Atheism And The Case Against Christ by Matthew McCormick

Author:Matthew McCormick [McCormick, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2012-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

ATHEISM

In chapter 1, I said that many aspects of the argument against Christianity and the resurrection could be expanded into a broader argument for atheism. Now we can see one of those expansions. Notice that the problem of divine hiddenness or the argument from nonbelief works against other religions, too. In fact, if you are a Christian, it may work even better. That is, suppose that a Muslim insists that Allah is real and that, furthermore, Allah has goals and plans for us, there are things he wants from us, he wants us to believe in him, he wants us to become Muslims and acknowledge that Muhammad is his one and only Prophet, and so on. The internal inconsistency of the position ought to be troubling. If Allah is a real, all-powerful being, then it would be a trivial matter for him to achieve those goals better than he has. If you are a Christian, or if you are a non-Muslim, you probably deem the plausibility of Islam to be low. You don't accept those claims, you don't have those beliefs, and you don't have the recommended sort of relationship to Allah. If Allah is what they say he is, then he could have done more to help us reach the desired state of believing. Assuming he is real, it would be perverse, capricious, and unjust for Allah to then judge you and condemn you for failing to believe. So these facts suggest that what the Muslim is saying about Allah's power and goals must be mistaken. There's something deeply amiss in the internal coherence of the story. And that contradiction counts against the plausibility of the story.

So the argument against Islam may help the Christian to see the problem with the internal logic of the scenario she is arguing for. And if it works with Islam, then it works against Christianity and any religious doctrine that claims some powerful divine being is real. The problem casts suspicion on every religious movement that asserts the existence of a being whose existence could have been more obvious and that has the power to bring it about. Why are all of the gods hiding? Without satisfying answers to that question, being doubtful about the existence of such gods is justified. The believing Christian now must argue on non-ad-hoc grounds, and without special pleading, that there are absolving reasons that explain away this internal problem for Christianity and that those same absolving reasons cannot apply to Islam and other religions.

The advocate for the historical resurrection of Jesus is in a serious bind. He's got to maintain first that the historical evidence shows us that the resurrection is real and second that the God responsible for the resurrection is one who is capable of making that historical evidence much better than it is but didn't. He's got to argue that we should believe the contentious and weak case for the resurrection, but, furthermore, we should not be puzzled by the weakness of that argument in the light of God's omnipotence.

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