Why Are Believers Willfully Ignorant About Atheists?

[intaglio]

41. Dunbar preaches nonsense

Look at it this way ...

Animals display grief as well as other emotions and this leave the theist with an unanswerable dilemma - do animals believe in God?

Deal with the simplest "horn", if animals do not believe in God then that disproves Rev. Dunbar without further argument.

Now for the more twisted horn. If animals do believe then it must be by direct revelation, for this knowledge cannot be taught as animals lack the mechanisms for teaching such abstracts. However, despite this knowledge, animals still suffer the effects of evil with all the suffering implied by that. What is more they suffer the effects of natural disasters and, if the Bible is to be believed, the consequences of God's punishments of humans. This is formally known as "The Problem of Suffering" and is one of the great problems that theology has never satisfactorily answered.

Ignoring the glaring hole that the "Problem of Suffering" leaves in belief look at the consequences of animals having direct knowledge of God. If animals can receive this knowledge directly then why cannot humans? Why does God hide from humans and require from humans, alone amongst his creation, the need for faith? There is an idea that imbuing such knowledge directly into the human mind would deny us free will, but the Bible teaches that Adam and Eve had the freedom to sin despite having direct knowledge of God; equally Jonah tried to avoid the duty that God put upon him despite speaking to God directly. So direct knowledge of God does not impinge on human free will.

Of course the apologist would muster various arguments against this idea and here is one.

The apologist might say "But animals do not really suffer grief," but this is just the "No true Scotsman" fallacy writ large. Animals will suffer lassitude, depression and unreasoning outbursts of anger at the loss of a companion; they exhibit every behaviour we humans associate with grief and to deny that this is "really" grief is to deny that animals feel any emotion at all.