A group of atheists on YouTube got together to assemble a series of questions for believers, and here it is:
These all sounded very familiar. I’ve asked questions like these before myself. But all I have are questions for these atheists.
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Why are you asking questions of people who don’t believe in questioning? It’s implicit in our approach that questioning everything is a good thing, but in their approach, questioning the articles of faith is bad.
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Who is your target audience? It’s an atheist video for atheists, so I’m afraid it’s more a “aren’t we clever for coming up with these questions” sort of thing.
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Do you expect answers? Or are you asking the questions because you’re confident they can’t answer them?
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Do you expect any respondents to answer all of the questions? Because that shuts down discussion. Either people will pick & choose and ignore the difficult ones, or they’ll just throw out the whole list and ignore everything.
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Are you aware of the history of this style of argumentation on YouTube? It’s not good. I first saw it in the terrible “Questions White Men Have for SJWs” that the Amazing Atheist assembled — it was an embarrassing vehicle for airing ignorant opinions. Likewise, there are multiple videos with Christians asking bad gotcha questions of atheists. The format does not hold up well.
What would be more interesting, and more thoughtful, is having atheists explain where they’re coming from — rather than asking Christians, for instance, where their morality comes from, or how the universe was created, how about just giving your answers, and perhaps more importantly, asking questions of yourself? An “Atheists Ask Themselves the Hard Questions They Can’t Answer” would be more informative. Also more challenging.
“Getting”?
I believe I could always get worse.
Just from looking at the video title, I assume it’s simply that after having responded to a hundred ‘questions for atheists’ videos, a lot of people got fed up and decided that two or more could play that game. I expect it’s somewhat tongue in cheek, in that it reflects theist youtube tactics. It’s one of those mostly rhetorical gambits which only makes any sense in the context of arguments on youtube.
I’ve no sense of whether it’s likely to be of use to anyone, though and I agree that asking questions of each other might well be more productive.
It’s one of those mostly rhetorical gambits which only makes any sense in the context of arguments on youtube.
I hate this dystopian future that I’ve stumbled into where this sentence actually makes sense.
To be fair – this has been my reaction to a lot of things recently.
Agree with your criticism. In defense of the people in the video, this form “____asks questions of ____” is a YouTube thing.
Of course, it’s always shitty and dumb. The worst one was the alt-light idiots asking questions of feminists (or SJW’s, don’t remember how they phrased it).
So, it’s bad and dumb, as you say, but it’s more a YouTube tradition than people thinking they’re doing something revelatory and important.
See you beat me to it, Ian.
This is OT, but if you are feeling jaded, it just might get your blood pressure up:
Bona fide neo-nazi is in the lead as candidate in the primary for a chance to challenge Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Patrick Little says the neo-nazi site Daily Stormer is “too Jewish”.
Sheee-it. The creationists are beginning to look good.
I like to see a professor with real ambition! Who says tenure inevitably leads to deadwood?
>These all sounded very familiar. I’ve asked questions like these before myself.
It’s great you figured it out back in 2004, but new people are coming into atheism all the time. New people are starting to critically think about their religion all the time. It’s OK to have them go through the same process that their peers from the ‘New Atheist’ generation went through.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
So we are old and jaded. Youth is wasted on all the wrong people. Yet we be content.
absolutely, for many when they start to ask questions do so secretly only in their minds, there still is a lot of social sanction to doing so. An open discussion of the questioning and thinking of others would be more helpful than smart ass questions.
uncle frogy
I recently came across one of those lists of questions for atheists, and the thing that’s most striking is how many of them are based on rather dubious assumptions about what atheists think. I would suspect that any list of questions drafted by an atheist for a theist is likely to suffer from the same flaws.
Even if we limit the discussion to Christians, you would ask different questions of an every-word-of-the-Bible-is-true fundamentalist than you would of a Jesus-is-just-the-name-I-give-to-the-love-in-my-heart moderate, or a squishy it’s-all-metaphorical-but-I-still-consider-myself-a-Christian type.
Also, while I know hyperbole is an occasionally useful rhetorical technique, and I certainly indulge in it myself from time to time, I think it’s a bad move for the side that claims to be honest brokers of evidence-based truth to claim that “no Christian can answer” your questions. Christians have answers to those questions. Us atheists obviously don’t find them persuasive, and some of those answers may be so weak that they’re useful for convincing others that Christianity is incorrect… but they have answers. It’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise, and reminds me of those misleadingly edited videos where PZ or Dawkins were supposedly “stumped” by a creationist’s question, when in fact they were (1) astonished by how stupid the question was; and/or (2) realizing that they’d agreed to an interview under false pretenses. It’s just not a good look.
Maybe, but I think atheists are more aware of what theists think than vice versa, because a sizable portion of atheists used to be theists.
Danny Husar, #9:
Fixate on one sentence (OK; two sentences), impose your own interpretation and then totally ignore the rest of the post. Way to go, you!
It’s a good XKCD but you’re pointing it in the wrong direction. Which approach do you think opens up discussion and encourages people to admit they don’t know things? PZ’s “Atheists asking themselves hard questions”? Or “Ha, ha, stupid Christians – you can’t answer these gotcha questions”?
@13
You’d think, but I’ve seen a good degree of youtube atheists attempts at counter-apologetics, and quite a good amount of them seem to operate under the assumption that theists are primarily strict literalists and won’t just shrug at their killer OMG OWNED TOP TEN BIBLE CONTRADICTION videos.
Porivil Sorrens, #14:
Exactly. I remember in my christian days reading or watching (on TV rather than youtube) people like Richard Dawkins and thinking “Yeah, very interesting, but what you’re arguing against isn’t what I believe.”
It took a year or so on Pharyngula before I realised that the one question I really couldn’t answer was: “OK, you don’t believe that the bible is literal truth – so what DO you believe in?”
Non-literalism is questioned at the second question of the video.
@Ian King #3
No need to assume from the title. That is literaly the explanation given by the author at the beginning.
@Colin J #16
Every conversation I ever had with believers (I myself was never religious) revolved around this one. Even fundamentalists often do not know what they believe, because they say they believe the bible literally, but often they do not know what the bible actually says.
There is one question that I tend to give to religious people during every conversation – not as a “gotcha” but to force them to think a bit (if they are capable of doing so -most are, some aren’t) – is: “Which criteria do you use to discern what in your holy book is just a metaphor and what is the truth?”
I have just finished with Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury.
The editing was better than that of this video.
I can’t find it now† — it was some years ago — but a high mucky-muck (possibly the then-archbishop himself (I can’t quite recall now precisely who)) in the Cult of English child rapists asserted Dawkins(? The God Delusion?) description of xanity was (paraphrasing from memory) . Now there are numerous reasons to doubt that, but taken at face-value, it does suggest caution when presuming what cultists think whilst formulating / presenting a critique.
† Also, I just recharged my mouse battery, so they have far more energy now. They are sliding around all over the desk — they are currently trying to climb the screen (and blocking my view of what I’m typing) — and being generally uncooperative, so my Generalissimo Google-fu is currently the victim of a hyperactive‡ computer mouse.
‡ They succeeded in climbing up the screen, whence they promptly fell off, and is now lying on their back wiggling the laser at me and going clickity–click–click§… Poor little box of electronics. At least they are a leash-less mouse, otherwise they’d probably have pulled the laptop on top of themselves.
§ Fortunately, out-of-range of the receiver. But now I have to claim them down and then cli…
Given that (1) as already mentioned, these folk are in fact intimately familiar with the question lists in the opposite direction, and (2) there are already some good answers from a Christian perspective which were actually welcomed by the atheist side, and (3) you’ve asked questions like these before,
why, I actually think your critique is misplaced.
Now, I certainly agree that the editing is … subpar.
I was lucky to have irreligious parents. The Education Act of 1944 imposed a Christian assembly on all schools in England and Wales, so I encountered religious observance when I was five. I asked my parents what it was all about. They simply said some people believed in gods, but they didn’t. They hinted ever so gently that some grown-ups would be offended if I decided and announced I didn’t believe in god. School told me god would listen and answer my prayers but it was pretty obvious that a prayer was a one-way conversation so I remained unconvinced. I’ve never been vehement about not believing; I don’t think you can reach many believers with rational argument, no matter how intelligent they may be, because faith is essentially irrational, and being rational is hard work. Sixty years on, I am still grateful to my parents for their sensitivity and for helping me to think for myself. If I’d started religious and become atheist I would be extremely annoyed with myself/my family/my teachers for a colossal waste of time.