Michael Huemer On God

 Michael Huemer is one of the best philosophers publishing today. His interests range from epistemology to political philosophy. He recently published an article detailing why he is not religious. Given his influence and philosophical acumen, his article is worthy of a response. Note that I have skipped a few sections. That's because there was some repetition in Huemer's article, and I don't want the article to be longer than it has to. 

Huemer states, 

"I think the main reason is that the contents of specific religious beliefs, especially things you find in texts such as the Bible or the Koran, sound to me a lot more like the sort of things that primitive tribes of humans from the past would make up than the sort of things that a supreme being would say."

1) What concerns does Huemer have in mind here? That's not to say I completely disagree, however, it is easier to work with specifics as opposed to ambiguities. 

2) What does Huemer make of Christ's teachings of loving your fellow man (Matthew 5:44; 22:39; John 13:34, etc.)? What about Jesus associating with the most shameful in ancient society, e.g. tax collectors, prostitutes, disabled, on and on the list goes?

Of course, one could concede that Jesus was just a nice man, but that fails to comprehend the honor/shame context the writers of scripture we're living in. 

3) As John Walton and Michael Heiser routinely state, the Bible was written for us, not to us. Of course we would expect to see scripture reflect a large part of the society it was written in! 

Huemer goes on,

"He created this universe 14 billion years before any human being ever existed. He may have existed for infinite time before that. After causing the Big Bang, he watched the birth of ten thousand, million, million, million stars that coalesced out of the gases produced by the big bang over millions to billions of years. After waiting one hundred million human lifetimes for the Earth to form, he then watched the lives and deaths of millions of entire species on this planet alone, before ever the first human walked the Earth."

1) I, like most Christian thinkers of the past, hold to divine timelessness. Given that, God isn't just "sitting there", he isn't confined to the present. Here, Paul Helm helpfully writes,

"Thus, when we say that God existed before the universe, the ‘before’ is not temporal but hierarchical in meaning…the universe might not have existed, and depends for its existence upon God…" The Providence of God (IVP Academic, 1994) p. 71

2) Those initial conditions are fine-tuned (cf. Luke Barnes and Gerraint Lewis "A fortunate Universe" [Cambridge University Press, 2016]), thereby raising the probability of theism (cf. Robin Collins' essay in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology)

I'll get into the fine-tuning argument at a later date; for now, I am just pointing out some of the literature for people to consult in the mean time. 

Huemer goes on,

"This is the being that, I’m supposed to believe, is going about choosing favorite human tribes."

1) Limited atonement doesn't rule out God's love for the reprobate. God loves the reprobate in virtue of them being his creation. God's universal love is not the same as his redemptive love. 

2) God's choosing of Israel is a part of his overall plan to redeem humans and give his justice.

Continuing, 

"Getting jealous of fictitious other gods? Becoming enraged when people fail to worship and obey him?"

1) This language of God feeling emotion is to accommodate himself to human incapacity and weakness. To illustrate this, John Calvin writes,

"What, therefore, does the word “repentance“ mean? Surely its meaning is like that of all other modes of speaking that describe God for us in human terms. For because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us.” Institutes 1.17.13

2) The onus is on Huemer to show these other "gods" don't exist. Of course, I am a trinitarian monotheist, I use "gods" to stand in for other, lower, divine beings such as demons.

Back to Huemer,

"This being is obsessively preoccupied with which humans are having sex, in what ways, with which other humans?"

As if hook-up culture is a positive? What is wrong with saving yourself for one person? 

For such a good philosopher, Huemer's objections to the faith sure do sound like a disgruntled teenager's objections. 

"And about maintaining human traditions and power structures?"

What exactly does Huemer mean here? 

Continuing,

"It’s what the primitive human imagines he would be like if he had ultimate power. “I’d make everyone worship me! If anyone didn’t want to, I’d torture him. Forever. I’d make my tribe defeat our enemies. And I’d kill the gays, because–gross!”

1) How does Huemer deal with the fact that in contemporary philosophy of religion, philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Alex Pruss, Robert Koons, James Anderson, Greg Welty and Andrew Loke are still defending Biblical theism?

2) That's a rather naïve understanding of hell. Interpreting the doctrine of hell through the lens of Dante's Inferno is a sure way to misunderstand hell.

2a) There is a distinction between torture and punishment. If a child gets put in time out for breaking a valuable object, is the kid being tortured? 

2b) One isn't punished merely for not having believed. If someone isn't saved, they aren't saved from any of their sins. Not merely unbelief.

Huemer then remarks, 

"And I’d kill the gays, because–gross!”

Huemer needs to learn some more covenant theology. He should also learn about Old Testament law.

What's also not mentioned in this article are the secular arguments for traditional marriage put forth by people such as Robert P. George, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Gergis.

Back to Huemer,

"Imagine looking down at two ant colonies fighting in the dirt. You would not pick a favored colony and then start stomping on the other colony, unless you’re a child. You would not become super-concerned about exactly how the ants are doing things in their colony, whether they’re reproducing in the right way, whether the ants believe you exist, or whether they are showing respect for you.

If there is a god, we are to God as the ants are to us."

1) Huemer needs to ask if God knows ethical truths.

2) Huemer needs to ask if ants and humans are analogous. Obviously not, given that scripture claims humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27.)

3) See my point earlier about God's choosing of Israel.

Huemer writes, 

"But God must have known all those things, and everything else that we have discovered, long before the Bible was written. He knows everything that we’ll discover for the next ten thousand years too. So if I read a book written by God, I would expect that same experience to happen, but in a much greater degree – I would expect to find deep insights, to feel my mind expanding, and to sense an enormous intellect (like when you read Isaac Newton, but more so)."

This is a classic internet atheist trope.

1) Why would God need to write a math or science textbook? The Bible is there for moral instruction and formation through the history of God's people, culminating in Jesus - the Messiah.

2) What would an ancient Israelite do with the quadratic formula? What would an Israelite do with Einstein's equations?

3) With respect to 2), why would the everyday person need these high-level academic ideas? Why would an accountant ever need to know about these types of equations? Not every person is talented in these fields. Huemer's objection is fundamentally self-centered. 

In short, Huemer is a talented philosopher, but falls very short regarding philosophy of religion and theology. Almost all of his objections are answered in good apologetics books, standard scholarly monographs and biblical commentaries.