How Theists and Atheists Reason Differently About God

Excerpted from my upcoming book, 7 Truths that Changed the World (Baker 2012)

Theists and atheists do reason differently about God and the world. A common skeptical objection to the enterprise of Christian apologetics is that believers engage in a god-of-the-gaps form of reasoning. This charge means that the Christian theist typically attributes gaps in (especially) scientific knowledge to something God has done. For example, when science can’t explain how the universe came into being or how life originated on Earth, the Christian apologist is quick to point to God as the cause or explanation. Thus the skeptic’s accusation is that Christians do nothing more than give their ignorance a name—“God.” No real and adequate explanation, says the skeptic, is provided by simply appealing to God as a cause or source.