Responding to Samuel Butler — Part 1

When I was an atheist and attending undergrad, I use to go to the Freethinkers club on campus. I originally did this as a place to find like-minded people – it was little more than to go and say, ‘hey, let’s make fun of Christianity!’ Freethinkers, nevertheless, became a very important to me for multiple reasons. However, there’s one criticism that I’d like to focus on now. One of the disconcerting things that I found while in Freethinkers was that a lot of my athiest compatriots seemed to be so convinced that there was no God that they generally did not deal with apologetics beyond creationism (obviously this was not the case for everyone, though). I remember one meeting when we were discussing what topics to cover in the coming year I purposefully listed off a bunch of names and arguments one can find on the internet: the Kalam Cosmological Argument by William Lane Craig, the Tautological Argument, Alvin Plantiga’s Modal Ontological Argument, etc. The response I got was a blank face followed by one poignant question: “What is that?”

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