Defending the Indefensible, part 2
When you KNOW that you're ACTUALLY right
This post is a continuation of Defending the Indefensible.
Allow me to introduce you to Dr. Zakir Naik. He is essentially Islam’s version of our Yosef Mizrachi (with a correspondingly huger audience).
Seriously, the parallels are almost uncanny. Like R. Mizrachi, Dr. Naik is known for his extremist and controversial statements. Like R. Mizrachi, Dr. Naik believes that the truth of his religion can be Proven by alleged scientific foreknowledge in the holy texts (Here’s a small sample of his Proofs. I’ll let you decide how compelling they are). Like R. Mizrachi, Dr. Naik has a basic contempt for his audience — his most fundamental assumption is that everyone will immediately believe everything he says without scrutiny (this is ubiquitous in apologetics). And above all, like R. Mizrachi, Dr. Naik knows how to talk like he knows what he’s talking about, even when he has not a clue.
Dr. Naik is 100 percent convinced that his religion is right. Like, not just “right”. I mean really, actually right, in the same way that you’re right about the color of the sky. He is so convinced that he’s right that he thinks it should be illegal to teach other religions. Why? Because of the simple fact that Islam is right and other religions are wrong. Just as we wouldn’t allow a math teacher to teach children that 2 + 2 = 3, so too we mustn’t allow other religions to be taught. That is how right he thinks he is!!!
Allow me to introduce you to another individual: Dr. William Lane Craig.
Dr. Craig is a professional philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. Compared to R. Mizrachi and Dr. Naik, Dr. Craig’s apologetics is a bit more nuanced and sophisticated. He is known for arguing for the existence of God with well-formulated arguments from natural theology, such as the fine-tuning argument and his updated version of the cosmological argument. But these arguments, at best, can only tell us about the existence of a generic demiurge, not the god of Christianity or any other particular religion1. So, in addition to those arguments, he has also argued for the historical plausibility of the Resurrection of Jesus. The Resurrection argument plays the same role in Christianity as the Kuzari argument does in Judaism (with one important difference: he is honest enough to call it an “argument” rather than a “proof”). The argument, briefly, goes like this:
Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his female followers on the Sunday after his crucifixion.
Various individuals and groups witnessed appearances of Jesus alive after his death.
Jesus’ disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that he had been resurrected, despite having strong predispositions to the contrary.
He says that these facts are accepted as historical by the vast majority of New Testament scholars, including secular ones. He thinks that they are best explained by a literal bodily resurrection (I can only assume that the secular NT scholars would have less spooky explanations). He wrote two books elaborating on the argument, so this summary cannot possibly do justice to it.
Dr. Craig does not give me the impression of someone who’s faking his beliefs. He seems to really think that he’s right.
I will take it for granted that everyone who reads this blog agrees that Dr. Craig and Dr. Naik are wrong. And not just wrong, but obviously wrong. They are so obviously wrong that you can’t even spare a few hours of your life to investigate their claims to find out if there’s any truth to them, despite the dire consequences if their claims are true. Remember, if they’re right and you disagree with them, you will be tortured in Hell forever, but none of you are losing any sleep over this possibility.
So, we have a puzzle. If they’re so obviously wrong, how can they be so confident that they’re right?!
At this point, you may be thinking “Hmm. Maybe if I point out all the problems with their so-called ‘proofs’, they will recognize their error.” No, no, NO!!! How naïve can you be? I promise you, they will have a response to every single one of your responses. And they will have a response to your response to their response, and so on. After all, they are actually right, so there must be a response to every possible objection. From your point of view, their responses may not be very good. But, more importantly, from their point of view, their responses are satisfactory. Simply telling them why you think their arguments are bunk will never, ever work.
We have another puzzle. If they’re so convinced that they’re right despite being dead wrong, then how can we be confident that we’re right about anything? Doesn’t this undermine the reliability of our own subjective sense of certainty? If Reb Dovid שליט"א is reading this, he is probably thinking: “Well, they may think they’re right, but I’m actually right.” There are two problems with this. First: it doesn’t answer the question at all, and second: they think they’re actually right too. You can respond, “they may think they’re actually right, but I’m actually actually right.” But they think they’re actually actually right too. And so on. So simply asserting “I’m actually right!” results in a stalemate. Nobody wins an argument where both sides are just bouncing off each other with “I am ACKSHUALLY right! You have no idea how right I am!! I AM SO GODDAMN RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Some additional puzzles.
How did they manage to convince themselves that such wrong ideas are actually 100% correct?
Is there any chance that we could convince Craig and Naik that they’re wrong, or is this completely hopeless?
Both the astronomer who tells us that the planets orbit the Sun, and the apologist who tells us that their religion is true, claim to be right. Why do we trust one and not the other? What’s the difference between them?
What is a neutral observer supposed to make of all this? Imagine you’re not a Jew, Christian, Muslim, or even particularly atheistic. You’re just some guy who enjoys a good beer while watching football with the boys on Sunday nights. You see a bunch of people screaming about how right they are and how many proofs they have that they’re right. What should your default assumption be? Why do you trust the astronomer and not the apologist?
I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here (I will try to answer these questions to the best of my ability in a future post(s)), but I don’t claim to have all the answers. The purpose of these questions is mainly to start a discussion. What do you think?
Which is why I think these arguments are irrelevant when discussing the truth of a particular religion.
Yosef Mizrachi is a blustering idiot. William Craig is quite intellectual. A huge world of difference between them.
Well written.