Atheism in the eyes of serious minds

This is a letter to you, and the first thing in it is a criticism of my own people, not of you.

In its first half I shall say that the picture my people have drawn of you is false, and that its falsity is not a wrong done to you alone but is, before anything else, their own loss. In its second half I shall say that a widespread picture of atheism is not atheism either, that my real opponent in this matter is harder than what is read under his name today, and nobler than him in how he disputes.

And if that picture is not yours, skip the second half; you are not obliged to defend what you do not hold, and I am not setting up a door here to blame whoever did not walk through it.

First: a picture we hold of you, and not a letter of it stands

It is said among us that the atheist is ignorant, or a man of appetite who wanted to be free of restraint, or a man with a grudge against his own family. Three descriptions, said in gatherings and said to be known.

And I do not push them away from you out of charity. I push the first of them away because it can be tested, and it fails. Religious and denominational groups in the United States were surveyed in 2010 on questions about the religions — on scriptures, on schools of thought, on the rulings of religious practice — and the group that scored highest was atheists and agnostics [pew-2010-religious-knowledge].

And I do not bring this forward as evidence that the atheist knows my religion better than I do. The survey was in one country, its measure was a quiz of thirty-two questions, the effect of years of schooling is not isolated in it, and those surveyed are not the people I am addressing: most of the questions are about Christianity and the major religions, and Islam has a bare handful in them.

And it may be said to me: this is not what the preacher means when he says 'ignorant'; he means 'the truth has not reached him'. And he is right in that objection. So I narrow my claim until it becomes a single claim: the one form of the charge that admits of being counted has been counted where counting was possible, and it did not stand. And what remains of it cannot be counted at all — so it ought not to be said in the language of knowledge.

As for 'appetite' and 'grudge', these are not claims at all. They are a reading of intention — and I do not possess your intention, nor does anyone. Whoever claims to know why you left without sitting with you has claimed knowledge of the unseen in a human soul, and that is graver than what he throws at you.

Then this picture has a cost, and the cost falls on the one who says it and not on you, and it is the cost that concerns me: a man who believes his opponent a fool has not prepared for him. He who believes it sits down with someone who has spent ten years on the matter, brings out against him what he picked up in an evening, and is broken in half an hour — and then he does not say 'I fell short', he says 'the doubt is dangerous' and flees the whole subject.

Belittling your opponent is training for a fight with a shadow.

And the strongest thing that pulls this picture down is that on your side are men who spent their lives on this question alone. Graham Oppy went over the most famous arguments for God's existence, critically, in a single scholarly volume [oppy-2006-arguing-gods]. John Mackie wrote a book on ethics that is still taught some fifty years on [mackie-1977-ethics]. William Rowe gave the problem of evil an evidential formulation that changed the field [rowe-1979-varieties]. And Paul Draper built a comparative argument on pain and pleasure that is taught in philosophy departments [draper-1989-pain-pleasure].

And most of what I have come across of our replies to them was not directed at these books, but at summaries of them. That is a heavy sentence, and I say it knowing its weight. And it is testimony about what I have seen, not a census of what has been written; so whoever shows me an Arabic reply that engaged the book in its own place, I withdraw to the measure of what he shows me.

Second: and a picture of atheism, which I pull down as I pulled down my own

Now it is the other side's turn.

Most of what reaches the Arabic reader of atheism today is a single picture: Dawkins and those who ran with him — and I say it as an observation, not a census; so if you have read otherwise then you were past this whole paragraph before it began, and you may skip it. They are eloquent books, widely read. But what I want to put before you is that the objection to them did not come from my side alone.

Thomas Nagel is an atheist, and one of the foremost philosophers of mind of our time. In a review published in 2006 he criticised the central argument of `The God Delusion`, showing that it rests on the assumption that any designing cause must be as complex as the thing it designed — an assumption the believer does not grant in the first place, since the God he believes in is a simple mind and not something assembled out of parts [nagel-2006-fear-of-religion].

And Nagel is not a neutral witness, and I know that. He is an outlier on his own side, and in that same review he says that he does not want the universe to be as naturalism has it, and what he wrote afterwards in `Mind and Cosmos` was answered by his own side before mine [nagel-2012-mind-cosmos]. So choosing him as a witness is a choice of mine, and I declare it.

And Erik Wielenberg is another atheist, who built a complete ethical theory with no God in it [wielenberg-2014-robust], and then gave a peer-reviewed paper over to arguing that Dawkins's argument does not succeed [wielenberg-2009-dawkins-gambit]. And his paper appeared in `Philosophia Christi`, a peer-reviewed journal of Christian orientation. I say so because it is the sort of thing one gets asked about, and because what I am asking of you is that you ask.

And both witnesses are on one argument in one book. So I draw from them no general verdict on a class of books; two criticisms of one passage do not carry a judgement on a library. What I claim is narrower: that the most famous argument in the most famous book was objected to from within that same side, at the level of the craft. So ask about the rest, and do not take from me that the rest is like it.

And the plainest thing in all of this is Oppy's condition. The man is an atheist who went over the arguments one by one and came out at no argument succeeding in either direction — and success, on his account, is to compel a reasonable opponent to grant the conclusion, and that has happened for no one [oppy-2006-arguing-gods].

And this condition cuts on my side before it cuts on yours. If there is no argument that compels, then I hold no argument that compels you. So whoever takes Oppy's condition is bound to come down a notch or two in his language — and I am the first bound by it, and I do not say it against you while exempting myself. Then Oppy himself is an avowed naturalist, who weighs naturalism above theism by the measure of the theoretical virtues — economy of ontology and power of explanation [oppy-2013-best-argument]. So the parity of the arguments on his view is not a parity of the two positions, and the man whose fairness I cite is not in my ranks. And I take his condition from him and do not take his conclusion, and I am telling you that this is what I am doing.

And I do not bring this forward to take from you a book you loved. Popular books do well what academic books do not: they open the door, they take the question out of a closed precinct, and they write in a language that gets read. But their price is that whoever stops at them reckons that the meeting which never took place has taken place and is over.

And say the same of my own side, word for word: whoever has read faith in the books of the pulpit alone has not read the strongest of it, only the most easily spread.

And here is a concession I must state in its own words rather than pass over: the names I brought forward on my side — Swinburne, van Inwagen and Adams — are three western Christian philosophers, in an Arabic letter. And you have every right to ask: where, then, is their counterpart among us? And my answer is that I cannot today put before you a contemporary Arab name who has worked on these very questions with these tools and to whom I can refer you by place and page. There may be one whom I have not reached, and there may not. Either way it is a deficiency on my side, and not an argument against you.

Third: how those who know the craft speak

And this is the point of the whole letter. Not in who speaks, but in how he speaks.

Rowe — who gave the problem of evil its most famous evidential formulation — coined in that same paper the term 'friendly atheism', and held there that the believer may be entirely rational in his belief [rowe-1979-varieties]. A man who builds the argument against me, and then writes with his own hand that I am no fool for believing.

And Draper lays it down that his argument is comparative and not refuting: the distribution of pain and pleasure is more likely on one hypothesis than on another, and this does not establish that theism is false, and it may be outweighed by other evidence [draper-1989-pain-pleasure]. The condition is written in the hand of the man who made the argument; it was not wrung out of him.

And Mackie — among the hardest of them on faith — grants in his second book that the free-will defence takes the outright logical contradiction out of the question, and then carries the dispute on from another quarter [mackie-1982-miracle].

And on my own side it is the same. Peter van Inwagen is a believer who delivered the Gifford Lectures on evil, and then said plainly that he does not know why evil occurs and is left to run, and that his aim is narrower than explanation: to show the argument to be non-compelling, not to explain evil [van-inwagen-2006-evil]. And Marilyn Adams — a believer — holds that the most famous defences fail for horrendous evils, because they address the good of the whole and not the good of the sufferer himself [m-adams-1999-horrendous]. And Swinburne — the most famous framer of the cumulative argument — enters evil into his scale as evidence against theism and grants that it lowers the probability, and then comes out with theism as the likelier of the two on the sum of the evidence: a weighting and not a certainty, with no number set to it [swinburne-2004-existence].

All of these speak in the language of weighting and not settlement. And each of them knows where his own argument is weak, and says it before his opponent says it.

And in a survey of the views of academic philosophers conducted in 2009 and published in 2014, atheism was the view of the majority by a wide margin, and theism about a seventh of the respondents [bourget-chalmers-2014-survey]. And this establishes nothing about the question itself: the view of the majority is not evidence, and the sample was from English-language departments.

And it is this manner — not this result — that I am asking for in this book.

Fourth: a dispute whose two sides never met

And the truest thing I know about the debate now running in Arabic I say as an observation and not a census: most of it runs between two men, neither of whom has read a single book by his opponent.

The preacher answers a post. The atheist answers a preacher. And if you look into the two answers you find them both right — because each is in fact answering what reached him. Only, what reached him was nobody. And neither of them is addressing the other at all; each addresses his own audience and takes it for an arena.

And something worse than this has happened on our part. It is passed around among us that Mackie concedes that objective morality stands in need of a God. And the report has a source I do not deny: Mackie wrote in his own hand that objective values, if they existed, would make the existence of a god likelier than it would be without them [mackie-1982-miracle]. But it is a condition put forward by a man who denies what it is conditional upon: his thesis is that objective values do not exist, and that is the argument from queerness on which he built his book on ethics [mackie-1977-ethics].

So we took a premise he wrote in order to demolish it, stripped the 'if' from it, and made of it his testimony for us. And this is exactly the difference between reading a man in his own place and reading him in the summary of one transmitter after another.

And I apologise for this one.

And it only became possible because the dispute among us is conducted in conclusions and not in places. The summary is passed on stripped of its condition, then it is passed on from the one who passed it, and then a weapon is made of it. And an argument is not read in its summary; its condition is in its premise, and the premise is read nowhere but in its own place.

Fifth: the question itself

I said that between you and me there is a question that deserves that we meet upon it by names and evidence and places. And a letter that says this and does not name the question is a deficient letter. So here is one entire, and I bring it because it is the heaviest thing on me, not because it is the easiest for me to answer:

Evil. And not in its pulpit form, but in two definite formulations:

The first — Rowe's formulation (1979). There are severe sufferings, such as a fawn that burns in a forest fire and lingers for days, which a being both able and knowing could have prevented without thereby losing a greater good or permitting an evil as bad or worse. And if a single one of these exists, then there is no God of the description we know [rowe-1979-varieties].

The second — Draper's formulation (1989), and to me it is the heavier. Draper does not claim that evil refutes theism; he rather compares two hypotheses: the distribution of pain and pleasure in the living world — its being tied to survival and reproduction, and its falling upon creatures that have no morality — is likelier to occur on the hypothesis of indifference than on theism [draper-1989-pain-pleasure]. And its weight is that it is not answered by what answers the first.

The familiar answer among us is that our minds are too narrow to judge that a greater good does not exist. And it is an answer with something to it, and van Inwagen stated plainly that his aim was to show that the argument does not succeed as a proof, not to say why evil occurred [van-inwagen-2006-evil].

And this answer has a price I ought to pay in the open, in two places:

The first of them is that it is a two-edged sword: whoever says 'I do not know what the hidden good is' has weakened his own capacity to argue from any good he does see. And this is a structural flaw in the answer, not a passing objection.

And the second of them is that it does not touch Draper's formulation at all: the comparison between two hypotheses stands even where we are ignorant of the details, because it does not claim to know them.

And the truest saying of this comes from a believer on my own side: Marilyn Adams holds that greater-good defences fail for horrendous evils, because they address the balance of the world and not the condition of the sufferer himself [m-adams-1999-horrendous].

So this is the question. Its name, its author, its year, its place, and where it is weak for me rather than for you. And if you want us to meet, then here is the place — not in 'is the universe an accident' and not in 'who created the Creator'.

Sixth: and what would move me

You asked — or you have the right to ask — what is in my own scale against me. And it is a question I have not answered in this letter, so I answer it:

First: I may be the one who is wrong. I say it not as a courtesy but because Oppy's condition, which I took, obliges me to it: whoever says that no argument compels has said it against himself first.

And second, what would move me on the question I have named: were it to become clear to me that Draper's formulation still holds the weight after everything I count on the other side has been weighed with it, and I found no difference in the balance of probability to lean on, I should be obliged to say so and obliged to bear what follows from it. And I do not promise you that this will happen; I promise you that it is the thing I look into, and that it is the place in myself that I fear, and that I know I fear it.

And third, if you read everything I ask, and sit with the manner I have described, and then remain where you are — then I have nothing owing from you. I bind you to no consequence, I attach no verdict to your position in these pages, and I do not claim to know what your case will come to. This is the limit of what I hold, and I do not go beyond it because I do not hold more.

And the limit of this letter

And this is a letter, not a proof.

I have proved nothing to you in these pages, nor tried to. That there are great philosophers among the atheists does not make atheism right, exactly as there being great philosophers among the believers does not make faith right. Men do not make arguments correct. And I intended this limit; I did not fall into it by oversight.

And a second limit, heavier, and it lies in the letter itself. I said a moment ago that each addresses his own audience and takes it for an arena, and this description holds of these pages: they are written in the second person to you, and published in a book that my own people will read before anyone else reads it. So your share of it may be to be a witness in an internal quarrel rather than the one addressed. And I do not know how to get out of this completely while I write where I write. And the least I can do is to say it to you and not leave you to discover it.

And everything I claim after that is narrower: that between you and me there is one question, which I have named in this letter with its place, and that what goes on today is not it. And that whoever comes at you with the three descriptions has lost you before he opens his mouth.

So if you sit one day with one of us who says 'I do not know' where it belongs, and reckons the evidence that tells against him in his own scale with his own hand, and does not ask you about your intention — then know that he has read his opponent. And if I sit with one of you who knows that his argument is a weighting and not a settlement, and knows where it stumbled — then he too has read his opponent.

And between those two there occurs speech that deserves to be called speech. And the rest of what we see is two men shouting in opposite directions, each supposing that the other has heard him.

Sources for this chapter

Graham Oppy (2006) — His thesis is that no argument carries in either direction, and 'carrying' on his account is that an argument should oblige every reasonable person who denied the conclusion or suspended judgement over it — and that has been achieved by nobody. So he does not say that the believers' arguments are void, and whoever has passed him on as 'a philosopher who refutes all the arguments' has taken half the stand-off and left the other half. And he is not to be cited for belief at all: Oppy is an atheist and remains one, and he states plainly that a reasonable person may be a believer or an agnostic or an atheist like himself — so the parity is in the arguments and not in the conclusion of the man who made them. And on the other side, he is not to be credited in this book with preferring naturalism on grounds of simplicity and the theoretical virtues: that is a known claim of his, and its place is `oppy-2013-best-argument` and not this book, and we have not set it against any chapter here. Nor is it to be said that he took in every argument: the reviews record a gap in his handling of Aquinas's arguments. And the claim that it contains an extended critique of divine simplicity in Swinburne has not been established by us against any particular chapter, so no attribution is built on it. 10.1017/CBO9780511498978 (and ISBN 9780521863865 hardback · 9780521122641 paperback · 9780511498978 digital)
William L. Rowe (1979) — It is not a proof and its author denies that it is one: he states explicitly that we are not in a position to prove that (1) is true, and that it is rather reasonable and warrants belief, and he likens it to an electoral weighting (that neither Goldwater nor McGovern should ever be elected president) — and he himself calls it 'the evidential form' and 'a strong argument for atheism' and not a proof. And in that same article he coins 'friendly atheism' and lays down that the believer may be entirely rational in his belief, so whoever has reported it as settling the matter has cut away the half of it that was written to deny any settling. And the words explanation/explain do not occur in the article at all — its whole text was swept and the count was zero — so attributing 'inference to the best explanation' to him is imposing the frame of Draper and those after him on a text that does not carry it; and likewise the word induction does not occur. And his description of the scene is 'So far as we can see… pointless', that is, so far as appears to us and not 'without purpose' outright. And it is the best known of the evidential formulations and not 'the strongest'; and the judgement that it is the strongest is our judgement and not the field's.
J. L. Mackie (1977) — Mackie denies that objective moral values exist at all — he opens the first chapter with 'there are no objective values' — and 'queerness' is his argument that they do not exist, not that they stand in need of a founder. So it is not sound to cite him as a witness that morality is in want of God, and this is the reverse of what is attributed to him in Arabic writing. Nor does he say that the atheist has no morality: the second part of this very book is a practical morality, and the tenth chapter is on religion, law and politics — so his theory is no invitation to licence. Nor has he a separate book on practical morality, and whoever has referred a reader to one has sent him looking for what he will not find; his works are on logic, causation, Locke, Hume and theism. As for the conditional that is cut away from him — that if objective values did exist, theism would come nearer to accounting for them — it is established from him in those very terms, but its place is The Miracle of Theism (1982), p. 115, and not this book: whoever denies it of him outright denies what he did say, and whoever passes on its consequent and folds away its antecedent has passed on half a sentence whose author rejects the antecedent. And it is the view of one man and not the language of all atheists, and whoever has levelled the two has chosen for his opponent the weakest form.
J. L. Mackie (1982) — Here is the place of the conditional that gets clipped, its substance at p. 115 being that objective values, prescriptive in themselves, would if they existed make the existence of a God likelier than it would otherwise be, so that we should have after all an inductive argument, and a defensible one, running from morality to the existence of a God — a condition and not a concession, and Mackie refers in a footnote on that same page to chapter one of Ethics (1977), where he denies the antecedent. So whoever passes on the consequent and folds away the antecedent has passed on half a sentence, and whoever says 'he never said it' denies what he did say. As for the concession in the problem of evil, it is not made to the free will defence: the text at p. 154 runs that since this defence is formally possible, we may grant that the problem of evil does not show, after all, that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another — and 'this defence' is the second-order good defence set out some paragraphs earlier, the free will defence being mentioned only after it, and Mackie closes the chapter by holding that every form of the free will defence fails (p. 176). And he does not abandon the argument after the concession: he follows it in the next line with the remark that whether this is a real solution to the problem is another question, and he ends at a strong indication that theism cannot be made consistent without a substantial change in one of its central doctrines. And he pressed it as an objection internal to the believer, by the believer's own description of God, while he himself holds an error theory in ethics — so citing him for the view that the objection binds its holder on an objective scale reverses his position.
Richard Swinburne (2004 (and the first edition 1979)) — The stated conclusion is that the probability of God's existence is greater than half (more probable than not) — no certainty and no compelling proof, and Swinburne states plainly that exact numerical values cannot be given; so nothing is to be added to him, neither 'by a little' nor 'an overwhelming balance' — and adding in the direction of modesty is like adding in the direction of exaggeration. And his position on evil was corrected against an outside source: he neither 'counts evil as evidence against theism and then drops it out of the scales', nor does he say that evil does not lower the probability — rather he grants in chapter eleven that it lowers it a little, and holds that adding the postulate of an afterlife lowers it as well because it costs simplicity, and then takes religious experience to be what tips the balance. And '97%' is not in this book at all: it is in The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003), and it is for the probability of the incarnation and the resurrection together, not for the probability of God's existence. And divine simplicity as he has it is presented and not granted, and it is disputed, and we do not adopt it.
Peter van Inwagen (2006) — The book is a 'defence' and not a theodicy: a story that may be true for all we know, which its author does not claim is the actual reason, its aim being to show that the argument from evil fails as a proof that would convince 'the ideal agnostic', and not to account for the occurrence of evil. So whoever promised his reader that it is 'the answer' promised him what the book denies of itself; and whoever said that it offers nothing at all dropped the distinction on which the whole book turns. And it is not sound to report him in the words 'he states plainly that he does not know why God permits evil' — denying knowledge of him is a denial he did not make: he says of his story that he believes parts of it and disbelieves none of it, and Hasker in his review for NDPR counts it on that account the kernel of a modest theodicy. And what is right is that the defence does not claim to set out the actual reason, not that its author declares his ignorance. And his testimony is the testimony of an ally speaking in his own interest — a believer answering an argument against belief — so it is not to be put forward in the manner of an opponent's concession. And we have not verified that the book takes up Draper's probabilistic formulation, so neither an answer to it nor a silence over it is to be attributed to him.
Thomas Nagel (2012) — It is put about in Arabic as 'the return of a great philosopher to God' — and Nagel is an atheist who states his atheism plainly in the book itself: he says at p. 95 that his preference for an immanent natural explanation accords with his atheism, and he grants in the first chapter (p. 12) that he does not find the design alternative a real option and that he lacks 'the sense of the divine' that makes others see in the world an expression of a divine intention. And he defends neither theism nor intelligent design: his alternative is an immanent natural teleology with no intending agent, and he sets the hypothesis of intentional explanation aside in so many words. And on the other side it will not do to deny him every fairness towards the opponents of naturalism: he says that the intelligent design people deserve thanks for challenging the scientific picture of the world, while stating plainly that he differs from them in their premise — and this very passage roused his own side against him (Pinker · Dennett · Sober) before it roused the side of the believers, so he is not a neutral witness. And he is a witness for the correction of a report and not a witness for the weight of an argument: an argument is weighed by itself and not by the man who made it.
Erik J. Wielenberg (2014) — The book makes no claim to have proved that objective moral truths exist, nor does it prove atheism, nor is it to be cited for anything in the question of the existence of God. And its pillar is a claim of parity of burden: that the queerness of brute moral necessities is no greater than the queerness of necessities the theist himself is committed to, so that the stopping at something brute falls on both sides. Yet it is not a mere throwing back of the burden, to be undervalued so: there is in it a deliberate positive construction — a 'making' relation that explains the dependence of the moral on what is not moral, and a reliabilist account that grounds moral belief in first-order reflection, and a 'third factor' answer to the evolutionary debunking arguments (Ruse · Joyce · Street). And he contends with two of the theists together: Robert Adams and William Lane Craig — so passing on only one of them is incomplete, and the central claim against them is that divine command theory does not explain the rational unbeliever's being subject to moral obligation. And whoever has passed it on as 'a proof of morality without God' has added to its written claim.
Graham Oppy (2013) — It is not cited for anything in the question itself, but for the position of the man who wrote it: Oppy is not standing in the middle. The book is a comparison between naturalism and theism on the theoretical virtues (simplicity, goodness of fit, breadth of explanation and predictive fruitfulness) across the large-scale causal structure, fine-tuning, the history of the earth and of man, a priori knowledge, morality, consciousness, religious experience and the scriptures, and it ends in a weighting for naturalism, because it posits less and is not at a loss before any datum that theism explains better than it does. So passing on from him that 'no argument carries in either direction' is a truncation that gives the impression of a stand-off: the absence of any obliging is on his account a premise he builds a weighting upon and not a conclusion he stops at. And he claims no decisive proof for the denial of God — the claim is a comparison of two theories and not an establishing of a non-existence, and whoever has passed him on as 'evidence that God does not exist' has gone beyond his text. And we have not opened the body of the book: the data are from the publisher's page (Springer/Palgrave), and the description from its abstract and from notices of it. 10.1057/9781137354143
Paul Draper (1989) — The argument is comparative and not refuting, and the text of its closing is that it is a prima facie reason for rejecting theism unless some other reason weighs against it — so it does not establish the falsity of theism and can be outweighed by evidence from other quarters, and whoever has passed it on as 'evidence that God does not exist' has dropped a condition its author wrote in his own hand. And the condition of weighting on his account is a comparison of two specified hypotheses and not of a hypothesis and its contradictory: that the data be far more probable on 'the hypothesis of indifference' than on theism (P(O/HI) ≫ P(O/T)) — and he does not require that 'the hypothesis rule out its contradictory', and that is a stronger formulation that was attributed to him with us and is not his, and it brings down the whole of probabilistic weighting. And 'the hypothesis of indifference' is neither atheism nor naturalism: what it states is that how sentient creatures on earth stand is not the outcome of any good or evil doing by persons who are not human, and it is wide enough to take in what is above nature. And nothing has been drawn from it in this book but the condition of comparative weighting; and it is not about the intelligibility of the universe, nor about mathematics, nor about Ockham's razor and simplicity — and the flat denial ('neither the word ought nor the word injustice occurs in it at all') we have not set against the complete text, so nothing is built on it, and what is established is that its structure is comparative and probabilistic and not a moral premise. 10.2307/2215486
Marilyn McCord Adams (1999) — It is entered in lists of 'the answers to the problem of evil' and it brings most of them down: the free will defence and the 'greater good' theodicy are helpless before horrendous evils, because they treat of the whole good of the world and not of the good of the injured person himself — so whoever has counted it among the familiar answers has counted their adversary in their ranks. And she does not end at a denial of God nor at a doubt about him: Adams is a believer, an Anglican priest, writing from inside faith, and she has her own positive answer (that God is an incommensurable good, and that Christ shares in the atrocities), so she will not serve as a witness to the collapse of the answer of faith. And she does not undo the free will defence in every quarter — her claim is bounded by horrendous evils and by the level of the person's good, and it is no general verdict on the logical question. And she does not accept a rule of debate turning on religiously neutral values, but states plainly that they will not do, and draws on scripture and on the history of Christian theology — so putting her forward as a neutral argument goes against her own declared condition. And her distinguishing instrument is the difference between 'balancing off/compensation' and 'defeat' inside the life of the injured person, and not between compensation and justification, as had been written.
Pew Research Center (2010) — The survey does not say that atheists know more about the religions generally, nor that it measures understanding: a short quiz of thirty-two questions in one country, with the effect of years of schooling not isolated in it, and it touches Islam only in a bare handful of questions. And there is not a word in it about the truth of a belief or its falsity. And those surveyed are not the audience of this letter, and that has been stated in the main text.
Thomas Nagel (2006) — Nagel states in the review itself that he is outside religion just as Dawkins is, and that he neither defends theism nor weights it; his objection is to the structure of the argument and not to its conclusion, and its point is the assumption that every designer is as complex as what he makes — which the believer denies, and not the philosophers of the subject generally. So passing it on as a great philosopher answering atheism inverts the purpose of the text.
Erik J. Wielenberg (2009) — Wielenberg is an atheist and does not defend God's existence in the paper; his claim is that the central argument in The God Delusion does not succeed as an argument. And the journal is peer-reviewed and of Christian orientation, and that has been stated in the main text. So citing it in favour of theism is an addition to its text. 10.5840/pc20091118
David Bourget · David J. Chalmers (2014) — The survey was conducted in 2009 and the paper published in 2014, and the confusion of the two occurred in the first version and was corrected. And it offers no evidence of the truth of atheism nor of its falsity: a tally of opinions is not a scale of arguments, and its sample was English-language departments in analytic traditions. And to argue from it about the question itself is a fallacy of appeal to the majority. 10.1007/s11098-013-0259-7