Claim Knowledge and Run

Next from Smalley’s “Top Ten Reasons Why I’m an Athiest”, we have this:

4. Demeter, Jesus, Apollo, Horus, Zeus, Mithra, Yahweh, Tammuz, Ganesha, and Allah are only 10 of the thousands of gods recorded in history. An Atheist is not one that refuses to read religious doctrine; it is often one who reads too many. 

As before, it is very unclear what the argument actually is here. But I suppose that it is something like this:

Belief in any particular religion (presumably, Christianity) is as unreasonable as belief in these other deities.

The first thing to note here is that this is simply not true. Anyone who actually reads a lot of theology would understand that the gods of ancient temple religions are open to a host of objections that wouldn’t remotely address the God of modern monotheistic book religion.

Little, if any, of the case supporting the existence of a monotheist God would support polytheism. Even according to the ancient Greeks, Zeus isn’t the first cause of the universe. There is no sense in which Horus is supported by the moral argument. Nor did Quezacotl gain the slightest credibility from the discovery of fine tuning.

And so on it goes. The one who does not understand this simply does not know the basics of the subject. Referencing dead religions as if this were a point in itself is, therefore, a mistake of someone who has read very little theology.

This also seems to assume, implicitly, that secular views are immune to this sort of argument. Were it fair to say that religions should be wiped away on the grounds that there are so many, or so many that have been discredited, the counter that secular views have many discredited relatives wouldn’t be far behind.

There is almost nothing that mention of Zeus or Quetzalclatl will contribute to discussion over western monotheism. And most of that is to point out how different these views are. Really, this seems to be the act of gesturing in the general direction of something that vaguely looks like an argument. No rational point against theism has been made.

Thus, the act of putting this on a top ten list serves mostly to highlight how little real material exists for Smalley to post in support of his materialistic atheism.