2013-01-21T21:30:21-08:00

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 9:30 pm   By

Atheism and Christianity discussionHere are the remaining arguments against abortion, with rebuttals. See part 1 here.

10. Why is murder wrong? Because it takes away a future like mine. If we found intelligent humanoids like us on another planet, killing them for sport would be wrong for this reason. And this is why abortion is wrong—it takes away a future like mine. This is Glenn Peoples’ Argument from the Future (podcast episode #29, 8/3/09).

Why focus on the future? Assuming these humanoids are largely unchanging month to month, like people, killing them for sport takes away a present like mine. I assume that Peoples focuses on the future only because he has no argument otherwise.

But let’s take the path that Peoples points us to. Killing a fetus would deprive it of a future like mine, but so would killing a single skin cell, once they are clonable into humans. Would it then a crime to scratch your skin? Or, let’s take it further back. Suppose I have two kids. Was it criminal to not have three? Or four? Or fifteen? I’ve deprived those people-to-be of life.

Extrapolating back to the twinkle in my eye, saying that we have a person deserving of life at every step is ridiculous. But the facts fit neatly and logically into the spectrum argument.

11. But a fetus has a soul! Does it? If the zygote has a soul and then it splits into twins, does each twin have half a soul or do they get another one as needed or did they get two to begin with? What about conjoined twins? Do they share a single soul like a shared body part? What about babies with terrible birth defects that leave them with very little brain function? What about a person cloned from a cell—would they have a soul? And if the story for the soul has a happy ending for the 50% of pregnancies that end in spontaneous (natural) abortion, why not for an artificial abortion?

This mess vanishes if we don’t insist on a soul. As Daniel Dennett said, “What isn’t there doesn’t have to be explained.”

12. “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent.” These are the words of an archbishop from Brazil. He was outraged at the abortion done on a nine-year-old girl, raped and impregnated by her stepfather. In response to the abortion, the church excommunicated the family of the girl and the doctors who performed the abortion.

Wow. Let’s leave this example of how religion makes you do crazy things and focus on the claim. First, a fetus is not a child. Second, the spectrum argument defeats this claim.

Variations on this argument are popular, and they all have pretty much the same response. Here are a few.

12a. Abortion kills a human life (at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) to help with another human’s self-actualization (higher on the hierarchy). That’s the opposite of the way it’s supposed to work. The two “human lives” are not comparable. This ignores the spectrum of development from single cell to trillion-cell newborn.

Killing a blastocyst with fewer cells than the brain of the fly troubles me less than killing a civilian in another country due to war or killing a criminal on death row.

12b. Don’t we normally go out of our way to defend the defenseless? Again, this ignores the spectrum. Defenseless people are more important than defenseless cells.

12c. Haven’t we been through this with racial minorities? Declaring that single cells aren’t human is like declaring that African-Americans aren’t human. Nice try. Spectrum argument.

12d. In response to your abortion clinic example: you argue that, if given a choice between saving a child and ten frozen embryos, you’d save the child. Okay, and if given the choice between your wife and a stranger, you’d save your wife, but that doesn’t mean that you can kill strangers. Spectrum argument.

13. Haven’t you heard of adoption? That’s the answer to an unplanned pregnancy. No, it’s clearly not the answer. Two percent of all births to unmarried women in the U.S. are placed for adoption. “Just have the baby and release it for adoption” is a pat on the head. It might make you feel good, but it doesn’t work.

14. You say that a trillion cells is definitely a person. Okay, how about a trillion minus one—is that a person? And if so, how about a trillion minus two? And so on. This same game could be played with the blue/green spectrum. If this color is “green,” what about just a touch more blue—isn’t that green as well? The point remains that the two ends of the spectrum are very different—green is not blue! Similarly, a single cell is not a newborn with arms, legs, kidneys, brain, and so on.

15. The woman who got pregnant knew what she was doing. Let’s encourage people to take responsibility for their actions. She didn’t necessarily know what she was doing—sex education is so poor that many teens become sexually mature without understanding what causes what.

But let’s assume that the woman knew what she was doing and was careless or stupid. What do we do with this? When someone shoots himself accidentally, that was stupid, but we all pay for the medical and insurance system that puts them back together. Let’s educate people, demand responsibility, and have a harm-reduction approach where we find the best resolution of problem. For a woman whose life would be overturned with a pregnancy, that resolution might be abortion.

16. If you’re so smart, where do you draw the line? I don’t. I find that pro-life advocates quickly turn the conversation to the definition of the OK/not-OK line for abortion, hoping to find something to criticize. I avoid this, both because it diverts attention from the spectrum argument—the main point I want to make—and because I have no opinion about the line and am happy to leave it up to the experts.

Barack Obama answered that question, “That’s above my pay grade,” which satisfies me, since he was running for Commander-in-chief, not Obstetrician-in-chief.

Next time: 5 Recommendations to the Pro-Life Movement

Photo credit

Related posts:

Related links:

2013-01-21T21:33:28-08:00

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 9:33 pm   By

What would an atheist think of Christians in favor of this?I’ve argued the pro-choice position with Christians, and I’ve gotten a lot of responses to my arguments. Here are some of the arguments I’ve heard, with my rebuttals.

1. The Bible says that abortion is wrong. As I’ve argued before, it doesn’t and God has no problem killing people, including children. The Bible is a poor justification for the argument that killing is wrong.

2. Abortion tinkers with the natural order. We have cheerfully adopted medicine and technology that “tinkers with the natural order”—antibiotics, vaccines, and anesthesia, for example—to which we don’t give a second thought. We prolong life beyond what the “natural order” would permit and allow it to happen where it otherwise wouldn’t (in vitro fertilization, for example). Abortion might be bad, but that it changes the natural order is no argument.

3. You argue that a newborn has more cells than the zygote that it started from. Is this just a size thing? What about someone who’s lost a limb? Or had tonsils, appendix, or gall bladder removed? Are they less of a person? The difference between an amputee and a newborn is trivial compared to that between the newborn and the single cell. In the long list of organs, limbs, and systems, this amputee has one fewer. Compare that with a single cell, which has none of those body parts!

We can push this thinking to the ridiculous. Imagine technology that provides life support so that a human head could survive. Is this less of a person?

Well, yeah—obviously. Someone who’s been reduced to just a head isn’t as much of a person as they were. Or consider Terry Shiavo, who was allowed to die after 15 years in a vegetative state. Was she less of a person? Her severe brain damage certainly made her less of something, and you can label this whatever you want.

4. Imagine that you’d been aborted! I wouldn’t care, would I?

5. Imagine that you had two planned kids, and then you had a child after an unplanned pregnancy. You wouldn’t want to give that child up. But if you’d aborted it, your life would be emptier. Of course I’d love my unplanned child as much as my other ones. But what do we conclude from this? That I should have not had two kids but rather three? Or five? Or fifteen? Should I expect some tsk-ing behind my back as neighbors wonder why my wife and I could have been so callous to have not has as many as biology would permit?

By similar logic, is a woman’s menstrual cycle a cause for lamentation because that was a missed opportunity for a child? It is a sign of a potential life, lost. But in any life, there are millions of paths not taken. C’est la vie.

I don’t think it’s immoral to limit the number of children you have, and I don’t see much difference between zero cells and one cell—it’s all part of the spectrum. I’ll agree that the thought “Let’s have a baby” isn’t a baby … but then neither is a single cell.

6. What’s the big deal about traveling down the birth canal? The big deal is that before that process, only the mother could support the baby. Afterwards, it breathes and eats on its own. The baby could then be taken away and never see its mother again and grow up quite healthy. Before, the mother was essential; after, she’s unnecessary.

I’m not arguing that abortion should be legal up until delivery. In fact, I’m not arguing for any definition of when abortion should become illegal. My main point has simply been that the personhood of the fetus increases from single cell through newborn, which makes abortion arguable.

7. It’s a human from conception through adulthood! The DNA doesn’t change. What else would that single cell be—a sponge? A zebra? OK, if you don’t like “human,” let’s use “person.” No—person means the same thing as human!

This name game is a common way to avoid the issue. I don’t care what you call the spectrum as long as we use names that make clear what the newborn has that the single cell doesn’t.

8. What if the mother wanted to abort because the fetus had green eyes or was female or would likely be gay? This is a red herring. How many cases are we talking about? Abortion to increase the fraction of male babies is done in India and China, but this isn’t a factor in the U.S.

Abortions for capricious or shallow reasons also aren’t the issue. Mothers-to-be have plenty of noble instincts to judge what is appropriate so that society can rest assured that the right thing will usually be done. (If you balk at the “usually,” remember that that’s how society’s laws work. They’re not perfect, and we can only hope that they’re usually on target.) We can certainly talk about the few special cases where a woman’s actions seem petty, but don’t let that change abortion rights for the majority.

The woman who aborts for some trivial reason would likely be a terrible mother. Let’s let a woman who isn’t mature enough to take care of a baby opt out.

9. Abortions are dangerous! Not really. The chance of maternal death from delivering a baby is 12 times higher than through abortion. This is just what you’d expect, since the fetus only gets bigger (and more dangerous to deliver) with time. Of course, this statistic will change if abortion is made illegal and more dangerous.

There is no indication that abortion is a risk factor for cancer or women’s mental health.

Next time: Why is it Always Men Advancing the Pro-Life Position?

Part 2: 16 Arguments Against Abortion, with Rebuttals (part 2)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

2013-10-02T22:27:32-07:00

Last updated on: October 2, 2013 at 10:27 pm   By

Novel about Christianity and atheism (and Christian apologetis)The Old Testament patriarchs would scratch their heads at the problem conservative Christians have invented and seized upon. “That’s not what ‘Thou shalt not murder’ means!” they’d say. “It means that you shouldn’t take a stick and beat someone over the head until he’s dead! We kill people around here at the drop of a hat—both our own people when they transgress the Law and people of other tribes when we get into border squabbles. And God has no hesitation in killing people. To simply make someone not pregnant is vastly different. People try lots of folk remedies to bring about that very thing, and our only complaint is that they’re not effective.”

All this hand-wringing about the safety of a single cell, less than one trillionth the size of an infant, would baffle them. God is happy to slaughter (or order slaughtered) lots ’n lots of humans—men, women, and children.

If the Big Man doesn’t care, why should we? That’s a rhetorical question—of course we should care. It’s just that we shouldn’t imagine an argument against abortion based on what the Bible says.

About Babylon, it says, “Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks” (Ps. 137:9). And: “Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished” (Is. 13:15–16). Whether God uses genocide against the other guys, poisonous snakes against his own people, or an old-fashioned global flood against everyone, God has a broad palette of options when it comes to death, and he makes no special provision for children, infants, or fetuses.

The Bible even describes a potion to deliberately induce a miscarriage, used by the priest when a woman is suspected of adultery.

God himself has a hand in abortions. Roughly half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, a far greater rate than that of clinical abortions. If God exists, he’s the biggest abortionist of all.

Why imagine that the Bible is against abortion? Maybe it’s that whole “thou shalt not murder” thing.

But you do know that “thou shalt not murder” isn’t in the Ten Commandments, right? Let’s review the story. Moses comes down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) and then smashes them when he sees the golden calf. He goes back up for another set (Ex. 34), but God must’ve been stoned when he dictated them the second time because it’s quite a different set of rules. But these rules aren’t just an addendum of some sort; these are the replacement Ten Commandments. Exodus 34:28 makes this clear: “[Moses] wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.” In other words, if you’d been able to peek inside the Ark of the Covenant to see this Ten Commandments 2.0, nowhere would it have said, “Thou shalt not murder.”

But let’s ignore that and assume that the scriptures say not to murder. What is “murder”? Is capital punishment murder? It’s illegal in Europe, and many people think it’s murder in the U.S., and yet it’s legal in 34 U.S. states. What about killing in wartime? Or killing in self-defense? Or killing accidentally? Or killing animals? Or euthanasia? Murder is undefined, so “Thou shalt not murder” is meaningless.

You’d think that this vaguely supported legal opinion that God is against abortion would give Christians pause, but I guess the hearts of pro-life Christian soldiers are resolute. They’re quick to argue that God’s actions are beyond our understanding when it suits them—when confronted with the Problem of Evil or the justice of hell, for example—but at other times they acknowledge no vagueness and know for certain what God wants. In particular, they know that God is against abortion!

Why is abortion that big a deal from the Christian standpoint when abortions send souls to heaven without the risk of doing the wrong thing in adulthood? That murdered babies go straight to heaven was one way William Lane Craig tried to wriggle out of the moral consequences of God ordering the Canaanite genocide (“Christianity Can Rot Your Brain”).

Using Craig’s logic, abortion clinics may save more souls than churches!

Next time: 16 Arguments Against Abortion, with Rebuttals.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related posts:

2013-01-21T21:39:23-08:00

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 9:39 pm   By

Christianity and atheism debateA typical pro-life position can be stated this way: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral.

We’ll return to that idea shortly, but first let’s look more closely at human life. I argue that there is a spectrum of personhood during gestation.

Consider a continuous spectrum from blue to green. Where’s the dividing line? Where does blue end and green begin? We can argue about this, but we agree that blue is not green! The two ends are very different.

What age is the dividing line between child and adult? Twelve years? Eighteen? Twenty-one? It’s a spectrum, and there is no objectively correct line. Again, the line is debatable but no one doubts that a child and an adult are quite different.

An acorn is not a tree, a silkworm is not a dress, a water molecule is not a whirlpool, a piece of hay is not a haystack, and a carton of eggs is not a henhouse of chickens. Similarly, a single fertilized human egg cell is very different from a one-trillion-cell newborn baby.

Note that this is not simply about the number of cells. At one end of the personhood spectrum, we have arms and legs, fingers and fingernails, liver and pancreas, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, stomach and digestive system—in fact, every body part that a healthy person has. And at the other, we have none of this. We have … a single cell. In between is a smooth progression over time, with individual components developing and maturing. That’s the spectrum we’re talking about.

Let’s approach this another way. Consider a brain with 100 billion neurons versus a single neuron. The single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all. The differentiation of the cells into different cell types and their interconnections in the newborn may count for even more than the enormous difference in the number of cells.

Note also that the difference between a newborn and an adult is trivial compared to the difference between the cell and the 1,000,000,000,000-cell newborn.

Some pro-life advocates argue that the humans at either end of this spectrum are identical in every meaningful way and use the term “baby” for every point along the spectrum. I’ve raised babies (with help, of course), and that makes me something of an expert in identifying babies. As an expert, I can assure you that an invisible cell isn’t a baby.

This inept attempt to collapse the spectrum by using the term “baby” for both ends is like the slogan used by the animal rights group PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” In other words, there is no spectrum here: vermin are the same as livestock, which are the same as pets, which are the same as people.

No, a rat is not a boy, blue is not green, and a single cell is not a newborn baby.

A lot revolves around what we call this spectrum. Do we call it Homo sapiens? With this term, there is no spectrum, because the species is the same—the single cell is Homo sapiens, as is the newborn baby.

What about “human”? That seems a good name for the spectrum—that is, we would call the newborn human but not the cell. Or, we might call the cell human but not a human. Pro-lifers typically reject this, wanting to use “human” for both ends of the spectrum.

All right, can we all agree on “person”? I’ve heard pro-lifers reject this as well.

This game where pro-lifers deny names to the spectrum can get tiring. I really don’t care what the spectrum is called—humanity, personhood, human development, like-me-ness, whatever—call it what you want as long as the naming acknowledges the stark difference between the newborn (with arms and legs and a circulatory system and a nervous system and eyes and ears and so on) and the single fertilized human egg cell.

Now, back to the original pro-life argument: (1) human life begins at conception; (2) it is murder to take a human life; therefore (3) abortion is murder and should be considered immoral. This argument is invalid because it is oblivious to the spectrum.

Pro-lifers claim to be celebrating life, but equating a newborn baby with a single cell doesn’t celebrate life, it denigrates it.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Other posts in this series:

2021-09-23T23:37:25-07:00

Last updated on: September 23, 2021 at 11:37 pm   By

This is yet one more stupid argument Christians should avoid (with a bonus argument). The list begins here.

Stupid argument #43: For the benefit of the Little People, don’t take away their God

This isn’t an argument that Christians make but I think it’s worth highlighting. The Little People Argument is made by atheists and agnostics against fellow atheists. These more generous atheists scold the cranky atheists for taking God away from ordinary people. They don’t need God themselves, they assure us, but we mustn’t ruin things for the people who aren’t as smart or stable as we are.

They say that there’s more to a religious claim than just its truth. If believers get benefits from their belief, and their belief is grounded on the (false) claim that it’s true, why rock their boat?

Christianity’s reckless activity within society is why. Remember the problems listed in argument #42—Christians pushing for Creationism in schools and prayer in public meetings, Christianity softening one’s inherent skepticism for nutty ideas so that QAnon and other conspiracy theories can come aboard, and so on.

Politicians sometimes abduct Christian thinking for their own purposes, demanding that good Christians must vote for them to end the godless scourge of abortion, vaccines, girls kissing girls, or whatever is causing the sky to fall today. For giving these “Baby Jesus will cry” arguments power, Christianity takes the blame.

One variant on the argument is to demand that you not undercut Christianity without something to replace it. Sure, if a philosophy group or lecture series satisfies an intellectual hunger that before had to put up with the thin soup of a sermon, that’s great. But such a replacement isn’t mandatory. Jerry Coyne, whose article was my inspiration for this argument, gives a counterexample: did the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s offer something to replace the idea that whites were superior to blacks? Nope. If the realization that they weren’t inherently superior to someone else caused someone existential heartburn, they had to get over it. Nothing replaced the false belief. Northern Europe is far ahead of us in sidelining Christianity, and they seem to have muddled through just fine.

Another example: when you’re cured of cancer or malaria, doctors don’t replace that disease with something else; they make you well and send you on your way.

I’ll end with a caveat. I have little enthusiasm for debunking the supernatural beliefs of someone whose awful life is made a little easier with those beliefs. Perhaps they’re abused, starving, or dying, and (false) beliefs help them get through the day. The good might outweigh the bad in these cases. For the rest of humanity, let’s believe as many true things and reject as many false things as possible.

And now, it’s time for a bonus argument! Let’s call the previous argument #43a so that this related argument can be called:

Stupid argument #43b: Religion is useful

Yes, religion can be useful. In placebo fashion, it might help people kick bad habits like addiction. It might encourage people to act better because they imagine God is taking notes. It might push people to donate time or money to good works.

And of course I’m happy to see Christianity’s benefits extracted from its many false claims. Community, charity, and an interest in morality are great, and they needn’t be encumbered with Christianity’s baggage.

Note, though, that this does nothing to show that religions’ fundamental supernatural claims are true. Truth is the bottom line at this blog, and failing at that is what makes this a stupid argument.

Returning to “religion is useful,” here’s a thought experiment: suppose religion were so useful that it was a net positive. That is, the upsides (hope for heaven, the belief that God’s plan is all for the best, and related beliefs) outweighed the downsides (the harm caused by those beliefs being false plus other negatives, discussed in argument #42). Should we reject religion then?

I’ll let you answer that one for yourself. As for me, the downsides of religion far outweigh the upsides, so the question is academic.

Is there any way to get to a harmless Christianity? Consider that there are secular Jews who self-identify as Jews. There are atheist Jews who attend synagogue. They see themselves as cultural Jews. Imagine the Christian equivalent—a community of cultural Christians who might have supernatural beliefs (or might not) and are brought together for community and doing good within their society. I think of this as Christianity 2.0, and it might be Christianity’s soft landing option.

I don’t agree with C. S. Lewis on much, but he had a good point when he said,

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

If religion is useful, let’s acknowledge that and try to understand why. But that shouldn’t hamper efforts to get everyone to agree on what’s true.

Don’t touch the fruit of the tree of historical knowledge
lest it open your eyes to the hooey that the Church professes.
— commenter Sophia Sadek

.
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from Edwin Andrade (free-use license)
.

2021-09-27T11:21:12-07:00

Last updated on: September 27, 2021 at 11:21 am   By

It’s time once again to put on our neoprene waders and gas mask and step in, looking for the stupidest arguments by which Christians embarrass themselves.

The list begins here. We’re well past the original target of 25 and still going.

Stupid argument #42: Why do atheists worry about someone they don’t think exists?

One Christian source expressed it this way:

How can you hate someone you don’t believe in? Why the hostility? If God does not exist, shouldn’t atheists just relax and seek a good time before they become plant food? Why should it matter if people believe in God?

We don’t care about gods; we care about their followers. Gods don’t cause problems within society, but people who think they’re carrying out the will of gods do.

This argument seems to presume that Christianity is about nothing more than good works, community, mutual support, and other worthy aspects that no one would object to. It presumes that nothing bad comes from believing false things. They imagine that Christianity has no more destructive impact on society than knitting, but Christianity in America does quite a bit more than just good works. Christians (not all, of course, but many) love to meddle. They:

  • push for Creationism in public schools,
  • demand prayers at government meetings,
  • stand in the way of same-sex marriage and find other ways to make life miserable for queer people,
  • block the use of fetal stem cells used for research,
  • vote for politicians that they admit are terrible people simply because they’re against abortion,
  • make other attacks on the separation of church and state,

and more. And that’s just their attacks on society—within their own communities, people can be ostracized for thinking the wrong things or traumatized as children with talk of hell and demons.

Stepping back from this, we see a larger problem in that religion encourages people to accept things as true without sufficient evidence. They convince themselves that Jesus walks with them in adversity and that God advises them when at a crossroads, but this is just comforting self-talk.

When the mind’s drawbridge of skepticism is let down for Jesus, other ideas can come through with minimal scrutiny like QAnon and other conspiracy theories, evolution and climate change denial, vaccine phobia, and so on. Christianity is more than just a sweet old lady walking down the block to church on a warm Sunday in June or people donating to good works. It can be the gateway drug to sloppy thinking that’s much more dangerous.

Atheism makes sense as an organized movement

A variant of this argument wonders why we don’t see a parallel to atheism (an organized movement against something) with, say, stamp collecting. If it makes sense for atheists to get together under the shared belief in no gods, why aren’t there organizations, blogs, and lectures for non-stamp-collecting?

That sounds like a good question until you think about it. The comparison doesn’t work, so let’s fix it.

  • Make stamp collecting in the U. S. an industry with revenue of $100 billion per year, all of which is tax deductible, but make that revenue secret. That is, require all nonprofits in the country to open their financial records to show that they are worthy of nonprofit status, except for stamp-collecting organizations (more here).
  • Have the leadership of the stamp collecting industry meddle in public affairs (or get in bed with politicians who will do it) and have them complain when stamp collectors’ perks are attacked.
  • Have politicians allied with the industry play Chicken Little, pointing at teh Gayz or abortion or vaccines and insisting that the sky is falling. Only by electing them can society be put right.
  • Have the stamp-collecting leaders declare their organization to be supernaturally moral despite being riddled with financial and sexual scandals.
  • Amend Article VI of the U.S. Constitution to forbid any public stamp-collecting test of political candidates but make it a de facto test anyway.

Now that’s an organization that could easily have organized opposition. Perhaps now it’s clear why atheism exists as a movement.

This is related to Stupid Argument #24: You really believe in God, where we discover that atheists must believe in God because we talk about him so much.

Dear God,
Protect me from your followers.
— seen on a bumper sticker

.
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/12/17.)

Image from h gruber (license CC BY 2.0)
.

2021-09-08T13:17:21-07:00

Last updated on: September 8, 2021 at 1:17 pm   By

If someone has a belief that is objectively wrong—that is, a belief that an unbiased observer equipped with all relevant facts would judge as false—giving the correct information isn’t likely to get them to change their mind. Indeed, they usually double down on their original, false belief. This is the Backfire Effect.

But this corrective to someone with a wrong belief feels so right! The other guy has come to the wrong conclusion, and once I give him the correct facts, he’ll cheerfully thank me and switch to the correct opinion, right? That sounds reasonable, but no—changing one’s opinion is painful, and this response to a person with a wrong believe only makes the problem worse.

I explored approaches that minimize the Backfire Effect, but here’s an approach that should be more productive (taken from “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” by Elizabeth Kolbert). But more on that shortly. Getting there is an interesting journey.

Study 1: biased weighing of data

The article gives a number of studies that reveal the embarrassingly inept way our minds sometimes work. In one study, half of the participants were in favor of capital punishment and half not. Each participant was given two studies that argued the two sides of the issue. These studies were actually made up, but they presented data that was equally compelling mathematically. Participants reported that the one that supported their own opinion was far more compelling than the other (this is confirmation bias). Afterwards, they were asked about their views. Unsurprisingly, they were more entrenched than they’d been at the start. This is the Backfire Effect.

Why are we susceptible to poor thinking?

This human failing enables America’s new vogue of fake news and alternative facts. But since this thinking isn’t logical, why do people do it? Why are they biased toward confirming evidence, and why does presenting disconfirming evidence force them to double down?

Since this is pretty much universal, it’s an evolved trait, but what survival value could it have? Shouldn’t believing true things always be better?

Some researchers say that it developed in a society where humans had to work together. A cooperating society wants to encourage members who contribute, but it must punish freeloaders—possibly even to the point of exile. That’s a draconian punishment because, in a primitive society, living on your own is much harder than being part of a community.

Human reason didn’t evolve to weigh economic policy options or evaluate social safety nets, but, according to this theory, it evolved to defend one’s social status. Winning arguments is important, and self-confidence helps. Doubting your position is not a good thing. The reflective tribal member who says, “Well, that’s a good point—maybe my contribution to the group has been sub-par” risks exile.

(Another area of thought where we are surprisingly poor is probability—surprising because we seem to bump into simple probability questions all the time. I’ve written about the Monty Hall Problem here and about simple puzzles that reveal our imperfect thought process here.)

Study 2: explain your answer

In this study, graduate students were first asked to evaluate their understanding of everyday devices—toilets, zippers, cylinder locks, and so on. Next, they were asked to write a detailed explanation of how the devices worked. Finally, they again rated their understanding of these devices. Being confronted with their incompetence (yeah, how does a toilet work?!) caused them to lower their self-rating.

It’s easy to think of how we operate these simple gadgets (just the user interface) and overestimate our understanding of how it works under the hood. This encapsulation is important for progress—you don’t understand how a calculator works but you know how to operate it. The same is true (for most of us) for a car, a computer, a cell phone, or the internet. We know how to buy hamburger or a suit, but we don’t understand the particulars of how they got to the store.

This encapsulation extends into public policy—we (usually) don’t understand the intricacies of policy proposals like cap and trade or trade deals like NAFTA or TPP. Instead, we rely on trusted politicians and domain experts to convince us of the rightness of one side of the issue (or more likely, do what needs to be done and not bother us with it).

Study 3: policy questions

That brings us to one final study, modeled on the last one. Participants were asked their opinions on policy questions like single-payer health care or merit-based pay for teachers and then were asked to rate their confidence in their answers. Next, they were asked to explain in detail the impact of implementing each proposal. Finally, they were asked to reevaluate their position. Having just struggled to explain the details of their favored proposal, they dialed back their confidence.

This finding may be relevant to our interactions with people arguing for scientific or historical claims like Creationism or the Resurrection, or for social policies like making abortion illegal or “natural marriage” (one man, one woman). Instead of pushing back, ask them to explain their position. Let them stew in their own confusion. Avoid the snarky retort (tempting, I know), which would trigger the Backfire Effect.

This research is equally applicable to ourselves. Find or create opportunities to explain how your favored policy, if implemented, would work and then ask yourself how this exercise changes your opinion. Is it still a no-brainer? Or have you uncovered obstacles that might make success more elusive?

How do they interpret your question?

When you ask someone, “Do you accept evolution?,” you may see this as a straightforward question about opinion or knowledge. For some, however, you’re asking about who they are. “I am a Christian,” they think, “and my kind of Christian rejects evolution.” Your straightforward question becomes in their mind, “Do you reject Jesus Christ as Lord and savior?,” to which the answer is, obviously, No. Other personal questions potentially fall into the same trap—questions about abortion or same-sex marriage or even climate change or COVID vaccinations.

Physician, heal thyself

Consider working on this problem within yourself, and you can begin to understand how hard it would be to do a 180 on some central tenet of who you are. And that’s how hard it is for the other person.

I’ll use myself as an example. Correcting myself on some heated issue in the news isn’t that big a deal. For example, I’ve mocked people for insisting that hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin protects them against COVID, but I’ll quickly make an about face once the medical community does. Imagine instead that I rejected my atheism and concluded that Christianity is true. That would be a big deal, especially since undercutting Christianity in this blog has been my job for the last decade.

For some insight, let’s turn to “Facts Don’t Change People’s Minds. Here’s What Does” by Ozan Varol. To help walk back a belief you no longer hold:

The key is to trick the mind by giving it an excuse. Convince your own mind (or your friend) that your prior decision or prior belief was the right one given what you knew, but now that the underlying facts have changed, so should the mind.

Gracefully accept the new, correct view from your debate opponent and avoid the tempting “Told you so.”

Going forward, avoid a dogmatic kind of declaration. Separate yourself from the facts so that if the “facts” eventually go down the toilet they don’t pull you with them.

A possible solution, and one that I’ve adopted in my own life, is to put a healthy separation between you and the products of you. I changed my vocabulary to reflect this mental shift. At conferences, instead of saying, “In this paper, I argue . . .,” I began to say “This paper argues. . . .”

This subtle verbal tweak tricked my mind into thinking that my arguments and me were not one and the same.

Finally, remember that from their point of view your opponent’s position makes good sense. Obviously—if it didn’t, they’d hold some other position.

Now imagine you’re arguing for accepting climate change.

If employment is the primary concern of the Detroit auto worker, showing him images of endangered penguins (as adorable as they may be) or Antarctica’s melting glaciers will get you nowhere. Instead, show him how renewable energy will provide job security to his grandchildren. Now, you’ve got his attention.

The same part of the brain that responds to a physical threat
responds to an intellectual one.
— Oatmeal comic

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/23/17.)

Image from Wesley Eller (license CC BY 2.0)

.

2021-07-26T11:19:14-07:00

Last updated on: July 26, 2021 at 11:19 am   By

Who can be surprised that Richard Dawkins, author of the bestseller The God Delusion, is Andy Bannister’s favorite atheist to hate? Bannister imagines Dawkins in the office of his literary agent. The agent reports that things aren’t selling well. What to do? Dawkins says that maybe the world needs The Santa Delusion.

This is a reference to Dawkins saying, “Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are part of the charm of childhood. So is God. Some of us grow out of all three.”

Bannister was shocked: “I guess a good place to begin is by illustrating what a disastrous argument this is on many levels.”

Huh? Where’s the problem? Bannister says, “The first problem is that it’s a classic example of an ad hominem fallacy. That is when, rather than critique an argument or belief, you attack the person making it.”

Bannister is correct that that is the definition of the ad hominem fallacy. Trouble is, Dawkins doesn’t commit that fallacy. I wasted half an hour poring over the pages that precede his charge trying to see if there’s anything more offensive than Dawkins’ quote above. Nothing. Dawkins’ observation remains standing: “Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are part of the charm of childhood. So is God. Some of us grow out of all three.”

This is a continuation of our critique of Andy Bannister’s The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist (part 1 is here).

The role of parents

The second problem that keeps Bannister up at night is Dawkins’ concern with Christian parents. In The God Delusion (chapter 9), Dawkins said, “Horrible as sexual abuse [of children by Catholic priests in Ireland] no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.”

Bannister overflows with ridicule for Dawkins, but he has no studies. He has no arguments. He doesn’t even provide anecdotes of people who’d experienced harm (or good) from a Catholic upbringing. He’s a textbook definition of ad hominem. All he has is another invented story where he imagines Dawkins faced with two educational options for his daughter. One school is run by Catholic nuns and the other “by a group of sexually voracious convicted pedophiles.”

Bannister is too busy mocking to notice the irony. For this to be an analogy with Dawkins’ quote, both of Bannister’s options—sweet nuns and sexually voracious pedophiles—are within the Catholic Church. Sure, that accurately describes some Catholic priests; I’m just surprised that Bannister wants to dwell on it.

Let’s recall Dawkins’ quote to be clear what he’s saying. He’s not saying every child raised as a Catholic is psychologically damaged more than every child sexually abused by priests. He’s simply arguing that there is overlap.

Dawkins makes his case

Bannister only has time for ridicule, but Dawkins actually supports his claim with evidence. Right after we read the quote above in God Delusion, Dawkins introduces a woman who experienced trauma from both sexual abuse and her Catholic upbringing. At the age of seven, she was sexually abused by her priest, and a friend from school died. What made it worse was that the friend went to hell (so she was told) because she was a Protestant. The woman later recalled,

Being fondled by the priest simply left the impression . . . as “yucky” while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest—but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell. It gave me nightmares.

Bannister’s book would’ve been better if he’d spent less time crafting witty dismissals and more time on actually making an argument.

He next quotes a psychologist lecturing for Amnesty International.

We as a society have a duty to protect [children from nonsense]. We should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Bannister then worries about the practical problems of a Big Brother state critiquing parents’ every action.

My response

Dawkins is right that religious indoctrination is a problem. However, I’ve never heard Dawkins demand that society ban religion or forbid parents from teaching their worldview to their children. That’s my belief as well.

(Aside: I propose a thought experiment where religion is in the adults-only category, like voting, driving, and smoking, here. Religion must have access to immature minds to propagate and would vanish like the Shakers without them.)

For Bannister to note that he agrees with Dawkins wouldn’t make for much of a chapter, I suppose, so he has to resort to strawman arguments, pushing back against what Dawkins isn’t saying. The result is that he loses any chance to offer a sensible critique of parents’ rights.

Symmetry: does free rein apply to parents and pregnant women?

Let me take a brief tangent. Bannister insists that parents be given free rein to raise their children as they think best. Society is there as a backstop to intervene as necessary, but the benefit of the doubt for how to raise children goes to their parents.

I agree, and that’s the philosophy that must govern pregnant women considering an abortion. In the same way, they are on the front line, they best understand the issues within their lives, and they must be given free rein to decide for themselves whether an abortion is the right course. (I talk more about abortion here and here.) Bannister must be consistent—if we trust parents to do the right thing, we must similarly trust pregnant women.

(Let me make clear that Bannister never mentioned abortion. I’m simply drawing a parallel that religious conservatives often miss.)

Separation of church and state

Now back to Bannister’s argument: I don’t want religion criminalized. Rather, I want religious privilege eliminated in the U.S. and education improved so that religion can be allowed to fall away. You don’t snatch away someone’s crutches; you cure them and let them discard the crutches in their own time once they’re unnecessary.

Some evidence points to religion being a symptom of a sick society. Religion is Marx’s opiate of the masses—a salve to cushion against problems within society. Fix those problems, and religion becomes unnecessary. Religion is arguably caused by poor conditions within society. Fix them, and the problems for which religion is a salve go away. It would have no more role.

Turn this around and see that conservative politicians or Christian leaders who push back against initiatives that improve society may in part be doing so to keep society dependent on the comfort religion offers.

Bannister ends the chapter with this: “When one believes something deeply, passionately, energetically, one has a tendency simply to grab hold of any arguments that appear to support you, however desperate.” That’s both true and relevant, though he’s thinking of atheists here. Can he really not see that it’s his side that is likelier to believe things without sufficient evidence?

See also: Your Religion Is a Reflection of Your Culture—You’d Be Muslim if You Were Born in Pakistan

Continue: Religion is a Psychological Crutch

God is Santa Claus for adults
— observation from the internet

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/2/17.)

Image from Bailiwick Studios (license CC BY-SA 2.0)

.

2021-07-09T09:34:04-07:00

Last updated on: July 9, 2021 at 9:34 am   By

The Bible in English has nearly a million words. Have you ever stopped to marvel at that? Why did God need so much space?

Not only is this a surprisingly large number of words, but it’s a clue that Christianity is false. Why would a perfect god need a million words? Couldn’t he have gotten his message across at least as clearly (or more clearly) with a tenth as many words? Or even a thousandth as many?

Just a page or two of instructions would be enough to teach you how to be a vegan. That’s a lifestyle with strict rules—why would it be any more difficult for a perfect god to convey its message with the same number of words?

For comparison, the U. S. Constitution was written by humans and has defined the U. S. government since 1787. It has just 4500 words. The U. N. Declaration of Human Rights has less than 1800 words. The Humanist Manifesto, 800.

The constitution of a god

Pare away the fluff and think about what a perfect god’s constitution might convey.

  • Explain the supernatural realm: the number of gods, name(s), and relationship to each other if more than one
  • The most important non-obvious morality: slavery is good/bad, abortion is okay/forbidden, vegetarianism is mandatory/optional, and so on
  • The afterlife: what happens, if anything, when people die? If there’s a supernatural realm that we should know about, how does it fit with and interact with our own?
  • The purpose for each person. What, if anything, should we be doing to satisfy the god(s)?
  • What, if anything, we should know about the future

This addresses world religions’ primary concerns—morality, purpose, how to please the god(s), and the afterlife—though this is obviously just a guess. A real god might have a different list, but a million words from a babel of books does not seem likely.

One additional point is why you should believe in these supernatural claims. This must be somewhere, and it might be conveyed through personal appearances or demonstrations. Could the evidence be included in this constitution? Before you say that it’s impossible to put something convincing in so short a document, don’t underestimate the capabilities of a god a trillion times smarter than any person.

Regardless of how it does it, this religion must have a mechanism for convincing everyone with evidence and argument that it is correct, unlike the myriad manmade religions.

Compare to the Bible

Categorize every verse in the Bible, and then sieve out everything that wouldn’t fit into the categories above. What would be lost?

  • The history of the Israelites. And then the Jews. And then the Christians. This does nothing to help understand god’s constitution.
  • Examples of God’s actions. Requirements would be in the constitution, not gleaned from God’s actions.
  • Just so stories. For example: did you ever wonder why we hate the Moabites and Ammonites? Because they’re the result of Lot having sex with his own daughters—yuck! Or: ever wonder why this place is named this? Here’s the story behind that name.
  • Ideas borrowed from other cultures. For example: the Sumerian cosmology of water above and below the earth, a world-destroying flood, and a dying-and-rising god. Include as well those passages that give bad science.
  • Contradictions. When not guided by a perfect hand, the more you write about your religion, the more contradictions you introduce.
  • An evolving message. Changes to the message from an unchanging god can be embarrassing. For example: we used to sacrifice animals but not anymore; we used to have a works-based view of God but now it’s faith based; Jesus didn’t exist before, but now he’s mandatory.

See also: Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

The Bible is just a rambling story that goes on and on. It was written by people and looks like it. There’s no hint of any supernatural guidance.

Take the book of Revelation as an example, a psychotic, Dalí-esque horror show. There are 24 elders around the throne of God, with the four living creatures. There’s a scroll with seven seals and different events with the breaking of each. There’s the seven trumpets and different disasters with the sounding of each. There’s the seven bowls with different disasters with the pouring of each. There are four horsemen and seven spiritual figures including a dragon and the Beast. Each punishment is lovingly detailed, as the novella drones on and on.

Or look at the practice of Christianity today. Why is there a Bible Answer Man—wouldn’t God convey his message so clearly that there would be no questions to answer? The web site GotQuestions.org crows that it has answered more than 600,000 Bible questions, but why are there 600,000 Bible questions?! Why are there 45,000 denominations of Christianity today, and why were there radically different versions of Christianity such as the Marcionites and Gnostics in the early days? Why did Paul have to help create Christianity—shouldn’t Jesus have done that? Jesus wrote nothing.

The more involved the story, the more you need to explain. Did Jesus have a human body or a spirit body? Why does God do immoral things in the Old Testament? Why isn’t God’s existence obvious? Why does God only care about his Chosen People but later decides to embrace the whole world? Why doesn’t the world look like it was created by an omniscient and loving god? And what the heck is the Trinity?

The church convened 21 ecumenical councils over the centuries to try to make sense of this. Swiss theologian Karl Barth tried to make sense of it all with his Church Dogmatics. He wrote six million words in 12 volumes, and he died before he could finish. Could a god be satisfied with something this convoluted?

The discipline of systematic theology tries to tie up all the loose ends, but why would the study of a perfect god need this?

Rebuttal

One Christian rebuttal is obvious: how do you know that this is what a god would do? How do you know that a perfect god would even want us to clearly understand his plan?

This is true and irrelevant. I’m given the claim that the Christian god exists, and I must evaluate it. I can’t peek at the answer in the back of the book, and I can’t give up and be told the answer. The buck stops with me. It seems to me that a god that chose to make itself known would do so simply and unambiguously. There would be a clear statement of his plan, like my hypothesized constitution above. Contrast that with the Bible—the entire story about all the stuff God did and how he got angry and then the Israelites did something stupid and then Jesus saved the day is unnecessary. Maybe it’s inspiring and maybe it’s great literature, but the entire Israelite blog is not needed to serve a perfect god’s goal.

Let’s step back and consider this another way. I look at the convoluted, redundant, and contradictory Bible and conclude that this is the hand of Man, not God. The Christian might demand to know how I can confidently reach this conclusion.

First, I’m simply following the evidence to its best explanation, not claiming proof. And second, I wonder how the Christian can be so certain that this mess looks like God’s handiwork. I don’t think it’s me who’s making the leap of faith.

A Stand to Reason podcast (9/27/17 @6:00) reviews a lecture by cold-case detective Jim Wallace where he said that the cold case binders with all the old evidence were often long, had parts that didn’t make sense, had parts that were boring, and were out of chronological order. And yet they were still useful. Why couldn’t the Bible be like this?

Wallace’s argument nicely makes my point. Cold-case files are human books. Humans are imperfect, so of course we’ll see evidence of people being sloppy, rushed, biased, or just plain wrong. That’s what you’d expect in a human book, and, sure enough, that’s what you find in the Bible. You’d expect quite the opposite from a book from God: short, to the point, perfectly clear and unambiguous, and focused with no tangents.

Another possible response: But the core of Christianity can be distilled into a tract! If you insist on a brief version, there it is.

But this merely ignores the problems. The Bible is still there, and it being a composite of manmade books, picked from an even larger set of candidates, means that the contradictions, tangential history, and unanswered questions remain.

I’m arguing for a different genre. A perfect god would give us a simple, unambiguous constitution. We have instead a book written by and focused on the people rather than the god, which is strong evidence that there is no actual god behind it.

See also: The Bible Story Reboots: Have You Noticed?

Living forever with God is the endgame,
so what’s the point of creating this elaborate,
blink-of-an-eye, soul-filtering machine called Planet Earth,
where beings have temporary bodies made of meat?
WTF?! Just create everyone in “Heaven” to begin with,
and none of the rest of this horror-show ever has to happen.
— commenter Kingasaurus

.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince)

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/1/16.)

Image from olivier bareau (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
.

2021-06-24T14:31:11-07:00

Last updated on: June 24, 2021 at 2:31 pm   By

Suppose Christianity were true. How would we know? What would that look like?

Christianity and naturalism make radically different claims, and their two hypothetical realities should look very different. We should be able to deduce which reality we’re living in by comparing the claims of each worldview with evidence from the real world.

Last time we looked at God’s hiddenness, the fragmentation of religion, scientific knowledge found in Christianity (or not), and the meaning of life. Let’s continue. The naturalism hypothesis is looking pretty good.

Morality

Theism predicts that religion’s moral teachings would be timeless and progressive. The wisdom of heaven might appear crazy to us simple humans, but time after time we’d follow it and discover that it did indeed improve society.

The Bible declares that Christians don’t sin: “No one who is born of God practices sin” (1 John 3:9; see also 3:6, 5:18). With the Christian church run by sinless Christians, the Church’s morality should likewise far outshine that of other institutions.

It doesn’t work that way. Not only is “sinless” not the attribute that springs to mind with many church leaders in the news, Christianity is conservative, not progressive. It is always late to the party, following society after it embraces a new moral outlook. Christianity must be conservative because it is built on the premise that it’s already got things figured out. New ideas—abolition of slavery, democracy, civil rights for all—catch the church off guard. Sometimes the church is mobilized on some of these issues (William Wilberforce against slavery or Martin Luther King for civil rights, for example), though invariably there are factions that resist these social changes. And why are these positions not plain in the Bible? Why did it take close to 2000 years to get on the right side of change? In these examples, the church was merely a tool used by change makers, not the instigator of change.

Christians were on both sides of these moral issues, as is true for any modern moral issue such as same-sex marriage, gay rights, abortion, or euthanasia. Pick the right Bible verses, and God can be used like a puppet and made to support either position. Pick other verses, and God admits to a long list of moral crimes.

As for the church clearly being a morally superior institution, the pedophilia scandals are merely a high-profile example. You can argue that there are just a few bad apples in the church and throw them under the bus for the benefit of the institution, but that simply makes a lie of the Bible’s claim that Christians don’t sin. The church becomes yet another large club that occasionally abuses power with no special claims of moral superiority over any other. So much for the guiding hand of God.

The Bible has a lot to answer for. The Old Testament in particular supports moral positions that modern society has long rejected—genocide, slavery, polygamy, and human sacrifice, for starters.

Christianity declares that morality is grounded exclusively in its god, but then it has a hard time explaining why other cultures without Christian dominance, both current and historical, seem to understand morality just fine. The Problem of Evil—the existence of gratuitous evil despite God taking a loving hand in our lives—also argues against Christianity.

Mind

Theism predicts a mind independent of the body that persists as a soul after the body dies.

In fact, “mind” is just what brains do. The mind’s capability is tied to the capabilities of the brain, and that changes as someone grows from child to mature adult to elderly adult. That capability changes due to physical causes such as being tired, sleepy, stressed, hungry, drunk, or drugged. Damage the brain with dementia or physical injury and you damage the mind, as the story of Phineas Gage illustrates. The fortunes of the mind parallel those of the brain, and no evidence supports an unembodied mind.

Not only do we have a natural explanation for the mind, but physics shows that there is no room for a supernatural soul. There is yet more physics to learn, but we know enough about the physics of our world to know that no as-yet-to-be-found quantum particles could hold or convey the soul.

Growth of religion

Theism predicts that heaven would favor the correct religion.

Christianity did thrive, but that wasn’t because of God’s beneficence but Rome’s. Christianity was just one religion among many until the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Naturalism predicts that religions struggle, rise, and fall and that none will have any supernatural success. And that’s what we see.

More

If Christianity were true, a single set of moral truths would be held universally, rather than morality varying based on culture.

If Christianity were true, believers wouldn’t use evidence-based reasoning everywhere in life but then switch to faith for evaluating the claims of their religion.

If Christianity were true, faith healers would go to hospitals and reliably produce healings that science verifies.

If Christianity were true, televangelists wouldn’t waste time asking for money from viewers but would get their expenses covered by praying to God themselves. Seen another way, God never gives cash to a ministry, and we should follow his lead.

If Christianity were true, Christians’ testable prophecies about our imminent end wouldn’t invariably be wrong. (Hilariously bad examples: John Hagee and Harold Camping.)

If Christianity were true, its Bible wouldn’t have contradictions, claims of prophecy wouldn’t suck, and it wouldn’t be wrong about the power of prayer.

If Christianity were true, we wouldn’t see its ideas mirrored in other contemporary religions of that part of the world like the Combat Myth, virgin birth stories, and dying and rising gods.

If Christianity were true, everyone would understand the same simple and unambiguous message from God.

Christian response

The typical Christian response is, “But God could have perfectly good reasons that make sense to him that you simply can’t imagine!” And that’s true. This tsunami of examples in which the naturalistic explanation beats theism and Christianity doesn’t prove that Christianity is false; it simply concludes that that’s the way to bet. This Christian argument fails by making the Hypothetical God Fallacy.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll in his debate against William Lane Craig said, “It’s not hard to come up with ex post facto justifications for why God would’ve done it that way. Why is it not hard? Because theism is not well defined.” Christianity is a moving target, not the unchanging wisdom of an unchanging god.

Christian blogger John Mark Reynolds wrote about a time when life was discouraging. After prayer, he saw a rainbow over his house. He said,

Was it chance? It was not. It was God. Would that convince an atheist? Of course it would not, but then it was not a sign for the atheist. God was speaking through nature to me.

Nope. If it wouldn’t convince an atheist, it shouldn’t convince you. If evidence were important, this being nothing more than a nice coincidence according to anyone outside your religion is the clue that you’ve deluded yourself. And that you dismiss that and embrace your interpretation as reality makes clear that you don’t care about evidence to support your belief.

This is the sign of an invented worldview.

Science doesn’t know everything.
Religion doesn’t know anything.
— Aron Ra

.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/21/16.)

Image from Eye See You Two (license CC BY 2.0)

.

Follow Us!
OTHER RELATED CONTENT
1
FACT CHECK: Melania Was A Sex...
Laughing in Disbelief
2
The Cold, Unforgiving World of Geoffrey...
Love, Joy, Feminism
3
Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions
Cross Examined
4
When Hollywood Featured Spankings of Adult...
Love, Joy, Feminism
Browse Our Archives
TRENDING AT PATHEOS Nonreligious
Theology: the Unevolving Scholastic Discipline
Church Gridlock: Steeples Everywhere, Sinners Beware!
Essential Tips to Successfully Navigate the Selling Process
To Make Remote Work Effective, Think About Others
Flexibility Is Key to Solving Problems of Tomorrow
view all Nonreligious blogs