I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist

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I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist is a 2004 book by Christian apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. Its title is based on the strawman claim that atheism is based on faith.

Many of the typical arguments for the existence of God are presented in the book: including cosmological, teleological, moral and Christological/Biblical historicity arguments. Moreover, attempts are made to address some arguments that the atheist may propose against the existence of God, such as the impossibility of miracles as proposed by David Hume and the argument from gratuitous suffering/evil. The foreword, by David Limbaugh, makes some bold claims such as there are good reasons to believe in the authenticity of what the Bible says, and that there are good arguments not just for pure deism, or even monotheism, but specifically Christianity. Yet what follows doesn't appear to live up to this claim.

Most chapters have a section about skeptical rebuttals which the authors consider to be the atheist position. They repeatedly stress how illogical their opponents must be to deny their conclusions. The authors are very keen to set up an "us vs. them" narrative. They ignore that many theists reject some or all of their apologetic arguments too.

"Believers in this theory of origin are called by many names: naturalistic evolutionists, materialists, humanists, atheists, and Darwinists"

Many theists accept evolution. Not all atheists accept evolution. The authors are making a hasty generalization.

The entire book is refuted in some considerable detail by various sources, like this one.[1]

Selected rebuttals[edit]

Regarding the existence of absolute truth:

"The skeptic may say, “Wait a minute! The elephant parable may be a bad parable, but that still doesn’t prove that truth in religion can be known. You’ve proven that truth can be known, but not necessarily truth in religion....""

No, the authors have asserted this, but not proved this.

The authors argue that Hume's fork, in which knowledge is based on reasoning or evidence, rules out belief in religion:

"Do you see the implications of Hume’s two conditions? If he’s correct, then any book talking about God is meaningless. You might as well use all religious writings for kindling!"

This implicitly admits that there is no empirical evidence for their God!

"Also, did you catch that Geisler and Turek just admitted that there is no empirical evidence for their God? So much for, you know, the premise of their book.[2]"

Their grasp of physics is rather feeble:

"If the centrifugal force of planetary movements did not precisely balance the gravitational forces, nothing could be held in orbit around the sun."

Centrifugal force is not really a force - it is the illusion of a force caused by massive objects to continue with their existing velocity. This is only apparent when a centripetal force, such as gravity, is acting on a body to cause it to follow an orbit. These "forces" are always the same because they really describe the same thing! This example is therefore a tautology.

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