Was 'Scooby-Doo' actually atheist propaganda for children?

Does “Scooby-Doo” teach children the core philosophical tenets of atheism?

I recently saw an atheist claim that “Scooby-Doo” was created to teach children about rationality and skepticism because every episode begins with a supernatural event — like a haunting ghost and unexplained phenomena — and ends with a “natural explanation” (i.e., it’s just a person in a mask).

I saw this claim on Reddit:

I just realized scooby-doo was made to teach kids skepticism and rationalitySuddenly it makes sense why my ultra religious mother ended up forbidding me from watching it as a kid. Last night, it suddenly occurred to me based on what I could vaguely recall about the show before I was banned from it that every episode was about something supernatural happening and then getting proven to have a non-supernatural cause. I looked it up and it turns out that was exactly the case.

This argument got me thinking and raised two important questions:

Is “Scooby-Doo” naturalist propaganda for children?
How strongly does the plot of a generic “Scooby-Doo” episode bolster the argument for naturalism?

Subversive Scooby

When you stop and think about it, “Scooby-Doo” is actually kind of subversive.

It teaches children that whenever we think something is supernatural, it really just has a natural explanation. It drills into young minds that the right answer is always the non-supernatural one. The ghosts are never real, the curses are always fake, and the monsters are just people in costumes.

There’s always a natural explanation. And by reinforcing this idea over and over, it teaches children that believing anything supernatural is irrational.

God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around.

“Scooby-Doo” is not a neutral show. It’s naturalistic indoctrination.

And here’s why that’s a problem: The argument that “every time we investigate, we find a natural explanation, so everything must have a natural explanation” is the same argument atheists use to claim that God isn’t real.

Fatal flaw

The subversive argument of the “Scooby-Doo” plot is not only a problem because it’s the same one that atheists use, but it’s a problem because it’s not a good argument.

In fact, it’s a really bad one.

First, even if you grant for the sake of argument that a natural explanation is found on the other side of a supernatural cause, it doesn’t require that all explanations are natural. That’s just logically invalid. It’s like saying, “All the swans I’ve seen are white; therefore all swans must be white,” or, “Every time I walk into a house, I see carpet; therefore all houses have carpet.”

These are inductive overreaches. It’s completely fallacious reasoning. Still, there’s an even deeper problem.

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Atheists believe that if God existed, then we should be able to see him directly intervening in the world in a visible, testable way. They think that if we hear a weird sound in the attic, we should be able to climb up there and find God directly causing the sound.

But this is a bizarre line of logic, because that’s not how God is understood in theism. God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around. Instead, God is the one who makes the whole universe possible in the first place.

Worldmaker

Consider J.R.R. Tolkien. When you read “The Lord of the Rings,” you don’t see Tolkien himself in the story. Rather, you see Frodo walking to Mordor, Gandalf giving advice, and Aragorn being born from parents. You’d never see Tolkien manipulating Middle-earth — he’s nowhere to be seen.

If you lived in that world, you might think based on your experience that everything was caused by something else in that world. The characters have their own internal causes, and yet their ultimate existence and explanation is found in what? J.R.R. Tolkien. He brought all of it into being.

Notice that even though Tolkien is the ultimate explanation for everything in his world, you cannot find him directly causing anything in his world.

That’s how God relates to our world. He’s the reason anything exists at all. Just as Tolkien is the cause of everything in Middle-earth without being a character in it, God is the cause of everything in our universe without being a natural object within it.

So to expect that you can “see God” in the chain of natural causes is like tearing apart the pages of a novel looking for the author’s actual fingerprints.

The final answer

Still, there is a much bigger philosophical problem with this argument that atheists hate to acknowledge.

If you say that everything has an explanation, then you are forced to ask: Where does the chain of explanations stop?

Sure, perhaps natural things are explained by other natural things. But what explains those? And what explains the natural things that explain those natural things? It’s a circular argument that results in infinite regress, which produces contradictions and ultimately explains nothing.

That’s not rational.

There has to be something at the end of the chain, something that explains everything else but is not explained by anything else. Something that exists by the necessity of its own nature.

If the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

That thing, whatever it is, must be radically different from everything else. It’s not one more link in the chain — it’s the foundation of the chain. And if it’s not caused, not contingent, and not dependent on anything else, then it’s not “natural.” It’s supernatural, and it’s fundamentally different from all of the “natural” stuff.

Once you realize this, you’re forced to consider: Does this supernatural foundation have a mind?

And what do you find in the universe it caused? You find minds. Information embedded in DNA. Consciousness. Reason. Intelligibility. Purpose. Order. Morality.

None of these things we would expect to get from mindless matter. These are exactly the things an intelligent mind produces. We know this because we ourselves possess minds. So if the fundamental cause of everything contains the power to bring forth minds, intelligibility, and moral reality, then the most reasonable conclusion is that it, too, has a mind.

And if the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

Maybe the real mystery isn’t whether or not “Scooby-Doo” was debunking ghosts. The real mystery is why so many atheists think that repeating a cartoon plotline counts as an argument against the existence of God.