1. “Miracles are, by definition, impossible, so Christians will believe 1+1=3 if ‘God’ tells them to.”

Reply: Miracles are not, by definition, impossible. There’s a distinction between the Ideal Order and the Existential Order. The first deals with thought laws, like the principle of non-contradiction (a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way), and mathematical propositions; the second deals with physical matters of fact, like rocks, water, insects, plants, planets, and human beings. The Ideal Order deals with why causes that are self evident, they cannot be denied. The Existential Order deals with that causes, causes we see that occur (we see that rocks fall according to what we call gravity), but the why of which we do not see, and can therefore see no reason they should continue to hold. The Christian miracles concern the Existential Order, and contain no inherent “why” cause contradictions in the Ideal Order. (For more on the difference between orders see David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, SECTION IV PART 1: http://www.etext.leeds.ac.uk/hume/ehu/ehupbsb.htm#index-div2-N943628287 .
See also G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter IV--The Ethics of Elfland, beginning at the ninth paragraph: http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html )

2. “If the Universe needs God as a cause, then why doesn’t God need a cause?”

Peter Kreeft points out “the argument does not use the premise that everything needs a cause… Everything in motion needs a cause, everything dependent needs a cause, everything imperfect needs a cause.” (See http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/first-cause.htm , near the bottom of the page, with a dot by it, starting out “Third, it is sometimes argued…”)

3. “Asking me to prove the non-existence of God is forcing me to prove a universal negative, which is like me asking you to prove that unicorns don’t exist when you’re not looking, or that the spaghetti monster isn’t flying about on some distant planet.”

First, you CAN prove a universal negative if it contains an inherent contradiction, but that’s beside the point. The comparison between God as the logical conclusion of various proofs (like the Cosmological Argument, the Argument From Desire, and the Argument From Reason) and the randomly devised spaghetti monster, Santa Clause or Easter Bunny, is a comparison of apples and oranges. The former conclusion is a construct of the intellect, a concept, which is
inherently un-picture-able (unimaginable), like the concept of a triangle, which contains the un-picture-able essence of all imaginable triangles, or, in the realm of the existential order, like the concepts of a black hole and a quark, both of which are inferred by effects, yet are none the less unimaginable. (See William Buckley’s interview with philosopher Mortimer Adler for more on intellect vs. imagination: http://radicalacademy.com/adlerinterview2.htm ).

4. “Faith is blind, irrational; it is believing without evidence.”

A.) Faith is trust in reliable authority. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York… The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority-because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority… A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.” (Full quote from Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 5, third paragraph: http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt )

B.) Christianity has what are called preambles to faith, also called motives of faith; for instance, God is knowable by reason with the attributes of goodness and truth; and Jesus, who was crucified for claiming to be God (for blasphemy) was indeed what he said he was. A reliable authority is one who has knowledge and veracity (moral integrity): God known by reason together with Jesus of Nazareth who claimed to be God provides us a reliable authority.

C.)“It is only in the waiting, thirsting spirit that revelation can find a reply.” --George Brantl

The need for faith in the Christian God is the result of an attempt to live according to conscience, according to what one knows is right, and the subsequent failure to do so -- in other words, it involves the recognition that one needs a savior who has a direct relationship to his will, not his abstract intellect alone (i.e., not to mental assent to propositions alone). Christianity, says Lewis, "is addressed only to penitents, only to those who admit their disobedience to the known moral law… [i]t offers forgiveness for having broken, and supernatural help towards keeping, that law."

5. “The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin didn’t see God anywhere, nor does the Hubble; so show me scientific proof that God exists -- till then I’m a skeptic…”

God is known by His effects, and in two different realms.

First, in the descriptive realm, the realm with which science deals where we describe what is, not what ought to be, we can come to a philosophical understanding of God. One way we (the traditional "we") rationally come to the intellectual construct "God," is a posteriori (after experience). It's method is no different from that by which we arrive at scientific "constructs," the only difference is the particular explanation of observable phenomena for which it is used to account. We start with the empirical world, and see a necessity to explain it's various aspects: science deals with becoming, with what philosophers term secondary causes; philosophy deals with existence, with ontology and metaphysics. It's either bias or misunderstanding, which would discount the one, arrived at by the same method as the other, for the mere fact that it is used to explain a different aspect of observable phenomena. Therefore, if you ask for empirically discoverable evidence for God's existence in favor of the scientific method to the exclusion of the philosophical, you are simply asking to affirm and deny the same method at the same time. In other words neither Yuri Gagarin nor the Hubble can, in principle, see a black hole, and we shouldn’t expect them to – the same goes for God.

Second, in the prescriptive realm, with which personal relations and morality deal; this is the realm of the will, and is really the more important and, as it concerns the existence of God, the relevant realm. Peter Kreeft notes that science operates on the principle of mistrust, but personal relations are just the opposite. If God is not a being with whom we can have a personal relationship, then He’s largely irrelevant in our practical lives; if He is then we need, like all relationships, to trust. But what idea of God do we trust? First, if God exists He is all good, and we must do our best to follow the moral law, which we can never completely uphold. Second, there is only one claim that God has actually come to us and we need to trust Him, and that we need his help to keep the law, and to transcend it in order to find ultimate fulfillment – that claim is made by Jesus Christ. Therefore, when you understand the Christian God to be the only source of the forgiveness and help we need, then it's quite clear that it’s our desperation stemming from the most important and basic attribute of our humanity -- our moral and relational experience, that drives us towards trust, towards a relationship with that "source"; a relationship which beckons: "taste and see," for the evidence will be a transformation of that deepest and most important part of yourself.

(For more on the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive, visit: http://radicalacademy.com/adlermoral.htm )

Buses in Washington DC will now carry the "humanist" slogan, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake." But what does that honestly mean? To me it's no different from asking, Why believe in goodness? Just be good for goodness sake. Or, Why believe in God? Just be good for God's sake. Nor can I consider that people who sing this song have seriously taken the music of goodness to heart; otherwise, I believe they would have discovered the desperate need to call upon a muse for divine help, for the art of morality and our inevitable failures to be good are, according to great men like St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and C.S. Lewis, the very motive for seeking revelation from God. Moreover, I'd argue that part of "being good for goodness sake" involves believing in God for people's sake; humanists who were good for people's sake wouldn't slight their deepest convictions, and spurn the hope, which attends their faith. To me, the "humanist" slogan is an oxymoron, I see nothing fundamentally humane about it.  

The very slogan itself, really, is an embarrassing tribute to its own authors. I'm sorry to say, it shows they either lack an awareness of, or refuse to acknowledge, the fact that God is not just a being religion holds exists, but philosophy does as well; that He's not only an object of faith, but of reason too; and, in either case, that it's traditionally posited that God is distinguished from all else by having no limitations, so that the slogan reading "a god" is confused from the start. There is and can only be one God, THE God; another "god" would have to be distinguished in some way, which would involve a limitation, thus would not BE God. In a country founded by Christians and deists, who believed in a basic idea of God, which served as the foundation of human ethics, is there, then, perhaps more to this inaccuracy than meets the eye? It's an ever-present temptation for those who want dramatically to alter the present to blur the past, even, I would think, if it starts with the most subtle propaganda (like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans).

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" Apparently, Thomas Jefferson would seriously doubt that a nation "can be good for goodness sake", that is, if goodness is deprived of an eternal context, i.e., divorced from the notion of God. This philosophical deism of a Jefferson or a Franklin, however, is, in itself, practically dead, and only really survives into the present through living forms of Christianity (like Evangelical and Conservative Catholic Christianity). The rub for certain people is that these active forms of Christianity are, in large part, the primary forces behind things like saving traditional marriage, banning embryonic stem cell research, and attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade. In other words, belief in a God of "justice" and "wrath" currently translates politically, so that political reaction, I'd suggest, is what drives things like "humanist" bus ads.       

I hear and read all of the time that people motivated by faith should keep their religion out of the political arena. To an extent I believe this principle is correct, but I think it helps to define that extent, which is really only to reclaim what I believe was understood by our founders, and by those in their succession, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'd like to do this, to define that extent, with the help of one more quote from Jefferson, "A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature." For many, that quote might understandably bring to mind the phrase in the Declaration of Independence reading, "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God", especially in light of Jefferson's earlier quote. But the point is that no one that I'm aware of wants to introduce articles of faith into the political arena -- no one, for instance, wants to force public schools to recite the Nicene Creed or, perhaps instead of fluoride, to take Holy Communion wine. Instead, the controversial issues rest, and should be discussed, at the level of "natural law"; that is, as subjects of reason, not faith. Whether or not one's reason is motivated by faith should be of nobody's concern, but that, I'm afraid, is what really angers people.

Indeed, it's religious motivation, I believe, that "humanist" reactionaries attempt to undermine through things like inaccurate and uncharitable bus slogans. To be sure, humanists have their own motives. The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche knew that the death of belief in God would mean the rise of our own selfish motives as gods in His place. Humanist slogans, in that case, might ultimately and more accurately read, "Why believe in God? Trust in OUR gods for goodness sake."