Critique of Kant Hume Darwin and the Skeptics

Book Review

Geisler, Norman L., and Frank Turek. I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004.

Introduction

Geisler and Turek have written a book that seeks to show why faith in atheistic materialism is irrational and not based at all on the evidence all around us regarding God’s existence. This paper will summarize their book I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and identify its main purpose and themes. It will also provide a constructive critique that examines the consistency, validity, and adequacy of the authors’ main arguments.

Summary

The main ideas of the book by Geisler and Turek are that the evidence to support the claims of Christianity does exist and can be understood, objectively speaking. The main problem that the authors lay out in the beginning is that an overly skeptical approach to the Bible does not answer the important question of whether God actually exists. It sidesteps it. That is not what the authors are trying to do. A professor in a university may be a skeptic, but he also is unlikely to have an answer to the question, “Does God exist?” This question can be answered by asking a preliminary set of questions, which are: Where did we come from? Who are we? Why are we here? How should we live? Where are we going?[footnoteRef:2] [2: Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 20.]

The authors discuss the differences between theism, pantheism and atheism. They note that facts matter when it comes to deciding what to believe because faith is ultimately based on facts. Or, as the saying goes, faith rests upon reason. One has to have a reason to believe what he believes. So the authors pose the question: What makes Christianity reasonable?[footnoteRef:3] [3: Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 24.]

The themes that the authors tackle focus mainly on the faith of atheists in atheistic materialism. It is not that they have no faith. They have no faith in religion, but they do have faith in materialism. They believe in the Big Bang (or some derivative of this explanation of the origins of life). They support this belief with scientific speculations and theories that they take for fact. The main point of the authors, however, is that such speculations and theories are insufficient to command one’s faith in them, objectively speaking.

The authors posit that truth is real and can be known. They rely on various arguments to make this assertion—the cosmological argument, the teleological argument and the anthropic principle, and the moral argument. They proceed logically from these arguments to deduce that God does exists, miracles can and do happen, and that faith in God is reasonable.

The purpose of the book is to show the evidence supporting these arguments that justify faith in God from a rational standpoint. They look at the origins of life, the historical claims of the Bible, the design of nature, and the various counter-arguments made by skeptics, such as Darwin, whose theory of natural selection and evolution is analyzed and dissected to show where it falls apart.

The authors seek to show why the Bible can be believed on its own terms, why skeptics do not have enough to offer in terms of alternative explanations for where we came from, where we are going, how we should live and why, and who we are. The authors aim to show that atheistic explanations for the creation of the universe, for the identity of human beings, and for natural law and design are inherently insufficient and rest in faith in “science.” The authors show that by using reason, one can answer the big questions that man has always had, and these answers necessarily lead one to believing in God, which necessarily leads one to accepting the claims of the Bible.

Critique

The authors’ argument is convincing throughout, even if it tends towards simple explanations of what the skeptics and philosophers like Kant have to say about sense data. For example, the authors criticize Kant for arguing that “according to Kant the structure of your senses and your mind forms all sense data, so you never actually know the thing in itself. You only know the thing to you after your mind and senses form it.”[footnoteRef:4] The authors go on to criticize this line of thinking, but it is not really all that problematic. One does only know thing as it appears to one. Kant is not saying anything that goes against reason. But it is the way his approach has been taken and run with that creates problems. A tendency to make excuses about reality emerges, which is what the authors take exception with. They argue in response by asking, “Why is it that the average person on the street doesn’t doubt what he sees with his own two eyes, but supposedly brilliant philosophers do?”[footnoteRef:5] I think it is unfair to say that Kant was arguing that one should doubt what one sees with one’s own eyes. He was simply arguing that we all tend to perceive things uniquely—not that one can’t know reality—but the simplified conception of Kant’s argument is used to make another argument that people are not using their common sense when they say they cannot know what is real. They can and do know what is real and base all their actions on this knowledge—from showing up on time for work to driving a car. The authors’ argument is certainly valid, consistent and adequate—but the way they frame it in response to a simplified reading of Kant makes it somewhat disingenuous. Kant is somewhat misrepresented in this manner—but that is typical among Christian apologists who view Kant as the forefather of modern agnosticism—a label I am not certain is merited. [4: Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 60.] [5: Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don\\\\\\\'t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 60.]

That aside, the authors’ point is valid. People tend to excuse themselves from making judgments about reality when they feel it goes against something they want to or do not want to believe in. They have no problem making judgments about reality that affect their personal safety or security—but when they are faced with the task of making judgments about reality that affect them spiritually or morally they make excuses about how they cannot really know. The authors say that they can know, and they are right to say so.

One important principle that the authors rely upon to make their argument is the law of non-contradiction. They use this to dismiss the skeptic’s view that reality cannot be known. They say that it can be known and people base their decisions on a daily basis on this fact. To pretend that this same fact does not extend to the moral, theological and philosophical realms is a contradiction. This is true and the authors are right to make this point.

From there they turn to the cosmological argument to explain how the origins of the universe cannot be explained but by the fact that God exists. They use the teleological argument (from design) to show that the design of nature also points to the existence of a Designer. They also use the moral law to show that there is a moral law giver (God) who has written this law on the hearts and in the minds of man. All of these arguments are consistent, valid and adequate in supporting the central claims of the authors’ book.

The authors also draw illustrations to convey these arguments, using popular media (films), historical events (such as the court decisions), and other philosophical arguments and counter-arguments. They never argue from within a box but branch out to look at a great deal of other things in life. They engage with counter-arguments throughout to show why the counter-arguments fail to explain away the existence of God. They use the law of causality, for example, and tie it into Einstein’s theory of relativity to make their case. Again, they cover a great deal of ground and simplify things so as to be able to make their argument, and in so doing they tend to short shrift what others have said. One could easily make the argument that Einstein’s theory of relativity is full of holes in and of itself—but the authors use it to show that there is a design in nature and that nature could not have sprung out of nowhere all by itself.

Overall, the book is well-written to convey these simple truths, but where it is lacking is in real engagement is when it comes to nuance. There is a great deal of nuance to many of these arguments and ideas that is simply glossed over or only dealt with superficially. It is not necessarily a weakness, because it is not the aim of the authors to delve into the nuances of the arguments and ideas—but rather to point out why the skeptics are wrong and why one must accept the basic premises and principles that should govern one’s reason when looking at the facts of the existence of God and how this acceptance guides faith. They are not aiming to explore the nuances of Kantian metaphysics. That would require a separate book altogether.