Lee Strobel

Last week, skeptic Michael Shermer turned to Carl Sagan’s famous invisible dragon analogy to try to demonstrate the emptiness of supernatural claims. I’m grateful to Sagan for enhancing my wonder of the cosmos at a young age. What I take issue with is the way Shermer (a former passionate Christian, by his own account) deploys Sagan’s invisible dragon analogy as if it actually shows the emptiness of claims about the God of the Bible. The key to understanding why he’s wrong is in the word “supernatural”: super = above or beyond; nature = the world or universe. If you accept that the universe had a beginning, then you have to deal not only with the question of what accounts for it, but where that cause exists. The cause cannot be within nature itself, so that implies the super-natural, whether God, a multiverse, or something else. The dragon analogy doesn’t engage that question, though; it treats any appeal to what lies beyond nature as equivalent to an unfalsifiable private claim. It’s not like Christians are asking you to believe in an invisible entity inside their garage, but more like they’re claiming an extra-dimensional being has created, entered, and acted within our world in ways that leave evidence. Sagan understood this concept. In an episode of Cosmos he memorably illustrated the difficulty of a two-dimensional creature in Flatland relating to a three-dimensional visitor. He understood how hard it is for us, in turn, to envision a fourth physical dimension. Yet the same episode shows that when a higher-dimensional being intersects a lower world, the Flatlanders don’t contend with an invisible, untestable entity, but rather with physical appearances, disappearances, objects moving around, and other things that don’t fit the ordinary rules of their world. It’s analogous to the way Jesus is presented in the New Testament as having entered our world in the flesh, visibly and tangibly interacted with people, performed miracles before eyewitnesses, died and then reappeared in a new body, and finally visibly ascended out of our world. Like Richard Dawkins’ use of Russell’s cosmic teapot, Shermer’s use of the dragon analogy assumes that people who believe in the supernatural do so “just because” or to have an invisible friend or something. That’s not why people believe. Religious people believe for a number of reasons. First, because there are questions about existence and the human condition whose answers are either not readily explainable by nature or cannot logically come from nature. Questions like: Why does anything exist? Why is the cosmos ordered and intelligible? Where did people come from and what happens when we die? What are the rules for living and why should we follow them? What existential questions does an invisible dragon or a cosmic teapot explain? What ontological problems does it solve? None. It’s a strawman, a reductionist way of presenting belief in the supernatural. The analogy works against claims that are constructed so that every possible test is met with a new exemption. It doesn’t work against the historical and philosophical claims actually made about the God of the Bible. ... That was an excerpt from my newsletter article, "Touching the Dragon," If you'd like to read the rest, click on over to my newsletter, Schrödinger's Poodle. If you like what I post here on X, I know you'll enjoy my long-form articles. (I know it's annoying to click out of here to read something, but the article feature on X gets zero traction.) Critics: If you want to take issue with my post, read my article first. schroodle.com/p/touching-the…