The Seeker's Guide to Faith: An Exposition of the Doubts, Delusions, and Deceptions of Atheism

By J. Peter Baumgarten

The Seeker’s Guide to Faith confronts and answers the thirteen principal arguments against God that are now advanced by modern secularist movement (sometimes called New Atheism) using the powerful insights and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

There are many books written to encourage faith for people who are experiencing doubts about God generally. However, this book is the only one of its kind by a Latter-day Saint author that directly and specifically challenges all the main arguments against faith in God that are now aggressively asserted by the belligerent modern secular movement. Its uniqueness is enhanced by the fact that the doctrines and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are used whenever applicable to effectively answer the challenges raised by this movement. This author believes that the unique teachings and insights of the Church are better suited than those of any other faith for answering those challenges.

Furthermore, the author’s professional and volunteer activities have afforded him the opportunity to know and work with people of nearly all religious backgrounds, in nearly all walks of life. Recent experiences have led him to examine the reasons many apparently intelligent people reject faith. His legal background and training have aided him in spotting and understanding the weaknesses and flaws of the logical underpinnings of atheism. His Gospel upbringing as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has helped him see through the fog of the dogma and arguments of atheism to the “More Excellent Way” afforded by the Gospel’s plan of happiness. He hopes The Seeker’s Guide to Faith will help others who stand at the crossroads of their doubts to find their faith in Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662411779

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Ascending Tide of Atheism

Atheism (or secularism) is a philosophy that denies the existence of God and of any Supreme Being. In this book, when I say God, I am not referring to the god of the deists who created the universe and then abandoned it or to the pantheist concept of a mere law or force of nature such as gravity.¹⁴ Rather, the God to which I refer is that very personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Secularism exalts man’s power to reason as the only way to learn truth while rejecting divine revelation, belief in God, and all forms of theistic religion. While cloaking itself in the garb of enlightened tolerance, it rejects all forms of religious teachings and orthodoxy as narrow-minded. Yet secularism has developed its own brand of militant orthodoxy with a goal of separating God from society by smearing, ridiculing, and otherwise neutralizing all opposing opinions.

One notable example of this militant orthodoxy in secularism was the evangelical fervor of Charles Darwin’s apostle, T. H. Huxley (1825–1895). In his day, Huxley traveled extensively, preaching atheism while advocating for evolution as the only plausible explanation for the existence of life as we know it on earth. A more recent example is his grandson, British biologist/eugenicist, Sir Julian Huxley (1887–1975), who taught, In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created; it evolved. So did all animals and plants that inhabit it including our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion.¹⁵ This is the so-called modern view about God and religion.

Yet there is nothing new in atheism itself. Men have pondered the meaning and origin of existence through the ages reaching both theistic and atheistic conclusions. Occasionally their existential musings have found their way into our literary culture. One example of this is a verse attributed to a famous eleventh-century Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer, Omar Khayyam (AD 1048–1131):

And that inverted bowl we call the sky,

Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die,

Lift not the hands to It for help:

It rolls impotently on as you and I.¹⁶

Eight hundred years later, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) famously pondered the futility of existence in his sonnet Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.¹⁷

No, there is nothing new about atheism. What is new is the aggressive movement that has sprung up in Western society during the last century, actively seeking converts to secularism. Recent examples of the revivalist fervor of secularism may be found in the zeal of British biologist Richard Dawkins (1941–), American philosopher Daniel Clement Dennett III (1942–), Anglo-American columnist and religion critic Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist Sam Harris (1967–),¹⁸ and others. In our day, atheism is on the march.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, even the Supreme Court of the United States has become complicit with the secular movement. Militant atheists brought lawsuits to challenge various accommodations to religious observances by government-sponsored entities. It began in the mid-1940s with the case Everson v. Board of Education.

In that case, a taxpayer challenged New Jersey’s use of tax funds to reimburse parents of children attending Catholic schools for bus fares paid by these parents for transporting their children to and from these schools. The law provided for reimbursement of bus fares for public school attendance as well, but the objection was that this accommodation amounted to indirect state sponsorship of Catholic schools and their religious curriculum. In a five to four decision, the court narrowly approved the New Jersey law, thus permitting the continuation of the state’s reimbursement of bus fares to parents of children attending the parochial schools. The court’s opinion for the case, authored by Justice Hugo Black (1886–1971), borrowed a metaphor from Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) stating,

The [First Amendment] clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state…[The First] Amendment requires the state to be neutral in its relations with groups of religious believers and nonbelievers; it does not require the state to be their adversary. State power is no more to be used so as to handicap religions than it is to favor them… The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.¹⁹

While the decision was favorable for the Catholic schools (they won!), the secularists took a cue from the Jefferson metaphor. Although the phrase wall of separation between church and state appears nowhere in the Constitution, secularists began using it successfully in later cases to shut down all involvement of government in religious matters.²⁰

For example, in a 1962 ruling, the Supreme Court outlawed prescribed prayers in all public schools. The rationale for this decision was that these prayers violated the First Amendment prohibition of the establishment of religion by the state.²¹ In another case, less than a year later, the Supreme Court forbade Bible reading in public schools, using the same rationale.²²

Following these decisions, Church president David O. McKay (1873–1970) issued statements publicly rebuking the court.²³ In one statement, President McKay observed that [b]y making [school prayer] unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of the United States severs the connecting cord between the public schools…and the source of divine intelligence, the Creator himself.²⁴ In a second statement, President McKay noted that [r]ecent rulings of the Supreme Court would have all reference to a Creator eliminated from our public schools and public offices. He then issued a prophetic warning that the Supreme Court was now leading a Christian nation down the road to atheism.²⁵

Although under the Constitution, all three branches of the federal government are supposedly equal in power and authority, Congress and the succeeding presidents of the United States are essentially cowed into compliance with these radical decisions. The same is generally true of all state and local governments, right down to nearly every local public school board.

You would think that these rulings should apply with equal force against the indoctrination of orthodox atheism in public institutions as it does to traditional religion. But in fact, this has not been the case. To the contrary, as President Dallin H. Oaks (1932–), first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church, once expressed, Under the influence of these decisions and their progeny, the public schools have become (1) proponents of atheism, or (2) hostile to religion, or (3) at least indifferent to religion.²⁶

In national politics, defense of religious principles and advocacy for religion, especially for Christianity, is becoming ever more controversial. In addition, books advocating atheism and mocking faith are now commonplace.²⁷ These works often include inflammatory smears against faith. For example, in the preface of his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins lists suicide bombers and 9/11 as the first two examples in support of his contention that religion is evil. This guilt-by-association ploy seems based on a weird syllogistic logic: the 9/11 World Trade Center bombers were evil; the 9/11 World Trade Center bombers were religious; therefore, religions are evil. Thus, from the very beginning of his book, Dawkins gives himself away, revealing his support of an odd form of bigotry masquerading as enlightenment.

Recently even street billboards in various US cities and ads on the sides of public commuter buses in Washington, DC, have conveyed the following message: Don’t believe in God? You are not alone. However, that bumper-sticker billboard apparently speaks truth. According to a recent study posted on the internet by PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute),²⁸ the religiously unaffiliated (those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or as nothing in particular) now account for nearly one-fourth of all Americans. Since 1990, this group has nearly tripled in size. If this group could be classified as a church or religion, it would now be the fastest-growing religion in the United States.

Both apathy and antipathy toward religion in general, and organized religions in particular, are on the rise. The boundaries between good and evil and right and wrong are blurred in a celebrity culture promoted by the mass media. This culture either ignores or openly ridicules traditional moral standards that are based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. In the place of morality, an artificial structure of political correctness, with its ever-changing tides, currents, and standards, has arisen. Good is called evil and evil has become good.²⁹ Without strong moorings in faith, even the well-educated are swept along as flotsam on the secular tide.

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¹⁴ Even a committed secularist may acknowledge the existence of some supreme power giving order and direction in the universe. But as one research chemist observed, you can pray forever to the periodic table of the elements and none of those elements, independently or in combination, could by themselves lift one finger to answer such a prayer, regardless of how psychologically self-inspiring that prayer might be. See Dr. John Leo Abernathy, MSc, PhD, A Personal God Viewed Scientifically, The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe: Forty American Scientists Declare their Affirmative Views on Religion, ed. John Clover Monsma (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958), p. 91.

¹⁵ Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1989), p. 202, quoting John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1964), p. 443.

¹⁶ Edward Fitzgerald, trans., The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam, LII (New York: Avon, n.d.), this again cited in Nibley’s Approaching Zion, p. 202.

¹⁷ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poetical Works of Shelley: Cambridge Edition, ed. Newell F. Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), p. 366. Ozymandias is the Greek form of the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II.

¹⁸ These four are sometimes collectively referred to by the colorful epithet: the four horsemen of New Atheism.

¹⁹ Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, 330 U.S. 1, 16, 18 (1947), citing Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 164 (1879). (Emphasis added.)

²⁰ See Appendix 1 for further discussion of the Everson case, including some historical background on Jefferson’s statement and, in addition, some criticisms of its subsequent use by the federal courts.

²¹ Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). See also Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985) (overturning Alabama statute authorizing schools to permit moments of prayer and meditation).

²² Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963).

²³ President McKay was the ninth president of the Church. Like all the presidents of the Church, President McKay was regarded by Latter-day Saints (members of the Church) as God’s prophet, seer, and revelator both over the Church and for the world.

²⁴ Parental Responsibility, Relief Society Magazine (December 1962), p. 878.

²⁵ President McKay’s Comments on Ruling, Church News (June 22, 1963), p. 2.

²⁶ Dallin H. Oaks, Personal Reflections (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 2011), p. 66. President Oaks was formerly a law professor at the University of Chicago, then president of Brigham Young University, then Utah state supreme court justice prior to his call to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the second most senior governing council of the Church). This latter appointment was only recently followed by his call in 2018 to the First Presidency of the Church.

²⁷ Many examples could be listed here. One that inspired this writing project is by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), which includes in its bibliography such titles as Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (London: Pan, 2003); B. Forrest and P. R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004); L. Kennedy, All in the Mind: A Farewell to God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1999); Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997); M. Young and T. Edis, eds., Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Dawkins lists dozens of other titles as well, including some that oppose his opinions.

²⁸ Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), prri.org. According to its own literature, PRRI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.

²⁹ Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight (Isaiah. 5:20–21).

Chapter 2

The Book of Mormon as Prologue

It is said that there is nothing new under the sun. Some contend that modern man has never had an original idea. While it may be impossible to support the accuracy of this statement if applied to all fields of knowledge, this may be fundamentally true for the fields of philosophy and theology. As applied to both these fields, atheism has existed as a documented mode of belief for thousands of years. As we shall see, many of the arguments used to support it anciently are still used today, notwithstanding their flaws. This is well-demonstrated in the Book of Mormon, thereby refuting any notion that atheism is modern and, therefore, somehow enlightened.

Within the Book of Mormon are accounts of three anti-Christian preachers, including detailed descriptions of their teachings and arguments—arguments that ring familiar in our times. Two of these preachers professed belief in a god. The third was an avowed atheist. All three opposed the doctrine of Christ with arguments that could be applied with equal force against a belief in God.

The first of these was Sherem. He held that whatever was beyond his experience could not be so. He said, No man knoweth of…things to come.³⁰ Since belief in Christ at that time was based solely on prophecy, this teaching struck at the heart of the dominant religion. Sherem also held that truth may be discerned only by objective evidence or, put another way, what is perceived through the senses. In other words, only seeing is believing. He challenged Jacob, the prophet of his day, to show me a sign.³¹

The second preacher described was Nehor. It is not clear from the account whether Nehor was the originator of his doctrine or the most notorious of those who taught it. But his doctrine could be boiled down to one cynical statement: that a priest should be popular and should be opulently supported by his followers. This idea infers that either truth doesn’t matter or that truth is whatever idea is currently in vogue—argumentum ad populum. For example, hell and damnation are unpopular doctrines among the irreligious. Therefore, Nehor taught that all mankind should be saved at the last day and that they need not fear and tremble because sin is inconsequential.³²

The third of these anti-Christian preachers (and the most interesting in my opinion) was Korihor, who was called Anti-Christ. In many respects, his teachings were similar to those of Sherem. Korihor taught the doctrine that only empirical evidence is acceptable: Ye cannot know things which ye cannot see.³³ Almost parroting Sherem, point by point, he further argued that there is no Christ since all prophecies are false. No man can know anything which is to come, he said.³⁴ Also like Sherem, he asked for a sign.³⁵

However, Korihor went far beyond both Sherem and Nehor in his ethical pronouncements. He taught that there is no sin because there is no morality except genius and strength: [E]very man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; and whatsoever a man did was no crime and that when a man was dead that was the end thereof.³⁶ In this he was anticipating the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest. This is also a restatement of the ancient ethic which holds that might makes right. Korihor’s teachings were essentially atheistic in that there is no deity to whom he or anyone else is accountable. Under this doctrine, even if there were a god, whom he denied, he would be irrelevant.

These proto-Darwinisms constituted the foundation of an atheistic religion and the justification for a frontal assault on the traditional Christianity of that time and place. According to Korihor, Christianity is the effect of a frenzied mind; and this derangement of your minds comes because of the traditions of your fathers.³⁷ Thus, to believe in the traditions of your fathers is, according to Korihor, a form of insanity. He further argued that the the silly traditions of their fathers are a form of bondage deliberately designed and promoted by a priestly conspiracy to keep men in ignorance, for the sake of glutting on the labors of the people.³⁸

These charges against the Church of that day and its priests are not arguments supporting atheism but more like sour grapes against ecclesiastical authority. They were factually unsupported and were contradicted by the testimony of the prophet Alma, who describes the Church as one that is administered by a lay clergy. The teachers, priests, and high priests mentioned ministered without material compensation.³⁹

So why then were these charges made? Well, for one thing, speaking psychologically, even the biggest and most outrageous lie, if oft repeated and widely disseminated in written and spoken media, assumes an aura of truth in the public psyche. Also as a psychological tactic, the design was to tear down faith by demoralizing those who might otherwise speak out in support of faith in God. In other words, the broadcast of these claims was probably intended as a bullying tactic to belittle and silence believers. The strategy was to disarm believers with shame in order to diminish the likelihood of serious opposition. They were also designed to promote the public’s bias against the Church, the priests, and the believers in general. Who wants to be publicly seen as supportive of a religious belief that stems from a neurosis and that subjects its people to narrow-minded and bigoted bondage? Meanwhile, the accuser, by means of these ad hominem attacks, poses as the one who is the champion of open-mindedness and liberty.

These same arguments with their evolving twists, spins, and bullying tactics are still employed by atheists and the haters of religion today. They are still used to attack faith and mock those who reject their antireligious/anti-Christian dogma.

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If we are to defend faith against these attacks in our day, it is to our advantage to understand all the main claims and arguments made by the secularists in support of their dogmatic atheism, the strength of their claims and arguments, if any, and the fallacies behind them. For purposes of this study, as a starting point, I have grouped the main forms of these arguments into the following thirteen statements or claims:

The smartest people are unbelievers.

Believers are ignorant and bigoted.

Evil works are wrought in the name of God and religion.

The Bible is an evil document, and its God is also evil.

Bad things happen to good people, and evil often triumphs.

The doctrines and tenets of orthodox sects are simply silly.

I don’t see God; therefore, there is no God.

God is not necessary for our moral conduct or for our happiness.

God is unnecessary for our existence.

God is like the Ultimate 747.

Occam’s razor: God is an unnecessary hypothesis.

The stage is too big for the drama.

Religion is a fairy-tale fantasy that is too good to be true.

As we shall see, these arguments are mere deceptions and are ripe for exposure. They are traps for the unwary because each has an aura of reasonableness, although rife with flaws, some less obvious than others. Also, most, if not all, of these statements are merely repetitive of the old dogma professed by the Book of Mormon anti-Christs: Sherem, Nehor, and Korihor. By using these arguments, secularists claim, in effect, that belief in God and Christ is childish and that to live a life of faith is to be trapped and enslaved by the foolish traditions of ignorant forefathers.

While many sophisticated atheists claim to be open-minded and at least admit that they don’t have all the answers to life’s questions, they almost always refuse to admit any specific defects in their atheistic system of thinking. In fact, one of the great ironies of our time is that these people, who say they oppose all religions and dogmas, have established for themselves a set of doctrines and teachings that must be accepted on faith, which they are not willing to debate and which they will defend as vehemently as modern inquisitors (minus the thumbscrews and stretching racks, so far at least). Anyone who truly gets in the way of the advancement of their doctrine and agenda will be slandered or libeled or worse. Obviously, none of this means that their opinions and arguments should be accepted as beyond challenge. In fact, they are quite susceptible to challenge, as I shall now demonstrate.

Accordingly, in the following pages, we will examine and discuss each of these arguments, what they are, what they mean, their nature and character, their weight and authority, if any, and their flaws. None of these discussions, which are in the form of short essays, will constitute an exhaustive treatment. However, it is my hope and belief that they will demonstrate that the doctrines and dogma of secular humanism are both porous and penetrable. Some are not only flawed but also dishonest. None are beyond challenge. None are beyond refutation. Not one constitutes proof that there is no God. None of these arguments justify the conclusion that secular humanism is the correct view of the existence of God.

And so, we now proceed to examine each of the thirteen arguments for the so-called New Atheism.

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³⁰ Jacob 7:7.

³¹ Jacob 7:13.

³² Alma 1:3–4.

³³ Alma 30:15.

³⁴ Alma 30:13.

³⁵ Alma 30:45.

³⁶ Alma 30:17–18.

³⁷ Alma 30:16.

³⁸ Alma 30:23, 31.

³⁹ Alma 30:32–33.

Chapter 3

The Secular Humanist Arguments for Atheism

Argument No. 1: The Smartest People Are Unbelievers

The Truth: It Is Smartest to Believe the Evidences for Your Faith

In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins devotes the first half of the first chapter to the argument that smart people are unbelievers and uses it as a basis for unbelief and the rejection of the existence of God. He begins by citing German-born theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein (1879–1955), and then he continues in sequence with American cosmologist Carl Sagan (1934–1996), American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (1934–), British theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942–), American biologist Ursula Goodenough (1943–), British philosopher Julian Baggini (1968–), and then Einstein again at length. By engaging in this undisguised name-dropping, Dawkins evidently seeks to bolster his own credentials and positions by mounting on the shoulders of those he thinks greater than himself.

Argument No. 1 needs almost no explanation. There are some very accomplished people—bright on the IQ scale—who reject the idea of God’s existence outright or who are agnostic on the matter. The argument seems to go like this: These smart people are smarter than you. They know more than you. They are better educated than you. If they say there is no God, then it must be so. Who are you to disagree? Or if they say they don’t know if there is a God, then no one can know. If you want to appear smart like these smart unbelievers, then you must go along with what they say, because only ignorant people can be rash or reckless enough to disagree with them.

Unfortunately, many people are taken in by this argument. It is