No atheist can answer!

I received a call from a girl I met in a philosophy class I took. She was excited to tell me she went to church and heard her pastor talk about "questions atheist can not answer!" - In class I was a little argumentative, it's hard for me to keep quite when I hear blind theistic assertions, especially when there's an audience. She invited me to talk with him.

I did, and recorded it as well (click here to hear the mp3)

I could (and may) write a response to most of what he said, but I wanted to focus on one aspect of our conversation, mainly because its so grossly common among theists.
It usually goes like this...

Theist: "...but David, if you look at [insert some fact of physics/biology], we notice [insert mystery], and no atheist can explain it!"

Now, these kinds of arguments have one hidden assumption: that the theist has an explanation! For one to argue that position-A is better than position-B because position-A can't explain X, it's self-refuting and meaningless if position-B can't explain X either!

And of course this is exactly what we find, almost always.

In my conversation with Zen, the pastor, he brought up some interesting facts about the cell (most of which went right over my head) on how the internal mechanisms worked. After he claimed no evolutionist (which he confuses with atheist) could answer how such a mechanism evolved. A classic argument from incredulity.

If you listen to the conversation I don't even try to answer (I often avoid talking about science with religious people because frankly, I don't think they care in the least) but simply say "I don't know, what's your explanation" - Zen says "god created it" but with bigger words cloaking it with intelligent sounding context. So, is this even an explanation?

An explanation is basically giving an account of how something took place. A good explanation would show the logical development or relationship between causes (provides a mechanism) that makes sense of the data.

Let's compare an explanation with a non-explanation

Phenomena to be explained: You walk in your living room and find your front window is broken, glass is all over the floor, and a dirty baseball is found on the couch.

Explanation: "Kids outside were playing baseball, and one of them either threw or hit a ball in the direction of the window, breaking the glass and landing on the couch"
Here we have a summery of events that explain the data. Although simple, it meets the requirement.

Non-explanation: Something happened, or Somebody did it.

I want to point out that something can be true and be a non-explanation. Somebody did 'do it' - that doesn't change that the statement explains nothing. Another point is, in a strictly technical sense "Somebody did it" could be used as an explanation, although it's virtually the most vapid and empty explanation possible, right under "X caused it" and since it's always true that something cause "it" it makes it meaningless.

So, as we can see the theist does not have an explanation. So the "you can't explain X" argument fails because the one making the argument is guilty of the same crime, causing the theist to shoot himself in the foot.

If the theist denies this, and insists his little "theory" is an explanations, then I can merely state "Nature did it." If the theist thinks 'god-did-it' is an explanation, then 'nature-did-it' must be one as well, since we're only changing one word.

Even if we pretend it's an explanation, the atheist still wins in competitions with the theist, because we've have examples of nature doing stuff, and none of gods doing anything!
So once again, theism falls to it's knees in failure.

By David Campbell
Originally written: Friday, June 23, 2006