Soon after moving to Only Sky, Bod Seidensticker decided to add a new “Silver Bullet” argument, which he continued in two separate posts. Since I responded to the previous 28, I thought I’d take a shot at this one as well. And since the limit of what he’ll put in one post seems to be significantly lower than mine, I decided that I’d talk about all of those posts in one post here.
Before getting started, let me remind everyone what it is supposed to mean to be a “Silver Bullet Argument”, according to Seidensticker:
I want to relabel these arguments “silver-bullet arguments.”* Silver bullets were thought to have magical powers and be able to kill supernatural creatures like werewolves that were invulnerable to other weapons. The idea is that a single one of these arguments should be enough to defeat Christianity’s supernatural claims.
End of story, game over, mic drop.
And my main objection to them was that not a single one of them rose to that level. Some of them may have introduced some doubts or had less than satisfying answers, but not one of them on their own could defeat Christianity or its supernatural claims. As I noted in discussing 27, they would have worked far better as a cumulative case than individually, and that the best atheist arguments really are that sort of case, and so it was odd that Seidensticker was so insistent on claiming that these arguments all individually refuted Christianity, especially since he would have started from a very odd position claiming that he had almost thirty irrefutable arguments that completely destroyed Christianity. I mean, wouldn’t he just need the one? Taking the time to outline that many arguments really seems like a waste of time if the first one really did work as claimed. So it’s an odd position to take.
This argument really isn’t any better, as the claim basically is that the arguments from Christians — and especially creationists — looks a lot to Seidensticker like Flat-Earth arguments, and this is supposed to completely and utterly defeat Christianity. And from the start, it clearly doesn’t work. That it might remind him in some ways of Flat-Earth arguments doesn’t make the argument wrong, and certainly doesn’t mean that Christians are going to have to accept it. Especially since there is one critical difference between the two that shows why we dismiss Flat-Earthers but can’t do that for Christianity: given the evidence we have we are all pretty sure that we know that the world is round, and that the only way to maintain that the world is flat is to deny all the evidence that we have and try to — often rather unconvincingly — explain it away. This is basically what the Flat-Earther is doing in Seidensticker’s first post, at which point the responses to the Flat-Earther are a bit weak because they somewhat half-heartedly give the evidence for a round Earth instead of overwhelming them with it. The Flat-Earther should be being given far less room to raise problems for a round Earth instead of being forced to explain the problems that a flat Earth would cause. In general, someone advocating for a round Earth will not shy away from a demand that they have a burden of proof and will insist that they and science have indeed met it. But as we’ve seen, when it comes to Christianity atheists go to great pains to insist that they don’t have the burden of proof — which implies that they haven’t met it — and will at times insist that they simply cannot meet such a burden of proof (usually with arguments that they can’t prove a negative). Those who accept the idea that the Earth is round will not be afraid to say that they have a positive belief that the Earth is round and will consistently argue that, yeah, they know that the Earth is round. Atheists, on the other hand, constantly retreat to claims that they merely lack belief in God — even the Christian God — and tend to act like they think they know that God doesn’t exist but will generally avoid saying that. To be blunt, the reason why Flat-Earth arguments can and are completely dismissed is because Round-Earth arguments have met the burden of proof that those arguing against Christianity keep trying to dodge having to provide. We really do just have so much better evidence that the world is round than atheists have for Christianity being false. So it has nothing to do with the form of the argument and instead has to do with the quality of the arguments for the position. Atheists simply don’t have strong enough arguments to get the benefits that Round-Earth arguments get against Flat-Earth arguments. That’s not a problem with Christians or Christianity.
That deals with the first post, which is just a conversation with a Flat-Earth advocate that Seidensticker hopes will remind people of conversations with Christianity, which might work for some atheists but is probably not going to be at all effective when dealing with Christians, and you don’t really need Silver Bullet arguments to convince atheists of their positions. So I’ll move on to the similarities that he outlines in the next two posts.
1. Sufficient evidence
Who is the audience for the argument? Not a scientist, if the argument is coming from a flat earther or a Creationist*. If Creationists were trying to do real science, they’d be going to conferences and writing papers for secular journals, like the real scientists.
Actually, Creationists have indeed been trying to do real science and trying to write papers for secular journals. I think they’ve even succeeded at times. Since the scientific consensus is against Creationism, getting papers published that are against the consensus is going to be quite difficult, but as we’ve seen that applies to new theories that are right as much as old theories that are wrong. So that means absolutely nothing.
If you donate to a Creationist organization, will that fund scientific research? Of course not—it will be used to convince lay Christians that they’ve backed the right horse and to appeal for more donations.
Actually, many of the most prominent Creationist organizations actually do try to look at and examine scientific results — which is as much research as many in those fields do — to try to come up with arguments that are scientifically credible and so can challenge the scientific responses in kind. So it isn’t the case that they just ignore the science that is causing them so much grief, as at a minimum they look at it to try to prove it wrong, in much the same way as atheists read the Bible to try to prove it wrong. If their response to science is indicative of the same sort of moves Flat-Earthers make, then so is the atheist response to theology … and even more so, since atheists deny that theology is a valid field far more than Creationists deny that science is a valid field. So his only move here can be “They’re arguing against science and not just accepting what it says!”, which is something that philosophy does as well when it comes to morality or consciousness and so can’t really be used as a blanket insistence that the questioning is just inherently incorrect and biased.
Seidensticker also here makes the mistake that he will make throughout this argument, which is finding parallels between Flat-Earthism and Creationism and then trying to use that against Christianity as a whole. But a lot of Christian religions — even Catholicism — accept science and try to find a way to fit their views into what science has clearly established, and so don’t have the science denial that characterizes Flat-Earthism. And so the argument doesn’t apply to many Christian religions and so would completely miss them, which is unacceptable in a Silver Bullet argument aimed at Christianity.
2. Misdirection by focusing on minutia
The FE proponent had lots of odd arguments. While they might have been confusing, which could have been their purpose, they were trivial. For example, our FE proponent was all over the literal map with questions about long-distance flight routes in the southern hemisphere.
The same is true for Christians and their complicated claims like the Fine Tuning argument or Ontological argument. This is what you lead with? If there were an omniscient and omnipotent god who wanted to be known, he’d be known! The very need for apologetics proves that such a god doesn’t exist.
In Christian parlance, they focus on the gnat but ignore the camel.
Well, first, as I’ve noted in my looking at the Biblical arguments most atheistic arguments against Christianity focus on trivial differences as if that matter. In fact, inventing 29 arguments that are all supposed to individually refute Christianity really seems like that sort of approach. Moreover, the Ontological and Fine Tuning arguments are the deeper arguments, that Seidensticker oddly dismisses. But most damningly he chides FE proponents for having a lot of odd arguments and being all over the place but his objection to Christians is that it is not just completely obvious, which is the same argument that the FE proponents makes against the Round-Earth arguments. So this argument really seems like a non-starter. It seems to misunderstand the Christian arguments and treats them in the same way that FE proponents treat the Round-Earth arguments, which means that this argument seems a better parallel to atheist arguments than Christian ones. The idea that God’s existence ought to be obvious is a different argument.
3. Gish gallop
The Gish gallop is a technique named after Creationist debater Duane Gish. His style was to pile many quick attacks onto his debating opponent while ignoring attacks to his own position. Even if his opponent were familiar with each attack and had a rebuttal, to thoroughly respond would mean descending into long, tedious explanations that would bore the audience and wouldn’t fit into a formal debate.
We see this in the FE argument. It contained rapid-fire arguments about the amount of sun in Arctic, why the moon doesn’t rotate, flat map projections, gyroscopes, and so on. This focus on quantity over quality takes advantage of the typical person’s scientific ignorance.
You see this in the Christian domain when they talk about a cumulative case. That is, any one argument may not be sufficient, but look how many there are! But consider this when applied to pseudo-sciences like astrology or Bigfoot. Crappy arguments don’t turn to gold just because you have a pile of them.
And, as with Gish, a debate or article with a pile-up of one terse argument after another is still popular among Creationists.
The big problem with this argument is that in pretty much any respectable academic field and especially in science what we really want and need is the cumulative case. It is exceedingly rare that you can even completely refute a view with one great argument and is never the case that you can prove one. As evidenced by his dialogue the reason we accept that the Earth is round is not because of one good argument but because we have a lot of good arguments for it. The same is true for evolution, as it’s not just one argument or case but a host of them. As I noted, the best atheist arguments are arguments where they say that it’s not the case that any one of these arguments can’t be worked around but the workarounds you have to make to deal with all of them suggest that it would be easier and make more sense to simply abandon it and accept the simpler atheistic argument. Science indeed is built on holding on to old theories until there are too many problems with them that the new theories don’t have while noting that the new theories also explain what the old theories are good at explaining. So this argument here basically rejects the scientific method to make a poor argument against Christianity.
4. Errors and lies
My goal in writing the FE position was a compelling argument, not a factual one. For a few points, I tossed out a claim that either I didn’t know was true or knew was false. I suspect this approach is common within FE arguments. If not that, then I can only conclude careless scholarship is the cause of the many errors.
I wonder how many times the typical FE proponent has been corrected. And I wonder how many corrections lead to that flawed argument never being used by that person again. In my case it takes just one such correction.
In the Creationist camp, Ray Comfort (to take one well-known example) has been schooled many times how evolution doesn’t predict a crocoduck. My guess is that he values the useful argument more than he is repelled by the broken one.
Considering all the times I’ve seen, say, incorrect interpretations of Natural Law or Cosmological Arguments or Ontological Arguments I think this might be a case of throwing stones in glass houses. Anyway, if the arguments are wrong, then they’re wrong and he wouldn’t need this argument, and citing one or even a number of people who maintain old and outdated and refuted arguments does not a refutation of Christianity make.
5. Always attack
The FE argument is a stringing together of arguments of the form, “Didya ever wonder about natural feature X? A round earth model is supposed to explain that? That’s crazy!”
It’s easier to attack a scientific model than to defend one when the audience is poorly educated in science. FE (and Creationist) arguments try to keep the opponent off balance, always on the defensive.
If they throw ten punches, only two of which land with any impact, that’s two more than they started with. A layperson poorly educated in the material and predisposed to root for the anti-science argument might give the decision to the attacker.
With an argument that intends to be scientific, the opposite is true, and a new theory is explained, supported with evidence, and defended. Not only should it explain what the old theory explains well (and a round earth and evolution explain a lot), it must explain additional puzzles that tripped up the old theory.
The Creationist hopes that no one notices their Achilles’ heel. An attack on evolution does nothing to build up any competing theory of their own.
Atheists spend their entire time not only attacking Christianity but also spending a lot of time trying to justify a claim that they only are required to attack and have no need to provide any evidence. This is thus a bit of a “Pot calling the kettle black” argument.
6. Burden of proof
The FE proponent explicitly rejected the burden of proof, saying that they had common sense on their side. But no one would accept this. They ignored the Sagan standard, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and rejecting centuries of scientific consensus is the extraordinary position.
It’s also in vogue for Christians to insist that both parties in its debates—the Christian and the atheist—are making claims, and so both must defend their positions. But while the atheist has the option to defend “There is no God” or “There is no supernatural,” that’s not necessary. Either of these could be the default position, leaving the burden of proof solely on the Christian.
I find it amazing that Christians will, without embarrassment, insist on this concession—aren’t they eager to share the Good News without prerequisite?—but here again, they know it’s easier for them to attack than defend.
Again, this is quite rich considering all the arguments that atheists make to avoid ever accepting the burden of proof. If the evidence was so clearly on their side, why wouldn’t they be willing to share it? It’s because they, as Seidensticker says here about Christians, also believe that it’s easier to attack than defend. And a statement that opposes what the majority believe like the two he cites cannot be a default position, and he cannot unilaterally declare that the position he holds should be the default so he can dump the burden of proof on his opponents. No, he’d need to provide evidence and arguments for that … the very thing that atheists go to great pains to avoid having to do.
7. Circular reasoning
The proponent of any theory could show how, starting with a set of widely accepted initial assumptions, an unbiased observer can follow the evidence and conclude with their theory. For example, think of a university course in physics where the professor starts with basic facts that everyone shares and uses evidence to gradually build from there.
FE believers and Christians often follow that approach backwards. They assume their theory and then show how their worldview is consistent with the facts of the world. The best they can do is show that their worldview isn’t falsified by reality and insist that the burden of proof is actually shouldered by their opponent. This is circular reasoning.
Looking at the above point, atheists do that far more often than Christians do. The Ontological argument that Seidensticker derides is obviously not that kind of argument, which also shows why Christians actually use it. Meanwhile the strongest atheist argument is the Problem of Evil which is an argument of that sort. Now, arguments of that sort aren’t invalid since they are used to show that their worldview fits reality better, but then the response from the other side is of course to show that their view is indeed not inconsistent with reality and so can still work. The debate in his conversation was about people doing that, but with the Round-Earth side being too weakly expressed.
So as we go along, Seidensticker’s arguments really seem to fit atheism better than Christianity, which is not what he wanted.
8. Appeal to common sense
The FE argument want you to use your eyes and trust your senses. Look at the horizon—it’s flat! Climb a mountain or look over the ocean, and the horizon is still flat. “If flat earth theory is wrong, it’s got to be the rightest wrong theory ever.”
The Creationist equivalent is to say that humans and worms and even bacteria are so complicated that they certain look designed. A Christian example is the Kalam Cosmological Argument, where the first premise has a twist on the common sense idea that everything must have a cause.
No, common sense isn’t reliable at the frontier of science. If it were simply a matter of following one’s common sense, someone like Isaac Newton would’ve resolved all of science’s loose ends centuries ago. Or even Aristotle, millennia ago. “Life is complicated—it must be designed” is common sensical but wrong. The same is likely true for the insistence that everything in nature had a cause.
Common sense and our sense experiences are our first and best access to the world. However, they can be wrong. And so we go by them but when we get enough evidence that they are wrong we readjust based on that evidence. That’s why we know that the stick doesn’t really bend in water. That’s why we know that the world is round. What the atheist is missing that the Round-Earth proponent is not is that evidence, and the atheist consistently is at great pains to avoid actually providing it, demanding that the Christian must provide that evidence even in light of comments that atheism violates common sense. So of course atheism is not going to get the same benefits that the world being round does, which invalidates this entire comparison and so this entire “Silver Bullet”.
That was the second post, so now into the third:
9. “God did it” resolves every problem
Flat earth thinkers and Christians rarely give a thought to the work of materials scientists, quantum physicists, or chemists. And they happily use the fruits of modern science like computers, electricity, and airplanes. They only lose sleep over those scientific fields that step on their theological toes such as geology which gives an old dating of the earth (and annoys young-earth Creationists), astronomy which gives round planets circling the sun (flat earthers), or biology which explains life through evolution (conservative Christians).
When faced with a tough problem, the scientist may admit, “I don’t know.” But flat earthers and Christians always have the God card that they can’t resist playing. They’ll point to science when they like its conclusions, and otherwise declare that God did it (or God is inscrutable, or God’s ways are not our ways, or some similar argument). It’s nice having a God that can be reshaped to fit any need, I guess.
Flat earthers demand, “What does it look like?” when they see a flat earth. And Creationists demand, “What does it look like?” when they see the God who must’ve made our world this complicated.
Atheists look at FE thinking and see pseudoscience, and at Christianity and see just one more manmade religion made of legend and myth.
This is an argument that doesn’t follow from his title, since he’s complaining that they reject science when it contrasts with their view which is not a “God did it” reply. This also doesn’t apply to accommodationists who think that religion and science are compatible and that when they clash religion must give way (this is, in fact, the actual stated position of the Catholic Church). So this is far more a rant than an argument. If Christians are right that the science is wrong or that there’s room for God in that science then their move is valid, and if they’re wrong it isn’t. Seidensticker needs to show it’s wrong instead of trying to make a parallel to Flat-Earthism.
10. Indoctrination
In the FE argument, those of us who remain skeptical were called indoctrinated. Apparently we can’t see the clarity of the FE worldview because we’ve marinated too long in a round-earth environment. We’re too devoted to authority figures who tell us what to think.
But the lady doth protest too much. The difference is that those of us who get our reality about nature from the scientific consensus can point to a remarkable track record. By contrast, FE thinking and Christianity have taught us zero new things about reality, and their disciplines’ track records show only failure.
Naturalist laypeople can accept the scientific consensus as the provisional truth, but we have no authority figures whose declarations we must embrace or which we refuse to challenge.
To those who place themselves as science’s ultimate authority and reserve for themselves the right to pick and choose the science they’ll accept, I have a challenge. They must fill in the blank in this declaration: “I reject the scientific consensus of field X, even though I’m an outsider to that field, because ___.”
Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms only fade away when all of the old scientists who were educated in the old theories fade away and are replaced by those who were educated in the new ones. That sounds sufficiently similar to indoctrination to me to invalidate the title. The rest of it is criticizing what knowledge religion has brought us, which only works if you try to claim that religion is a way of knowing which many do not. And speaking as someone who does philosophy it is indeed the case that if we want to reject the scientific consensus we need a reason but that reasons for that are often a lot easier to come by than Seidensticker seems to think it is. Including that the scientific consensus is not as clear as lay people like Seidensticker think it is and that the conclusions they are making do not follow as directly from science as they think it does. And, again, if they’re right, then this doesn’t matter and if they’re wrong then Seidensticker would need to focus on that rather than on this parallel.
11. Science is hard
The flat-earth argument is correct when it points out that science is hard, and that’s a weakness for the round-earth position. To those of us who care about which worldview is correct and nothing more, it can be frustrating to realize that some might embrace a worldview despite its not being correct.
This is the problem with the science-based approach. We’re subjected to a Gish gallop of our own making. Yes, you can explain the science, but it’s a slog that demands patience from our audience.
And yet just above Seidensticker criticized Christianity for having a bunch of complicated arguments that require us to do a lot of thinking and that touches on a lot of different areas. Yes, he insisted that if there really is a God that shouldn’t be the case but philosophically speaking worldviews are always going to have a lot to do no matter what. And I also pointed out that the idea that God is supposed to be obvious is another argument and so can’t be used to defend what is supposed to be an argument that on its own would defeat Christianity.
12. Conspiracy theories
You think the earth is a disk? Here’s the view of earth from the International Space Station. As you can see, the earth is round. Next question.
But of course that won’t satisfy a FE zealot. If inconvenient facts get in the way, they might explain them as a conspiracy.
Creationists, which includes most conservative Christians, have their own inconvenient facts. Evolution convulses their world, so it must be wrong. Again, apologist Greg Koukl is our example. He says that not only is evolution flawed but those within the field know it’s flawed. In other words, it’s a conspiracy.
But here’s an odd problem. Apologist and fellow evolution denier Jim Wallace comes at the question of conspiracy theories from another angle. He says an invented resurrection of Jesus is an incredible conspiracy.
So these apologists tell us that it’s plausible that tens of thousands of evolutionary biologists are part of a conspiracy today but implausible that a small group of people would invent and support the Resurrection claim centuries ago. I’ll let them fight it out.
Here is another example where Seidensticker conflates Creationists and Christians which invalidates his argument. This would only be a problem if the same person argued both cases, because it would be a contradiction. So it might apply to Jim Wallace. It doesn’t apply to Christianity in general, and again is a different argument and so not one that he can argue on the basis of the parallel. And taking on the parallel, where is Seidensticker’s “picture from the ISS”? Again, Seidensticker and other atheists go to great pains to avoid having to ever provide that evidence that can only be explained by a huge conspiracy theory, which is why we can dismiss the Flat-Earth proponent. Given the atheist worldview, the Christian cannot be dismissed in the same way.
13. Playing the skeptic
The FE proponent was just being skeptical. Who can complain about that since science welcomes challenges, right? If it’s correct, it can tolerate a few friendly questions.
But “friendly questions” of this nature have consequences. Remember how anti-vax media asked whether hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or even bleach could be effective treatments for COVID. They were just asking questions—where’s the problem?
The problem was that inventing a worldview based on fake news undercut the credibility of the worldview that was based on real science.
Creationism is a far bigger industry than the FE, with researchers busily undermining the credibility of evolution with pseudoscience. They’ve been fairly successful, and 66 percent of white evangelical Protestants in the U.S. accept Creationism over evolution. The problem here is false stories that encourage people to reject the truth.
Do you remember the Ken Ham (Creationist) vs. Bill Nye (scientist) debate? They were asked what would change their minds. Nye quickly gave a couple of examples of potential new data that would change his mind. But what would change Ken Ham’s mind? Nothing, he admitted.
And that’s the problem with FE proponents and Creationists. Remember point #5: Always attack. They ask questions, but these are only meant to sow doubt. They don’t actually want them answered. It’s not like they have any intention of changing their minds because of new information.
Note that a number of atheists can’t say what would change their minds as well, so this isn’t as good an argument as Seidensticker thinks. And atheists have defined themselves as “just being skeptical”. And even his examples are ones where people didn’t just invent these ideas, but had some kind of reasoning. I think that the reasoning, as I heard it, was that those drugs also reduced inflammation and the big problems from COVID were caused by inflammation. Arguing that COVID’s not caused by worms and so the ivermectin wouldn’t kill COVID was not a reasonable response to that argument, since that wasn’t why they were advocating for it in the first place. So in general if people could actually reply to “friendly questions” instead of relying on insulting dismissals then perhaps that wouldn’t happen. Or maybe it would. At any rate, Flat-Earthism does not seem to benefit from this so this parallel doesn’t seem valid, even if Seidensticker’s concerns were valid, which in the case of Christianity they may not be.
14. Sweeping, unfalsifiable claims
FE proponents are usually Christian, and they’ll point to the obvious flat earth models in the Bible. This means that if an argument isn’t going the way they’d hoped, they have the option to fall back on an omnipotent God. They’ll say that if God’s actions are surprising, you can take it up with him. God moves in mysterious ways, we’re in no position to judge God, blah blah blah.
But it’s not possible to falsify “God did X” since God is always a dozen steps ahead of us. And by being unfalsifiable, this claim is unscientific.
The Creationist or Christian is hoist by the same petard. Perhaps if they see parallels with FE thinking, they’ll be less likely to make the FE proponent’s claims.
A Scientific American blog post makes the science/pseudoscience distinction clearer.
Scientific claims are falsifiable, … while pseudo-scientific claims fit with any imaginable set of observable outcomes. What this means is that you could do a test that shows a scientific claim to be false, but no conceivable test could show a pseudo-scientific claim to be false. Sciences are testable, pseudo-sciences are not.
If God is capable of doing something and we can come up with a plausible — even if mysterious — motivation for Him to do something, then that’s a valid response to an attack that says that something must be natural. That’s not the sort of thing that makes something unfalsifiable. Also, after arguing that Creationists reject science he seems to want to argue against them by arguing that their views are unscientific, which is a bit of a contradiction. Also, Christianity being unfalsifiable is, again, another argument, and so we shouldn’t need to try to make that parallel to pull it off if it’s valid, especially since Flat-Earth proponents would clearly deny that their view is unfalsifiable, but would insist that it hasn’t been yet because they can find ways to fit the evidence into their theory and note that from their perspective it’s the Round-Earth theory that’s invalidly trying to fit the evidence into their theory. So that doesn’t really work.
15. Teach it in schools?
I haven’t seen any FE proponent demand that their alternate reality be taught in schools. I’m sure the average Christian would be as outraged at the suggestion as any atheist. But if that’s the case, Christians should help keep all pseudoscience, including Creationism, out of schools.
That assumes it’s pseudoscience, which assumes it’s wrong. Again, the fact that Round-Earthism has so much better evidence in its favour and isn’t trying to deny that it needs to provide evidence works against Seidensticker’s argument here.
I can wrap up this post by responding to this summary statement:
Christians, how can you accept Christianity but reject flat earth theory when these 15 parallels show how similar they are? Christianity is in present society only because it was in past society. It’s been grandfathered in. It didn’t earn its way in with evidence like science.
I can do that because we have much better positive evidence in favour of Round-Earthism than we do for atheism, and Round-Earth proponents don’t spend a lot of time arguing that they don’t have to prove anything and refusing to provide evidence to Flat-Earth proponents. If Seidensticker really had such strong evidence in arguments and provided them instead of dodging them and trying to push the burden of proof on the beliefs that are accepted by most people, then maybe we would reject Christianity as well.