed to be able to explain all manner of differentiation and integration.

Eight laws, four for differentiation and four perfectly matched ones for its inverse, integration. (It's true that the last of each law can be derived from the others) The two are perfect inverses of each other, and with the power of both every mathematical mystery can be answered. You gather weekly to remind each other of these laws, apply them to your lives, and sing praises to the great father Newton who derived them.

One day, feeling curious and less than satisfied with what you've been taught about the clarity, harmony, and sufficiency of these laws, you decide to try to apply them all by yourself. You quickly run into difficulty. You try testing the inverse relationship of differentiation and integration on a simple function, but get the following by applying the laws:

Wait a minute. You differentiated and integrated x squared, but you just got x back, even ignoring the extraneous C. How are they perfect inverses of each other? Moving on and hoping it will make sense later, you try plotting x squared and its derivative next to each other.

More confusion! Isn't the derivative supposed to be the rate of change of a function? If the graph of x squared is curved, that means its rate of change is, well, changing! And yet the derivative is a flat line, a constant 1! How can this be? Poking around in your holy scripture, you even find functions like logarithms that don't seem to have any way of being differentiated or integrated at all!

You arrange a meeting with your pastor for some answers. You show him your calculations, you show him the pages with the odd functions in your Bible. He closes his eyes, sighs, and shakes his head. He says, "Newton sometimes works in mysterious ways. For now, it is ours to have faith in the perfect correctness and completeness of the revelation he has given us, and to trust that one day he will make everything clear."

You don't find this answer very helpful or even credible at all. If calculus is so correct and complete, worked out by the smartest man who ever lived, why does it seem like it has contradictions and flaws, and why doesn't even your pastor know about it? You decide to turn to the internet, posting your questions on some calculus forums in hope that someone else out there has the right answers, though you're starting to wonder if there is no "right answer".

But the answers aren't much more helpful either. Some internet mathematicians say that these questions, don't bother them because they "feel in their heart of hearts" that Newton's system is correct and complete. Some make wild arguments about the order of nature and internet stories of people seeing Newton's laws show up on their toast. Some intellectual types try to redirect your questions or answer ones you never asked, explaining from their ivory tower that your church's teaching isn't true to Newton and drawing up pages of proofs and derivations of their supposedly-perfect system from algebra (if Newton was real, why would he make the truth so incomprehensibly complicated?). Some go on the offensive, asking, "How dare you question Newton?"

You start broadening your search, asking liberal mathematicians who only accept the first two laws and even followers of the antimathematician Leibniz you once considered heretics, but really it's starting to seem like there is no grand, mathematical system for finding derivatives and integrals. You finally reject the faith you once held and decide to pursue an BA in English.

This parable is largely a response to the other atheist book I read, Deconverted by Seth Andrews. He describes four kinds of people he interacted with in his doomed search for answers, represented above: the feeler, the folklorist, the theologian, and the foot soldier. Obviously I would fall into the theologian category. It sounds like Andrews saw the (partially true) answers the theologian types were giving him as overcomplicated, overconfident, grasping-at-straws attempts to explain away what he saw as increasingly obvious evidence for Christianity being a bunch of baloney. The parable is an attempt to show what this might have looked like to the theologians he was talking to--an unreasonable demand to have truth conform to expectations of simplicity and rejection of evidence that said otherwise as "explaining away' the obvious. (e.g. answering some Biblical questions by bringing up the need to read the Bible in its original context, which he dismisses but which I see as "obvious")

A New Sect of Islam

Suppose that in the near future, in Iran, a new sect of Islam emerged. This movement worshipped a previously little-known, poor, itinerant Muslim imam (teacher) named Isa. This man's life was little-documented at the time, but he was believed to have been stoned to death as a heretic in 1980, the early days of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Isa had been killed for claiming to be God, unthinkable blasphemy in Islam, but nonetheless after his death the cult he had led continued to persist and even grow, proclaiming that Isa really was God and was equal in stature with Allah, though somehow, mysteriously, one in spirit with him. Despite continuing, fierce persecution, the cult of Isa continued to spread, both inside and outside Iran, in the east and the west, converting not just Muslims but people or all faiths, finally gaining widespread, international attention in the present day.

Obviously not all of the parts of this story align perfectly with the gospel accounts. The point is that the emergence and persistence of an Islamic sect that holds a multipersonal view of God is just as unthinkable today as the emergence of a Jewish sect that held a multipersonal view of God in the first century. Judaism and Islam are both strongly monotheistic religions. The very existence of such an offshoot sect begs the question, how can this religion have possibly formed around a belief that completely flies in the face of the most cherished beliefs of its parent religion, and how can it possibly continue to hold traction and convert believers of this parent religion?

Again, to use another analogy, this would be like an explosively popular Christian denomination emerging, converting many existing Christians, while proclaiming that we should actually be worshipping Michael, with God as his assistant. It's that different. Atheists, who are inclined to see all religion as equally superstitious nonsense held by people who will believe anything, may not see any difficulty with how this could happen, but in my opinion it is even harder to explain than the resurrection accounts.

Responses to "Godless" by Dan Barker

I've been reading a book that I doubt many Christians have read. That book is Godless, by Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

I first heard of Dan Barker in college (my sophomore year, I think) when Cru and CASH (Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists) co-hosted a debate between him and Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza. At the time, the very existence of people like Barker who went from being believers "just like me" to staunch atheists genuinely frightened me. Copies of this book were on sale after the debate, but I stayed well away. I think it's an indicator of growth that I've now not only bought bought the book but find it fascinating, if challenging and troubling. Unlike most of the books I post about, I wouldn't recommend it to every Christian.

Barker divides the book into four sections: his personal "testimony" of de-conversion, his reasons for not believing in God and refutations of lots of apologetic arguments, his arguments against Christianity, and his life as part of the "new atheism" movement. It's a tough read because there are nuggets of truth that Christians need to hear in the midst of seas of statements and arguments I disagree with. I've learned a lot from reading it, though (as is often the case) not what the author was trying to teach.

I mostly bought the book for the first part, which takes up surprisingly little of its length. I was interested in the similarities and differences (for clearly there had to be some) between "deconversion stories" and my own struggles with doubt. Clearly our stories had to diverge at some point, but where?

Early Life

In the first part, it soon became clear that Dan Barker as a Christian, was never "just like me". He grew up in a highly charismatic, fundamentalist branch of evangelicalism that focused on spiritual experiences and gifts and believed that since Jesus was coming back in the next decade or two, now was the time not to make any preparations for the future but to win souls. He decided to start preaching at the age of 15--because "I didn't think the world would last long enough for me to go to college or get married or raise a family". Trusting in God to come through despite his youth and lack of experience, he would go on frequent soul-winning expeditions in southern California and Mexico, trying to convert the unchurched and Catholics, bringing the Truth to poor, lost souls. He used his talent for music in church, revivals, and faith healing sessions, as well as writing Christian songs and musicals. He was "the kind of guy you would not want to sit next to on a bus."

Eventually he did get married and, rather than settle down and focus on providing for his family, stayed on the road, working with her as "musical evangelists" from church to church while supplementing their living writing and producing Christian music. He describes one particular incident that summed up his "life by faith". While driving he heard a voice saying "turn right". So he turned right, into some farmland. He kept following these directions by faith, excited to see what God had in store for him at the end, until he arrived at a dead end in a cornfield. When nothing came of this, he realized God had merely been testing his faithfulness and obedience!

Deconversion

Barker is clear that his apostasy was a gradual process; he didn't suddenly realize that God didn't exist. He seems to view fundamentalism at one end of a spectrum that he gradually slid down via a series of concessions, through moderate and liberal Christianity to agnosticism and atheism. The first step came when he decided to maintain fellowship with some Christians who didn't believe Adam and Eve were historical people, despite thinking they were "lukewarm" (Revelation 3:15-16) in their liberal beliefs. For the first time, at around 30 years old, he started asking questions (not having doubts) about Christianity, feeding an intellectual hunger he'd been ignoring for years in his fundamentalism and evangelizing. He started reading philosophy, science publications, psychology, and the newspaper(!), seeking an intellectual dimension to his faith that had been missing. At each little step, he thought his faith was being strengthened or maturing, "when it was actually my knowledge that was being strengthened." This perception is troublingly like what I've been doing lately. (I don't consider this ominous, but it raises the question of whether my story is just his at an intermediate stage)

He also began studying what Christians of other traditions and denominations believed and realized that  "there is no single Christianity--there are thousands of Christianities", each with their own, "correct" theology and interpretation of the Bible. This denominational pluralism clashed with how he knew that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Corinthians 14:33). How could they all be right? To me, this seems like the result of a very simplistic view on hermeneutics that views the Bible as existing primarily to define a single, precise body of doctrine--if this precision and univocality are absent, as they seem to be, then clearly the Bible and (God, its heavenly author) has failed at its purpose.

Anyway, Barker began to swing across the theological spectrum from fundamentalism to liberal theology. One day, while driving and arguing with God and himself about emotion and reason, he had one thought that seemed to come from the voice of honesty, not God: "Something is wrong. Admit it." It was then that he committed to "follow reason and evidence wherever they might lead, even if it meant taking me away from my cherished beliefs".

He started thinking of different denominations as being distinguished by where they drew the line between essential and nonessential doctrines. He was drawing this line higher and higher, "discarding many lesser doctrines as either nonessential or untrue." (I'm not sure how considering a doctrine nonessential equates to discarding it) He came to respect the more liberal theologians he was reading rather than seeing them as evil heretics, even while not agreeing with them fully.

He began questioning not just his beliefs, but his inner spiritual experiences. Interestingly, he claims to be able to duplicate those feelings and experiences today, which of course raised doubts as to their authenticity. If so many people of other faiths could be wrong about these experiences, why not him as well? He started having doubts that a personal God really existed at all. He describes the process of reason taking the place of faith and the Bible in his life as being like a fossil slowly turning to stone. Here his perceived dichotomy between faith and reason is clear. "Where did we get the idea that words on a page speak truth? Shouldn't truth be the result of investigation and analysis?" To look at the issue from all sides, he began reading books by non-Christian authors with "facts that discredited Christianity", which he tried to ignored because they didn't fit with his religious worldview. "Faith and reason began a war within me". He kept crying out to God for answers to these questions--just as I have done--but none came. This is one of the hardest parts of the book to read as a believer. Why me and not him? I don't think I am qualified to answer.

The only answer he saw from Christianity was "faith", which became to him like a "cop-out, a defeat--an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason. It is only indemonstrable assertions that require the suspension of reason, and weak ideas that require faith." It seems like he saw faith and reason at this point as diametrically opposed, and saw an undeniable need to make a choice between them. He makes it clear that this choice was not easy--"It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. It hurt badly." All the connections and the career he had built on his faith made it harder. and choose he did. "I did not lose my faith--I gave it up purposely. ... I lost faith in faith."

In answer to my original question of how our stories differ, I think the answer starts with relationship we see between faith and reason. His search for truth seemed to be based almost from the beginning on the belief that faith (which sounds a lot like my definition of blind faith) and reason were fundamentally opposed to each other (see below). My questioning has been guided from the start by the assumption that faith and reason are inextricably linked as two ways of apprehending the same truth, and must either stand together or fall together. My experience has served to reinforce and affirm this assumption, just as it did Barker's. Am I only self-deluded in this? His conclusion that thousands of denominations meant "thousands of Christianities" is also a point of departure; he thought it meant God was divided or confused, I think it means people are divided and confused.

He expressed resentment over a lot of the responses to his apostasy that assumed that he somehow wasn't a "real Christian" or he would never have turned away. And, indeed, no one can no whether his faith was real except God and Dan Barker. But, though he does mention how hard the process was, the fact that it happened and then was over, and that the unpleasantness seemed largely due to the difficulty of completely reorienting one's worldview, seems like a clue. There isn't the kind of bottomless loss or grief I would expect from someone who really believed the gospel, the real gospel, but lost that belief. If I stopped believing Christianity, I would mourn for the rest of my life that a worldview as fundamental and wonderful turned out not to be true. The promise of building a peaceful, rational society of liberty, equality, and prosperity utterly pales in comparison to the glorious, eternal hope Christians hold to.

Atheism and Agnosticism

I'm not going to cover the whole book in that much detail. Parts 2 and 3, which take up most of its length, are persuasive, not narrative, and I'm going to be selective about what I respond to in no particular order. For a while he argues more philosophically about his reasons for atheism and against Christian apologetic arguments. One interesting  thing is the difference he draws between agnosticism and atheism, which conflates them more closely than I would. He says "agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief." (I would not draw so sharp a line between knowledge and belief) So, to Barker, being an agnostic means you don't know with reasonable certainty that God exists, and atheism means you don't believe he exists.

He further defines agnosticism as "the refusal to take as a fact any statement for which there is insufficient evidence"--which is much closer to my definition of skepticism. In my view, agnosticism is simply the lack of knowledge of (or belief in) something for whatever reason--the statement, "I don't know." (Which seems closer to the Greek root of agnosticism, a-, meaning "without", and gnosis, meaning "knowledge", but anyway) Atheism, then, is not knowledge or a religion but simply a lack of belief. He distinguishes between the soft, "small-a" atheism he holds and the hard, "capital-A" atheism that positively denies the existence of a God. (Of course, in all the rest of his rhetoric Barker assumes the nonexistence of God, so he doesn't seem very on-the-fence about the question)

The Burden of Proof

Anyway, this contrasts interestingly with my argument that moving either way from the purely agnostic position of claiming no knowledge about the existence or nonexistence of God requires a reason (the "burden of proof"), and I know of no reasons to move towards belief in the nonexistence of God. He would say that everyone agrees without argument that the natural universe exists, but that anything beyond this is not obvious and needs to be proven. "We should start with nature. We should start with the nonexistence of God and then the believer should argue for God's existence, not demands that atheists argue against it. The burden of proof in any argument is on the shoulders of the one who makes the affirmative claim, not the one who doubts it." This is a clever, almost undetectable bit of philosophical sleight-of-hand. Barker conflates the agnostic, "I don't know whether God exists or not" view with the negative, "I don't know that God exists, so prove it" view. Since the existence of God and the supernatural are not obvious, the reasoning goes, we should assume they don't exist and work from there. While claiming to be correcting Christians who were misusing the "burden of proof" argument, Barker misuses it himself.

Cosmological "Kalamity"

The Kalām cosmological argument for the existence of God is the reason I know I will never be an atheist (at worst, a deist), so I was interested enough to see what Barker had to say about it than I read ahead to that chapter. I can't say I was disappointed that his argument against it wasn't very convincing. The basic thrust of the argument can be summed up with the question, "Where did the universe come from?" In more logical terms, as apologist and philosopher William Lane Craig puts it:

1. Everything that begins to exist had a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

Barker argues that Kalam begs the question (presupposes the existence of God) with some set-theoretical smoke and mirrors. He says it implies that the first step of the argument assumes that reality can be divided into two sets: things than began to exist (BE), and an implied set of things that didn't. (NBE) For the argument to work, he says, NBE must not be empty and must accommodate (conceivable contain) more than one item (God). If NBE only accommodates God, it is effectively synonymous with God and so Kalam implicitly begs the question, assuming that God exists in its formulation.

Notice how Barker has to transform the argument to get to this point. First, he assumes it is making a statement in set theory, even though the original, Islamic argument greatly predates set theory and the argument can just as easily be stated with propositional logic without sets.

1. If something began to exist, it had a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

The only thing this version says about NBE is the contrapositive of the first statement: "If something did not have a cause, then it did not begin to exist." Then he begins to reason "behind the scenes" of the set theory version of Kalam and base his whole argument about a purely implicit set (NBE) that the argument itself says nothing about. It's hard for me to believe that Kalam "begs the question" if if can conceivably be transformed into a form that does so, no matter how much work it takes to get there. It's also debatable in the first version whether NBE should also include things that did not begin to exist and don't exist, like dragons, in which case it certainly accommodates things more than one item. As well, even if all his set theory logic is correct and the argument does assume an implicit set NBE that only accommodates God, it does not "beg the question" of God's existence; it only assumes the existence of a concept of a beginningless first cause (who himself may or may not exist) that is coherent enough to be reasoned about. Reasoning about God is not the same as assuming his existence. If Barker really thinks existence is a property that God has, maybe he'll be convinced by the ontological argument?

He then gets at more of the argument's premises. He argues that Kalam is self-refuting or internally inconsistent, based solely on a materialistic understanding of the cosmos and reality. "If an actual infinity cannot be a part of reality, then God, if he is actually infinite, cannot exist." If we use words like "decided" and "create" differently than how they are used to describe human actions, he says, they are meaningless and worthless. So if something is incomprehensible to us (or to Dan Barker), it is meaningless and can't be true; apparently the presence of mystery in Christianity is enough to condemn it. He argues that the impossibility of traversing an infinite amount of time also applies to God's non-temporal existence, so God had to begin to exist. He says that existing "outside of time" is impossible: "To say that God does not exist within space-time is to say that God does not exist." (How is this not begging the question of metaphysical naturalism?) None of these arguments should be convincing in the least to Christians.

Lastly, again restricting Kalam to being defined in set-theoretical terms, he says that the universe is not a "thing" and is the "set of all things", so it is not part of "everything that began to exist" and applying the first statement to it is like comparing apples and oranges. I'm really not sure why the universe must be a set and not a "thing", and I have no problems with treating it as such. As well, there are versions of the cosmological argument that only refer to objects within the universe rather than to the universe as a whole; Barker pays them no attention. Throughout the chapter, he either misses or refuses to address the real force of the question: "How did space, time, and everything begin to exist?" or simply "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and its implications.

Faith vs. Reason?

It seems that the wedge of evidence that led Barker away from faith was driven into the dichotomy he saw (and still sees) between faith and reason, or belief and knowledge. He views reason as the gaining of truth from empirical evidence and logical reasoning. Faith, then, is just the opposite, believing claims without this sufficient evidence. He claims this willingness to believe without evidence is not only foolish, but even dangerous: "Without faith, anything goes" is a phrase he repeats several times. If you believe without having sufficient evidence, the thinking goes, you can believe anything you want and no one can disprove you! "With faith, everybody is right." (This is a slippery slope fallacy)

Unfortunately, many Christians (like Barker as a Christian) also perceive this false dichotomy between faith and reason. I randomly stumbled upon a blog post that expresses it from a Christian perspective: "Truth doesn’t need credentials, it just needs to be believed."

Attacking Biblical morality

Much of the third part (arguments against Christianity) contains Barker's issues with the view of morality presented in the Bible. Bizarre rules with disportionate penalties (Numbers 15:32-36), lots of smiting (in the KJV), God-sanctioned violence, and seeming disregard for human rights--it's easy to see how a modern, skeptical reader would find these things detestable. Barker contrasts this with the humanistic view of morality, which "comes from within humanity" and "implies avoiding or minimizing harm". Later he says it is "simply acting with the intention to minimize harm". He resents the common apologetic jab leveled against atheists that without God, there is no way to hold to any system of morality. The humanistic system of morality Barker presents is simple and, I think, inernally consistent.

But I think this question still has significance. Yes, humanists like Barker are able to develop and hold a nice-sounding, coherent definition of morality. But, unless they already agree, why should anyone listen? What makes this picture of morality, centered around the value of minimizing harm to living beings, any more "right" than any other that could conceivably be proposed? Consider ancient Near East cultures, where the highest "moral" values were legitimation of the reign of the king and giving honor to the gods. What gives humanists any right to judge this morality as any better or worse than their own? Because it contradicts theirs? (But the ANE cultures could say the same thing) Could the humanistic valuing of prevention of harm above all else be just as culturally conditioned as ANE cultures' devotion to gods and king? For this reason among others, his constant comparing of the moral values seen in the Bible with humanism or common sense fall rather flat. If you claim reason has a monopoly on morality, your claim is at least as arbitrary as Christians who claim that God does. (Of course from within the humanistic worldview this questioning of ancient morality is quite justified, but the same could be said of judging humanism from a Christian perspective)

Barker also shows that he doesn't seem to understand how Christian ethics actually work. To him, Christian morality is based entirely on blind, unquestioning obedience to absolute, timeless commands issued by ultimate authority. Christian love is not authentic; it is "because God said so". He asks Christians in debates, "If God told you to kill me, would you do it?" and points to the ultimate answer of "Yes" by some of his opponents as evidence of Christianity's depravity. If God told me to kill someone, I would seriously question whether it was actually God speaking to me, or check myself into a mental hospital!

Bible Contradictions

I won't go over his chapter on Bible contradictions (most of which I was already aware of) in too much detail. It was a mixture of uncovering real tensions in the Bible (which he says immediately undermine its credibility) and blatant misreadings that are often based on the specific wording of the KJV (which he uses exclusively). e.g. Saying that John 8:14 ("Though I bear record of myself, [yet] my record is true") contradicts John 5:31 ("If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true."), even though in 5:31 Jesus is stating an untrue hypothetical ("I" is implied to mean "I alone") and He is in fact making the same argument in both passages. These misreadings were somewhat surprising as he does demonstrate some hermeneutical ability, including Hebrew and Greek word studies, elsewhere.

Denying Christ

He also argues that Jesus probably did not actually exist, and even if He did the accounts of His resurrection are myths. (Taking the fourth option, "legend", in C.S. Lewis' "lord, liar, or lunatic" trilemma) I'm not sure Barker is aware, but Lewis actually does address this possibility in his essay, "What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?"

What are we do to about reconciling the two contradictory phenomena [Jesus' moral teaching and claims to be God]? One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. this is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God--that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.

Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

Barker also argues that the existence of miracles make the gospels unhistorical; that is, because miracles have not been credibly observed, they can be assumed to be extremely rare, if nonexistent, so accounts with miracles in them are more likely to be myths or fabrications than true. "History is limited; it can only confirm events that conform to natural regularity." He quotes David Hume: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." And Hume elsewhere in his essay On Miracles writes:

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as could possibly be imagined.

I would recommend that Barker read more of Lewis, who in his book Miracles also directly addresses this argument:

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely "uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

He goes on to argue, in more words, that the naturalistic assumption that nature is uniform ("natural regularity") which Hume assumes cannot be known except by circular reasoning: "Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything." And, "No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated."

One other thing of mention is that, while going over possible naturalistic explanations for the resurrection, Barker brings up the "swoon theory". This is the theory that after the ordeal of being starved, severely flogged, crucified, and impaled by professional executioners, after lying in a tomb with no food, water, or medical attention for over 24 hours, Jesus somehow started feeling well enough to escape and convince people He had "miraculously" risen from the dead. This is absurd. Barker calls out Christians for applying "healthy" skepticism to other religions but not their own, but here shows himself to be similarly selective.

Materialistic Epistemology

Though he never explicitly explains it, I think I arrived at a decent understanding of the worldview Barker is writing from. Since all we can directly see evidence for is the natural world and evidence for the supernatural is sparse and explained more easily by naturalistic explanations, it is unjustifiable to assume that anything beyond the material world exists. Since science and reason have proven to be by far the most useful tool we have in understanding the natural world (i.e. the universe), they are the best possible yardstick by which to measure all claims of truth. Religions fails miserably at meeting the criteria for a good explanation of phenomena like being falsifiable, simple, and internally coherent, so it should be discarded. Morality should be defined in terms of measurable, even quantifiable effects, with the goal being to minimize harm to living beings like humans.

I think many "endless debates" are endless because what is always discussed is not the underlying assumptions by which the disparate positions differ, but the implications and results from reasoning by those assumptions. So with Calvinism and Arminianism, where (I have found) the real difference lies in underlying philosophies of free will, determinism, and God's sovereignty, but what it usually debated and contrasted are the five points. And so with the theism-atheism conversation. I think the deepest difference between the above way of thinking and Christianity (I won't speak for other worldviews) is one of epistemology--the study of knowledge and how we come by it.

Atheism enthrones human rationality, human senses, human understanding as the ultimate standard of truth. The only valid conclusions are those that can be based on empirical evidence that is developed via sound, tried-and-true reasoning. The body of truth and knowledge begins with our senses and expands outward from us via reason. The scope of truth is that which can, potentially, be observed or induced from evidence. Logical devices like Occam's Razor are assumed to be universally applicable and binding. The supernatural, by definition that which is not part of nature and cannot be directly sensed, can safely be assumed not to exist because we can't directly sense it. So religion, which makes claims that can't easily (or at all) be supported by evidence seems absurd.

Christianity, on the other hand, believes that the human intellect and senses are not perfect and that the nexus of truth is located outside (and is larger than) ourselves, though it is still possible to interact with it (and the natural world) via reason. The empirical-rational epistemology of atheism is not wrong, but incomplete, and the mistake is in making it the scope of what can be considered true. I'm especially confused as to how atheists can claim to know so much about what is true while believing that their "knowledge" is a series of biochemical reactions in the brain that has evolved to be able to parallel situations in the material universe. In this view, why should these chemical reactions be able to "work" when dealing in abstractions or things not directly sensed? 

Conclusions

The above was not meant as a comprehensive refutation of Godless, just as an intellectually honest response to the book as I read it and an encouragement to Christians who may be afraid of reading the views of atheists. But I am a bit nervous about including it because what I ultimately got out of this book is rather opposed to it. Which is simply this: the basis for Christianity's relationship with atheists cannot, cannot, cannot simply be debates and conversion attempts. Christian apologetical arguments, which are presented as valuable tools to correct the falsehoods believed by atheists and bring them to the truth, are revealed, by actually reading the thoughts of an atheist, to largely be tired, smart-sounding,  slogans being thrown around in an echo chamber, unaware that many of them as stated are completely unpersuasive to actual skeptics.

Godless begins with a rather off-putting, acerbic foreword by Richard Dawkins who, in the most condescending terms possible, expresses the need to actually understand Christians in order to reason with them. And Dawkins is right. Relationships between these two disparate worldviews can't be built on canned arguments and intellectual potshots aimed more at readers within the writer's own community than at the other one. Real dialogue and mutual understanding are necessary. Simply confronting the naturalistic worldview from the perspective of our own is not sufficient. For example, atheists like Barker don't see themselves as hopelessly lost, rebels, depraved sinners, etc., so addressing them as such is at best counterproductive, at most hurtful, even if we think we're being loving by presenting the truth to them.

In a sense, there is a difference between belief and knowledge, as Barker argues. If we dialogue with atheists while "knowing" we Christians are right, that we alone have the truth and anyone who disagrees is wrong, end of story, so therefore atheists must be proved wrong on every point...well, you can see how this "dialogue" would be a sham. Atheists, with their exaltation of reason and disregard for superstition, are guilty of this as well, even in this book, which is happy to evaluate Christianity almost entirely according to humanistic morals and naturalistic reasoning. By allowing "orthodoxy" to dictate that Christians must be right and atheists wrong, we lose the ability to learn from them. I think the very existence of a "Freedom from Religion Foundation" is not simply an occasion to cite Matthew 5:11 and consider ourselves blessed, but a sobering indication that something may be wrong with Christianity in America. Barker's synonymous usage of the terms "freethinker" and "atheist" should be an indication that our way of reading John 8:32 as emphasizing the need to believe the right things may need to be rethought. Critiques of the church are not automatically sin or persecution, no matter where they come from. If Barker allowed some credibility to the Bible, he might have closed as I am about to, by citing James 3:17: "But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere."