I'm a bit self-conscious since I've never even been to the US. But I think I know a bit about these cultural traits. If you disagree on the merits, here's a chance to show your US-cred in the comments! What I'd change culturally is increase curiosity and decrease anti-intellectualism.
Curiosity
It's a common generalisation by non-US people that most Americans believe their country is the world. This chauvinism happens in pretty much every country but I think there's a kernel of truth to this stereotype that sees Americans as especially centered on domestic issues.
A trivial example: my family came to Australia from Russia but many of our family friends emigrated to the US. Some would call my family in the middle of the night, because it simply didn't occur to them that a completely different timezone (with a 17 hr difference) could exist. And these weren't stupid people, they just seemed immersed in an inward-looking society.
This is part of a bigger problem. The US news cycle is very narrow. There's ample coverage of award ceremony interruptions (including how the President's dog's manicurist's plumber reacted). Virtually no coverage of World War Three. Of course it's a global problem; but from what I've seen of the US news it's sharper. There seems to be an attitude of active disinterest in the outside world (where domestic matters aren't directly affected).
Anti-Intellectualism
Much noise is made today about the latest skirmishes in America's culture wars. Yet if you think debate today is shrill, read up on Robert Ingersoll. He was an outspoken anti-theist in an age where people would deliberately seek out opposing points of view. In the late 19th century he toured America giving vehement radical secular humanist speeches and pulled in thousands.
Anti-intellectualism has increased in America. Part of it involves insulating yourself from public debate, immersing yourself only in the views of those you agree with. This makes genuine public debate appear unusual. It is quite rare today to see the type of expectation of open, complete and intellectual debate as there was in Ingersoll's era. This selectiveness in the opinions we see is also an all-you-can-eat buffet for our confirmation bias.
Two sides of the same coin
I cheated by listing 2 things, But they're manifestations of the same problem. Both are celebrations of ignorance. And willful ignorance feeds hysteria, whether on the right (Obama is a communist fascist Muslim who will kill grandma) to the right (Bush is the stupidest, most incompetent president ever, yet he somehow managed to brilliantly execute 9/11 as an inside job). For public discourse to move past this, people of all walks of life need to open themselves to a bit more theories and a bit more sensory data than they're getting.
20 comments:
I think your comments are valid; however, most the animosity towards intellectual thought come from the extreme biases that many experience in college.
If you are a liberal, the liberal professors feed you a ton of biased information while misrepresenting the arguments of their opponents.
In our country, the liberals are shut out opposing debate at the college level. The only people that are advanced are people that agree with liberalism.
When you have such extreme bias taking place, most non-liberals just throw in the towel and walk away because the system is set up to reward liberals and punish conservatives.
We really need a new system that seeks real diversity in our colleges. We just don't have that and everyone knows it.
Thanks for the post Michael - but I think you were pulling your punches. Is Christianity the source of this anti-intellectualism?
The core opposition to mainstream secular progressives does not come from libertarianism or ethnic nationalism (common in Europe), but from Christianity. And Europe simply does not have a large and powerful Christian movement at the grass roots like the United States.
Would I like to see a more intellectual Christian movement? Sure. But I am also realistic. The evangelical movement is about one or two generations removed from being working class and it takes time to develop the institutions and scholarship. Pace the "death of conservatism" arguments, Christian philosophy is thriving and it has a halo effect elsewhere. The current state of modern secular scholarship is also leading in directions that are much more consistent with the Christian worldview than what was being produced twenty or thirty years ago. E.g. asymmetrical information and the theory of the firm leads to the need for a strong work ethic and interpersonal trust.
So while Slate and The New Republic are proclaiming the death of conservatism I see the movement as growing, although perhaps beneath the surface.
I would change the cult of celebrity.
As for the death of conservativism, it's true, but it will rise again like a zombie. Republicans used to be the intellectual elite, with Democrats the unwashed masses. However, the Republican move towards Christianity (on the basis of stabilising society from a social upheaval) has backfired in the worst possible way for America. How can a pro-business party slam higher education for promoting *cough* evolution and expect graduates to be adequate?
As an aside, why is it conservatives ALWAYS find themselves on the wrong side of the argument with progressives when history judges? It's called progress for a reason.
We may end out hijacking Michael's thread here but March raises an interesting question. Have the progressives been vindicated by history? This is a big topic so it easy for confirmation bias to come into play, but I see the opposite.
If you think that Rousseau created the blueprint for secular progressives and Burke created the blueprint for Christian conservatives, then I think Christians have been vindicated on virtually every point.
1. There are powerful constraints on human nature (see also: A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell).
2. Human nature is not a blank slate.
3. Self-interest - and self-destructiveness - are powerful forces in human nature. People do not instinctively strive for the Good (either their own or the groups). If that sounds incoherent I can draw this point out.
4. Children are not natural learners. Education takes hard work and discipline on tasks which are unnatural and which people are not internally motivated to pursue.
As a practical consequence this explains just about everything from the failures of communism to the failures of pre-reform welfare, to the grudging realization for the importance for family and cultural values. The fact that serious modern progressives try to incentive their programs shows the triumph of the conservative vision. The fact that the principle-agent problem is unsolvable through incentives alone only continues to vindicate it.
Zdenny -- so you're saying people don't take more interest in international affairs because there are a lot of liberal professors?
Justin -- I wanted to stick close to the question so as not to make it too long. I think it's the reverse -- anti-intellectualism causes Christianity (at least in the kinds of numbers and social trends it's present in within the US).
I don't think I'm qualified to comment on the progressive/conservative/liberal issues (in terms of broad history) but I think it would largely depend on what we define as being progressive today (and what claims we attribute to progressivism -- if there is such a beast).
But I do think even the most conservative people of today would have been considered dangerous lefty radicals a few centuries ago (culturally, freedom of conscience was not valued until relatively recently but now it's taken for granted by all but the most extreme conservative and evangelical stuff I see). So it largely depends on how you enumerate beliefs.
Michael: Yes to your question.
I remember a few years back the Southern Baptist decided to educate their ministers with the highest level of intellectual thought. What they found is that many preachers went to the secular schools only to discover that these 'highly intelligent' folks were denying the very foundation of the Christian faith despite the overwhelming evidence for Christianity.
As a result, there was a huge backlash against education specifically in the South which continues to this day. The intellectuals were seen as idiots who were inconsistent in how they handled evidence with a bias always against Christianity (which is true by the way).
Everyone in the US knows how biased and arrogant the liberal elite have become in the US. If there was real diversity of ideas in our colleges, then it would not be an issue; however, there is a monolithic front where liberals will not hire conservatives and punish anyone that steps outside the 'mainstream' of liberal thought.
You find the same animosity in the public schools towards Christians. I remember sitting in class listening to a teacher who sought to undermine Christianity at ever opportunity. I was specifically told that God was a myth and that Christian love was the problem rather than the solution to the worlds problems.
Christians who know the Bible know that the heart of Christianity is love. The evidence for the resurrection has never been undermined with evidence. You only hear liver quivers that no knowledgeable person accepts as true.
It really is that simple.
@ZDENNY:
What a strange collection of points, some I vehemently disagree with and others I agree with wholeheartedly.
I could not agree more that the lack of free speech in colleges of all places is a distressing development, and a step backwards, driven by the "liberal" elite's fear of being politically incorrect.
Any teacher undermining Christianity is not doing their job and is breaking the Constitution. However, I see no problem in having a discussion on faith and perhaps showing a broader picture of religion than kids may learn at home. This may well appear as an attack if you point out glaring inconsistencies in ALL holy texts but the context would be important. Incidentally, you believe that every god apart from your God is a myth. Statistically, that is unlikely to be true. I won't even go down the "overwhelming evidence for Christianity" apart from to say that there is no more, and likely less, evidence for Christianity than Islam.
Surely the fact that the Churches sending people to be educated only to find them more questioning of their faith shows that these beliefs need challenged and a better response to the challenge is preferable to closing off all areas of enquiry. When a belief cannot be challenged then you start punishing those who disagree and you end up in a theocracy where blasphemy is punished by death. So much for the Freedom Of Speech.
Hiya Michael,
anti-intellectualism causes Christianity (at least in the kinds of numbers and social trends it's present in within the US).
There is another reading of social trends which is observationally equivalent. I believe it was Cotton Mather who said, "Religion gave birth to prosperity and the daughter killed the mother." People who are affluent can afford to depart from the straight and narrow - they can recover from their mistakes. The poor do not have that luxury, and cleave to that which provides moral guidance.
One point in favor of my analysis is that Christians are one of the groups most fed up with the dumbing down of modern education. Christian private schools and homeschooled Christians favor rigorous back-to-basics curriculums instead of wishy-washy progressive stuff (whole world language learning, new math, and the like).
March Hare,
Surely the fact that the Churches sending people to be educated only to find them more questioning of their faith shows that these beliefs need challenged and a better response to the challenge is preferable to closing off all areas of enquiry.
Agreed, but I think this goes back to a point you recognized - the stifling of debate. If these liberal seminaries presented a cutting-edge debate, such as between N.T. Wright (one of the leading evangelical scholars) and Dominic Crossan (a leading skeptical scholar) then most seminary students would find their faith strengthened rather than damaged. Christian scholars can do well against the best and brightest.
@Justin Martyr
"Christian scholars can do well against the best and brightest."
Right up until you point out that there is no evidence for Christianity that trumps Islam, or Hinduism, or Norse Mythology.
All Christians who go toe to toe with atheist debaters fall back on the argument that you can't disprove god, they never go on the offensive that their particular god is the right one. They choose some wishy-washy, ethereal god, ignoring the fact that 99% of Christians believe in the bearded man in the sky.
Hiya March,
I always find it ironic that atheists cleave to the gap problem. No matter how one responds it still means that atheism is false. A rational and scientifically informed person would have to at least choose deism, or as you put it a "wishy-washy, ethereal god". But while the gap problem remains a bigger problem for atheists, Christians too should address it. There are several methods.
Arguments lead to theism Arguments such as the Kalam cosmological argument and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics simply fall out of the scope of pagan gods. You need a God who is both timeless and omnipotent. That culls various pagan gods like Zeus. You are left with theism. So now you have the three Abrahamic faiths and some versions of Hinduism.
The Resurrection. I am not up to speed on arguments for the resurrection of Jesus so I will not personally debate them, but from sitting on the sidelines I've seen that Christian philosophers consistently win those debates as well. See William Lane Craig with Antony Flew, N.T. Wright with Dominic Crossan, and so on.
Heuristics. People can apply a heuristic like "only consider as live options those gods which have large faith communities".
Defeater defeater. Most Christians do not come to faith by reasoned argument but by personal experiences of God. But they may still feel, deep down, that the experience was a delusion. A traditional argument for the existence of God would defeat the "delusion defeater" and allow them to give full weight to their religious experiences, which presumably lead them towards Jesus.
Bounded rationality As economists and evolutionary biologists point out, most people do not get their beliefs (for anything) by analyzing them from the ground up. Instead they stand on the accumulated knowledge of culture and survey the lay of the land from that perspective. There is more knowledge in cultural norms, beliefs, and institutions than any one mind, or even community of minds. If this process leads someone to faith - and common sense and sociologist s of religion like Rodney Stark agree that this is how it it typically happens - then that person might also lean on arguments for the existence of God much like the defeater defeater objection above.
So how about you? Does the gap problem make you a deist? Or agnostic between various types of theism?
Interesting comments Justin, not sure where to begin picking them to pieces... Start with a question:
How is there a 'gap problem' with atheism? What is it?
A common misconception I would like to disabuse you of, not that it's actually relevant to anything, is that God has to be omnipotent (or omniscient). Not true. A timeless God could timker with the rules and laws of various universes until He found one He liked.
Also, simply because something is unlikely does not mean it's impossible. The fine tuning argument disappears if you think that there are a multitude of universes, each with their own set of physical constants. Also, I fail to see how you get from the fine tuning argument to monotheism (all the while ignoring that the Abrahimic religions, especially Christianity, are far from monotheistic - what is the devil? Saints? Angels, Archangels? The Trinity?) Why couldn't there be a group of Gods with one creating the universe as a playground for themselves?
The arguments for the resurrection are laughable. They consist of second or third hand retellings that could equally well apply to the leader of most cults and certainly many of the religions around the middle east 2 millenia ago.
Just because lots of people believe something adds no real weight to its underlying truth. Given that a billion people are Christian and a billion are Muslim, one group MUST be wrong. Most of the ancient greeks believed in their pantheon of gods, no-one does now.
Most Christians DO NOT come to their faith from personal experience but from their parents and/or culture.
If we can reproduce the personal experience of God in the lab by stimulating parts of the brain would that convince you of the fallability of these personal relevations?
People whose faith is strengthened by seeing so many others believing rely on positive reinforcement for the maintenance of their false beliefs. There are so many cultural problems with speaking out against a false and dangerous delusion that most people happily go along with it.
As for me, I am an atheist. Technically, everyone is an agnostic, but the concept of a personal god is so alien to my mind that any evidence brought forward for His existence could be better explained by something else. Even a mountain of such evidence would be enough to push me towards His existence, but even then I'd be skeptical. However, as of yet, no such evidence exists, yet the Religious are so convinced that not only do they know He exists, but that they know what He wants. That is actually inconceivable.
Hiya March,
Thank you for the thoughtful comments!
timeless God could timker with the rules and laws of various universes until He found one He liked.
The Kalam cosmological argument is about how the universe came to exist in the first place. A god whose powers were limited to tinkering could not create a universe.
The fine tuning argument disappears if you think that there are a multitude of universes, each with their own set of physical constants.
I've already address that in this post. There are three big problems with both theories of the multiverse (eternal inflation and cosmological selection). They are (1) some types of fine-tuning are not explained, (2) there are strong evidential challenges against the multiverse theories, and (3) the multiverse itself demands fine-tuning.
Also, I fail to see how you get from the fine tuning argument to monotheism (all the while ignoring that the Abrahimic religions, especially Christianity, are far from monotheistic - what is the devil? Saints? Angels, Archangels? The Trinity?) Why couldn't there be a group of Gods with one creating the universe as a playground for themselves?
monotheism means one god, not one spiritual being. As to the last question, I've already answered in the first post. Creating a universe demands more power than pagan gods are accorded to have. As to a group of omnipotent gods, occam's razor rules that out.
Most Christians DO NOT come to their faith from personal experience but from their parents and/or culture.
Of course, I made that point myself in my first comment. Economists and evolutionary biologists have come to recognize the importance of culture as information.
If we can reproduce the personal experience of God in the lab by stimulating parts of the brain would that convince you of the fallability of these personal relevations?
That argument is question-begging. God would use instrumental means to evoke the desire religious sentiments. AIG Busted, in his debate with me over whether or not faith is rational without evidence, recognized this. His argument was much milder, which is that one should thus be indifferent between God and atheism. My response was generally that (1) we do not have epistemological duties to seek out all possible counter-arguments (e.g. most atheists do not read philosophy blogs and don't know anything about the multiverse but that does not make atheism irrational), and (2) we are not required to be indifferent between "I am rational and had experience X" and "I am irrational and had a delusion of experience X". E.g. I could turn it around. On Christianity, everyone has had personal experiences of God but some people resist the work of the Spirit. In other words, atheism is irrational. But that charge is also question-begging.
Omnipotence is not a requirement to create one or more universes. Omniscience even less so.
Even if I give you the Kalam cosmological argument (which I really don't) it still in no way points towards a God of the Bible. It doesn't point towards a God that has any interest in the affairs of men. So be a non-interventionalist Deist if you choose, but no (decent) arguments have ever been made in favour of any of the 'holy' texts being, in any meaningful sense, correct.
Multiverses are actually posited by some physicists to accomodate some of the stranger properties inherent in quantum physics. But that's not an argument we need to enter into.
Just because Pagan Gods do not let on their power to mere humans does not mean they don't have it!
I do like your sense of irony, quoting occams razor to rule out polytheism :)
Omnipotence is not a requirement to create one or more universes. Omniscience even less so.
No, but creation ex nihilo takes vast powers that dwarf those of Zeus or Odin. Again, we are back to my point that tradtional arguments bring us to theism.
Even if I give you the Kalam cosmological argument (which I really don't) it still in no way points towards a God of the Bible. It doesn't point towards a God that has any interest in the affairs of men. So be a non-interventionalist Deist if you choose, but no (decent) arguments have ever been made in favour of any of the 'holy' texts being, in any meaningful sense, correct.
Again, I've always pointed out that these bring us to theism or possibly deism. But they rule out virtually all pagan gods.
Multiverses are actually posited by some physicists to accomodate some of the stranger properties inherent in quantum physics. But that's not an argument we need to enter into.
Right, but not all of them. Neither eternal inflation nor cosmological selection can account for pauli exclusion, a universally attractive force such as gravity, and the fact that matter/energy are quantized into discrete packets.
Just because Pagan Gods do not let on their power to mere humans does not mean they don't have it!
And I've addressed that in my first response to you over a variety of different arguments. It would be worth rereading because now that we are three posts in they stand unchallenged. (1) heuristics, (2) cultural rationality, (3) defeater-defeating. Based on the success of professional historians and philosophers in debate (N.T. Wright and William Lane Craig), I'd add the resurrection to the list, but I don't know it very well and cannot debate it myself.
I do like your sense of irony, quoting occams razor to rule out polytheism :)
ah yes, like Laplace you have no need for that hypothesis. But we've already seen that you cannot answer Kalam or the fine-tuning of physics. You have a rational duty to either provide a better response or to accept some form of deism or theism.
Justin, I can accept that someone could be a deist, but to go that bit further than a creator of the universe to a creator who knows or cares about humans is a bit of an anthropomorphic stretch.
I am in no way advocating the existence of any Gods and certainly not Pagan Gods, however you cannot rule them out by saying they don't have enough power to do so - the power humans believed them to have is not necessarily the power they actually have, assuming their existence. However, I'll accept your challenge:
1. Heuristics:
Why would only a large faith community be viable? Christianity was once a one man band. Why would a large number of people following one brand of religion, due to cultural norms, make the existence of God more or less likely? Let alone make that brand of religion true? Surely facts should be used to determine which, if any, God is likely or if any religion is correct. Since (virtually) all religions are internally inconsistent I would suggest that religions have it wrong.
2. Cultural Rationality:
Surely a greater argument for the falsity of religion could not be found than the need to indoctrinate children into a belief system before they are given the tools for critical thinking. The culture of Ancient Egypt led to the belief in the Son God Ra, does that make it more or less true? Surely the scientific advances we have made and understand what happens to the sun at night makes it less likely to be true than the number of believers.
3. Defeater Defeating:
Why should we accept the, likely, delusion of a Christian over a Muslim? Why would an omnipotent God give the same message to a Hindu as a Jew only to have them interpret it differently? We can inspire the same brain reaction in a Christian, a Muslim and an atheist, the Christian sees God, the Muslim Allah and the atheist has a spiritual experience. Which one is true? None, they were all artificial. What does that say about the truth about any given religion - nothing, but it does imply that the 'defeater defeater' argument is false.
You have not yet told me how the 'gap problem' in any way is an issue for an atheist... Please elaborate.
Hiya March,
1. The gap problem means that arguments for the existence of God do not establish which particular god. It is a problem for atheist because it still means that atheism is false.
2. Theistic arguments. Traditional argument for theism are called that (arguments for theism) for a reason. Pagan gods do not have the power to create the universe or fine-tune the laws of physics.
3. Heuristics. The reason why using heuristics is rational is because they allow people to make rapid and efficient decisions without getting bogged into minutia. Sure, it is possible that there exists a God who created the universe just so that John Deer #17 is the only believer. But believers are within their epistemic rights to use a heuristic like "have faith in God if it results in beneficial works in one's life" or "only consider as live options faiths that are well-established and/or growing rapidly".
4. Cultural rationality. Several responses here. (A) atheists are equally indoctrinated. The number of atheists who know about the multiverse defense is very small. Of those who do, most knew it before becoming atheists. Moreover, most atheists also believe in objective ethics. To paraphrase Nietzsche, having killed God, most atheists cling even more tightly to His morality.
(B) You do a disservice to the nature of culture. Culture is vastly more than mere "indoctrination". You should do some reading on cultural selection (not the memetics of Dawkins). It is processed and aggregated information. See Not By Genes Alone by Richerson and Boyd.
(C) Apropos to that, the gods of ancient Egypt are as dead as the rest of the culture of ancient Egypt. Something better has come along. Cultural selection happens within group (people choose their faiths and other life strategies through various imitative heuristics and by directly analyzing the content of the various strategies in use), and between groups. Cultural group selection weeds out groups based on a bad strategy. As such, Christianity could not be more different than that of faith in Ra.
3. Defeater defeating. You do not seem to have grasped the question-begging nature of this charge. See my first response to your above. In the non-question begging sense, it can at most establish that we should be indifferent between various options. But I've argued against that above.
Justin,
The 'gap problem' is not an issue for an atheist who can simply say, "we don't knwo that yet and maybe never will." It is a huge problem for religious people who say "you don't know that therefore it must have been God" then someone comes along and explains it (see evolution).
Religion (not a belief in god per se) is at fault for claiming to explain everything - Adam and Eve were NOT seen as a euphamism, they were postulated as real people kicked out of a real Garden of Eden until science showed that such a situation was not possible using DNA evidence. The creation myth common to the Abrahimic books is demonstrably false and as such it would appear that each religion based upon it must logically also be false.
We need not be agnostic between religions, it is logical that Mormonism (Christianity with a couple of added nutty bits) is less likely to be true than a simpler form of Christianity. Equally some of the ancient religions that make bold and false claims for the heavens are less likely to be true than the more flexible religions, ones that change to allow modern scientific facts to fit in alongside their mythology.
I would also like to point out no athiests are indoctrinated. We are born without religion and are given, discover or invent it. I think the charge of indoctrination falls solely onto the religious community, unless you think that critical thinking and the scientific method are indoctrination.
I am still mightily confused as to how you can be so certain that atheism is wrong. I grant that there may be a god but consider the ideea ludicrously far fetched and consider it a near impossibility that any religion that I have encountered can be true due to the demonstrably false claims and the internal inconsistencies.
The initial cosmological argument is a complete fallacy. It may be random luck that the universal constants are as they are, it may be that the values they have are the only ones possible, at least the scientific community is searching for the answers. Deism offers a solution, but merely pushes it one step back to: "How can a being as complex and powerful as the God you propose have come into being?" To which your answer would presumably be "God is outside of time and therefore has always existed. Which is no better than the natural universe being an entirely natural phenomenon.
Incidentally, one of your criticisms of the multiverse theory is patently wrong. I posted a comment on your blog about it.
I agree that I am not getting your Defeater defeater argument. A psychological ratinale for all mystical experiences does not make them any less real but it does make their evidentiary value for the existence of god less important.
As to your cultural rationality (how do you get away with using rationality?) argument, does the atheistic nature of communism make atheism any more accurate in China? Of course not. Most people cannot conceive of most of the concepts of quantum mechanics (wave particle duality for example) but that does not in any way change the reality of the situation.
I have to stop you as soon as you mention morality. There are any number of biologists, philosophers and generalists like me who can tell you exactly where morality comes from and religion is not it. If anythin I would say that the inherent immorality in most religions and their holy texts are good arguments against them pointing to a 'good' God, possibly a nasty one but more likely their true origins in the minds of people.
Your point about people using heuristics is fair, we are limited minds and choose many things based on shortcuts of the mind. That doesn't make them correct. The only rational use of heuristics would be to assume that all religions are wrong as they are each a minority view.
I have gone on long enough and will allow you to pick and choose which parts of this you wish to respond to.
Apologies Justin,
it appears I missed your charge of not answering Kalam. Allow me to do so now.
Kalam, from wiki,
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.
Premise 1 is actually false. Particles come into being all the time. The cause is not the energy they come from, their appearance is not predictable.
Even if the conclusion were true, the cause of the universe does not HAVE to be an intelligent powerful being.
The second premise will receive no argument.
The conclusion is a jump from a logical argument to the cosmological one and is far from subtle, but if you are looking for an answer you won't mind. The fact i disagree with the first premise is not the only reason to doubt the conclusion. Premise 1 is based on the current universe, it is possible that there exists a universe or multiverse where premise one is not true and this universe is a creation of that realm. To name that realm God is a leap of faith that has nothing to back it up.
1. Kalam. Particles do not begin to exist. As you point out, their appearance is unpredictable but that does not mean uncaused. New particles are created by quantum vacuum fluctuations.
2. Multiverse. I've responded to your multiverse objection back on the same thread.
3. Gap problem. It is an issue for atheists who choose to remain atheist rather than adopt some form of theism or deism (or remains agnostic between them).
4. Atheistic indoctrination. You make it seem like all atheists have come to their beliefs after deep study in philosophy, physics, and science. That is simply false. It may be true for those who haunt philosophy blogs, but not for most atheists. They are atheists because their parents were secular and they grew up in a secular culture. They don't even know what the multiverse is, or how to argue against Kalam.
5. Eternal nature of God. The conventional wisdom of philosophy - both Christian and atheist (until the discovery of the Big Bang) - was that contingent events were ultimately grounded in an necessary entity. Hume and other skeptics simply took the universe as a necessary entity. Christians have a much better First Cause than atheists. That is really the root of all philosophical arguments.
6. Cultural rationality. You really should read Not By Genes Alone. You can expand your knowledge of evolution beyond Dawkins while you are at it. The benefit of culture is that people do not have to singlehandedly discover every single truth from the ground up. No single person can accomplish that. Cultures consist of aggregated and processed information. By leaning on culture we do not have to do this incredibly difficult (actually impossible) and error-prone process. Atheism is not more true in China, but since culture spreads through direct knowledge and imitation, people in China are able to evaluate "confucionism" and "atheism" as worldviews. Of course, this process itself assumes a heuristic like "true worldviews will lead to adopting a more effective life strategy than false worldviews." That heuristic may be false (if atheism is true then is almost certainly is false).
Why isn't this blog promoting more social conservative Christian thinkers? We tend to blame the liberal academics for shutting out conservative thought in universities, but there are lots of conservative colleges with lots of conservative Christian academics. Why are the libertarian and neoconservative intellectuals the leading public intellectuals of conservatism? This blog is a perfect case in point. Although it is a great example of socially conservative intellectual thought, its links seem to mostly go to libertarian intellectuals of which the majority that I am familiar with are either secular or Jewish. Is this blog shutting out socially conservative Christian intellectuals too?
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