Atheists sometimes illustrate the apparent randomness (irrationality) of believing in God (per-se) by positing that it is similar to the belief in an invisible pink unicorn. Of course there is a trivial counter to this, however, it can perhaps be more interestingly approached via the invisible bird argument.

The invisible bird argument posits several observed cases and a hypothesis.

In case a. observer 1 sees a bird fly behind a building and the a few moments later it flies out from the other side.

In case b. observer 1 sees a bird fly behind a building and it does not appear within any reasonable time frame on the other side (as expected).

in case c. observer 1 sees a bird fly out from behind a building however this is an unexpected situation; a bird was not observed flying in from the other side.

Based on case a, b and c, observer 1 posits the hypothesis that the bird is turning invisible and/or visible behind a building. Further, that because the observer has never observed this happen at any other time, the observer posits that the bird is aware he is being observed and does not change his state unless no one can see him – which is why it only seems to happen while he is behind a building.

In order to test this hypothesis observer 1 asks observer 2 to stand to the side or behind the building and present his observations. However, observer 2 reveals that the birds observer 1 originally thought to turn invisible were just stopping to rest or doing something else.

So now, observer 1 relies on the testimony of observer 2 in order to understand the truth of the matter. Next, observer 1 publishes his findings in a magazine. A scientist (3rd person in chain) reads the article and advises a school board (4th) which then advises teachers (5th) who teach students (6th) who then use their knowledge and derived authority from education to explain the “truth” to others (7th chain). None of this is considered wrong, unscientific or in any way illogical, because it is assumed that anyone can repeat the experiment at any time. Even so, for some branches of science, especially medicine and physics, the average person has no hope of repeating the experiments on which modern science is based. Therefore I would posit that it is realistic to expect that if a large number of educated people believe something, that their position may hold some weight.

Therefore to compare the belief in God to the belief in invisible pink unicorns is simply a bad analogy – however, we have not finally shown that believers in God are in fact educated(!!) – we will do so now.

Within the narrative of the Bible – the nation of Israel is called to be the witness to God and the keepers of the word of God. Thus we come to the kuzari argument that the Jewish people today are the witnesses by which we are to learn about God. This becomes important when we are looking at some random isogesic expression of “God”, such as what the Christians may espouse. We thus see that the Atheist argument against a Christian God is a straw man argument – and we must reject the isogesic narrative of the Atheist position. We are then left with an exegesic expression of God in the Bible, which is usually enough by itself to counter the argument made, or at least to reframe and note that it counters many of the complaints Atheists have about God. Ultimately the position of the Bible is that it is a choice– one is perfectly capable of choosing not to believe in God, while still being a moral person.

The Invisible Pink Unicorn analogy is a bad analogy because it is phrased as a loaded question; it presupposes that people who believe in God require the belief in God, or require a relationship with God, to have some sort of moral capacity to reason or judge between good and evil. We do not, but instead we recognize the error of the atheist and hope to progress the discussion beyond the simple talking points in order to make real progress.