It’s far too long to write-up as a single article (and I suspect it would bore you all to tears if I tried), so instead I’ll try to write up one section a week.

Interestingly, the tone of this course is overwhelmingly about trying to find evidence for God, and trying to philosophise God into existing. That seems like a little bit of a cop-out of the whole faith equals belief without evidence thing to me, but maybe that’s why I’m an atheist.

Because the Leaf Fell

This section sets the tone and lays some of the groundwork for the rest of the course. It is also, as we shall see, highly flawed and internally inconsistent. It starts by painting a picture. It’s a picture that has a leaf in it.

“…A leaf breaks off of the branch, floats down through the air, swoops from side to side, being pushed about by a soft breeze and then lands on the ground…”

You can probably guess where this is going already, but just in case you’re immune to things less subtle than being smacked repeatedly with a hammer, we are then treated to a discourse on how some single event must have caused the leaf to fall. We are even given a list of possible causes: Gravity, the breeze, squirrels – All building up to this statement, which I shall call Wince Number 1 (because that’s what happened when I read it):

“…We do have to agree that there had to have been some cause that lead to the falling of the leaf.”

Well… No, not really. The implication here is that there must have been one, single causal event which was responsible for the falling of the leaf. But that ignores the possibility that there may have been many events and contributing factors (which, undoubtedly, there are, even for an event as simple as a falling leaf). Remember: The course doesn’t talk in terms of a triggering-event, it talks about a cause. That’s not the same thing, but the piece conflates the two ideas with startling repetition.

At this point you’ve probably already realised that we’re in the midst of a set-up for the fallacy that cause = intention, but stay with me. It gets worse, I promise.

Now we get to a seemingly uncontentious, statement:

“PRINCIPLE #1: Any activity in this universe creates an effect(s)”

Well… Yes, kind of. Even the act of waving my arm in a vacuum has some effect, if only in terms of glycogen and oxygen burned by my muscles, extra carbon dioxide filtered from my blood by my lungs. So I’ll accept that premise as reasonable until proven otherwise.

There follows a short discourse that we shall call Wince Number 2:

“But that principle is also true when read in the other direction. We also have to agree that in order for it to even be possible for the leaf to fall – a greater, earlier event (cause) must have already taken place: the growth of the limb that the leaf grew from! If that limb had never grown then that particular leaf would have never existed in the first place and thus could never fall. Keep going. If the trunk never grew there would be no limb. Before that, if there were no tree seed – the sprout would have never grown to create a trunk which would never produce a branch that would never grow any leaf to fall.

Did everybody spot the step that was skipped? If we really read the first scenario (that some triggering event caused the leaf to fall) in reverse, we would say that the falling leaf required a trigger event to make it fall. Wince Number 2 skips straight past that unavoidable conclusion, stops talking in terms of triggering events, and instead starts conflating required preconditions for an event with cause for the event. So far, so torturous! All of this leads to Wince Number 3:

“PRINCIPLE #2: Conversely, every effect in this universe is the result of some unified cause(s).”

Just in case I haven’t already pointed out how hard the author(s) of Going Deeper have failed to demonstrate a logical chain from principle #1 to principle #2, let me put it like this:

If all trains are all vehicles, are all vehicles trains? No, of course not. Just because A always equals B, does not mean that B always equals A. This is a common failure among poor arguers: Using the rules of mathematics as interchangeable with the rules of logic.

Another short discourse follows, but it’s largely irrelevant as it assumes that principle 2 is true and proven, and it’s really just a re-statement of it in slightly more complex terms anyway:

“PRINCIPLE #3: All activity in this universe is related through a chain of causes/effects. Nothing in this universe is “uncaused” but rather is dependent upon a prior cause.”

To reiterate: The authors have failed to demonstrate that this is true. Let’s see what they fail to demonstrate next! The next one is fairly straightforward: That the chain of cause and effect is not infinite, it is finite.

I’m not actually going critique the paragraph in which this is asserted, because it is so patently ridiculous – The ignorance it displays is breathtaking all on its own. Here it is:

“To start weighing the facts use this example: Imagine that I am going to travel from my house to yours. I feel like going for a brisk, comfortable jog. Your house is the perfect distance for me to run before I get too tired. So I’m going to head over to take a break at your place! I’ve been conditioned for long distance running. This will equip me for the journey. The only catch – the distance between your house and mine is infinite. There is an endless amount of room between my place and yours!

Can this be true? Can I make the trip from my house to yours by covering the infinite distance between them?

We may not be able to figure out the true distance of space but we can figure this out with absolute certainty – if I am standing at my front door and I claim that I can make it to your house which is an infinite distance away I am rotten a liar!

Why? To travel an infinity is to never, ever stop. There is no such thing as endpoints in an infinity! If I start running no matter how trained I am I will not make it. That fact has nothing to do with my athletic stamina but rather with mathematical laws. An infinite distance means that for every step I take there would be another, and another, and another, and another in a never-ending cycle for all eternity. From whatever point are you standing and looking out onto infinity you will never find an endpoint because that is what defines an infinity – no ending point!”

Um… Yes? And? I’m confused about where this is going. I’ll let you look up the next paragraph yourself if you want to read it – It’s pretty much a restatement of the last one. It’s equally irrelevant, and involves brownies. I’m not making this up. It all leads to this:

“PRINCIPLE #4: All events in this universe have a finite list of causes. Since nothing in this universe is uncaused all things are related to one another through their dependency on a prior cause. Thus all existence in this universe is contingent upon common, ultimate, singular first event.

Do I need to restate the obvious? Absolutely no part of principle 4 has been demonstrated or proven in any way, shape or form. Further, even if they could demonstrate first-cause, how could they rule out many simultaneous but otherwise unrelated first-causes? They could not.

What follows is almost sixteen hundred words that can be summed up very easily in one sentence: “The whole universe is subject to the same physical laws and constants as human beings”. Of course, the authors don’t actually demonstrate (or even reason) this. They just blithely state is as if it were an established fact. I suspect this is the reason for the sixteen hundred words: They’re stultifyingly dull and repetitive. I suspect they’re only there in the hope that readers will skip to the conclusion and assume that it has been proven. It hasn’t been proven, or even vaguely justified, but the conclusion is:

“CONCLUSION: Something transcendent to our universe put the chain of causes/effects of our universe into motion. A “FIRST CAUSE” exists.

Hands up if you saw that coming straight from Wince Number 1. I think that will do for now, not least because I’ve reached my limit for reading such silliness for the day. Stay tuned for part 2 next week.

[source]

Today, most of our fellow travelers have fallen by the wayside. The rise of Evangelical Christianity pushed deists and pantheists further into the margins, and even unitarians are no longer the vibrant movement they once were.

In their place, a new crop of people that find orthodoxy too confining have arisen: seekers, liberal Christians, postmodern Christians, Christian agnostics and syncretists of every type. Many of these modern groups emerged as a reaction to the same forces that atheism did: science, higher criticism and individualism.

But whereas atheism rejected belief in a deity as unsustainable and even immoral, these other freethinkers just made things more complicated. As Karen Armstrong says, “belief is a red herring.” Religion is no longer just an assent to an intellectual proposition.

Armstrong, a bit of a mystic, will say that God is not something you believe in, it’s something you experience. Similarly, there’s a long line of Liberal Christians who say that religion begins with an experience of faith; an inner feeling of absolute dependence.

Robert M. Price, a Christian Atheist along the lines of Don Cupitt, will sometimes say that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he’s willing to suspend disbelief on Sunday mornings. God is real within the worship itself, even if nowhere else.

Folks like Real Live Preacher have said that “faith is a verb,” it’s not something you have, it’s something you do. Some would say “fake it until you make it,” act like you believe until you feel that you believe. Others, even more postmodern, would say “fake it, and who cares if you make it.” Do what works for you.

I’ll be honest, sometimes I feel like a relic. I’ve been reading The End of Christianity, a collection of counter apologetic essays edited by John Loftus (review coming). Many of these argument would have been familiar to atheists 150 years ago, at least in outline. We’re trapped in the same debates that Robert Ingersoll and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started.

As folks like Evolving Thoughts parse the difference between belief, disbelief and agnosticism ever more finely, I can’t shake the feeling that the whole argument is becoming obselete. What does it mean to be an atheist in this postmodern world? What does it mean to not be a Christian when belief in the Christian God is no longer the point?

I will never answer the majority of the questions unbelievers have about God, questions that deal with proof that God exists; to do so would violate the “faith clause” that is a condition of becoming a Christian.

In a lot of ways, it makes sense. Faith, for Pastor Steve, means believing in God without concrete evidence. It’s vital to him, because faith is what’s required to be saved. Part of the challenge of being Christian is continuing to believe in a complex series of theological assertions (God loves us, Jesus was God, his death saves us from something called sin, etc.) based only on ambiguous clues.

You can look at it another way. Faith is a presupposition from which all the rest of Christian thought flows. If you don’t believe in a God already, you’re not going to believe in a God ever. You have to believe in a God, in sin, in an inspired scripture and in salvation and heaven before you can makes sense of Steve’s brand of Christianity.

So you either have faith or you don’t. But is it really that simple?

Last month, a portal for motherhood blogs called “The Circle of Moms” held a contest to find the most popular mommy blogs of various categories. One category was faith blogs. Competition became heated when a pagan blog, Confessions of a Pagan Soccer Mom, took the lead.

The blogger, Mrs. B, found herself the target of a lot of bile. Some Christians seems unable to accept that there might be non-Christian and even non-monotheistic faith. Mrs. B came out with a confession of faith:

Before I get much further, for those who might be wondering (and I can only speak for myself on this part of the issue), I can say that yes, my practice and religion is faith based. I live my faith every single day. I wake up and say a prayer to my deity.

So Mrs. B has faith. The Christian bloggers should applaud her. Some did, but quite a few continued their heated criticisms of the whole idea of pagan faith. She still won.

If we take Mrs. B and the rest of the sprawling online pagan community seriously, we see that there has to be more than one type of faith. So it’s not a binary problem, where you either have faith or not. Many Christians who were raised in the Christian traditions can’t seem to wrap their minds around this. There’s faith – Christian faith, naturally – and then there’s superstition. This is parochialism, pure and simple.

So here’s the problem with the faith card: why this faith and not that one? There needs to be some criteria to figure out which faith you should accept. You can’t tell me to take the leap of faith until you give me some way to know which direction I should leap in.

“A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction… The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.”

The countries studied were Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. I didn’t really raise an eyebrow looking through that list until I got to Ireland – Ireland? Really? I’m not a mathematician or a statistician, so I can’t really give an opinion on their method of analysis, but the trends as they currently stand are pretty unambiguous.

The UK census is currently being taken (mine is sitting on the floor next to me, I’ve been avoiding it for days), but Question 20 (“What is your religion?”) is voluntary (as well as incredibly presumptive and badly worded), so it remains to be seen whether the group will (or will be able to) apply the same analysis to UK data, but I shall wait with interest to find out.

In the meantime, I put it to the multinational UF family: What do people from those countries think about the predictions? Accurate and incisive or foolish and flawed?

I’ll start with a premise. There is such a thing as good and bad behaviour. There are moral acts and immoral acts; these things are, in my opinion, highly subjective, but they do exist.

Some theists will argue that this proves God exists – because morals have to have a source. Of course, this is flawed immediately because it discounts the possibility of evolved social behaviour, however we’ll continue to the question, which should be familiar to most atheists:

Are right and moral acts and deeds right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral, or does God say that right and moral deeds are right and moral because they are inherently right and moral?

Now to the point of the question:

Option one (right and moral acts and deeds are right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral) logically leads to the conclusion that God could say that anything is right and moral, including (for example) genocide, child rape, slavery, cruel and unusual punishment… Would anybody ever agree that these things are right and moral? I don’t think so – and yet they’re right there in the Bible – some of them as instructions from God himself. I guess that rules out option one! It also causes massive problems with option two: God’s proclamations (if you believe the Bible) are often not right and moral – in fact they’re often very wrong and very immoral. There’s more: If something is inherently right and moral, then surely we don’t need God to point it out to us – surely we’d have figured it out for ourselves anyway?

Now look at option three: Human societal norms are evolved and God has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t that rather neatly solve the problems with options one and two?

Bishop Broadhurst, who is the chairman of the Forward in Faith organisation, declined to say whether he would leave the Church of England, because he said he needed time to talk to the priests under his pastoral care.

“My organisation has 1,000 priests and about 8,000 lay people in it. None of those priests are happy,” he said.

“Now people have to decide whether they will knuckle under – if they do, that is not a very happy situation for them or the Church – or whether they’ll go, or whether they’ll just defy it, and I can see that happening with many people.”

Part of me finds it hard to suppress a little soupçon of glee over this; as an atheist it confirms some of my opinions of religion in general so very nicely – particularly that some people simply use religion as a cloak for bigotry and that their bigotry is far more important to them than any faith they might profess. Most of me, however, finds it deeply sad that the laws of my country still permit exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation on religious grounds, effectively allowing organisations like the CofE to remain decades behind the rest of society in their attitudes towards equality and fairness.

Background story from the BBC.
Main story from the BBC.