Catholic Apologist Rebutted

Bishop Robert Barron is a noted Catholic Evangelical, with a particular focus on atheism. He recently sponsored an Ad on Facebook offering a free download of his 22-page ebook entitled "Answering the Atheists." I downloaded it, edited it with some comments, and sent it back to him via email. Below is a synopsis of the content and essentially my responses (in red):

• The Introduction included this sentence: "Today's atheists, in their condescending and often snarky dismissal of all transcendent truths, seem to be playing at atheism rather than seeing to the bottom of it."
• My response: What ARE "transcendent truths?" There is objective truth only. 
• He presented four "claims" that he thinks atheists make and then attempted to refute them.
• Atheist Claim #1: There is no evidence for God.
• His answer to Claim #1: There are plenty of "rational warrants" for belief in God.
• My response: There is no objective evidence for any God. Reason/intuition/philosophy ("transcendence?") will never trump objective evidence (science) as the brain alone has flaws and only science can justify its assessments. All syllogisms used by Christian apologists have at least one false premise. The theist is making the claim, thus, is obligated to provide the objective evidence. Christianity makes claims on our objective reality, thus, science can evaluate the claims. Science has rejected them all. Why should religion get an exemption from this process?
• Atheist Claim #2: What caused God? This is special pleading.
• His answer to Claim #2: Nothing, as God is not contingent on anything else. It is the "First Cause."
• My response: To say that God caused our reality is an argument from ignorance (God of the Gaps). Physics shows that an uncaused, eternal multiverse is at least as plausible as a God.
• Atheist Claim #3: Science has disproved God.
• His answer to Claim #3: This is Scientism (science is the only way of knowing). Other rational methods like philosophy transcend science.
• My response: What you label pejoratively as "Scientism" is only talking about objective evidence. Of course, there are other ways of knowing. I have already addressed transcendence. No atheists I know make the positive claim that there is no God. We only say that we can't accept the claim because of the lack of objective evidence.
• Atheist Claim #4: The Problem of Evil is a barrier to belief.
• His answer to Claim #4: A finite mind cannot take in the workings of an infinite mind.
• My response: You first have to show the evidence for an infinite mind. The Christian God supposedly is All-Good and we do not see evidence of such a reality, thus, it is falsified.

My assessment of this apologetic is that it is just another failed Christian apologetic. Only gullible, magical thinking atheists would fall for these arguments. Science-based thinkers, who are the atheists I know for the most part, would not be impressed, to say the least.