If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: people who don’t believe evolution don’t understand evolution. Have you heard it too? At its root, this is nothing more than a No True Scotsman's argument (that is, everyone who understands evolution believes it), but the reason it continues to be used is because it seems to shift the burden of proof away from the critic. In other words, it’s not that atheists can’t explain their theories - it’s that creationists can’t understand them. Um, no. I think it’s 100% that atheists can’t explain their theories.
Atheists often claim they simply lack a belief in God. They should call themselves agnostic but they don’t. Instead, they pretend they’re merely withholding judgment about the existence of God until they see evidence for Him. I recently discussed the problem with this position and pointed out that their lack of belief in God necessarily requires a belief in something. If you press them with reasonable questions - like where did everything come from? - they often respond with an uncommitted, “I don’t know.” Other times, they throw out terms like evolution, the Big Bang, or science.
It’s my belief that not only do unbelievers have no good answers to questions about origins, the vast majority of them don’t even understand the answers they give. Further, I think creationists reject the arguments of skeptics because the creationists understand the issues better than they do! I don’t reject evolution, for example, because I don’t understand it; I reject it because I do understand it and I can see that it’s absurd!
To that end, I thought it would be fun to compile a list of questions I’d like unbelievers to answer. Skeptics often publish lists of questions under headlines like, “Questions no Christian can answer” but ignore the hundreds of answers that they’ve already heard. So even though I’m tempted to call this, “Questions no atheist can answer,” I won’t. I’ll just ask the questions, and let the sheer weight of their rhetoric weigh on skeptics’ minds. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of questions - it’s only meant to provoke thought.
Let’s get started:
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
Do you believe God doesn’t exist?
If you believe there is no god anywhere, isn’t that a knowledge claim?
If you only claim there is no evidence for God, do you allow for the possibility there could be a god?
Do you believe the scientific methods that we use to study the natural universe are adequate tools to examine the evidence for a supernatural god?
Are miracles evidence for God? If “no,” why not?
THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE
Do you believe it’s more reasonable to believe the universe poofed into existence out of nothing than to believe in an eternal Creator?
If everything poofed into existence at the Big Bang, what prevents new matter/energy from forming out of nothing now? If the universe poofed into existence from nothing, why doesn’t that violate the 1st Law of Thermodynamics (the conservation of matter/energy)?
If you believe energy is eternal, how is that any more scientific than saying God is eternal? If you believe energy is eternal yet hasn’t been completely exhausted (entropy), how is that not like believing in perpetual energy?
ABIOGENESIS
We’ve never observed life being formed from non-living chemicals. If a scientific theory is tested and observed, can there really be a “theory” of abiogenesis?
How is abiogenesis substantially different from spontaneous generation?
If we somehow created metabolic life in a lab, how could we be sure that’s how it supposedly happened in the past?
If we don’t know how life formed in the first place, how could we confidently say God didn’t create it?
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Can something be true if it can’t be demonstrated scientifically?
Is science the only way to determine what is true?
Can a miracle be studied via the scientific method? Is the scientific method an adequate tool to study the supernatural?
How much of science is philosophical rather than testable?
Can the scientific method be used to study historical events or persons?
Is there any scientific evidence that supports the premise that every phenomenon has a natural explanation?
CONCLUSION
These are just a handful of questions I could ask. Do I really need to explain the points behind any of these questions? Where did everything come from? Why are we here? Is there a god? Is there anything beyond the mundane? What is the truth? These are questions that people have asked for all of history. Yet the committed skeptic can only answer any of them with a shrug and dogmatic faith that there is an answer and it’s not God!! They are materialists of the worst sort. They reject the idea of anything beyond the natural, but they cannot offer any compelling reason for why they do so. They claim to believe in “science” but struggle to answer even simple questions about our world. Theirs is a paradigm that claims to seek out “truth” and understand “reality” but fails to do either.
