No, God Isnt Just Another Possible God to Dismiss

With All the Rest

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By David Marshall Published on November 18, 2017 8 Comments

David Marshall

One of the most popular arguments against Christianity these days is what John Loftus
christened the Outsider Test for Faith. I (and reviewers so far) think I not only refuted that
argument in How Jesus Passes the Outsider Test, but showed that comparing Christianity with
other religious traditions tends to confirm the Christian message.

But this Outsider Test is a monster that does not die. It merely changes shape, like Proteus.
Heres another form it shifts into from time to time:

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And heres the kicker: When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Who is Stephan F. Roberts? He doesnt appear to be a scholar of any sort. The most I can find
is a somewhat self-deprecating comment about how this quote has gone viral. But that was
only because he posted it at the beginning of the Internet Age and it seemed to strike a chord.
But Roberts is certainly not a scholar of world religions.

Pardon, Your Ignorance is Showing

As someone who is, I find a few confusions in this meme. For instance, it includes both the
Chinese Queen Mother of the West and a character named after her in some of Orson Scott
Cards Sci-Fi novels. It names both Ares and Mars, which the Greeks and Romans were so
broad-minded as to consider the same god. It even names both Kuan Yin and Guanyin, though
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the first is the Wade-Giles romanization for the second, in the modern Chinese pinyin writing
system.

In addition, Allah is just the Arabic word for God. Names in different languages for the same
thing do not designate different objects. For instance, the fact that theEnglish look up in the
sky and say moon! while Chinese say yueliang and Japanese say tsuki does not mean that
Planet Earth has three (or ten thousand) moons. It means that people speaking different
languages use different words for the same experienced reality.

But the real problems with this argument run far deeper than ignorance; deeper than
linguistic confusion or flexibility about details.

Nor does the fact that Mohammed said false things about God mean Allah is a separate
being. The sentence, The moon is not made of green cheese is not rendered incoherent just
because some people may mistakenly think it is. Differing ideas about the nature of the moon
dont mean were talking about separate moons. Allah is the Arabic word, also used by Arab
Christians, for the Creator.

But the real problems with this argument run far deeper than ignorance; deeper than
linguistic confusion or flexibility about details. The simple fact is that most intelligent people
find belief in God far more credible than belief in, say, Bacchus, Pan, or Huitzilopochtli . Ill
detail just one of those problems.

God is not god.

Many people are confused by the fact that the two words, God and god, are spelled the
same. This is a much greater error than confusing, say, I work for Apple Computer, with I
ate an apple.

God refers to the eternal, self-existence, all-knowing, everywhere-existing, non-contingent,

perfectly good and loving, origin of all things.

There can be, by definition, only one such being, though He may be three in one, as Christians
believe.

Arguments That Dont Pan Out

Few of the arguments given to defend the existence of God would apply to his alleged
competitors. For instance, one skeptic claimed that the existence of Pan might be supported as
well as that of God by the Argument From Beauty. But that argument, as given by the Oxford
philosopher Richard Swinburne (pardon if I borrow from Wikipedia this time), goes as
follows:

God has reason to make a basically beautiful world, although also reason to leave some of the
beauty or ugliness of the world within the power of creatures to determine. If the world is
beautiful, that fact would be evidence for Gods existence. Poets and painters and ordinary
men down the centuries have long admired the beauty of the orderly procession of the
heavenly bodies, the scattering of the galaxies through the heavens (in some ways random, in
some ways orderly), and the rocks, sea, and wind interacting on earth.

Would this argument work just as well if you substituted the name Pan in place of God?
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Of course not! First, Pan is not eternal. He is the son of some other god, perhaps Zeus or
Hermes. They themselves were considered beings whose existence depended on some other
being before them. Second and third, he is local, not universal, and he knows some things but
not all. He is the god of the meadows, and took his habitation apparently in Arcadia.

So how could Pan be responsible for all the beauty in the universe?

If Youre Talking About God, Youre Talking About God

But suppose he were so responsible, and did have such powers after all. Then, as Augustine
pointed out (in reference to Jupiter), then wed be talking about God after all, though under
another name. We would be arguing about words, not realities.

A god is not God. A god is a kind of ancient super-hero, more like a movie star. Indeed, modern
Marvel movies get that just right: Thor can little more be confused with God in the Marvel (or
ancient Norse) universe, than Tony Stark with his suit, flying around the sky battling bad guys
and breaking hearts and expensive equipment.

The confusion here is absolute, and it is deliberate.

Confusion, Deep and Deliberate

The confusion here is deep, and it is deliberate. There is but one point behind conflating God
with this entirely different concept of gods or divas as we could also call them. Its to
muddle the head of the skeptic so that he misses the obvious. And everyone knows that.
Which is why no one believes in Pan anymore, but most people find God vastly more credible.

The skeptic sees this too, which is exactly why he mocks God by comparing him to a goat. But
neither God nor wise men will have reason so mocked.

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