Thinking Like a Theist

 

This figure is making the rounds with the title "When a theist starts a debate with an atheist." It's funny because it mocks the average theist who thinks that they have an overwhelming case for the existence of God. For some strange reason, theists don't think it's funny.

Brandon appears to be one of those theists. He's a Roman Catholic philosopher with a blog called Siris and he recently posted a rejoinder called When Atheists Try to Be Clever... .

Brandon noticed that the board has no kings. (Aren't those philosophers clever?) It also doesn't have any bishops but he doesn't mention that. In spite of the fact that the board is missing a few pieces, Brandon thinks that the standard rules of chess should apply ...

... it nonetheless ends up backfiring because ... it is logically and mathematically impossible, given any standard rules of chess, for either side to win this game. The rules of chess require an automatic draw if there is an impossibility of checkmate -- once it is established that no legal series of moves can reach checkmate, the game is over and both sides tie. A game with no kings has no possible checkmate, and so is an immediate draw. In trying to depict with a chessboard how much better their arguments are, a task in which they had perfect freedom to choose any possible chess set-up, they still managed to give themselves an unwinnable board. In other words, the atheist player doesn't know what he's getting into: the board is rigged so that the theist, with nothing but pawns, can guarantee a draw no matter how many queens the atheist has. Diabolically clever theist, getting atheist hopes up while making it impossible for them to win! That's on standard rules. And, of course, if the rules are supposed to be nonstandard, it is impossible to know what this board even means.

Looking at the board, you can can imagine that the contest will end when all the pawns have been wiped out and there are 15 queens left. At this point the theists will declare a draw because an imaginary, nonexistent, king has not been captured. Yep, that certainly sounds like an argument from a theist.

It also—for some strange reason— reminds me of The Black Knight. ("Right, we'll call it a draw.")

John Wilkins, who is also a philosopher, thought Brandon's "rejoinder" was clever enough to deserve a mention on his own blog [Agnostic versus atheist chess]. I guess you don't have to be a theist to believe in imaginary, nonexistent, chess pieces.

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