Why We Disagree on Moral Issues

Last updated on: July 1, 2016 at 10:47 pm By Bob Seidensticker

Why do liberals and conservatives argue so much about morality? Don’t we all have a common sense of right and wrong?

Yes and no. For the common examples given by Christian apologists (torturing babies, for example), we’re all on the same page, but it’s more complicated than that. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has brought the amorphous domain of morality into focus to reveal five separate categories. It’s a simple idea that explains much and can help us get past our differences—or at least understand them better.

From his TED video, here are Haidt’s five components of morality.

Care/harm. We’ve evolved to feel (and dislike) pain. This isn’t just true for ourselves; we also sense and dislike pain in others. From this comes kindness, nurturing, empathy, and so on.
Fairness/reciprocity. This is related to reciprocal altruism. From this foundation comes justice, rights, autonomy, and the Golden Rule.
Ingroup/loyalty. We have a long history as tribal creatures able to adapt to shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies patriotism, selflessness, and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s one for all, and all for one.
Authority/respect. As primates, we understand hierarchical social interactions. This foundation underlies the virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
Purity/sanctity. This is shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. Being repulsed by things that look or smell bad can keep us from eating unsafe food. It also underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, and more noble way.

Haidt theorizes that the rise of civilization may have needed all five of the morality categories.

Make love, not war

Here’s the interesting bit: when people from different viewpoints are tested against these five categories, everyone strongly endorses #1 (care/harm) and #2 (fairness/reciprocity).
As Haidt’s drawing shows, Americans across the political spectrum strongly endorse the foundations of Care/Harm and Fairness. Not so for the next three. The conservative says “go team,” while the liberal says “celebrate diversity” (#3). The conservative says, “respect authority,” while the liberal says, “question authority” (#4). The conservative says, “life is sacred” (while the liberal says, “women have the right to choose”) and “Men kissing? Eww!” (while the liberal says, “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t have one.”), category #5.

That’s a caricature, of course. Liberals like the team, authority, and purity as well; it’s just that they are likelier than conservatives to fear these good ideas taken to an extreme.

Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed, and they’ll risk chaos for the benefits of change. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions, and they’ll risk injustice to those at the bottom for the benefits of order.

Haidt observes that in Eastern thought, it’s not the zero-sum game that it is in the West. While there are opposites (yin and yang, for example), they aren’t enemies. Each is recognized as having value. Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. Each has a role.

This insight that morality is composed of different components has been helpful to me in making clear how those who disagree with me aren’t evil or insane but simply see morality differently. We value the same moral foundations but rank them differently.

Are we at an impasse?

Let me think aloud for a bit.

Social liberals and conservatives will see issues like abortion and same-sex marriage differently. The liberal acknowledges the differences and wants each person to be minimally constrained. You need an abortion? Up to a point, it’s your choice. You’re going to get gay married? Congratulations!

Alternatively, if you don’t like abortion or gay marriage, then don’t get one. If you want to argue against them, the First Amendment allows that.

The conservative typically wants minimal government intrusion but makes an exception here because the stakes are so high. Life is too important to permit abortion. Marriage is too important in the traditional sense to expand the definition. Government is tasked to impose the correct approach on everyone.

Where does this put us as a society? Are we destined to struggle? Or are there larger social trends pushing us in one direction or the other where, like slavery and civil rights, one side will prevail and the debate will seem inconceivable decades from now?

Never let your sense of morals
prevent you from doing what is right.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/29/13.)

Image credit: Wikimedia

Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists (3 of 4)

Last updated on: July 29, 2016 at 12:09 am By Bob Seidensticker

We continue with my book review of Ray Comfort’s Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before America Has an Atheist President. (Start with part 1 here.)

Ray has positioned his pig book as an evangelistic tool, a book that is supposed to convince atheists of the rightness of the Christian position. Let’s see how well Ray did toward that goal.

Christians and atheists in positions of power

Ray shares his insights into how Christian voters see atheist political candidates.

Our founders understood that people in positions of power would have opportunities to do corrupt deeds for their own benefit. But if they believe in God and in a future state of rewards and punishments, then when tempted to do wrong they won’t give in.

Is that how it works in practice? Christians don’t commit crimes? They’re immune to temptation? No Christians in prison? Are crime statistics in countries inversely proportionate to the fraction of Christians?

Not really. In fact, the very-Christian U.S. does far worse than those godless European countries on measurable social metrics.

Oblivious to what it does to his argument, Ray brags that Christians have subverted the Constitution’s prohibition of a religious requirement (Article VI) and made it impossible for an atheist to get elected to national office. But atheists have achieved political power in other countries. Polls within science show that education and prestige correlate with atheism. And I wonder how many of America’s self-made billionaires are atheists. Bill Gates is one, and his foundation, the world’s largest private foundation, is worth $44 billion. He’s using it to improve health care and reduce poverty in the developing world. I wish churches did the same.

And I have to wonder at the phrase “our founders.” Here and in other places in the book, Ray positions himself as a U.S. citizen, but his bio doesn’t say that. I can see how his being an outsider (he is from New Zealand) might weaken his standing to critique American culture, but Ray, you’re not passing as a Yank to deceive us, are you?

Because atheists have no absolute basis for good and evil, and don’t believe in an afterlife, they therefore can’t be trusted with public office. Whether this ‘bias’ would stand up to today’s Supreme Court scrutiny, it clearly shows the intent of our founders.

What an obnoxious moron. “Our founders” were very clear about the role of religion in government, and they deliberately kept them separate. The U.S. Constitution admits of no supernatural grounding backing up the government, and it begins, We the people.

Your bias would indeed fail a Supreme Court test because the intent of the founders was clear: there can be no religious test for public office.

I can’t imagine Ray has thought this through. Despite evidence to the contrary, he has assurance from his deity that non-Christians are bad people. Is that how a society should work? If, decades from now, Ray’s group became a minority, would he still want a religious test imposed by the majority? Or does this only apply when he’s got the power? If that future doesn’t sound good, Ray, maybe you’re seeing the value in the founders’ wisdom.

Atheists, like the rest of us, are not morally ‘good.’ Without an unwavering moral compass to guide him, an atheist president would be easily swayed by the winds of popular opinion and his own selfish desires—doing whatever was right in his own eyes.

Demonstrate this “unwavering moral compass.” Take a contentious social issue like abortion or same-sex marriage and show that all Christians get the same God-given response. Last time I checked, Christians were all over the map on social issues. Some churches have rainbow flags, and some have signs that say, “God hates fags.”

Ray undercuts his non-argument when he denounces the many corrupt Christian politicians:

And this from people who claim to believe in a Supreme Being who will one day hold them accountable!

So then he admits that being Christian is no guarantee of moral action. He doesn’t even attempt to show a correlation—”Christianity makes you good” is just a bold claim supported by handwaving.

Ray drops in a predictable attack on Islam. His argument is basically: Say what you will about Christianity, it’s better than Islam! Uh, okay, and say what you will about dengue fever, it’s better than smallpox … but I’d rather have neither.

He frets that atheism’s attack on Christianity will create a vacuum for Islam:

By dismantling Christianity’s influence in our nation, [atheists] are preparing the way, and making every path straight [for Islam].

You don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water. Similarly, you don’t fight Muslim illogic with Christian illogic; you fight it with reason.

Getting the Ray Comfort treatment

If you’ve seen Ray’s Ten Commandments challenge on his videos, he gets people to admit that they’ve stolen, lied, cursed, or lusted. You’d feel like you haven’t gotten your money’s worth if you read a Ray Comfort book and didn’t find this flabby challenge, but the pig book has it. He concludes it with this:

God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterer at heart. Do you still think that you are good?

Yes, pretty good, though not perfect. If not being perfect is a problem, talk to my Maker.

And Ray does nothing to untangle the problem of the incompatible versions of the Ten Commandments. Given how little he understands the issues he talks about, I’m guessing he doesn’t even know that there is more than one.

How well would Ray do on his own Ten Commandments challenge?

Atheists, how confident are you in your worldview? Prepare to have it rocked.

Using the infallible logical fallacy of the Argument from Incredulity, Ray gives an argument that he plans to stretch into his next movie, The Atheist Delusion. First, he points to a book and asks, Do you believe that this book could happen by accident? When you say no, he pounces: the content within human DNA is equal to that within a thousand ordinary books. How could DNA happened by accident?

Ray hammers home the punch line:

DNA’s complexity (for any sin-loving sinner who is honest) instantly shows the absurdity of atheism, which holds that the unspeakably amazing instruction book for life happened by chance.

Wow—where does one begin?

It’s biologists who have useful opinions about the origin of DNA, not atheists.
Sin isn’t relevant to any issue within biology.
Neither atheism nor biology say that DNA “happened by chance.” Mutations happen by chance, but natural selection (also part of evolution) doesn’t.
Evolution is the consensus of the scientists qualified to evaluate the evidence. Deal with it. I’d be an idiot to reject that consensus view based on any argument from a non-biologist like you.
“Amazing” is no argument. That you’re amazed doesn’t mean that a Designer is behind it.

DNA isn’t a powerful argument against evolution or atheism. In fact, it alone is a powerful rebuttal to the Design Argument, the popular Christian argument that the apparent design we see in nature is evidence of God.

Ray keeps using his simple platitudes, like DNA happening by chance, because he’s kept the one-liners that work on people and discarded those that don’t (an example of artificial selection, by the way). He’s been corrected by the best—Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and other biologists have pointed out his errors. And yet he pops back up like a Weeble with the same stupid arguments. (This explains my subtitle of this post series, “Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists.”)

Ray, what do you call someone who makes a mistake, has it corrected by a reliable authority, and then deliberately repeats that mistake? You him a liar.

Have you thought about how you would do on your Ten Commandments challenge, Ray? Does it worry you that you lie? Or maybe you have some rationalization like it’s okay to lie for Jesus or you can lie as long as you ask for forgiveness afterwards. Or maybe you reserve the right to declare who’s an authority based on how their arguments please you. One wonders how your argument about immoral atheists being unqualified for elected office stands now that you’ve shown that even you don’t feel bound by God’s moral commandments. (h/t commenter Michael Neville.)

Ray then makes the Appeal to Authority fallacy as he points to Antony Flew, who was convinced by the DNA-is-complex argument and went from atheism to deism. (I care nothing about the musings of a non-biologist like Flew about evolution). And then it’s the Christianity of Francis Collins, who was head of the Human Genome Project. (Collins will be quick to tell you that DNA alone gives overwhelming evidence for evolution.)

I think Ray needs to select his authorities with more care.

Concluded in part 4.

To borrow from The West Wing,
“If you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians,
you are just begging to be lied to.” …
If a politician can win your vote
simply by claiming that they are part of the religious majority,
what do you imagine they will do?
— Andrew Seidel

Image credit: Peter Brantley, flickr, CC

Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is)

Last updated on: May 5, 2016 at 12:39 am By Bob Seidensticker

This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

I’ve responded in detail to the case against abortion here, but let me respond to the pro-life argument given in this podcast. To quote Sherlock Holmes, “Elementary as [the argument is], there [are] points of interest and novelty about it which may excuse my placing it upon record.”

The pro-life case point 1: abortion is killing a child

Koukl said:

We spend our time helping people see clearly that taking the life of an innocent human child in the womb is just wrong. What surprises me is that we have to continue to make this point because it strikes me that the point is so obvious. (@26:25)

You think your point is obvious? If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard the obvious response: a fetus is not a child, a baby, or a person—it’s just a fetus. In the same way, a cake that’s not done cooking isn’t a cake—it’s just batter.

The pro-life case point 2: the SLED test shows that the fetus is a child

SLED is an acronym for Size, Level of development, Environment, and Degree of dependency. The argument attempts to show that, while the fetus is different than a newborn on each of these categories, none disqualify it from being a child (I use “child” because Koukl used it above, though other pro-life advocates might use “human being” or “person”). I’ll respond to the SLED argument as laid out in the Cold Case Christianity blog, since Koukl didn’t discuss it thoroughly.

Size: A fetus is much smaller than a newborn, but is size important? An adult might weigh 300 pounds while a newborn might weigh 5 pounds, but is the adult any more human? Any more a person?

Response: An adult being 60 times heavier than a newborn doesn’t begin to illustrate the difference between the newborn and the single cell that it started out as. The newborn has a trillion cells, and the single cell has just one. I expand on this thinking with the spectrum argument here and here.

Level of development: A fetus is less developed than a newborn, but so what? A newborn is less developed than an adult—does that make the newborn less a human?

Response: Here again, this childish approach doesn’t begin to acknowledge the differences. Yes, a 30-year-old adult (say) is far stronger, smarter, and more agile than the newborn, but these are mostly only changes of degree. Both the newborn and the adult have arms; the adult’s arms are just better developed. Both the newborn and the adult have a brain; the adult’s is just better developed. By contrast, the difference between the newborn and the single cell is one of kind. The newborn and the adult have pretty much the same parts—arms, legs, eyes, ears, skin, brain, and so on, while the single cell doesn’t have any of these parts. It doesn’t even have a single cell of any of these parts.

Environment: The fetus is in the womb and the newborn isn’t, but so what? Is the location of the child important?

Response: Abortion laws must have a simple, unambiguous criterion for drawing the line after which the fetus is too much a person to abort. Once a baby is born, it has crossed that line. That doesn’t change the fact that a growing fetus becomes more a person with time and that a single cell is not a person or a child.

Degree of dependency: The fetus is totally dependent on the mother, but then the newborn is also dependent on caregivers. Even as adults, we might not be completely independent—perhaps we need heart or thyroid medicine, a pacemaker, dialysis, or a wheelchair. We might be bedridden or even comatose. Just because we’re dependent on others doesn’t make us not a person.

Response: Dependency isn’t the issue. There’s a spectrum of personhood through gestation. A newborn is a person, and the single cell nine months earlier wasn’t.

The pro-life case point 3: ignore the facts and change definitions to suit yourself

Koukl again:

People say, “Well, the unborn doesn’t look like a human being.” To which I respond: of course it does; he or she looks like any human being ought to look like at that stage of development! (@27:30)

This is simply the Argument from Potential: the fetus isn’t a human being (or a person) … but it will be!

Yes, I agree. That there is a spectrum of personhood that increases through the nine months of gestation is my main point.

Koukl takes what it will be (a human being) and applies that definition retroactively. The fetus is a potential human being, so Koukl simply drops the unpleasant word “potential” and declares victory. Taken to an extreme, the thought, “It might be fun to have a baby” is also a potential human being. Is it immoral to deny that one life as well?

Seen properly, babies aren’t killed with abortion; they’re prevented.

The only thing that changes is how they look at any given point in time, and that should not change the value, because if it did, it won’t be long before ugly people are going to be on the chopping block, right? (@28:00)

Once again, Koukl is either confusing himself or deliberately confusing his audience about the kind of development we’re talking about. The differences between a newborn and a child, teenager, or adult (or the difference between an ugly person and a beautiful one) are trivial compared to the difference between that newborn and the single cell it started as. On one hand, we’re talking about the set of persons (with eyes and ears, arms and legs, stomach and digestive system, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and so on) who have trillions of cells each precisely interconnected into a whole. And on the other hand, we’re talking about a single unindividuated cell.

See the difference?

Conclude with part 5: “Do Pro-Life Advocates Want to Reduce Abortion? Sure Doesn’t Look Like It.“

The consensus in a well-informed field of expertise
is not the same thing as a show of hands from ignoramuses
who can’t be bothered to learn about the subject.
— commenter Susan

Image credit: Hartwig HKD, flickr, CC

Pro-Life Advocates Running from the Consequences of their Actions

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 8:34 am By Bob Seidensticker

This is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)

The question puts pro-life advocates in a dilemma. Declaring abortion to be murder demands punishment to fit the crime, but that makes them look heartless. Is there another way?

Koukl wants to disentangle the moral question (Is abortion wrong?) from the policy question (If it’s wrong, what punishment should apply?). He says that you can correctly answer the first without having an answer to the second and assures pro-lifers in this situation that they’re not inconsistent.

Here’s his prerequisite for deciding the policy (punishment) question.

We can’t ever make a decision on the policy concern unless we’re really, really clear on the moral concern. (@8:40)

Are you really, really certain that abortion is murder? Then you’ve suddenly become really, really clear on the policy response as well. If the punishment that goes along with murder doesn’t apply, then the crime couldn’t have been murder.

This is what happens when pro-lifers play games with definitions. It suits them rhetorically to call abortion “murder,” so they do. They want to retreat from the consequences that come along with that definition. In the same way, it suits them to call a single cell a “person,” ignoring that in common parlance persons may be big or small, but that only extends down to newborns. Persons have arms, legs, and faces, and they aren’t microscopic. (I expand on this spectrum argument here.)

If you detach yourself from reality in one place, it may bite you in another.

Koukl next grants himself permission to avoid the policy question. Pro-lifers can judge the moral issue, but they can justifiably avoid the policy question if they’re not “specialists in the law.” But how difficult is it to decide that if something is “murder,” it should get the penalties that go along with murder? The word and the punishment are well understood.

This isn’t the first instance of pro-lifers having their noses rubbed in the consequences of their reckless rhetoric. In November, 2015, three people were killed and nine injured by a gunman at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Koukl’s backpedaling about the consequences of his stand on abortion is like that from the pro-life community as they distanced themselves from a gunman whose actions were the reasonable consequences of their “abortion = murder” rhetoric.

(And I must point out a tangential but flagrant inconsistency. Koukl and other Creationists have no reluctance judging evolution. They lose no sleep over the fact that they’re not biologists and are not qualified to even evaluate the evidence, and yet they still declare evolution false. But in the case of abortion, Koukl is suddenly cautious about the boundaries between disciplines. He’ll call something “murder” but say that he’s not a “specialist in the law” and so can’t figure out what that means. Consistency, please.)

As a final attempt to stop the leak in this dike, Koukl says that even if he were to grant that pro-lifers were inconsistent, so what?

[That] says nothing about abortion; it says something about us! (@9:40)

Yeah, and what it says about you is that your argument is ineffective. If you can’t provide a coherent argument without self-contradictions, then your argument is useless.

It certainly doesn’t follow [from our supposed inconsistency] that if we are being inconsistent in our view that our view is false. (@10:00)

I don’t conclude that your view is false, it’s just you’ve done little to argue that it’s true!

Continue with part 3: “When Abortion is Illegal in America”

[Pro-life conservatives are] like comic book collectors.
Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package.
And then it is worth nothing.
— Trevor Noah

Image credit: Anna Levinzon, flickr, CC

Unraveling Bad Pro-Life Thinking

Last updated on: May 5, 2016 at 12:14 am By Bob Seidensticker

Greg Koukl and Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason podcast recently responded to an issue raised in the U.S. Republican campaign, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?”

Here’s how they outline the dilemma for pro-life Christians. Christians declare that abortion is murder, but you can’t have a crime without the appropriate punishment. Both the abortion provider and the woman herself should be severely punished—this is murder, after all.

On the other hand, that paints Christians as callous and unfeeling, so maybe we shouldn’t impose a harsh penalty on the woman. Or maybe any penalty at all. But in that case, what happened to the “abortion = murder” claim? Was that just hyperbole? Does the Christian carrying the sign know that abortion isn’t really murder? If it’s just a little harmless exaggeration to make a point, how compelling is the pro-life case?

Though the boys tried mightily to extricate the average Christian from the punish-her-or-not dilemma, none of their attempts eliminated the problem.

Attempt 1: suicide analogy

If only the labeling of the crime (which the pro-lifers want) could be detached from the associated punishment (which they don’t want). They point to a recent article that gives an analogy they’d like to follow. From that article:

Until the late 1960s, suicide was illegal in the United States. Of course the successful suicide cannot be prosecuted. Still, given that the great majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful, we could in principle prosecute large numbers of people for unjustified attempts on their own innocent lives. Why don’t we do this?

We don’t now because attempted suicide has been decriminalized. But in the 1960s, in some states it was a misdemeanor or even a felony. That is, it was a crime with a punishment. (Is there any other kind?)

Public opinion has since softened. The article continues:

In general, it doesn’t seem either prudent or constructive [to punish suicide attempts]. Suicidal people typically aren’t a public safety risk. Anyone who wants to end his own life probably needs support and care.

The parallel is that women who have abortions are also not public safety risks, which allows Christians to sidestep punishing those women.

What actually happened was that the hypocrisy of toothless laws against suicide led to it being decriminalized. Does the pro-life movement want to simply repeat that blunder and criminalize abortion with no threat of punishment? Is this just hyperbole, or is abortion actually murder? If so, demand the appropriate punishment.

This parallels the problem with many Christian anti-gay arguments. They point to the Bible to argue that homosexuality is wrong (it doesn’t say that—see here and here), but then they refuse to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment. With both abortion and homosexuality, there can be no crime without a punishment.

Attempt 2: drug use analogy

Drug use is another parallel. The drug user is the pregnant woman, and the drug dealer is the abortion provider. Punish only the latter, Koukl says.

The analogy argues that drug users only hurt themselves, like the person attempting suicide. Drug users do hurt society if their habit drives them to crime—robbery or burglary, for example—but of course when they commit those crimes, they get the regular punishment. When a woman asks for and then consumes a chemical abortifacient (the preferred approach up to about two months of gestation), she should logically receive the punishment due any crime she committed.

As with suicide, the trends aren’t going where Koukl wants them to. Attempted suicide was criminalized; now it’s not. Drug use was criminalized, but that’s being reduced. Crimes are punished consistently; it’s just that some things are no longer crimes. Koukl wants the unbalanced situation where abortion is a crime … without punishment for the central participant.

Attempt 3: fetal homicide laws

Koukl notes that 38 U.S. states have fetal homicide laws in place. These laws apply to “fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women.” There you go—killing a fetus is homicide.

There’s just one point that must be emphasized. It’s a small point. Indeed, it’s so trivial that I hesitate to muddy the water by mentioning it, but it must be made clear: sometimes the pregnant woman very much wants to keep the pregnancy and sometimes she very much doesn’t! These are two completely different situations, and fetal homicide laws are meant to protect the woman and fetus in the first situation only. For our discussion, this is a red herring.

Read the other posts in this series:

If men struggle and strike a woman with child
so that she has a miscarriage,
yet there is no further injury,
he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him,
and he shall pay as the judges decide.
— Exodus 21:22–3

Image credit: Anna Levinzon, flickr, CC

Attack of the Angry Atheists!

Last updated on: March 11, 2016 at 11:56 am By Bob Seidensticker

Some years ago, I attended a lecture by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza. He began by asking why atheists care about religion. No one goes around complaining about those who believe in unicorns or mermaids, he said, so why should an atheist complain about theists? Theists and atheists should be allowed their separate viewpoints so that everyone’s happy.

The proper place for religion in society

Atheists are annoyed, and yet they have no reason to be, right?

Wrong. But before I get into that, let me briefly summarize the religious aspects of American society that I’m happy with. It’s okay to hand out leaflets in public places (not government buildings or schools—I’m referring to parks or sidewalks) or proselytize from a soapbox. Free speech is great. We all have to put up with hearing stuff we don’t want to, but the good (each of us getting the same free speech rights) outweighs the bad. Churches are fine. I have no problem with someone saying “Merry Christmas” or religious displays on private property. These are all guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The problem

But I do draw a line, so let me summarize some of the things that concern me. I don’t like the tax support for churches ($83.5 billion in lost taxes each year in the U.S. because church donations are tax deductible). That’s tax money that the rest of us have to make up. I don’t like that all nonprofits’ financial records are available for public critique except those of churches and ministries.

I don’t like “In God We Trust” as my country’s new motto (that change was made about fifty years ago) or on my money. I don’t like “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (also added about fifty years ago). I don’t like the idea of the Ten Commandments displayed on government property, and I don’t like prayers opening government events like city council meetings.

I don’t like that “I’m more religious than you are” seems to be an important claim to make in politics. In 2002, the Senate passed a resolution in favor of “under God” in the Pledge when that phrase was under attack in the court system. The senators then made a pompous photo op on the Capital steps to demonstrate the God-pleasing (or voter-pleasing?) manner with which they could say the Pledge with “under God.” Even Democrats need to make public pilgrimages to churches to prove their godly credentials.

I don’t like revisionist historians claiming that this country was founded as a Christian nation (an empty argument given the clearly secular nature of the Constitution).

I don’t like religion clouding policy decisions. President Bush reportedly said in 2003, “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq … And I did.”

Why is it that if Bush had said, “Poseidon told me to end the tyranny in Iraq,” he would be laughed at, but when he refers to God, it’s okay? I know the answer, of course—it’s because most of the people he’s talking to are comfortable with the idea of God—but is reason a majority-rules kind of thing?

Political lobbyists of any kind can be a problem, of course, but I don’t like the special influence of religious leaders (James Dobson, Pat Robertson, etc.).

I don’t like that policy questions like abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research are partly driven by religious concerns. I don’t like religion in the form of Intelligent Design masquerading as science in the science classroom. Despite the Dover decision, ID will doubtless reappear, like a hydra.

I don’t like that children are indoctrinated into religion when they’re young and defenseless. I’d like to see religion treated as an adult issue, like cigarettes, alcohol, voting, or driving—something that you can get involved with if you choose, but only after you’re mature enough to weigh the issue properly. Adults are very good at justifying beliefs they arrived at through poor reasoning—that’s why adults from a myriad of religions can each argue with a straight face that theirs is the one true religion. And, of course, this explains why religion must maintain access to children’s minds: their market share would plummet without it.

I don’t like people using religion as a proxy for moral behavior. For example, you’ve probably heard about the survey that ranks atheists as the least trustworthy minority in America.

For more reasons why atheists have a right to be angry, see Greta Christina’s list.

D’Souza is right about one thing—no one complains about belief in unicorns or mermaids. That’s because those beliefs don’t cause harm in society. Contrast that with Christianity.

Conclude with part 2.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force
for atheism ever conceived.
— Isaac Asimov

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/13.)

Image credit: Navaneeth KN, flickr, CC

Yeah, but Christianity Built Universities and Hospitals! (2 of 2)

Last updated on: February 8, 2016 at 8:55 am By Bob Seidensticker

Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.

(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)

Health care in the Bible

We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.

We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.

This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, as is homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.

The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.

Medieval hospitals

Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because no one but Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe at that time, pretty much everyone was Christian.

Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.

Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning

Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.

Dr. Peter Harrison says, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity … of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”

This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.

A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals

We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.

One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.

Hospitals and medicine today

Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”

Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray.

I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but don’t take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.

How many diseases has faith cured? How many have reasoning and evidence? Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.

Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.

Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”

Related posts:

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

Image credit: MilitaryHealth, flickr, CC

Was the Colorado Springs Shooter No Worse Than Planned Parenthood Itself?

Last updated on: December 4, 2015 at 9:43 am By Bob Seidensticker

I stumbled across an article on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s entertainment and news network, claiming “Abortionists and Planned Parenthood Shooter Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Coin.” Matt Walsh is the author, and his goal is to show that it wasn’t the outrageous rhetoric of pro-life fanatics that pushed a gunman to shoot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood facility, killing three and injuring nine.

I’m not Walsh’s audience. He’s preaching to his choir, using terms like “pro-aborts” and “abortion fanatics” to refer to people like me, but the article gives an insight into the hostility of and rationalization by this community.

Violent talk has consequences. Walsh wants to walk away from any consequences of violent rhetoric from extreme quarters of the pro-life movement.

[Clues that he’s unlike the typical pro-life terrorist] has not prevented abortion enthusiasts on the left from gleefully spiking the football as if some point has been proven by the random violent outburst of a paranoid hermit.

The point is that speech can have consequences. Spin a story about how Planned Parenthood is an evil organization, and this kind of violence may be a consequence. If you don’t think it through, impressionable readers might not either. As the Bible says, you’ve sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.

As another example of speech having consequences, one mother tried to kill herself and her two daughters to avoid the Tribulation predicted by Harold Camping for May 21, 2011 (more here and here). Did Camping deserve no condemnation for saying that the world would end, knowing that some of his gullible flock might take him seriously?

Here’s an example of extreme anti-abortion speech from video evangelist Joshua Feuerstein:

I say, tonight, we punish Planned Parenthood. I think it’s time that abortion doctors should have to run and hide and be afraid for their life. (7/29/15)

That was in response to the anti-Planned Parenthood videos. After the Colorado shooting, pro-lifers tweeted about “babies” saved.

How pro-life is the pro-life movement?

Walsh says it goes without saying that he’s shocked by the shooter’s actions.

It goes without saying because, for one thing, we’re pro-life.

No, you’re pro-birth. How about being pro-health care? Or working to improve the society into which these babies are born? And isn’t it inconsistent when most of those who oppose abortions also accept the death penalty?

For another, there’s no logic in it.

Wrong. You went on and on about the deaths of “over 50 million babies.” That’s BS, of course—there’s a spectrum of personhood across the gestation period, and a single cell isn’t a baby, a human being, or a person—but it is quite logical to kill a few lives to save many. You can’t argue that abortion is murder but then claim that murder to reduce abortions is illogical.

The lives that were snuffed out in the front of the building weren’t any more or less human than the lives exterminated in the back. Our humanity does not exist on a spectrum.

Walsh imagines that Homo sapiens DNA is all that makes someone human, but with this he invents single-celled humans. Indeed, humanness does exist on a spectrum. A single cell isn’t very human, while the trillion-cell newborn nine months later is. (If you’d prefer, say that the single cell isn’t a person while the newborn is.)

Why shoehorn gestation into a binary situation? Drop the ridiculous idea that a single cell is a “baby” or “person.” Say that the single cell isn’t a person, the newborn is, and it’s a spectrum in between.

[A pro-choice advocate outraged at the vitriol is] like a Nazi standing up at Nuremberg and scolding society for hating him.

Nope. The Nazi was on trial for crimes against humanity. Planned Parenthood kills a fetus that isn’t yet a person. Walsh will predictably respond that it will be a person if given time, but this simply becomes the Argument from Potential—it isn’t inherently worth protecting now, but it will be. Which is no argument at all.

Apologies. Walsh rejects the shooter’s actions, but he chafes at this obligation.

We’re the ones who have to be seen condemning murder, as if there’s any reasonable question at all about where we stand on the subject?

You demand that moderate Muslims apologize for Muslim violence, don’t you? If so, you can appreciate how we’d like some assurance from the pro-life community that they reject the shooter’s actions that they might have triggered, but there’s still an asymmetry. The Friendly Atheist notes the difference between how Muslims after the Paris attacks are treated and how anti-Planned Parenthood activists are treated.

Unlike the seemingly endless stream of demands and condemnations that followed the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, no one has suggested that churches in which Planned Parenthood are routinely depicted as the devil’s spawn be closed; no one has demanded that Evangelicals who believe performers of abortions are committing crimes against humanity should be issued with special identity cards; and no one has called for arresting or deporting the inciters who exploit such incidents to whip up hate (and garner more votes).

Dismissing murder. Walsh says that the shooter’s actions were bad, but. He can’t leave it at that. He can’t ignore a grandstanding opportunity to argue the other side of the issue, that the shared enemy, abortion providers, are the worst people imaginable.

George Tiller, the heinous late-term baby executioner who ruthlessly slaughtered thousands of viable and fully developed infants, is the only abortion worker to be killed by an abortion opponent this century. That’s it. One. And he was one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived.

You make it sound like working at a Planned Parenthood clinic is no more risky than being a librarian. Not so: “Between 1997 and 2012, there were seventy-three violent attacks at abortion clinics across the country” (source).

Go research why women went to Tiller to get abortions. Was it because they didn’t want to be so fat? Or was it a more substantial reason—birth defects, mother’s health, catastrophic changes in financial status, or something similar?

And let’s pause to listen to your rhetoric. Was Tiller seriously “one of the most dangerous, vicious, and murderous human beings to have ever lived”? Few of us would morally object to going back in time to assassinate Joseph Mengele or Heinrich Himmler or Adolph Hitler. You’ve intentionally put Tiller with this company, so why do you object to the shooter’s actions?

This hypocrisy is the problem that Walsh can’t acknowledge. He wants to say that the shooter was a killer and Planned Parenthood kills, so they’re in the same boat. He’s cut from different cloth because he’s pro-life.

But the rage he reveals in this article gives just as strong an argument for a very different arrangement: now it’s the killer with Walsh in the same boat because of his venomous rhetoric that could easily provoke violent action. Planned Parenthood is the odd man out because it provides legal abortions before the fetus is a person.

As the article progresses, Walsh is on a roll, and the indignant “Of course we deplore violence—we’re pro-life!” attitude is gone. With no ear for irony, he repeats the line the killer is said to have used:

Planned Parenthood sells the parts of dead babies.

Wrong again. The mother can choose to donate the fetus for research, and Planned Parenthood can be reimbursed for their costs.

Planned Parenthood is a rotten, corrupt, depraved, vile, disgusting, brutal, murderous conglomerate of butchers and mercenaries.

And yet you wonder how anyone could possibly be incited to violence?

Abortion fanatics hate pro-lifers personally. They hate Christianity. They hate children. They hate life itself. Theirs is the sort of hatred that destroys the soul and dissolves the human conscience. We hate what is evil; they hate what is good.

And now it’s just a rant.

Improving society.

Why don’t you [Planned Parenthood] just shut up and work on not killing babies?

Are you? What are you doing to minimize unwanted pregnancies?

Among countries in the West, the U.S. compares poorly. In the United States, the annual birth rate was 56 per 1000 women aged 15–19. Compare this to 8 in the Netherlands. The U.S. abortion rate for that group of women was 30 per 1000, while it was 4 in the Netherlands. What are we doing wrong (or what is the Netherlands doing right)? Clearly, there’s enormous room for improvement.

Is it better sex education? Is it easier access to contraception? Whatever it is, cutting the number of abortions in half in five years simply through more effective education and policy seems possible. Why are you approaching it the hard way? Instead of swimming upstream, you could work with pro-choice people who want the same thing. It almost sounds like you’re not really serious about this, and abortion isn’t the holocaust you claim it to be.

The trolley problem. Almost everyone has heard of this thought experiment, but let me give a brief summary. I think it’s relevant to this situation.

Imagine a trolley that’s heading toward five unsuspecting workers on the track. If it continues, it will kill them all. But there’s a switch, and you can reroute the trolley down another path with only one worker. Would you switch the trolley?

Most people say they would. But what if you’ve got the same trolley heading for the five workers, and you’re on a bridge over the tracks. The only way to stop the trolley is with a large weight in its path. You’re not big enough to stop it, but there’s a fat man on the bridge who is. Do you push him over?

Most people say they wouldn’t, but it’s the same calculation, five deaths vs. one.

The Colorado shooter has in effect pushed the fat man over. He’s taken the unthinkable but logical step—logical given Walsh’s own analysis. Walsh is left fuming about protocol—it’s one thing to label abortion providers as the most wicked scum on the earth, but in polite society one doesn’t actually act on it! He wants his rage but won’t accept the consequences.

But the consequence of using language like that, can be very dangerous.
I think candidates need to step back, take a deep breath, and understand …
we have a responsibility to use thoughtful and careful language.
— Wendy Davis, the former Texas state senator
who filibustered to block legislation that would restrict abortion

Image credit: Kit Clutch, flickr, CC

Christianity Is a Hospital, and Sinners Are Ill (Or Not)

Last updated on: November 12, 2015 at 1:24 pm By Bob Seidensticker

If Christianity is the correct moral and spiritual path, why doesn’t it look like it?

Some Christians are good and some not so much, just like in any large population, but if morality is a central part of religion and Christianity is the one true religion, shouldn’t this be obvious somehow? Why can you not tell a person following the truth path from one following a false religion by their actions? Why are prisons full of Christians?

Christians have a response. When you look in a church, you see that it’s full of sinners. Well, what did you expect? Christianity says that we’re all fallen people. Jesus said, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” The church is a hospital, with the sinners as the patients.

Let’s take this metaphor for a drive and see the many ways it fails.

1. A hospital stay is temporary. When you’re sick, you go to the hospital if you must, but your stay should be as brief as possible. The hospital is the option of last recourse. Financial pressure encourages the patient to leave quickly.

By contrast, church isn’t to be avoided, it’s celebrated. It’s a lifestyle and a worldview. Once you’re in, there are often penalties for leaving such as loss of friendships and even family. Church isn’t free, and you are encouraged to contribute as much as possible.

2. Hospitals improve society. If we can expand the metaphor to include modern medicine and health-focused social policy, this expansive view of “hospitals” has found many ways to keep you out of a hospital bed: a healthy lifestyle with proper diet and exercise, vaccines, improved environmental conditions, laws to safeguard working conditions and food, and preventative medicine like periodic checkups.

By contrast, churches have no interest in seeing you leave. They sometimes encourage their members to fiddle with social policy, standing in the way of same-sex marriage and abortion, for example. Church leadership often dabbles in politics. Christians can push for Creationism to be taught in schools. Evidence drives medicine, but dogma drives religious meddling.

3. A hospital can cure you. Modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it often cures an illness. While medical treatment and research is expensive, we have a lot to show for it.

By contrast, churches have no concept of a cure for a spiritual ailment. To follow the metaphor, churches provide palliative care only. Christianity says that we’re born spiritually sick, there is no cure in this lifetime, and God himself made us so. As Christopher Hitchens noted, “We are created sick and commanded to be well.”

Religion takes in over $100 billion in the U.S. every year. Tell me that church is a country club and I’ll buy it, not so much that it’s a hospital.

4. Hospitals treat actual illness. Hospitals treat illnesses like pneumonia, hepatitis, and AIDS.

By contrast, churches invent a new problem of sin plus a god to get offended by it, as if there weren’t enough real problems in the world. This is theology, not science.

Here’s an idea: if God is offended by sin, let’s assume that he’s a big boy and can take care of it. He can tell us himself how we should conduct our lives, not through a religion that looks no different from all the other manmade religions. That God needs human agents here on earth and never speaks for himself is more evidence.

5. Hospitals follow science. Hospitals use medicine, and medicine follows evidence.

Churches use dogma and faith, not evidence.

6. Hospitals work. Antibiotics and other medicine as well as other treatments work. Some are 100% reliable, while others are less so, and doctors can reliably predict how a course of treatment will go.

Churches use prayer whose only effectiveness is as a placebo. Christians often say that prayer works, but it certainly doesn’t in the sense that medicine, electricity, or cars work. Prayer may reliably work only in that it provides meditative benefits, but that is certainly not the intention behind the claim “prayer works.”

They also claim that miracles happen. I issue a challenge to provide that evidence here.

7. Hospitals use professionals. Doctors and nurses are trained. Evidence is used to improve their training.

Jesus is the Great Physician (as in a spiritual healer) in name only. He never shows up. It’s said that he does his work by magic, but there’s no evidence of this. People marvel at his work, just like people marveled at the diaphanous fabric made by the tailors weaving the Emperor’s new clothes. Any example of an actual healing through the church—someone who kicked an addiction or got out of homelessness or got control of their anger—has people behind it.

In this “hospital,” the patients treat each other. Some are lay members and some are clergy, but they’re all ordinary people, with the Big Man conspicuously absent.

The treatments (that is, the right path of spiritual living) are sometimes incompatible between Christian denominations. Extend that out to all religious people, and the incompatibilities underscore the partisan nature of religion’s answers (more here).

8. Bad things happen if you need to go to the hospital but don’t. Centuries ago, doctors might’ve caused more illness than they cured, but we’re long past that. Faith healing or wishful thinking are no help when there is a medical cure.

By contrast, people outside the church look about the same as those who are members. In fact, those who had been in but quit the church say they’re happier. (Of course, Christians will say that the opposite is also true—those who had been outside the church and are now inside are happier. There are plenty of miserable Christians, but let’s accept that point. That simply makes this a worldview issue. Atheism and Christianity are worldviews, and those in each one prefer it to the other. But is this the best that the One True Religion can claim? It’s just another worldview? Shouldn’t it be obviously better somehow?)

But there is one parallel that works. Hospital-acquired infections cause or contribute to 100,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Similarly, churches can give you new spiritual infections such as new biases or hatreds.

Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by an excellent commentary by Deacon Duncan at Alethian Worldview.

You say you’re supposed to be nice
to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists
and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense! I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.
— Pat Robertson

Image credit: Wikimedia

Parallels to Christians’ Selective Use of Science

Last updated on: November 10, 2015 at 10:05 am By Bob Seidensticker

The film Pandora’s Promise (2013, 86 minutes, $4) explores nuclear power as it interviews prominent environmentalists who switched from being against it to being in favor. I’d like to highlight some of the features of the transition these environmentalists went through. There are surprising parallels with the transition people make when leaving Christianity, and there are parallels between a dogmatic anti-nuclear attitude and a dogmatic religious attitude.

The charges against nuclear power

Dr. Hellen Caldicott (a medical doctor) is used as the representative of anti-nuclear environmentalism. She has been called “the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner.” She has received many prizes, 21 honorary doctorates, and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize by Linus Pauling and has been called by the Smithsonian Institution “one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.”

Caldicott uses nuclear accidents to make her case and claims that 985,000 people died as a result of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. She says that the 2011 Fukushima power plant accident will be even worse. Seven million will die in the next two decades, and tens of millions more will suffer from “debilitating radiation-induced chronic illnesses.”

And the rebuttals

The World Health Organization disagrees. About Fukushima, it concluded in 2013, “The increases in the incidence of human disease attributable to the additional radiation exposure from the Fukushima Daiichi NPP accident are likely to remain below detectable levels.” No deaths due to radiation have been attributed to the accident.

Caldicott’s source for the nearly one million deaths due to Chernobyl has been widely discredited. A consortium of United Nations organizations and others said about the Chernobyl disaster:

According to [the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation] (2000), [Acute Radiation Syndrome] was diagnosed in 134 emergency workers. … Among these workers, 28 persons died in 1986 due to ARS. … Nineteen more have died in 1987–2004 of various causes; however their deaths are not necessarily—and in some cases are certainly not—directly attributable to radiation exposure.

There were no radiation deaths in the general population, though there have been close to 7000 cases of thyroid cancer among children. These would have been “almost entirely” prevented had the Soviet Union followed simple measures afterwards.

The report estimates an increase in cancer mortality due to radiation exposure of “a few per cent” in the 100,000 fatal cancers that would be expected in this population.

In other words, Caldicott is about as wrong as it is possible to be. This is not to dismiss the problem—the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents were indeed disasters—but it doesn’t help to see them incorrectly. The Fukushima earthquake and tsunami caused 16,000 deaths, while the power plant accident caused none.

Not seeing the problem correctly causes its own problems. The World Health Organization concluded twenty years after Chernobyl that “its psychological impacts did more health damage than radiation exposure did,” and childhood obesity in the Fukushima area is now the worst in Japan because children are not allowed to play outside, in most cases without any valid reason.

Environmentalists—aren’t they the ones who should be following the science?

One critic compared environmentalists with climate change deniers.

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

I find this topic revealing because anti-nuclear attitudes are typically held by liberals. Instead of using science and technology to find solutions to the problems of nuclear power, some liberals simply want it to go away. But these problems have solutions. For example, the Integral Fast Reactor was an experimental fourth-generation reactor program begun in 1984. It was cancelled ten years later by Democratic pressure, after it had proven that it was failsafe (it survived a loss of electrical power and loss of all coolant) and shown that it could reduce the waste leaving the facility to less than one percent that of conventional reactors.

The mothballing of the reactor cost more than letting the project conclude. Democrats can be as mindlessly ideological as Republicans.

While the U.S. civilian nuclear power industry has caused no deaths, the U.S. health burden from fossil fuel power generation is 30,000 to 50,000 premature deaths per year. Worldwide, the total is perhaps millions per year.

Breaking free

Some of the interviewees spoke of their change of mind. Mark Lynas said, “I was under no doubt that my whole career and my whole reputation as an environmental activist, communicator was at risk if I talked publicly about having changed my mind about nuclear power.”

Richard Rhodes said, “I came to realize [journalists] basically avoided looking at the whole picture. They only looked at the questions that seemed to prove to them that nuclear power was dangerous, as I had, too.”

I was most shocked at how little some of these environmentalists knew about nuclear power. They had their standard line—nuclear power of any type was bad—and they stuck with it. One career environmentalist admitted that he hadn’t known about natural background radiation from the ground, from space, and even from bananas. Natural potassium, of which bananas are a good source, is 0.012% potassium-40 (a radioactive isotope), and humans are more radioactive because of potassium than because of carbon-14.

Comparison with Christianity

Dr. Hellen Caldicott, the strident anti-nuclear activist, has a lot in common with Christian leaders. (Obviously, her opinion of religion isn’t the issue. I’m simply paralleling her actions with those of Christian leaders.)

Dogmatic. Caldicott is a charismatic speaker, and she has a ready audience eager to hear her message. She’s “the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner” for a reason. She says that nuclear power is wicked just like a televangelist might say that same-sex marriage in America is wicked. She says that nuclear power of any type is bad, just a preacher might say abortion of any type is bad.
Confident and unchanging. Caldicott is well aware of this controversy and the fact that her figures are orders of magnitude greater than the most widely accepted data. Her position is at least grossly out of touch with reality and could even be called hysterical. But she uses this notoriety to her advantage, and I imagine her façade is as confident as ever.
Reputation. This is her livelihood and her identity, and she’s not likely to change. Like Harold Camping or John Hagee in the Christian domain, she can’t admit a big mistake. Some career environmentalists do change, though, as the film documents, and the soul-searching crisis that individual environmentalists endure parallels that of ex-Christians like Dan Barker, Bart Ehrman, or Matt Dillahunty. Leaving one’s identity in either domain means reinventing or even re-finding oneself, and former allies may ridicule or shun.
Embrace of science. Caldicott is like William Lane Craig and other apologists in that neither feels bound by science. They use science as it suits them. Caldicott is outraged that climate change deniers dismiss environmental dangers by ignoring or selecting their science, but then she does it herself. In the same way, William Lane Craig quotes cosmologists to defend the Big Bang (because he likes a beginning to the universe), but he ignores quantum physics when it says that events needn’t have causes (he’s desperate to find a cause for the universe).

I’m starting to worry that reason is an acquired taste.
— Sam Harris

Photo credit: Idaho National Laboratory