John Blanchard's Does God Believe in Atheists? (2000) is available as a 650-page book (a 2014 revised PDF is available free at christianstudylibrary.org). Or, if you prefer, you can get what I assume are the same arguments in the format of an audiocassette with a run-time of just under one hour.
I listened to the audiocassette. Blanchard delivered the lecture as a church sermon at which he was selling his book at half-price. His church audience was not apparent until the middle of the second side, when he informed these Christians that the fact that they were sitting in a church should suggest to them that Jesus is actually real. (No word on why Jews sit in synagogues and Hindus sit in temples.)
Cassette Side 1
Blanchard argues against the idea that the universe is “just here” and that humans are the result of a cosmic accident.
The Big Bang isn’t even really a theory, he says, because it can’t be empirically tested. (Well, I guess that means that creationism isn’t a theory either.)
He says no one any longer believes the “steady-state” theory that the universe has always been here, because scientists now know that matter is always changing. (Then how about a non-steady-state theory that the universe has always been here and has always been changing? He doesn’t propose this possibility.)
Might the universe have self-created? He dismisses that as nonsense. (Why?)
The only option left is that a “self-existent” God created the universe. (So, God can be self-existent, but not the universe. Why, he doesn't say.)
Of course, the God who created the universe is, he says, the God who is defined in Christian scripture. (No reason to assume that.)
After going on for some length about the extreme odds against the universe appearing by accident, he concludes it's easier to believe that life is purposefully made than to believe that life is an accident. It takes more faith, he says, to believe it was an accident. (In doing so, he is inadvertently disparaging faith, because he is saying that one needs faith to believe nonsense.)
Evolutionary theory, he says, claims — to the contrary — that life is the result of pure chance. (It does not. The theory of natural selection observes that some living beings are better equipped to survive than others, and thus their survival is not purely a roll of the dice, but rather it has to do with their physical and mental traits and how they interact with other living beings and with their habitat and ecosystem.)
“How can we jump from atoms to ethics, and from molecules to morality?” he asks, thereby implying it's impossible to start with pure matter and end up with ideas. (Well, one might ask him the same question in reverse: How do you start with a purely immaterial God and get matter?)
Regarding ethics, he continues, “Why are we in tune with some kind of law that we never brought into being?” (This simply assumes, rather than argues, that morality is not a product of human biology and psychology.)
He notes that some features of human morality seem to be universal, though they haven't been transmitted through writing. (But plenty of things aren't consciously created by humans, and that does not mean they were given by God. Another option is that they are unconscious behaviors or biological functions.)
Cassette Side 2
Next, Blanchard mainly preaches about the Bible, which, he declares,
“has the highest standard of morality in the world. Simply put, we can trust the Bible implicitly in everything it says about everything of which it speaks. And its main subject is not a principle but a person. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, the central subject of Scripture is, of course, Jesus of Nazareth.”
Every other word of this is wrong. The Bible commands offensive wars of attrition, institutes the death penalty for ritual infractions, and regulates slavery. People make livings interpreting the Bible precisely because it is not “the highest standard of morality” without some serious work to make an interpretive framework through which we can discard the half that appalls the common moral sense. The Bible was written from the point of view of particular peoples and does not represent objective viewpoints, much less is it the final word on history, so it cannot be trusted on “everything.” And the character of Jesus does not appear until the New Testament; he is not the central theme of Genesis, which was written hundreds of years before Jesus supposedly lived. Only a Christian interpretive framework would find a way to locate Jesus in the Garden of Eden. Whatever artistic license the author intends by this hyperbole, it crosses over into simple inaccuracy.
Conclusions
Side 1 ends with the claim that the planet can meet all basic human needs. (No, not if there are 7 billion of us living industrialized lifestyles — see the concept of an ecological footprint.) He then makes the analogy that, if we have spiritual needs, then surely God can fulfill them. (No, that would be the fallacy of wish fulfillment.)
Side 2 ends with various claims such as:
- Jesus performed miracles without being physically present;
- he felt everything that humans feel, except that he never sinned, so he never felt guilt or shame;
- God gave humans the faculty of thought so we can find God; but also, we’ll find God if we seek God with our hearts.
No, none of it makes sense.
Why do I care?
I wouldn't spend much time picking on things that people say in defense of their faith. I give people polite leeway to believe what they believe, especially if they're not picking on atheists. This author, however, in his promotional lecture, spent all of Side 1 complaining that atheism is irrational and claiming he had a better alternative. I do consider it my responsibility as an atheist to occasionally listen to Christian apologetics just to be aware of the basic arguments. In this case, I listened, but no viable alternative to atheism was provided, at least not on the audiocassette (2002). Maybe it's provided in the full book (2000, revised 2014), but did the lecture persuade me to read the book? No.
Background of this small essay, i.e., why you are reading it here now
I listened to the 1-hour audiocassette lecture in 2011. Since it had the same title as the 650-page book, I treated the abridged audio as an alternate version of the book, and I posted my comments about it to Goodreads under this book title. I didn't leave the book a starred rating, so as not to affect its collective starred rating, and I did specify I was responding to the abridged audio and not to the full print version. This generated a few negative comments from people who were mad at me for — in their view — reviewing a book that I admitted to not having read.
I disagree with this characterization of the book and of my activity. Audiobooks are books; abridged books are books; abridged audiobooks are books. If a one-hour recorded lecture is not meant to be considered a valid version of the longer print book, then the author or publisher should not give them the same title, as that causes confusion, the responsibility for which falls on them. Finally, I don't believe there is a One True Answer for how people ought to use the Goodreads website; it's social media, and we make it up as we go along. Goodreads may have hoped people would use their website in a particular way, but people who use the site may come up with creative interpretations and we are not necessarily wrong when we do so.
Nonetheless, I no longer wish to receive sporadic comments questioning the validity of why I posted comments about an abridged audio on the product webpage of the longer book ten years ago. I mean, the planet is burning, can we worry about bigger things please. But also, to the extent that I allow myself to be trolled, I admit to being peeved that I have logged over 1750 full-length books that I've read and yet internet strangers are repeatedly needling me about my intellectual capacities because of the single instance of an abridged audiobook among them. (Never mind that I, not they, am the one who bothered to engage the author's argument.) From their perspective, it makes sense that they comment on this post, since it is the post that they saw; but from my perspective, I wonder why this post is high-engagement and rarely does anyone interact with my other 1750 posts. It is a headscratcher. Thus, I have moved the old essay from Goodreads to this webpage. I have rephrased and reformatted the essay for clarity.
May I also add that it is common for people to complain that an online comment is not the correct length — it needs to be shorter to hold their attention, or it needs to be longer for me to prove my intellectual capacity to them upon their demand. That's in the same bucket with people who claim I should not have posted the essay in an internet field labeled "review" because my essay is, for one reason or another, not a proper "review." Or, if the field is labeled "comment," I shouldn't write a full-fledged review, but rather a shorter "comment," because that would be the proper use of the field. People have assumptions about the "proper" use of fields on the internet. (It's almost as if the proper use of the internet were ordained by God.) When they cannot or will not engage with the substance of what I wrote, they sometimes pick an argument with my choice of website, or my choice of labeled field on that website, or the length of what I wrote. But actually, that's not their concern. The reason they criticize the way I wrote what I wrote (be it essay, review, comment, or what have you) is that they don't agree with my point at all and they would like me to stop making it. Until they provide a counterargument, of course, I'm left with my own argument. Thus, my argument here has not changed since 2011, as no one has yet bothered to rebut it.
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.
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