Executive Summary

Marshall Brain is a strong atheist. He doesn't just "not believe" in God. He believes that "God Is Imaginary" and that it's downright foolish, and harmful to us as a species, to believe in God. He owns two websites:

1. http://www.whywontgodhealamputees.com/
2. http://www.godisimaginary.com/

Here at Brain is Ignorant, I have written a complete, word for word rebuttal to the latter of the two, God Is Imaginary. This essay is an Executive Summary of my work which shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to read.

Prayer Doesn't Work

One of Brain's central arguments is the inefficacy of prayer: prayer doesn't work, all answered prayers are coincidences, and because it doesn't work we should conclude that God exists. But the key point to consider regarding this argument is that there is a qualifier: Jesus says in the Bible, according to Marshall Brain, that you can pray any prayer and it will be answered immediately, no questions asked. That's where the inconsistency, in his mind, lies. He gives Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19, James 5:15-16, Mark 9:23, and Luke 1:37 to support his view. See Proof 1.

The trouble with Marshall Brain's argument, aside from the fact that not a single Christian on the face of the earth interprets those verses to mean as he does, is that it's littered with problems.

1. That's obviously not how the Gospel authors interpreted it. If they had interpreted it that way, the moment they would have had a prayer go unanswered, they would think Jesus was lying and make sure not to put those in the Bible.
2. There are several criterion Jesus gives for having your prayers answered. Most notably, the Lord's Prayer is literally an instruction Jesus gives on how to pray, and most of the prayer isn't asking for anything: most of it is praise. And when they do ask for things, it's only for daily needs, not just any old thing. Secondly, John 15 says that in order to receive what you ask for, you must remain "in Him," and that is accomplished by keeping his commandments.

An argument he uses to discredit prayer is comparing it to a lucky horseshoe (see Proof 48). If one asks of a lucky horseshoe for things, you won't get them either. But this is a seriously broken analogy. He is comparing a sentient entity to a non-sentient entity, a being with the ability to answer requests to an object that has no rationality or ability to interact with the outside world.

He also states that there have been no scientific studies saying that prayer has any results (see Proof 2) But this is a distortion of the truth. There certainly are studies that say prayer is ineffective, but there are also several studies saying the opposite. However, I don't believe in the validity of any of the tests, negative nor positive, for the simple reason that prayer is not something that can be scientifically tested with any sort of reliability. There are too many variables and unknowns.

No Evidence

A common argument Marshall Brain makes is that there is no evidence for God's existence whatsoever, be it science or some other form (See Proof 11, Proof 17). But this is also a distortion of the truth. Philosophers from literally hundreds of different religions for the past thousands of years have all put forth arguments for the existence of God that Marshall Brain has not addressed in his writings. Billions of people claim to have experiences that necessitate, if true, the existence of the supernatural. We observe moral laws in the universe, which have no real explanation if God does not exist. And we have reams of historical evidence that Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again.

The question is not whether there is evidence or not. The question, instead, is whether what we have is evidence enough to believe that God exists. I have attempted to demonstrate that the evidence we have is good evidence by laying out several of the arguments listed above in places on my blog.

The Bible is Unreliable

In many places, Marshall Brain attempts to dispute the validity of the Scriptures (see Proof 14, Proof 15, Proof 16, and Proof 21). This is often his weakest part of his writing. I am more adept at arguing about scriptural issues than philosophical or scientific issues, so I've had a great deal of fun refuting him here.

He says that many of Jesus's miracles could be recreated by a magician, and so there is no reason to accept them as legit. Firstly, magicians wouldn't really be performing a miracle. Brain says that there are many ways a magician can make water look like wine, but that's not what Jesus did: he actually made water turn INTO wine, not just look like it. Magicians can't get away with that. He also says that this is the same type of thing "faith healers" do all of the time, but that is not so either. Has Marshall Brain ever seen a faith healer give sight to a blind person, or turn someone's fully crippled legs into fully functional legs? This is not even mentioning turning five loaves and two fish into enough food to feed several thousand people with lots of leftovers, or rising from the dead.

He then demands that God give some sort of greater measure of proof, such as giving us the millionth trillionth digit of π, or moving Mount Sinai into New Jersey. But such requests are unreasonable and unnecessary, not to mention hazardous in the second example. No one but him needs that much proof to believe. Billions of people, in fact, have believed without it.

He falls even farther when he examines the resurrection. One of his central points is that if Jesus resurrected and appeared to hundreds of people, he should appear to each and every one of us too. Note that this does absolutely nothing to disprove the fact that Jesus actually rose from the dead and appeared to those people two thousand years ago. In fact, he doesn't even touch a speck of historical evidence in his essay. He merely asserts that Paul's testimony that Jesus appeared to him must be false, since Jesus doesn't appear to us. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is merely a huge non sequitur, not an actual argument.

Lastly, he attempts to make the argument that since contradictions exist in the Bible, the Bible must be false. This is an extremely bloated conclusion. The Bible is a work written over fifteen hundred years by many different authors, made up of books of a lot of different literary genres and themes. Just because one contradiction exists in 1 Kings doesn't mean Jesus didn't rise from the dead. Such is an extremely black and white approach: either the whole Bible is true, or it's all false. This is why I call Brain a "fundamentalist" atheist: despite him not believing it, he still views the Bible as the typical Christian fundamentalist does, as if it's all black and white. This is not even mentioning the fact that all of the contradictions he gives in the essay can be answered fairly easily, as I have done.

God Is Unjust, Sexist, Racist, etc.

Even if the above title was actually true, that still wouldn't imply that God doesn't exist. That's Wishful Thinking. However, I will go into his various assertions.

He says that God is unjust in many places (Proof 22 is a good example). However, nearly all of the objections given are as a result of a lack of understanding of the ANE culture. The laws given made perfect sense in the context of the historical time of the Bible, but to our modern, Westernized eyes, they don't make sense at all. Marshall argues out of the easy chair of Westernism, which leads to fallacy.

He says that God is sexist in Proof 30. But the verses he gives in support of the idea are actually against it, which he doesn't realize because of his lack of exegetical reasoning. For example, he gives 1 Corinthians 14 as an example of God's racism by citing the passage that says that women weren't allowed to speak in churches. But if he had done his exegesis, he would know that this is actually an example of Paul quoting his opponents and refuting them, not supporting the idea of sexism. In the passage, we find a small particle of text not translated into the NIV right after verse 35, which is an exclamation often translated as, "What?!" We also know that Paul used the literary device of quoting his opponents and then indicating disagreement several times in his writings, such as in 1 Corinthians 6:12-13. God is not sexist. This fact is quite clearly demonstrated by a mere perusal of the Bible, in which it says that women were necessary to make the universe "good", that they shared joint responsibility with man to rule/fill the earth, that God judged people who sinned against females, that God spoke directly with females, that God listened to females and answered their prayers, that God makes promises to females, that the first appearance of the Angel of Yahweh was to a female, that God blessed Sarah at the same level and in the same covenant-forms as Abraham, that, God includes females and their issues in His discussions with males, that women could inquire of God formally...I could go on.

He accuses God of advocating slavery (See Proof 13). What he doesn't understand is that slavery in the Ancient Near East is miles and miles away from our modern day concept of slavery. This is a point that many atheists today can't seem to grasp either. Here are just a few of the differences, which are mentioned in Glenn Miller's article on Christian Thinktank:

1. Modern day slavery is almost entirely involuntarily. ANE slavery, as mentioned in the Bible, is almost entirely voluntary (Lev 25:39, Lev 25.47, and Deut 15.12 all mention "selling himself"). People would sell themselves as slaves as a last ditch effort to survive. Thus, slavery in the Bible is more akin to our concept of "indentured servitude," which is being a slave for a certain amount of time for some sort of compensation.
2. Slavery in the New World allowed for virtually no social status, no legal bearing on your master, no legal exit, no possibility of social advancement, and no incentive to perform other than fear of injury. In the ANE, slaves had a wide range of social statuses available to them: people could be anything from peasants to doctors. They also had legal control on their masters to a certain extent. They would automatically be set free after seven years, and if at any time the slave wanted to leave before then, the master could not forbid him to do it. Lastly, there were a great deal of reasons to perform that didn't involve fear of injury.
   

Miscellaneous

Other weaknesses of Marshall Brain's arguments are as follows:

1. He seldom addresses any of the serious arguments for the existence of God. When he does, he uses straw men and essentially brushes them aside. This is seen in his response to Pascal's Wager and his Proof 36.
   
2. He appeals to false authorities, namely The Da Vinci Code, Rick Warren, Guidepost Magazine, and Christianity Today, as experts or as important figures of Christian doctrine, and then uses those authorities to refute an idea. I would ask him to consider legitimate authorities such as Bruce Metzger, Ben Witherington III, N.T. Wright, and William Lane Craig.
3. He has an entire proof dedicated to stupid things Christians say, and then says that God would stop them from saying that, and because he doesn't, he must not exist. I wonder if he genuinely believes this, because what he is asking for is a big censor in the sky.
4. He uses flagrant non sequiturs, such as because Christians divorce, God doesn't exist. No, I'm not kidding. See Proof 38.
5. He often gives examples of "typical" Christians who really aren't typical at all. He thinks the typical Christian really believes that God removes the stains from their clothing (Proof 44), and the typical Christian might believe their prayers are answered because it's an ego boost and because they like to be the center of attention (Proof 40). If anything, this is an embarrassing ad hominem and ego stroke on his part, not the Christians'.
   

I plead with atheists and Christians alike to discount the arguments of Marshall Brain. They are fallacious, illogical, irrational, and embarrassing. Any "normal, intelligent person," whether they have been an atheist all their life or a Christian for five minutes, should be able to see that quite plainly.

In Christ,
Patrick Dunnevant