“These are the reasons,” Justin Brierley says, “that I believe God is the best explanation of human existence, value and purpose” (p. 93). What reasons does he mean? Really, nothing more than a repeated confusion between the obvious natural reasons why we like getting to be alive—and can appreciate much of what we are able to experience and enjoy about it and do with it—and needing a superhuman spirit to explain all that. As I noted yesterday in my general summary of his book Unbelievable? Why After Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian (see “Unbelievable: Justin Brierley’s Epistemic Failure”), Brierley repeatedly rests his Christian faith on failures of fact and logic. Here I’ll illustrate this in respect to his fourth chapter, “God Makes Sense of Human Purpose” (pp. 71-93). Because I think this chapter contains the actual psychological reasons Brierley thinks he needs his faith. Reality scares him. And he has latched onto a false belief to escape that fear. I suspect every other chapter is just an elaborate rationalization in support of this emotional need.

Key to much of this is the fallacy of Argument from Emotion. Brierley even calls it the Argument from Desire (p. 79), and doesn’t realize this is not a legitimate argument at all, but an established fallacy. It’s literally illogical. Many theists recognize this with their own adage, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” But however you describe it, that you desire something to be the case, is not evidence it is the case. “I don’t like the inconvenient fact that I am mortal; therefore I shall just believe I will live forever” is not a rational line of thought. Yet we have Brierley declaring that he finds it “very hard to believe that the rational and ordered universe we live in came from nowhere and is heading nowhere” (p. 93) and endorses C.S. Lewis’s fallacious appeal to his desire to fix the world or rise above it (pp. 79-80) as evidence that there already is a fixed world somewhere, and if we just perform the correct magic rituals we can get there. Even Brierley would recognize this is bonkers coming from anyone other than a Christian. Yet it doesn’t become any more logical from the lips of a Christian. In this whole section Brierley basically admits that he emotionally dislikes many inconvenient facts of the world, and for that reason chooses not to believe those things are true. This is not rational thinking. Yet he outright says this is why he is a Christian.

The rest of us cope with the way things are, and accept that they suck because no one built it for us; and then endeavor to do something about it ourselves, because now we know we’re the only ones who will. We were born with opportunities only conscious experience can obtain for itself; yet the world was not created to serve those potentials. This frustration can cause a lot of people to cling to vain superstitions, rather than get past the stark reality of it and start building something meaningful in spite of it. As such, Christianity is just an efficient revamp of old pagan cult practice. For instance, in paying votive cult, where worry over disease and heartache and other hardships beyond our control would motivate people to give valuables to a local god’s shrine—simply because they didn’t know what else to do, not because any such god existed or would do them any good. And yet when outcomes came out the way they wanted, they’d illogically conclude this did work, and therefore that that god does exist; while conveniently ignoring or forgetting (or explaining away as somehow still a success) the vastly greater occasions that things didn’t come out the way people hoped for.

Today, instead of paying votive cult so literally (except for Christian sects that still preach tithing or its functional equivalents, e.g. Prosperity Gospel), Christians dedicate themselves to something—vows of obedience to some obscure code; rituals of “payment of attention,” like prayer and devotional reading; repeated declarations of faith and gratitude; everything they deem as “paying” their god for some return, in this life or the next (personal savior cults long predated Christianity too). The alternative is to stop believing in this transactional superstition and start looking for how we can cooperate with each other to build a better and more meaningful world for each and every one of us. And that begins with recognizing that our reasons for liking being alive and wanting to do things with that opportunity do not come from any spirit world. They come from the obvious facts of conscious awareness itself.

Argument from Parental Love

Evading this realization, Brierley deploys a bunch of illogical and fact-challenged reasons to stick to that old votive superstition instead. This all begins where he speaks of his feelings for and about his newborn child as a reason to believe in God. The argument goes like this: in the words he quotes from a Christian convert who appeared on his show, we’re told that “from a pure atheist, materialist perspective” her baby “is a randomly evolved collection of chemical reactions” and “if that’s true then all the love I feel for him is nothing more than chemical reactions,” which is unsettling; therefore she just concludes, “that’s not true” (p. 72). Brierley endorses her reasoning across two ensuing pages. 

Of course that argument is inherently illogical in that it argues from emotion to fact: they want the world to be a certain way; therefore it must be that way. That’s not how reality works. Our not liking a certain truth, it making us uncomfortable, does not make it not true. But this kind of motivated reasoning replaces evidence-based reasoning throughout Brierley’s book, and would be alone sufficient to explain why he remains a Christian: he just can’t reason logically. He is too emotionally attached to the comforts of his false beliefs to think rationally about them. But the failure here is not just of mere logic. They are also failing to understand and think through actual reality. Their facts are wrong.

Because hidden in that fallacy of Argument from Feelings is a twice-repeated modo hoc fallacy, the illogical error of declaring something “just is” the things it is made of. I described this fallacy in Sense and Goodness without God (index, “modo hoc”):

This is the faulty argument that if, for example, all we are is matter in motion, then we are just clumps of moving matter and nothing more. This is clearly false. … [For example] there is obviously a difference between us now, and us hacked up into a stew. Both contain all the same matter, but not the same pattern of arrangement. Thus, how matter and energy are patterned, arranged, within space and time is itself a defining aspect of a thing, and this pattern has causal and other distinct properties. 

The modo hoc fallacy is an admixture of two more general fallacies called the Fallacy of Composition and the Fallacy of Division. The Fallacy of Composition occurs when you assume that because one thing is made of other things, it should have the same properties as those things (“atoms are too small to be seen; the sun is made of atoms; therefore the sun is too small to be seen”). The Fallacy of Division occurs when you assume that because one thing is made of other things, those other things must have the same properties as the one combined thing. So, we get, “the sun radiates light to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit; the sun is made of atoms; therefore any atom must radiate light to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit”; ergo, the fallacious thinking goes, if an atom doesn’t radiate light to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, then being made of atoms cannot explain the sun radiating light to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. That’s illogical. Being made of atoms that don’t radiate light to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit precisely does explain how the sun can. And that’s because of their systemic arrangement, which is physically, materially different from, say “a widely dispersed, and thus extremely cold, galactic dust cloud,” even one made of exactly the same atoms.

Everything is like the sun and its atoms: it is simply factually false that it “just is” a “randomly evolved collection of chemical reactions.” Because the idea that the sun is “just a bunch of atoms” is false. And it’s obviously false, too. This isn’t some obscure scientific fact; to the contrary, it is readily apparent to anyone who bothers to think about it that it is false. Therefore to argue from that false premise is simply illogical. It’s lousy reasoning. And no one should be praising this; much less going around being convinced by it. In actual reality, “from a pure atheist, materialist perspective” a baby is not “randomly” evolved (because evolution is not random), and “love” is not a mere “collection of chemical reactions.” Love is a very specific form of physical information processing quite distinct from literally any other “collection of chemical reactions.” Which is precisely what makes it “love” and not “hate” or “indifference” (or “an iPhone” or “a brick of cheese”), which also are “collections of chemical reactions” (yes, even the iPhone and brick of cheese), yet remain on atheism physically, materially different. And that’s why they produce physically, materially different feelings and sentiments, and effects.

Brierley says he’s “certain there’s a very convincing evolutionary explanation for why such feelings are produced within the parent of any newborn child,” but he’s also “convinced” (by the above illogical line of reasoning, and his corresponding failure to learn the actual facts of the matter) that “such an explanation” can’t “describe the totality” of that experience. But it does, if by “evolutionary explanation” you mean the complete scientific explanation of why an information processing circuit now exists in human brains that generates an experience of certain thoughts and feelings towards their children (and, even more particularly, infants). 

You could stop at a partial explanation (the mere fact of the genes and computational machinery; the mere fact of selection effects on a disposition’s impact on differential reproductive success) and then express disappointment that what you chose to stop at isn’t a complete explanation. But that would be your fault, for ceasing your inquiry there, as if you didn’t really want to know that science has gone much further than this, and therefore so should you. We don’t “just” have a science of the biology and genetics of parental emotions; we also have a fully developed empirical science of the psychology and sociology of parental emotions.

Parental love isn’t just some reflex, like feeling hunger when your body needs food. And yet even reflexes have factual justificatory content: a feeling of hunger is (usually) an accurate assessment of your condition (needing food). It is not some “random” chemical reaction. It’s (usually) an accurate cognitive assessment of reality. And that is why evolution selected for its existence. The same is true of parental love. And yet parental love is a far more sophisticated cognitive assessment of your situation than mere base hunger. Because it is not just “I feel x, and don’t like it; and I have learned if I do y, x will stop,” or “I don’t feel x, but like to; and I have learned if I do y, I will feel x.” Brierley’s own account establishes that parental love is connected to a very sophisticated cognitive understanding of a whole system of facts; and that whole cognitive understanding, not just its associated feelings, biologically evolved its way into us (as even he admits). So…why?

Parents could have just felt a blind instinct for taking actions that help their kids; a simple base response like hunger. But they didn’t. Human parents (and possibly a few other animals of similar cognitive advancement have come close, like apes, cetaceans, elephants) evolved a detailed cognitive understanding of what an infant is and what their own social role is with respect to it. In other words, all the feelings and thoughts Brierley described. Those would not exist in his experience if his brain had not evolved a capacity to comprehend them. And the reason the human brain evolved that capacity is the same as all other emotions, both high and low: when they are functioning correctly, they accurately model reality, and we can then use that information to navigate reality more successfully.

There is a lot of science of love Brierley could school himself on. I summarized the state of it as of 2005 in Sense and Goodness without God (III.10.3, pp. 197-202, “The Nature of Love,” and the related section on emotions generally, III.10, pp. 193-208), but that was nearly two decades ago and a lot more science has advanced on the subject (example, example, example, example, example—and those are just on parental love; there has been ongoing science on nearly every variety of love, and on the value of its foundational activator, empathy, to both groups and individuals). But what I wrote then remains the case:

In one popular model of human emotions, love is the combination of joy and acceptance in response to a person or thing … [and] entails some degree of adoration, respect, and compassion. … And though a basic kind of love is an emotion even an animal can feel, human love has the added potency of a cognitive component: that of understanding.

An understanding of what? Everything Brierley lists. Love, I there conclude, “is telling us that something is moving and exciting us in the profoundest way our brains can calculate.” And that’s based on its factual, cognitive content. Our brain is doing that calculation. And it evolved to do that calculation; and not randomly, but because of the advantages in understanding reality over being ignorant of it.

And in any case of love, of whatever kind, we can independently verify that this isn’t a false conclusion (when reliably activated). We aren’t being “tricked” into thinking that we are witnessing the beginning of a whole person, or that this is a person who already does (and soon will even the more) experience everything we have known (pain, pleasure, awe, despair, satisfaction, disappointment, knowledge, ignorance), or that (by our actions in creating this child) we have the most credible responsibility of anyone for taking care of them and building them up into an autonomous adult who will (we hope) be a blessing and not a curse to the world, or that this is our chance to do for them what we are grateful others did for us (or would have been, had they done; this being our chance to get right anything we are outraged our predecessors got wrong): care for them well and build them up into someone with the requisite skills and wisdom to realize for themselves a satisfying life (because it’s not as likely anyone else will do it; or do it as well as we can personally make sure we do; and if we really are unsure about that, we can place them by adoption with whoever we think can and wants to). This is not an illusion. We actually are witnessing all that. All of that really is true. And it’s as true in an atheistic, physical, material world as in any other. And yes, it’s of biological benefit to humanity for us to comprehend these facts. But we nevertheless are indeed comprehending these facts. And they are actually factually good for us—we are all better off when we comprehend them and act on them accordingly.

The same is all true of empathy as a motivation, which resides at the core of all of this: it, too, is a cognitive realization of what is actually the case (other minds experience what we do and are affected by what we do; and we by them, in turn), and demonstrably correct in its assessment as to how we should be disposed to that reality (even cold game theory entails we ought to cultivate, so as to govern our behavior with, empathy; but so does sociology, psychology, and even personal emotional economics: see The Real Basis of a Moral World and Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider). But this veers into moral theory and Brierley’s deployment of that stale old Moral Argument for God, which I’ve written about in another article. Here the relevant point is where the cognitive understanding that underlies parental love comes from, why we have that, what it is, and whether it correctly tracks and models real actual facts. Atheistic science has answered all this. Christians like Brierley just ignore the science, or endeavor to remain ignorant of its very existence. Which is the nature of all apologetics: it relies on leaving evidence out; evidence that, when you put it back in, reverses the conclusion. It is only then that we realize gods no longer remain a credible explanation of any of it.

This follows even if we just stumbled into comprehending reality completely at random (though we didn’t; evolution isn’t sentient, but it also isn’t random). For example, if someone just randomly connected up some circuits and by mere chance a computer started comprehending reality, it would still be comprehending reality. And that would still make it remarkably different from any other computer (as likewise almost any other animal). Its feelings and thoughts would not be false; they would not be “illusions” of anything; they would remain (most of the time) accurate calculations about reality, which it can then use to more successfully and productively navigate that reality. Being accidentally able to comprehend the truth does not make that truth false. The truth remains the truth. And all that has changed is that now we can comprehend it. It doesn’t matter how we acquired that ability. Once we have it, we have it. (Whereas on the probability of having it, I’ll get to next.)

One could say we are quite lucky then, for evolution to have produced in us a computer capable of comprehending reality, and translating that into correspondingly appropriate feelings and motivations. But one would have to say the same of any god; we’d have to be just as lucky for there to have been one of those, too. So “atheism means we got lucky” is no logical argument for theism; because theism also means we got lucky (see The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit). As arguments go, that’s a wash. All that remains is to determine which bit of luck we actually got. And that’s when we find that no evidence supports the lucky god scenario; all the evidence backs the lucky physics scenario instead. Science has more than adequately established which bit of luck we actually got (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them). Whereas theism doesn’t even have a plausible alternative, much less an evidenced one (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism).

Argument from Reason

Which gets us to the same modo hoc fallacy, and failure of both fact and logic, in Brierley’s repetition in this same chapter of C.S. Lewis’s long-refuted Argument from Reason (the same one Elizabeth Anscombe so catastrophically refuted that legend had it he left their debate in tears). The basic idea here being that “atoms don’t think, much less ascertain the truth about anything; therefore brains, being made of atoms, can’t have evolved to think, much less ascertain the truth about anything” (lest you think I’m straw manning, you’ll find this is an accurate paraphrase of what Brierley says on pp. 77-78). Time and again I have found C.S. Lewis to be one of the worst philosophers of his generation (worse even than Ayn Rand; and that’s saying something). This is just another of many examples (already our second so far; we visited his fallacy of Argument from Desire earlier). 

Any competent philosopher of that era would (and did) recognize this as a Fallacy of Division, confusing the atoms of which a computer is made, with what the computer does—which is a function of the arrangement of atoms, not of the individual atoms. Those atoms don’t just “randomly collide,” as if a brain or any other computer was just a tank filled with inert gas. And any informed philosopher of that era would know how a computer scientist, from Ada Lovelace a century prior, to Lewis’s famed contemporary Alan Turing, would respond to this nonsense: as long as the atoms are arranged so as to compute information (as machines had been doing quite prominently by then), and as long as that system has a way to check its outputs against reality (like, say, the basic human senses; as well as success or failure at avoiding danger and eating, and other like necessities), atoms (more specifically, suitably arranged systems of atoms) can indeed tell the difference between true and false propositions. 

In fact the entire evolution of brains, from their start in mere worms all the way to mammals and thence humans, is a story of an increasing attunement of these computers toward an ever-increasing reliability in ascertaining true facts about the world. Because complex animals have to navigate that world successfully, and doing so better than competitors at an affordable resource cost is always an advantage. The rest is history (see Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience). There is no excuse for anyone like Brierley not to know this by now, or not to understand it. It’s been readily explained in multiple places easily accessed. That instead their Christianity rests on a bed of ignorance like this is one of the reasons we know Christianity is false. Christianity is the height of epistemic folly, on a par with QAnon and Flat Earth Theory, or the belief that lizard people secretly rule the world (see John Loftus, “Christianity Is Wildly Improbable” in The End of Christianity).

The dumbery of C.S. Lewis’s argument can be revealed by rephrasing it with any mechanical example. For example, “if my car is nothing more than the collision of atoms and electrons, and everything it does can be reduced to such physical events, then only God can explain how its dynamic cruise control works.” Bollocks. The computer that calculates what velocity to maintain my car at on the highway, using such information as the radar-calculated distance and velocity of the vehicle in front of me, even accounting for steering that radar angle around curves when I’m turning the wheel so as to register a car to my starboard fore as actually ahead of me in my lane, requires no gods to function. It’s just atoms and electrons. Yet lo and behold, it is determining the truth of things about the world with considerable reliability. How? Because it’s not some random jumble of atoms. It is a collection of atoms arranged to compute an output from inputs, and ultimately trained by feedback. Just like the human brain. 

“But who built the computer?” is no response to this, because we already know how evolution by natural selection blindly yet smartly builds all sorts of sophisticated machines that aren’t random jumbles of atoms. That among the things it has built over the last half billion years are truth-honing computers is established science. No god was involved. Indeed, a god’s involvement is not only not required, it’s patently unlikely. On which point see my Argument from Mind-Brain Dysteleology in my response to Wanchick, and Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases demonstrating how unintelligently engineered our brains actually are; and remember, we did not evolve any understanding of logics or the scientific method either: those are tools that took us tens of thousands of years to invent—and with no help from any gods, despite the absurd word counts of their supposedly inspired books. All of this is exactly as we expect if there is no God; but it’s highly unexpected if there is. So as always, when we put the evidence back in that apologists like Lewis and Brierley are leaving out, the conclusion of their every argument reverses: the actual facts and history of human reason is evidence for atheism, not theism.

Even recent attempts to rehabilitate Lewis by fixing all his errors in deploying this argument fail to carry any merit (see my extensive critique). But Lewis’s original is a disaster of bad logic and an even worse command of the relevant facts. That Brierley still buys it shows us that he is not capable of logical reasoning, and doesn’t know (nor sought to know) any relevant facts about computers or brain evolution, and yet Dunning-Krugers his way straight to “it must be spirit beings.” In Lewis, this argument revealed a complete ignorance of even the existence of the computer, and an even greater ignorance of how evolution by natural selection operates—even in general, much less in respect to brain development. But there is far less excuse for such ignorance today. So it’s even more alarming now that, as Brierley here reveals, not being informed of readily available facts is the second most common cause of Christian belief; though “sucking at logic” still holds strong at first place.

And yet Brierley declares this to be a key argument that convinced him Christianity is true! Yikes. I’m not joking. He outright says, “Understanding the self-defeating nature of the naturalist worldview,” meaning solely this illogical and factless Argument from Reason, “was a penny-dropping moment for me” (p. 79). This is how he has duped himself (or been duped) into believing in this ancient superstition. We hardly need explore further to realize he has no reliable ability to determine the truth of any worldview. He can’t do logic, nor seeks any relevant command of the facts before declaring conclusions about them. In defense of their emotional attachments, the Christian just buys any illogical rationalization they hear; whereas despite their emotional attachments, the atheist immediately asks questions, like, “Wait, is the brain just a random jumble of atoms? How do scientists and engineers explain how brains came to successfully reach conclusions about the world? How do mere animals tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false? Why did we end up preferring science and logic once we discovered them?” The Christian never even asks these questions; or if they do, they never do any real work toward finding out how they have in fact already been answered. And that’s why they’re still Christians.

Where Meaning & Purpose Actually Come From

The thrust of Brierley’s fourth chapter is that only his God (or at least “some” god or other) can give our life meaning and purpose. His fallacious and factually ignorant Arguments from Reason and Parental Love are just two of several illogical attempts to prove this thesis statement. But as they are illogical, they don’t prove this thesis at all. I’ve elsewhere shown the reverse is the case: the fact that meaning and purpose demonstrably only come from humans themselves is evidence against the existence of any god providing one for us; not the other way around. As I then wrote:

[L]ife only has meaning because you value it, and because of the things you value about it. Its meaning comes from you. That being so, does not increase the probability of a god one whit. To the contrary, that we are mortal, and throughout history have always invented our own meaning for life, and always different people have valued different things about it, is exactly what we expect if there is no god. Whereas, excuses aside, it’s not all all what we expect if there is a god.

The same contradiction comes up, we’ll see, in respect to morality, too: it’s not logically possible for any god to give anything meaning or value to us unless we already have some meaning or value for it, or that will be satisfied by it. Otherwise, if we have no reason already to care about something, a god’s caring about it will mean nothing to us; whereas if we already have reason to care about something, we won’t need a god to—we’ll then already have sufficient reason to care about it on our own.

For example, if God thought it supremely important that we all submit to eternal torment by Satan (for whatever reason he had, whether to sate his malicious glee, or to prove some esoteric point only God cares about, or “for his glory,” or to scare others into complying with his commandments to hoard sex slaves and murder people who speak their mind or pick up sticks on Saturday—and I’m not saying Brierley’s god does want this or for any of these reasons; I am only saying if he did), then if we had no desire in us that would be satisfied by that outcome, we’d have no reason whatever to embrace that as “the meaning or purpose” of our life. Such an end would not give our lives any meaning for us at all. It would serve someone’s purpose; but definitely not any we approve. Its being what a god wants would be completely irrelevant. We would gain no satisfaction from it. So it just wouldn’t appeal.

By contrast, if God said the meaning of our life was to live forever in paradise, we would agree only because we already want that for ourselves; we’ve already worked out why that would be great, without any required input from God. We like life a lot, and can do a lot with it that we ourselves care about—we are, in fact, quite abundant generators of meaning and purpose (as every evolved personal consciousness necessarily will be: see The Objective Value Cascade); and to be able to do all that with with less misery and encumbrance would be even better; and to get to do it forever, better still (and yet still not required; because some resources and enjoyments are always better than none: see Pascal’s Wager and the Ad Baculum Fallacy). But this is all true whether God existed or not. We therefore don’t need any God for all this to be something worth our pursuing.

This is the real reason why we all agree pursuing longer, better, safer, more prosperous lives is good for everyone. Hence we would all agree with that whether gods existed or not. Gods are just a lazy fantasy about how we could get to “live forever in paradise,” conveniently with minimal effort and flawless success; while the truth of how we actually can get there requires a lot more work, and is a lot more perilous (see How Not to Live in Zardoz). Christianity is hardly more real than a fancy email promising us riches from a Nigerian Prince. And yet it’s usually people who have bought into that fantasy who keep getting in the way of our efforts to get there for real. That fantasy is indeed a lie Christians have been sold on for thousands of years; regardless of how strongly they believe, Christians won’t really get that result. Even worse, being false, it is easily attached to all manner of immoral ideologies, as the entire history of Christianity demonstrates, then to now. And this makes Christianity all too often toxic, the most common basis still for adopting countless hostilities to both progress and investment in actual technologies of immortality and an actually better future world (see What’s the Harm). Google it and you’ll find Christianity is pervasively opposed to transhumanism of any variety, the only actual way anyone can ever live indefinitely; and pick any issue, you’ll find the people who are standing in the way of every attempt to improve the social welfare in any real way are always predominately Christians.

This is a travesty. And this is why the most potent fact that comes from realizing no god is coming to save us is that we had better concentrate on saving each other. Because no one else is going to do it. Yet it is Christians who are predominately against our doing it. Not all Christians are the enemy of society; but in the West, nearly all society’s enemies are Christians. Their ideology throws at us countless immoral ideas about how to control people and blind them to the truth and hinder society’s progress. “But some of us don’t” is no evidence against that fact, as it is a fact about the net aggregate effect of Christianity on the world, not about individual outliers whose exceptionalism, by its very rarity, proves the rule. And that is why Christianity is a poison pill, no matter how much sugar coats its outer shell. Until it stops giving us PragerU, the GOP, the Armageddon Lobby, racism and sexism, laws and teachings against abortion, birth control (often even condoms and other prophylactics like vaccines), critical thinking, sex education, gay rights, public welfare, even climate science, and every other evil it’s saddling us with, from opposing teaching of the truth about history in schools to perpetuating the immoral and misery-multiplying prosecution of so-called “vice” crimes (including even, when it can achieve it, the state murder and oppression of gay people), Christianity clearly is not a functional worldview. If it can’t protect you from all those false ideologies, it is itself bankrupt as an ideology. A genuinely rational, evidence-based humanism is the only real cure (though atheism alone, not being a specific worldview, doesn’t cut it). I’ll revisit that point in my last entry in this series. But I’ve gone over it before.

Brierley’s Solution Doesn’t Work

That Brierley’s reasons for remaining a Christian are emotional, not logical or evidence-based, is most apparent in this chapter (and in chapter seven, on his excuses for misery, which I’ll get to in my next entry). His overall argument is, essentially, “If atheism is true then there is no ultimate right or wrong, there is no over-arching narrative” (p. 76), and he just doesn’t like that, and so he emotionally prefers to deny that it’s true, by attaching himself to his preferred fantasy about the gods. Other people choose other fantasies for the same arbitrary reasons, hence the pervasive parallel existence of Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, modern African and Chinese polytheism, even Marxism, and beyond. But their reasoning is folly, as Brierley would admit; what he will refuse to acknowledge, is that his reasoning is exactly the same folly as theirs (see John Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith).

The truth is, as I’ve already explained, there is no rational reason to need an “ultimate” right or wrong or any “ultimate” meaning or purpose. It is enough that there is right and wrong, there is meaning and purpose. That it comes from us does not make it not exist. Just as would have to be the case for Brierley’s God: He would have no reason outside himself to care about anything either; His values, His decisions as to what matters, what His purpose should be, what meaning He’d assign to anything, why He even matters or why anything He does even matters, would all be random arbitrary accidents of His origins or nature, never anything He rationally chose. Which means we couldn’t put any faith in His interests either; unless we can find some reason we should. But as soon as we find whatever reason there may be to care about the random accidental interests of the random accidental God we just by chance ended up with (the same reason this God would have to find for himself, to resolve his own Brierley-style existential anxieties of “why bother”), those reasons would then justify caring about those interests anyway, even if there was no God. Whereas if there are no such reasons, then these things being the interests of God won’t make them ultimate or appealing. They’ll just be some distant alien’s arbitrary subjective interests that we have no good reason to care about.

So there is no “easy fix” for Brierley to exploit here. He’s just screwed. Until he realizes he doesn’t need any of this, and it has his whole life been folly to think he did. Ultimate thingamagigs don’t do any work. They serve no function. They help us not at all. The caring about things, about anything whatever, simply has to come from you. If it doesn’t, you wouldn’t care about them if they came from God either. So God can’t solve your problem. The only actual solution is to look within, and find in yourself which desires actually produce outcomes you want to live for. What is it that you actually like about living, and why? More importantly, what is it that you would like even more about living, if you knew of it, and why would you like that more? Every time Brierley expresses any worry that some thing he values wouldn’t be valuable unless God existed, he is already telling us the reasons why those things are valuable regardless of whether God existed. So we don’t need the God bit. If you want something to matter, it matters. And it matters for all the same reasons you think your god would tell you it does. Then you can rally around those things; organize your priorities accordingly. That becomes the only meaning, the only purpose, you’d ever embrace as worthwhile anyway, whether any gods shared or recommended them or not. There may even be an objective justification for all this (see, again, The Objective Value Cascade). But it doesn’t matter. You don’t need any. You just need to want the outcome. And that’s that.

Aristotle figured this out thousands of years ago (and well before Jesus came along—completely ignorant of it, as he never explains why anyone should want any of the future outcomes he promised). Most everything you want, you want for some other reason (it’s instrumental, a means to some end); so you will want to interrogate your every desire until you get to the one thing (if not things) that you want for itself, and not for some other reason. To be satisfied with oneself and one’s life ends up the answer you will always land on. Everything else we desire, we can justifiably desire only for its instrumental function in obtaining that. The happenstances involved are irrelevant (such as, what specific foods we like, or with what chromatic range our eyes allow us to marvel at the world, or who we prefer to share our lives with); the opportunity to revel in them, to experience them, to comprehend and appreciate them, is what makes life worth living. It’s the only thing that’s better about being alive than being dead. And this will be true in all possible worlds—even worlds without gods.

Brierley has many worries. Mortality disturbs him. He doesn’t like the fact that he and his loved ones (and humanity as a whole) only get a limited time to exist. The possibility that he, or anyone, might become a callous sociopath also disturbs him. He flails around for ways to escape these fears. God is the blanket he chooses to hide under. And this appears to be because he doesn’t know how to accept his own mortality, and instead embrace it as the reason to make the best of the only life he has, the only chance he has to do anything with it while he lives that he himself would deem worthwhile (whereas anything he himself doesn’t deem worthwhile, he won’t miss by not doing); and as the reason to be grateful that his loved ones, and countless others, have had or will get that same chance; and as the reason to be all the more concerned to help end everything that would end his life and others’. That there is no do-over makes life as it is vastly more valuable, not less, than his worldview does. It likewise seems Brierley doesn’t know how to explain, to himself or anyone, why being a callous sociopath actually sucks, that that is factually the least effective way to realize a life worth living (as I recently explained, once again, in Erik Wielenberg and How Atheists Keep Missing the Point of Grounding Morality). Ironically, all of Brierley’s own arguments about why we need God to explain this, don’t need God to explain this. If pursuing pointless material or superficial pleasures is in fact hollow and dissatisfying, and in the end it really is—particularly to anyone who has come to realize all the pertinent facts of the world and not just a few—then that remains factually the case whether God exists or not.

There is a substantial difference between understanding life and the world shallowly vs. deeply: all that extra information that makes the difference between “shallow” and “deep” understanding is by definition then missing to the shallow reasoner. Which means the shallow reasoner is suffering a factual ignorance of reality that is the actual problem in need of solving. This is the problem plaguing the callous, the heartless, the selfish. It is not an ignorance of God, but an ignorance of the actual facts of reality, of the lives they could be living instead, of the deeper satisfactions available to them. This is what Brierley should be doing. Rather than invent a fantasy creature to fob all his reasoning on, just outright say what you are thinking: actually give the reasons why shallow thinking leads to shallow satisfactions; actually explain how deeper understanding of what things are and what things can be leads to deeper satisfactions. Because simply saying “because some god somewhere said so” is not a convincing reason for this; so what are your actual reasons? Why is your imagined god right? If you can’t answer that question, your appeal to god is ineffectual. You solve nothing by it.

Thus all Brierley is really doing here is tautologically repeating his own opinions. Because he can’t empirically show that his god shares those opinions. All he is doing is choosing to “insist” that God does. Which is just a lazy way of claiming people should share your opinions because they have a celebrity endorsement—without any actual evidence that that celebrity endorses them. That your own endorsement of them is your only “evidence” that your god does too renders all of this a circular argument. You aren’t actually justifying your opinions to anyone this way. Whereas if you can answer the question, the question of why your god would endorse those opinions, and why his doing so is correct—and thus why anyone else should endorse them too—then you no longer need appeal to god. Once you can explain why your god’s opinions are right, you no longer need appeal to your god.

So Brierley should do the hard work here, the actual philosophy, to understand why his opinions about all these things are justifiable. Which means, in his own terms, understanding how even his own God would justify them, since merely “because I’m a god” doesn’t cut it. There is actually a well-developed science of this, of why everyone agrees that deeper life satisfactions are better once comprehended—why empathy is better for you than callousness, why prosociality is better for you than selfishness, why honesty is better for you than deceit, why a self-examined life and critical thought are better for you than persistent delusion or incessant distraction, why some pursuits and achievements (like knowledge, friendship, love) are genuinely fulfilling and not hollow (like mere money, or fleeting, superficial pleasures). And this science never needs to appeal to gods or spirits or immortality; just the actual facts of the world, the way things really are.

As just a mere sample, see my bibliography on the correlation between happiness and moral virtues in The End of Christianity (p. 425 n. 31) as well as the discussions in:

• Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being.
• Albert Ellis, The Myth of Self-Esteem: How Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Can Change Your Life Forever.
• Katy Milkman, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.
• UC Berkeley, Greater Good Magazine: Science-Based Insights for a Meaningful Life.

All this same science also reveals that obstacles to human fulfillment are often a product of social engineering or the lack thereof: people need the time and education and resources to overcome the obstacles to living a deeply meaningful life; and no god is stepping up to solve this problem. There’s only us. We are the only people on this planet or anywhere near it who can step up and solve it. So if you want that, get on it.

Brierley worries, for example, about the “drug addicted prostitute” seeing atheist bus signs telling her she should stop worrying about the threat of hell and get on with enjoying her life; how is she supposed to do that? That’s actually a question the theist needs to answer. God isn’t doing jack all for her. The rest of us are busy offering real solutions to her (state health care and rehab; legal help; food and shelter), and fighting to provide even more, usually by fighting Christians (because it’s usually Christians) who are too busy selling her on some vain ideological drug, like Jesus (which cures none of her actual problems), while making her life more miserable by cutting programs that would help her, and by criminalizing prostitution and drugs, rather than defending her professional rights (thus prosecuting abusive bosses and clients instead of honest businesswomen) and access to healthcare (thus ensuring she can seek real medical treatments for ailments like substance addiction, as well as any underlying causes in mental illness she may need society’s help treating). That’s what we should be doing. Because that’s the only thing that can be done.

All of this refutes Brierley’s claim that “a post-Christian culture has very little to offer people who are looking for purpose and meaning” (p. 85). To the contrary, science not only has quite a lot to offer (see all the science referenced above), but what it has to offer on this point is all that’s actually empirically verifiable as real, and empirically verifiable as effective. Everything else is mere fantasy. And by that metric one fantasy is as good as another. If we needed to fake our hopes, we may as well declare ourselves for the religion of the Jedi, or take holy orders with the Church of the Dude. I’m partial to the Mystery Faith of Bacchus; apart from all the great parties, he left us clear and simple instruction manuals, etched in gold plates, for how to find paradise in hell (pro tip: it’s to the right, by the glowy tree; you need a passphrase, duly provided). That’s right. Bacchants had the good sense to etch this in immortal gold plates. Jesus and the authors of the Bible were morons by comparison. They could have taken a clue (“Oh wow! Etched gold or lead lasts longer than papyrus? So you mean we don’t need to rely on demonstrably dubious scribal honesty and competence copying this stuff over and over?”). If they couldn’t even figure that out, they clearly couldn’t have been selling any true faith.

To illustrate how Brierley’s ignorance here has caused his recourse to Christianity as pseudomedicine (akin to acupuncture or crystal magic), note how he literally doesn’t even know the answer to his own despairing question, “[W]hat happens when the things we have built our lives upon—family relationships, love of the arts, political activism, pursuing a successful career—are washed away by divorce, illness, failure, redundancy or death?” Of course this is already another reveal, of his irrational, purely emotional reason to be a Christian. He is scared of “divorce, illness, failure, redundancy or death,” doesn’t know what to do about them, and then so clings instead to his functional equivalent of a ring of garlic and iron faerie ward, and offerings of gold trinkets at the shrine of the Monkey God. This is literally the entire history of human religions in a nutshell. It’s always what our gods have actually been for. Which has never been rational.

But like all superstitious fears that used to be offered a superstitious solution for want of any other, science has actually solved this problem. Indeed, this one has been solved since the secular philosophies of ancient Greece and Rome, which all produced more or less the same answer to it; we just now have empirical science confirming they were right. What happens when we lose all the things we were working on and living for? We get back up, dust ourselves off, and start building new stuff to live for. Even more importantly, we start by adopting obvious statistical wisdom: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The more diverse things you build your life on, the more things you live for and find fulfillment and satisfaction in, the less likely they’ll all get wiped out at the same time; likewise, the more durable the things you build your life on (development of the mind, wisdom, friendship, community, simple pleasures, and causes greater than yourself; rather than “money” or “stuff,” or a specific marriage or job). But even in the rare event of a clean sweep, you built it all once. So you know you can build it again. Even if you are starting behind the line on the second go, this is a civilization you live in—there are lots of folks who can offer help and advice; all you have to do is earn it, with good character and honest effort. If instead of this wisdom you prefer recourse to magical solutions, well, you may as well opt for Bacchus’s glowy tree on the right. It’s as likely to sort you out as any other spirit, whether Jesus or Victor Hugo.

“I am scared of the vicissitudes of life, therefore you need Jesus” is not a logical argument. It’s also not evidence-based. I have as much evidence for Bacchus’s glowy tree, or Victor Hugo as the true Messenger of God, as anyone really has for Jesus still being around. You’d be better off looking to what science and philosophy have to teach, and what goods of civil society you can build or tap, than to invisible magical beings. Your imaginary friends might feel comforting. But they won’t ever really solve any of your problems; least of all after you’re gone. There is no glowy tree; no interdimensional paradise. This is it. So you’d better get on making this place better, for yourself to enjoy while you’re here, and for everyone else after you. After all, many of those who died before you left you a better world than they received; and if you like them for that, then the secret to liking yourself is to repeat for those ahead what those behind did for you. And they built this world for you to make the best of it for yourself too. So do it. You don’t get another shot. This is it, your only chance to enjoy being alive, and make something you find meaningful out of it. Don’t squander it.

Failing the Outsider Test

I was only half-joking about the Bacchus cult being no less effective a fantasy to believe in, if we need to believe in fantasies (we don’t). I could have cited the actual real example of my life: I was a devout Taoist from my teen years into adulthood; the only actual religion I have ever believed and practiced, my only real faith. I’ve written about this amply before (see the opening chapters of Sense and Goodness without God). But this gave me crucial insight that Brierley lacks. Everything Brierley cites as his inner personal evidence of Jesus, I experienced as an identically-convincing inner personal experience of the existence and greatness of the Tao. I deeply and viscerally experienced its power, comfort, reality; it made me a better, calmer, happier person; it spoke to me, not in words but in visions and inspirations and the power of the spirit; it gave my life meaning and purpose. But Brierley must agree Taoism is false. Which means these experiences have zero weight as evidence for any religious truth.

That is why we need evidence to confirm any such experience is caused by something externally real and not just something happening in our brain—which was the subject of my very first peer reviewed work in philosophy, notably in response to an apologetic identical to Brierley’s but in defense of Buddhism! That’s how easily people have these experiences in support of false beliefs (see the first journal publication listed on my cv). And this is evidence—in the wrong direction. That the world works this way is exactly what we expect on atheism: that anyone can fool themselves into thinking they are experiencing some spirit power in the world (we even have a well-developed brain science of this: see Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell). But this makes little expected sense if Brierley’s God exists. Then only his God, and his God’s message, should be what we are all and ever experiencing. Yes, you can make up excuses for why your imagined God allows the world to look exactly like a world with no God in it. But that excuse simply makes your God hypothesis even less probable. You have no evidence that excuse is true. And you shouldn’t have to make stuff up to explain away the evidence as it is. That’s why the existence of Brierley’s God is improbable.

The history of religious experience thus again reverses Brierley’s argument from an argument for his God into an argument that his God is actually quite improbable—once you put back in all the evidence Brierley leaves out, namely, every other world religion’s experience-history identical to Brierley’s. When he boasts that “Those who have experienced its power claim that they have found the true life by giving their own lives away in [its] service” (p. 89), this is literally exactly the same thing I said about the Tao. Likewise his insistence that, “the only way I can justify that claim is to point you in the direction of people who have experienced it to be true” (p. 90). Indeed, both sentences can refer to either Jesus or the Tao (or Bacchus or Victor Hugo); as worded, you can’t tell. Which means these declarations clearly are not an argument for the reality of the Tao. It cannot be, if Brierley is instead insisting it’s an argument for the reality of Jesus. But that means it clearly is no argument for the reality of Jesus, either. It cannot be, if I was instead insisting it’s an argument for the reality of the Tao. You can’t have it both ways. If this is an unsound argument for Taoism, it’s an equally unsound argument for Christianity. It’s only the worse that this argument is not only unsound, but the reason it is unsound is itself evidence against the existence of Brierley’s God!

This is how Brierley’s failures of fact and logic leave him stuck as a Christian. He does not realize his argument is illogical. And he does not realize the actual facts of the world deeply undermine his entire point. He does not recognize the fact that he is now as fooled about his feelings of Jesus as I was fooled about my feelings of the Tao. I learned my lesson. He hasn’t. And that’s why he remains a Christian. He has failed The Outsider Test for Faith.

Using False Facts as Rationalization Premises

We see this again and again in this chapter. For example, Brierley writes a few pages on how he is unable to explain why people experience emotions in respect to beauty (from music, poetry, anything: pp. 90-91), and then leaps illogically to “must be celestial spirit magic.” That’s not only a non sequitur (no logical argument is to be found here), it’s also factually ignorant. We have a very well-developed scientific understanding of the evolutionary biology and neuroscience, and psychology and anthropology, of the human beauty response (I covered this in Sense and Goodness, Part VI, but start with my updated summary in Musical Aesthetics). So he isn’t even reasoning from true facts about the world—much less logically, even from the false premises he has been duped into.

Similarly, Brierley is suckered in by the false declarations of Tom Holland, claiming Holland’s “research had shown him how the concern for the poor and marginalized demonstrated by the first generation of Christians was unparalleled in the ancient world” and “the idea that human rights, welfare provision and equality will naturally prevail in any educated society was a secular myth” (p. 84). Every single thing said here is false. Whether Holland is a liar or a completely incompetent fool who actually didn’t do any real research on this (which, really, still makes him a liar if he claimed to have) I’ll leave for you to decide. But fact is, the ideas of human rights, state welfare provision, and equality were invented by secular pagans centuries before Christianity, and are nowhere to be found in the entire Christian Bible. There is likewise no evidence Christian empires have ever been more concerned for the poor and “marginalized” than even the pagan Roman Empire that preceded them; and quite a lot of evidence that they were considerably less so—as the loss of women’s rights, gay rights, rights to free speech and freedom of religion, the creation of a de facto enslaved peasantry, global expansion of chattel slavery, and a wild thousand-plus-year increase in worldwide income disparity all exhibit.

For the truth, and not the lies of Christian Nationalists and propagandists that Brierley has been duped into believing and is still basing his faith on, see:

• No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West

• Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy

• That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation)

Even insofar as you try to defend the point by admitting actual Christians never significantly practiced any of the supposedly novel moral ideas Jesus developed (thus admitting Christianity is completely ineffective at transforming the world and thus not a hot recommendation, and thus likely false on that account alone), even that is based on myths about what the Gospel Jesus said and taught that don’t align with the reality (see the opening paragraphs of my analysis of this point in The Real War on Christmas: The Fact That Christmas Is Better Than Christ). Brierley is a far more wise and moral a person than the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. And everything making him a better, wiser person comes from secular Enlightenment values, to which Christianity has simply slowly adjusted itself to, when its pushback against it became increasingly unpopular—yet still the majority of Christendom remains entrenched against those values, thus continuing to exhibit the fact that it is the enemy of world human good, not its benefactor. There are more effective medicines—as in, beliefs (factual knowledge and understanding) that actually do transform the majority of those who embrace them into better people. And none of those beliefs is a superstition or in any way dependent on the supernatural (see “Religion as Medicine,” Sense and Goodness without God, IV.2.2.4, pp. 270-72).

Another example of resting his case on false beliefs about reality is Brierley’s strange statement about famed 20th-century atheist Bertrand Russell. I don’t know where Brierley actually got the lengthy paragraph he quotes from Russell (p. 86) about how facing reality requires admitting life is only temporary and the world is not intelligently designed for us, but he can’t have actually read the work it is from. I suspect he got it from some Christian apologist, gullibly unaware that he was being duped by a quote-mine. The paragraph comes from Russell’s famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship.” In which, after the opening section Brierley quotes, Russell goes on to explain why conscious awareness, human achievement, love, and freedom from superstition all compensate for these stark realities.

For example, literally the very next paragraph reads (my emphasis):

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Did Brierley blank on this? Forget that it was there? Or did he never really read this essay? Russell goes on in it to survey the history of the failure to explain and understand reality that religion has trafficked in for thousands of years, and how that has produced countless evils. Then he shows how greater wisdom and understanding leads to realizing this, and to replacing those religions with a different response to reality (emphasis again mine):

Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe … [and thus] build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. … [Such that] in the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple. … [And thereby we can find] the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart. … [Then] united with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love.

In other words, Russell says, consciousness allows us to realize godlike feelings and ideals, to shape something great out of the world rather than succumbing to it; to build a better world, and find solace in love and beauty and kindness, cooperation, and creative endeavor. Because, he is saying, that is all there would ever be worth doing whether God existed or not. Brierley has yet to learn this lesson. He hears only one paragraph; ignores the rest—and thus foolishly doubts any atheist congregation of the Sunday Assembly would ever meditate on this text. Ooops. Brierley would do well to base his beliefs on factual reality instead. For the same reason, Brierley also fails to inform his readers—possibly because he himself is ignorant—of the fact that Bertrand Russell literally wrote, not an essay, but an entire book on The Conquest of Happiness. He didn’t just declare doom and walk away. He actually explained why that doom is no obstacle to human purpose and meaning—literally his only point, of essay and book, and yet the point Brierley still doesn’t get. When he gets it, he’ll realize this is no argument for God. It’s an argument for making something of your life and the world precisely because there is no God.

I am reminded that even the writers for the recent James Bond film No Time to Die get this, when they conclude as a requiem for his death Jack London’s refrain, “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” The theist naively asks how an undesigned being can have a “proper function.” But Russell and London are answering that question. Once you have conscious existence, there is only one thing to use it for that could ever be worth doing: to live, not merely to exist. To merely exist would be pointless. Whereas it is inherently pointed to seize the grand opportunity you have been given to experience and explore and enjoy living, and to make something of the world that the world would not make of itself. Which is the very same reason—the only reason—any God would have to give to Himself for why He should care about building any world, creating any people, or doing anything for them. God’s reasons are our reasons. And as that God would need no other God to exist for those reasons to make sense, neither do we.

Conclusion

As all these examples show, Brierley has no factually sound or logically valid arguments for his conclusion that God must exist because we can find meaning and purpose in life and love. God is actually the worst explanation for why we are mortal and the world hostile to our desires, and the worst explanation for why we then find meaning and purpose in life and love, and for how we can comprehend the realities of life and stand in awe of them, and for what we have found actually works toward achieving or improving them. Life has a lot of potential, much we can find in it, much we can love about it. No God is required for that to be the case. To evade realizing this, Brierley stacks up nothing but false claims about how the human brain actually came to access the truth about the world, the neural cognition of love and beauty, the bogus emotive and historical uniqueness of his arbitrarily chosen religion, even what Bertrand Russell really said about human happiness in the absence of gods. And a belief that rests on a stack of falsehoods like this is almost certainly false.

Brierley’s argument is also illogical. Because it is not even possible for meaning and purpose to come from a god. There is no reason to care about what he thinks or wants, much less to think it’s good for us or preferable to something else we can have instead. Unless there is. But if there is a reason to care about those things, then we don’t need God; we already have all the reason we need to care. That’s all the meaning and purpose we will ever need from life. Like Aristotle said, that’s the one thing we will want from life for itself and not for something else. And that’s what Brierley fails to understand. “God wants this, therefore we should too” is not a logically valid or sound argument. You need to explain why what God wants is what we will want too, why it is good for us, why it will be preferable to anything else we have access to. But once you’ve done the hard work of actually defending the conclusion, you’ll realize you’ve just removed any need for God to exist to defend that conclusion. This is why atheists aren’t Christians. We’ve figured this out. Brierley hasn’t.

You also, of course, need to prove what you are selling actually exists. Brierley makes clear in his fourth chapter that he is afraid of a bunch of things (death; failure; becoming a callous, hollow person), and to assuage these fears he seeks comfort in the fantasy of an imaginary friend who will “fix it all” in the future. But the wise long ago figured out why that’s a bad offer. As Joe Hill’s 1911 union song goes, “Work and pray, Live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. (That’s a lie).” Or as Jayne Cobb says, “If wishes were horses, we’d all be eating steak.” If there is no low-cost, perfect paradise we can buy into with the right magic spell, then it doesn’t have any competitive value. Wishing it exists does not make it so. I can as easily wish for Bacchus’s glowy tree. There are, meanwhile, real things about life that we can actually achieve and appreciate and enjoy; and being demonstrably real, they win every competition for our attention.

Brierley simply declares that he wants certain things. Then he declares (on no evidence at all) that his God wants those things too. He wants to give his opinions authority without doing any of the actual logical or factual work of explaining why anyone should care, indeed why even he should care. Why are God’s opinions on these things worth anyone heeding or caring about? Brierley still needs to answer that question. And until he does, he has nothing to sell. And that’s already before we get to the problem that he can’t even prove what he is selling even exists. None of his other chapters present any evidence that any God exists who cares about the things Brierley wants his God to care about. Even if they proved any god existed, they get nowhere to proving God agrees with Brierley on literally anything whatever. But that’s for my analysis of his other chapters. It still wouldn’t be enough. Having a verifiable line on what God really wanted and has to offer still doesn’t argue we should want it too. You need to state your reasons why anyone should agree with that, why it will satisfy; and those reasons need to actually logically entail the conclusion that they should. So far as I can tell, there is literally no such reason Brierley could ever give that actually requires there to be a God.

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