Please don始t feed the troll
Please don始t feed the troll By James Gardner
"I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it." ~ Edith Sitwell
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Introduction!6 On the origin of creationism!11 Wolves in sheep始s clothing"23 Rewriting history"27 La la la, I始m not listening"28 Irreducible Complexity"33
Backwards and forwards!35 Random acts of kindness!60 Dating fossils"65 Teach the controversy"70
Liars for Jesus!72 Becoming the thing you fear the most"82 Created sick, commanded to be well"88
The Ten Condiments!92 Acknowledgments!94
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For Peach Boy Filling a much needed gap in the fossil record since 19:45
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Introduction " Some people canʼt learn. They have a primal fear of understanding anything which contradicts their existing opinion. This isnʼt limited to people who are simply stupid. There are university lecturers, physicists, teachers, lawyers and brain surgeons who, faced with a leaking bathroom tap, wouldnʼt know the difference between a chisel and a spanner. People who lack what used to be called dog sense, about anything outside of their immediate sphere of understanding or interest; those who simply lack the kind of intuition others take for granted, are in no way limited to those who hold their religious beliefs above what can be scientifically proven to be true and it is not the intention of the author to assert otherwise. Indeed the opposite is often true. It should be obvious that, historically, there were higher numbers of de-facto Christians, born in the last century, who changed the world around them for the better, who were believers of one kind or another in either the Judaeo-Christian God, Yahweh or who would have, if asked, happily considered themselves firmly in the “there must be something out there” bracket. But if you want to find stark examples in the modern world of where this disconnectedness between common sense, received opinion and clear thinking is seen as a virtue rather than the hinderance to any real understanding which it most certainly is, American evangelical Christians are the best place to start looking. " This particularly narrow, however highly visible demographic within the wider Christian faith, quite separate from their self-proclaimed moderate brethren, are borne of factors as diverse socioeconomically as they are political. They cherish some of their worst ideas on spurious grounds and insist those who donʼt share in their delusions are missing something profound. They fortify their perceived right to express often offensive and extremist views on grounds of patriotism, or a loyalty to dimorphic preconceptions about the morality of others on a level which almost beggars belief. 6
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This book is about those people and the oldest marketing device in the world, which has robbed them of their intellectual honesty and basic awareness of the real world which surrounds them. " We look at the pseudo-science creation movement and their message of ʻif it sounds like science and looks like science, it must be scienceʼ, which has been falling on happily deaf ears across America ever since the resurgence of the religious right in the lead-up to the election of president Ronald Reagan in the early 1980ʼs. This cabal of the wilfully deluded, orchestrated by the knowingly false, have had a long time to prepare some very slick looking, extremely bad ideas, tailor-made for a certain type of Americanised Christian; a ready made, disparate group of paranoid conspiracy theorists, who find solace in each otherʼs distain for progressive liberalism and social democracy. These historical revisionists, of the alleged Christ, see the global trend towards a more open society, in the rights of homosexuals, women and equality for all, as a force for evil; a battle front in their bitter struggle, fought under the auspices of Christian values, in their barely concealed hatred of all things secular. They see gay rights, equality of the sexes and the breaking down of social and territorial boarders as indicative of a general loosening in “traditional values”—code-speak, to a certain kind of radical for the dissolving of white, working-class culture and by their own illogical non-thinking, therefore, an unmistakable portent to the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and the end of days. " Within this group nestles the Kingdom Capitalists; the pyramid scheme money changers in the temple, who promise financial success alongside a personal, spiritual and marital togetherness, in exchange for generous donations. They, in turn, are loosely allied to the crystal danglers, homeopaths, faith healers, the anti-vaccination movement and those who deny the incontrovertible link between the pumping into the atmosphere of industrial waste and man-made climate change. The Stepford wives anti-everything movement, who with Sarah Palin as their figurehead, act united in their mistrust of big government and a deluded vision of a utopian, 7
ultra-capitalist, free market future, where the indifference of the rich towards the poor is a confusion of virtue for phantasmagorical naivety. " We始ll also take a look at some of the sound, falsifiable science that debunks many of the truth-claims made by all of the above and their refusal to accept that evidence on occasionally hilarious, sometimes downright terrifying grounds. " This book is as much a mix of conversations I have had with family values evangelicals, as it is a personal exploration of where their bad ideas both originate and ultimately lead to, if left unchecked. I始ve done this by piecing together entries and comment threads from my blog with various unpublished articles I have written with the intention of one day moulding this part debate, part monologue collection of writing together into something like the, hopefully, semi-coherent whole you now hold in your hands. Along the way I will make some glaring errors. My detractors will howl and use this as an excuse to ignore me even more than they already do; while my friends, family and supporters will politely point out these mistakes in time for the second edition. Some will Google certain passages and find that, for purposes of brevity, I have paraphrased sections from publicly available, peer reviewed data sources. Again there will be some who suggest that this is in some way indicative of the often aired assumption that atheists (a catch-all term, intended as an insult) take science as much on trust as do the religious take on faith the edicts of their chosen belief system. I assure you, I ask not that the evidence I hope to present to you in a concise and easy to read manner is taken as canon, but as merely an introduction to a wider world of discovery and awe, not just for the planet we call home and those beyond, but the worlds inside the mind of those far more capable than I of describing and exploring the human condition. " No matter what, the reader will have already donated to UNICEF before turning another page of this book, be it as a free PDF download or in its lulu.com printed form, by visiting http://unicef.org and giving generously. This means you!
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" Logically enough, we start in the beginning and work forwards. Iʼve been engaging with creationists for four or 5 years now, but when I first began their arguments were newer to me than they are now and so I naturally gave rather different answers to their questions than I would today. With the emergence of twitter, I see more than ever some of their most tried and tested one-liners still catching out the accidental, or unprepared conversationalist, who inherently knows something isnʼt quite right about a “tweet” which makes a nonsense of science and / or religion, but perhaps doesnʼt know how to effectively respond—at least not without being seen as overly attacking or sounding angry or viewed as having been caught on the wrong foot. This is especially true if someone is not particularly well versed in the general sciences and the kind of Christian apologetics which seeks to misrepresent them. So in the opening chapters weʼre going to dispel some of the clichéd arguments against the scientific method fundamentalists use and take a look at some of the easier to dismiss myths that your entry level creationist usually always plays as their opening gambit. We look at how we might effectively counter these non-arguments without breaking a sweat and using nothing more than Google, an open mind, a reasonable inside knowledge of basic debating tactics and some examples of how critical thinking works. " In that light, we also delve into the psychology of religious fundamentalism and why religionists quiet themselves with often very shallow, childlike ideas. Weʼll also be looking at some of the slightly more sophisticated theology the dyed in the wool apologists fall back on, even though in so doing they inadvertently afford an air of respectability to the creationistʼs internal logic. This encompasses everything from the “I used to be an atheist” argument; the “Iʼve read Antony Flew and Lee Strobel, therefore God exists” simpleton and the “I bet you didnʼt think I was going to say that” smug armchair pseudo-philosopher, who will wait with baited breath for you to swallow hook line and sinker any half-baked, skeptical of skepticism nonsense they dress up in new-age, Deepak Chopra gobbledegook, who, given time, will respond with the same old burn in hell anger when you refuse to fall for their 9
ideas on the same non-evidence that somehow managed to convinced them. Weʼll also look at their self-congratulatory view of what constitutes “real science” and how theyʼve managed to sell their new-age brand of Christianity, to the next generation of woe is me, fashion parade evangelicals. There are also various mini-chapters throughout, that look at specific examples of how this movement is (rather ironically) evolving, and the likely battlegrounds of the future; their fight for your childʼs classroom and the legalistic and political victories theyʼve already scored. For a more in-depth exploration of the various issues raised, there is also a liberal (get it?) smattering of links and citations in the Section Endnotes as well as an open invitation to contact me personally by emailing thatjim@gmail.com or by visiting my blog at howgoodisthat.wordpress.com or by twittering @MovingToMontana " " My ultimate hope is that ordinary Christians and the nonreligious alike can see that this isnʼt about drawing lines in the sand between each other, but identifying a common and very real threat to the life on this planet we all share. As an atheist I am constantly frustrated that the battle against bad ideas is portrayed as an us and them situation, which neither side should be seen to help the other in winning. This is a picture of both mainstream Christianity and the non-religious alike which is being painted by the extremists among us on both of our behalves—as will it remain to be the case for as long as we entertain the notion that feeding the trolls only serves to give them what they want. Into the void between us they have stepped. With that in mind, I ultimately hope this book explores new ways in which the genuinely faithful and the thinking non-theists can together publicly shame the charlatans in our midst, for the common good, and do away with the lazy and irrational idea that if we leave them alone, theyʼll simply go away. “In the beginning man created God and saw that it was useful” Ancient Twitter Proverb 10
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On the origin of creationism " Because all creation myths are religious, anything which is seen to attack the factual validity of those myths is immediately perceived as an attack on the religion or belief system from whence they came. For this reason, perfectly valid matters of fact are seen as an attack upon those who cherish those myths as if they are either literally true or so intrinsic to the dogma of their faith of choice, that they form the central tenets of an entire cultural tradition which, almost unique to religion, is therefore supposed to be held beyond criticism. Weʼre told to back off, when we cite the life works of Alan Dundes, for example—a folklorist and scholar who traced the lineage of many bible stories to Pagan mythology. Our strongest critics are sometimes other non-religious, who somehow feel more secure in a world that prizes syrupy fanfiction over the genuinely fascinating and authoritative works of theological inquiry, such as those written by Bart D. Ehrman, who decided as a young evangelical Christian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, that to study the original texts of the bible, he would learn to read ancient Hebrew and, in so doing, not only abandoned his evangelical certainties, but forensically disassembled the New Testament to reveal clear and compelling evidence that the dogmas of the suffering Messiah, the divinity of Jesus and the trinity, were each the invention of politically motivated theologians, contrived many years after the death of Jesus and those who knew Him. " These matters of historical fact, are passed off as merely an attack on Christianity from militant atheists serving a political agenda. Theyʼre dismissed by the very audience who would stand to gain from them the most, precisely because the Christian dogmas these works examine are revered with-
out question. Indeed the reaction to religious polemic in the literary world as a whole often resorts to ad hominem attacks on the author him or herself, rather than take on the evidence or ideas presented, often for fears of reprisal from publishers and newspaper editors who represent their bread and butter—and, as if to over compensate, on a level no other kind of criticism dares to stoop. These tried and tested methods of attack, usually rely upon clumping everyone into the same bracket as either Hitler, or Richard Dawkins or both and often include Sam Harris, Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, because of their much internetʼd video lectures and debates being seen as the single most important reason for the rise in so-call new-atheism, since the turning of the new millennium. Burnt at the conservative talk-show stake, for heresy, by the paragons of virtue in the Christian media; branded as merely hate filled and tempestuous instruments of the devil, sent to tempt His children away from His word with the ambiguity of bad science and its cold, unsympathetic, clinical dismissal of our true purpose. " It is not OK to dismiss the discoveries of science, simply because they are perceived as being without heart by those who understand them the least. Evolution, weʼre told, is “just a theory” which “doesnʼt explain where we came from or how life on Earth appeared in the first place”. Even ostensibly rational and open minded people, will regurgitate one or more of the urban myths about why evolution is “wrong”, much to the chagrin of anyone with even a passing interest in the general sciences, who happens to be privy to the conversation and who resists opening their mouth to interject, out of bitter experience of fighting a losing battle against armchair experts of this kind in the past. Weʼve all heard that one about “if weʼre evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys” despite that it reveals just how little the person saying it actually knows about the taxonomic classification of organisms, known as cladistics, or the independent evidence from genetics, which unambiguously describes our relationship to all living creatures, past and present. " But of all the stories out there which attempt to step into this void between the public understanding of the sciences 12
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and an alternative explanation for the emergence of, not just life on Earth, but the formation of the Universe itself, nothing is more of an affront to the intellect than young-earth creationism; a literal interpretation of the creation myth from the book of Genesis, in the bible, which itself is a retelling of a number of ancient Greek creation stories, such as those found in Hellenistic stoic philosophy, going back to the early 3rd century BC. " It goes something like this: an eternal creator, which was not created and is outside of our ability to perceive or empirically measure in any way, over a period of time, created the heavens and the Earth and all living things on its surface, including light and dark. Judaeo-Christian literalism has this time period set at 7 days and occurring sometime in the last 10,000 years—a figure arrived at, believe it or not, by adding up the ages of all the prophets in the Old Testament, on the back of the proverbial envelope, and using the account of Noahʼs flood, in chapters 6 - 9 of the book of Genesis, to describe the formation of the continents and mountain ranges, fjords and deserts of the world. With the arrival of sin, when in the garden of Eden, Eve ate of the tree of knowledge and submerged the world into a fallen state, hence burying a true understanding of this process to all those who donʼt believe that, one day, Jesus will return to Earth to take the saved back to heaven for eternity at His fatherʼs side. " Let us be clear. Anyone who thinks the book of Genesis as being a word for word description of ʻhow God did itʼ, is acting in direct contradiction of the teaching of the modern church—by which we mean every umbrella group under one giant festival marquee marked ʻcomedy tentʼ, next to the main stage, behind the face painting stall. Even among this disparate and self-contradictory group, young-Earth creationist remain a fringe minority and for understandable reasons. If there is one thing more than any other, which reenforce the stereotype of “bible basher” or “crazy Christian”, itʼs youngearth creationism. If youʼve ever been woken up at 8am on a Sunday, by a nice young man on a bicycle, accompanied by his 40 year old doppelgänger, who just wants to take five minutes of your time to politely remind you that unless you 13
become like him, sometime in the next 50 years, youʼll be tortured for an eternity while he looks on from the luxury of his rightful place in heaven, youʼll know exactly the sort of person weʼre dealing with. In fact the fundamentalist cliché has been so well established in the collective consciousness, that in an attempt to blur the intrinsic links between creationism and the far-right protestant evangelicals who espouse it, sometime in the 1970ʼs and early 1980ʼs, groups began to instead refer to themselves as advocates of ʻIntelligent Designʼ—a rebranding notion dreamed up in an attempt to reclaim the phrase from the 17th century deist botanists and naturalists, who used it to describe the appearance of intricate design in animals and plants, for which their experiments and apparatus lacked the fidelity to examine at a molecular level, where the notion of intentional design becomes far less suggestive. " The phrase Intelligent Design was itself designed to make it sound scientific and therefore make it easier to sell creationism to the American public as if it is real science, when in reality it is naught but a thinly disguised amalgamation of old-wives tales, re-imagined falsehoods and the blatantly false rumours, many of which were deliberately started in Victorian Britain, long before the publication of Charles Darwinʼs On the Origin of Species, as a political means of attacking advocates of the enlightenment. The idea that Intelligent Design somehow offers a genuinely new alternative to the scientific evidence—seen as inherently atheistic by virtue of the fact the scientific method precludes supernaturalism—was specifically built into the grand plan for the rolling out of ID, across America, by the chief architects behind the new Intelligent Design movement, who exclaim proudly to have restored darkness to the areas of our understanding made bright by the light of rational enquiry, in identifying supposed weaknesses in and the fraudulent methodologies of everything from the theory of Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection to plate tectonics and the Big Bang. " The foremost advocates of ID are headquartered at The Discovery Instituteʼs Centre for Science and Culture. Responsible for the production of a now famously leaked internal document known as The Wedge Strategy, The Discovery 14
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Institute is charged with attempting to “provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology and biological evolution”i. The main purpose of The Wedge Strategy was to spread ID into as many mainstream news and information outlets as possible; to present the scientific sounding idea that the appearance of design in nature cannot be explained without postulating a designer, and that ID is therefore a valid scientific postulate, independent of any particular religious conviction its proponents may or may not hold about what or who the identity of that designer may be. ID, so the Wedge Strategy document advocates, should simply seek to defend a deistic view held by a large number of people, that a designer (God) used methods of design in the creation of life on Earth for which it is impossible to describe using purely scientific means, least of all Darwinian evolution. In practise, however, the document was designed to literally drive a wedge between the publicʼs general lack of any real understanding about the life sciences, and undermine the validity of legitimate education programs which attempt to explain these discoveries in non-technical terminology ii. " The Wedge Strategy was deliberately designed to cause a controversy in the media which would, in turn, cause the general public to believe that a fundamental problem with the theory of evolution exists, which (wouldnʼt you know it) can only be resolved by Discovery Institute scientists and the various books and seminars, teaching materials and propaganda they also rather conveniently happen to sell. To shoreup their assertions, as if they are based upon a legitimate disagreement within scientific circles, few of The Discovery Instituteʼs materials refer specifically to God or the bible. The books are often graphically well produced and made from high quality materials and appear no different from any other school reference library books, which seek to introduce students of all ages to basic scientific principals. They differ only in that they donʼt actually contain any falsifiable scientific data—and, make no mistake, the designer ID is referring to, in all but name, is the Judaeo-Christian God, Yahweh. 15
" Perhaps for this reason, no-one outside of the evangelical Christian movement endorses ID on any level. Indeed any pretence ID may have towards being concerned only with the designer, no matter what the identity of that designer may ultimately prove to be, is highlighted by the fact that no credible scientific establishment, anywhere in the world, has peer reviewed any published, falsifiable research data in support of Intelligent Design whatsoever. Moreover, of those private organisations that advocate ID, not a single one has so far produced a peer reviewed paper containing evidence of any kind that claims to have falsified any single aspect of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Whether or not there is any positive evidence in support of Intelligent Design at all remains unknown, since many of The Discovery Instituteʼs senior fellows and pseudo-scientists are also extremely hostile to the journalistic peer review process, to the point of dismissing its worth altogether. " There have never been any serious scientific studies undertaken into what a possible alternative to Darwinian evolution might look like, on behalf of ID, let alone how this theory might also seek to falsify, in so doing, the wealth of evidence in favour of both natural selection and the independently acquired yet mutually corroborative evidence from genetics. All, it would seem, the so-called theory of so-called Intelligent Design rests upon, is negative attacks upon Darwinʼs theory, with no positive evidence of its own to back-up these attacks, or any ideas of any kind which can produce observable, empirical and measurable evidence and, in turn, subject that evidence to specific principles of reasoning, hence forming a scientific theory. " This fact doesnʼt sit well with creationists. Indeed that so many of IDʼs most fervent supporters claim, at least, to be unaware of this fundamental problem at the heart of the ID movement, is testament to the slick media blitz which IDʼs evangelical protestant supporters, such as Stuart Burgess, William Dembski, Stephen C. Meyer and Phillip E. Johnson have managed to put together over the last 30 - 40 years. " Unsurprisingly, when the opportunity arrises to draw attention away from their lack of data, and divert media attention 16
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instead onto either their ideas of what constitutes real science, or more often what they perceive as being the fraudulent methodologies of the scientific establishment, they seize it eagerly. Phillip E. Johnson, for example, who also denies that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS iii, has explicitly called for an obfuscation of the religious motivations behind ID, saying in a 1999 Touchstone Magazine article "the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion"iv. Whereas Stephen C. Meyer has been caught pulling favours with Richard Sternberg, the managing editor of the peerreviewed scientific journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, who also happens to be a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, a group dedicated to promoting Intelligent Designv ; Sternberg having published an August 2004 article by Meyer, bemoaning that opponents to “Darwinism” are persecuted by the scientific community—an accusation heavily rebuffed by the Journal of Clinical Investigation, who found in their investigation into the matter that, "the idea that there is a community of ID scientists undergoing persecution by the science establishment for their revolutionary scientific ideas" is a hoax, due to the fact that "a search through PubMed fails to find evidence of their scholarship within the peer-reviewed scientific literature."vi " But nothing speaks of their staggering lack of honesty more than their concerted attempts to bury the religious extremism inherent to the ID notion and their lack of data, than the tactics which ID antagonists arenʼt above using to dupe legitimate scientists into apparently supporting their cause. In 2008 a number of leading lights in the public understanding of the sciences agreed to be interviewed for a film named Crossroads on the intersection of science and religion. On the word of a filmmaker named Mark Mathis, that the documentary was geared towards explaining how Charles Darwin gave us the answer to how humanity developedvii. In a question and answer section filmed for the production, the presenter, Ben Stein, asked evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to explain a situation in which he could imagine life emerging by Intelligent Design. Presuming at the time that the filmmakers 17
were making a serious documentary about the controversy which exists between creationists and evolutionary biologists, predominantly in the American media, Dawkins began to explain an idea supported by William Dembski, a prominent proponent of Intelligent Design, who has in the past called the mechanistic and precise detail of evolutionary biologists like Dawkins “pathetic” in his many tirades against his critics, often to the detriment of addressing their legitimate concern for his sloppy methods and blatent refusal to publish any data. " Dempskiʼs idea, known as Specified Complexity, is loosely based upon that of Directed Panspermia, the notion that life may have spread throughout the universe via an unknown transport mechanisms which may include radiation pressure, microorganisms in rocks, or what Dempski called, in a March 2002 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “space aliens”viii. " In Steinʼs film, Richard Dawkins describes Directed Panspermia as “Intelligent Designʼs best shot” but adds that he doesnʼt personally give it any credence, since it still assumes a designer designed these space-borne organisms, and doesnʼt offer any specific evidence as to who that designer may be, or, indeed, who designed the designer. These qualifying remarks, however, were not included in the film. Upon the filmʼs general release, it then transpired that Crossroads wasnʼt, in fact, the working title of the film being made at all, and that Stein had been originally approached to present it some years previous to interviewing Dawkins and others, on the understanding that the title was Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and that the filmmakerʼs intention was to expose how “university professors unmercifully crush any fellow scientists who dare question the prevailing system of belief”. Henceforth the section of the film which apparently shows one of the worlds leading evolutionary biologists, author of The God Delusion and leading light in the secular humanist movement apparently endorsing Intelligent Design is repeatedly cited as proof, by those who donʼt want to learn the truth, that even the public face to the so-called new atheism believes in some form of Intelligent Design—and despite that Dawkins himself has repeatedly asserted he doesnʼt endorse Panspermia or Dembskiʼs Specified Complexity and that he 18
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was tricked into taking part in a film he would never have agreed to be involved in, had he known the filmmakers true motivationix . " As further proof, were it needed, that the link between American rightwing evangelicalism and the advocacy of ID is absolute, it should be noted that only the latter ever cry foul when the former is set the task of presenting evidence of their various claims. Indeed the vast wealth of evidence in support of evolution, being taught as the scientific fact that it is, in the American school system, is itself seen as proof there is an unfair bias towards one theory over another. Even the complete lack of data to argue logically in favour of ID is seen as proof that evolution theory is dominant and to the detriment of any alternative idea and therefore skewed and bias towards itself, precisely because it doesnʼt seek to encompass Intelligent Design—even though IDʼs own proponents have yet to outline the exact nature of what, in their view, a more complete theory of how life on Earth came to be should look and what the positive evidence in support of those ideas might tell us about our existing observations. " " Simply put, ID is not science—but to be fair, no-one from any of the major Christian churches believes for one second that it is either. Only a fringe minority give ID any credence of any kind. Nevertheless, the teaching of science is increasingly made out to be a controversial topic in the American state education system, because of an artificial argument engineered entirely by certain religious pressure groups, often very tellingly in key Republican States, where they are virtually guaranteed the support of the media to report that ID is a problem atheist evolutionary biologists would wish to go away. And sure enough, whenever the subject comes up, the man the news media clamber to interview is Expelled host Ben Stein, who continues to dine out on the vociferous reaction his movie received, not because it sought to expose the stifling of real science as was its prima-facie remit, but because, in reality, it depended entirely on the filmmakerʼs underhand tactics to create the impression of a controversy where none exists. 19
" It isn始t only the way in which Expelled secured quote mined interviews with real scientists, which tells you everything you need to know about pro-ID propagandists. In a section of the film, where Stein claims that the theory of evolution inspired Nazi Eugenics, a passage taken from Charles Darwin始s book The Descent of Man is read aloud: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
But the passage had been so heavily altered from the original, it skewed entirely Darwin始s intentions, as is apparent from the actual text written in Darwin始s own hand, without the omissions made by the makers of Expelled: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. 20
Please donʼt feed the troll The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil
" This poisonous and deliberate misrepresentation of what Darwin actually said, is sadly nothing new, but it is precisely these kinds of tactics which propagate the impression of Intelligent Design as the little guy versus the vast scientific establishment; the cause célèbre of the small town conspiracy theorists and conservative talk-show, mid-west masses—just as the authors of The Wedge Strategy intended—which perfectly feeds into the no smoke without fire mentality of the American mainstream media. Fuelled by the Rupert Murdoch 24/7 rolling news agenda, ID and The Discovery Institute have—to a certain extent—succeed in giving the impression, to ordinary people, that the only thing its proponents are fighting for, is a redress to an inherent bias towards atheistic evolution. Indeed ID supporters openly admit that their main goal is to establish “equal time” given over to the teaching of a religious explanation for the emergence of life on Earth, as is given over to the teaching of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. In that light, ʻTeach the controversyʼ, as advocated by George W. Bush, remains to be the main thrust of the argument put forward by the pro-creationist political lobby—as an attempt to sneak creationism into the school science curriculum by the back door. Their ʻlogicʼ being that if you teach students about the furore, then you have to, by default, also teach them about “both theories”—as if one theory is supported by as much evidence as the other—when in reality, there is no more evidence in favour of Intelligent Design in biology than there is the flat Earth theory in astrophysics, or the Stork theory in human reproduction. “Evolutionary Darwinists need to understand we are taking the dinosaurs back. This is a battle cry to recognize [sic] the science in the revealed truth of God.” - Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis
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i http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf ii http://www.technologyreview.com/web/13514/page1/ iii http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_overestimatingaids.htm iv http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_wedge.htm v http://www.iscid.org/fellows.php vi http://www.jci.org/articles/view/28449/version/1 vii http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/im_gonna_be_a_movie_star.php viii http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-03-17/news/17537370_1_intelligent-design-science-te aching-standards-natural-selection ix http://chronicle.com/article/Scientists-Say/39653
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Wolves in sheep始s clothing
" It is important, at this point, to spend a moment explaining that the author understands fully, that the vast majority of modern, progressive Christians believe the bible to have been inspired by God but that it is not a direct, word-for-word account of actual events in history. It is also understood that successive reinterpretations of the original scriptures, by generations of people who were following ancient traditions, while acting in accordance with how they believed God would have had them behave, means that most Christians also accept that the bible is not a word-for-word, accurate record of events but a collection of parables which were important to the founders of their faith, but which were never intended to be taken as literally true. Most modern Christians understand as well as their ancestors understood, that to take the bible as a historically accurate record of events which actually took place, is to undermine the allegorical complexity of the bible stories and to ignore their true worth as a record of human achievement, in both terms philosophical and cultural; a historical echo of a time when people were first learning to live with and love those from whom they were culturally so different, in recognition of their shared humanity. " For all this is understood by the vast majority of non-crazy Christians, as much as it is by those of us who do not believe there is any evidence of any Gods, or a supernatural aspect to reality whatsoever, there is nevertheless a traditionalist element within many American churches, who feel marginalised by certain key moves made by secular society, in recent years, which are designed to remind the religious of their espoused humility in contrast to their many strident, presumptuous and unconstitutional actions. The American Civil Liberties Union has, for example, changed via the legal system many long-standing traditions within American Christianity, such as with their successful campaign to enforce the Establishment clause of the constitution, by doing away with morning prayer in the state-run school system. There have also been successfully argued legal cases which resulted in the removal of nativity scenes from public spaces at Christmas
time. Those who find this an unnecessary intrusion into what are perceived as non-denominational traditions, celebrated by the religious and the non-religious alike for decades, are the primed and ready audience for creationist propaganda; already aggrieved at the perceived erosion of their traditions by those who merely seek to uphold the law. " Rightwing evangelicals repeatedly bring legal challenge to the teaching of evolution in American classrooms, by way of an attempt to redress this balance—despite that there have been various rulings over the years which have found both Intelligent Design and creationism to be “without any scientific merit” and Darwinian evolution to be a scientific fact. " In States such as Texas, where as well as having an ostensibly large groundswell of support in the Republican party electorate, church groups also hold sway over the wording and textual content of school books, which are used by the entire rest of the United States, due to the disproportionately larger purchasing power of the Texas School Board of Education, the argument being put forward, by those who insist the United States needs to harken back to more “traditional values”, by seeking to “redress the balance” and iron out “a bias towards the liberal agenda” in science education, has seen a number of State boards of Education effectively hijacked by a small minority of pro-creationists who are, ironically, just as demonstrably and indeed openly bias towards rightwing conservatism as they claim those who simply want to teach the facts are towards “a liberal, godless agenda”. " In Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia and more recently Texas this tit-for-tat swapping out of rationalism for dogmatism has seen warning labels placed on school science text books; pitched battles between parents over their childrenʼs right to a fair and honest education, has given rise to a supreme irony which goes to the heart of the evangelical movement; that even those who are credited with claiming Christianity on behalf of the Republican party, have been forced to speak out against. " The Theologian Francis Schaeffer, widely credited as founding the fundamentalist presuppositional Protestant movement, that lead to the political resurgence of The Chris24
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tian Right in the 1980ʻs, with his book ʻA Christian Manifestoʼ, has been publicly criticised by his own son, Frank, who points out that there was never any intention in his fatherʼs work to attack or undermine scientific progress. Indeed, to now insist upon such a strange and wilfully ignorant course of action, simply in the name of harkening back to a “simpler time”, is akin to exactly the kind of theocratic oppression the founding fathers of the United States sought to flee from the British, in order to found a free and open, secular, democratic republic, with liberty and justice for all. The American right has, in other words, become the very thing Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and others, feared the most. " Intelligent Design is, for all the world to see, a blatant divide and conquer, fear and mistrust political play; literally a wedge strategy, led by wilfully mislead individuals, dancing to the tune of a giant tax free organisation who have learned very quickly, thanks to their powerful friends in Washington, how to manufacture the appearance of a grass roots movement, which no right-minded person would endorse given all the facts. That the Intelligent Design movement has been made to appear as a legitimate rift between differing scientific opinions, is a total and complete fabrication—stage managed by The Christian Right, churned over by the conservative press, sympathetic to the rightwing Republican agenda and eagerly consumed by the blissfully ignorant underclass, with an ambitious hunger for self-congratulatory mysticism and sugarcoated fan fiction, purposefully designed to be just beyond their scholastic ability to fully comprehend. "If you disagree with what I'm going to say, please do not give me your opinion, because I'm not interested. I only want to know what the Bible says. “The grass-roots movement you see across America right now, with the school board battles, with the students questioning evolution in colleges, all of that is really in a big part due to the work of Dr. Henry Morris. All of us in the modern creationism movement today would say we stand on his shoulders.
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“You see, a belief that the Earth is billions of years old means that death, disease and bloodshed have been around from the beginning rather than entering as a result of Adam's sin, as the Bible teaches. What a difference it makes when these non-Christians are shown that this is a fallen world it was once perfect, but now is groaning. “These scientists look at this present, groaning world, and assume that if this is the world God made, and declared "very good", then He canʼt be loving and all-powerful. When Christians say the world is billions of years old, they are reinforcing this idea.” - Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis
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Rewriting history
" One further irony in teaching anti-science to children, in the name of traditional Christian values, is that the creation myth as it appears in the book of Genesis has its origins not in The Hebrew Bible, but in Paganism. Indeed the archetype for most of the creation myths throughout all the worldʼs religions, find their roots in one of the oldest works of literature known to man; an Iraqi poem called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Pieced together from a series of twelve Sumerian legends and poems, carved into clay tablets for the Library of Ashurbanipal, now held at The British Museum in London and made sometime between 1300 and 1000 BC. The tale not only recalls perhaps the earliest known creation story in all folklore, but also the origin of the great flood myth and other tales which would eventually become erroneously believed by half the world to be unique to Judaeo-Christian scripture. " The lead character in the tale, Gilgamesh, tells of the struggle for triumph in the face of adversity. He is: " “...the first tragic hero of whom anything is known and is the most typical of individual man in his search for understanding, and of this search the conclusion must be tragic. It is perhaps surprising that anything so old as a story of the third millennium B.C. should still have power to move, and still attract readers in the twentieth century A.D., and yet it does. The narrative is incomplete and may remain so; nevertheless, it is today the first surviving epic poem from any period until the appearance of Homer's Iliad; and it is immeasurably older.” - Sandars (1978) i
" In Gilgamesh we see the story of a man faced with the same trials and tribulations, in his day-to-day life, that all humans throughout the ages can relate to. Man has always yearned to make sense of mystery and relate their struggle in that quest to other men. What we see in Gilgamesh is that people have always wondered about the fundamental questions: How did we get here? What is life for? Similarly we see that man has always sought to answer these questions with artistic expression; trying to say what cannot be said. Anyone who seeks to belittle that endeavour, by flattening out
the undulations and exceptional beauty in the imperfection of any one set of ideas, by encasing them in dogma and ridged idealism, fundamentally misunderstands what the traditions behind those myths and folklore were designed to rely to future generations, when they were first told and later written down. This is why creationism is such an affront to common sense—not because it seeks to insert a designer into the grand scheme of things—but because it seeks to challenge centuries of ernest, sincere thinking by the greatest minds, with tiny, non-thinking, circular arguments that only its most fervent believers afford any credibility—and even then in the face of numerous reasons to desist, often voiced from within the very churches they seek to usurp. This, then, is far from being simply a black and white struggle between hardline atheists and believers which ID proponents often try to make it out to be. “Evolution is scientifically impossible. Evolution is a religious belief, a major tenet of atheism. Evolution is foolish and destructive. Make no mistake, evolution is atheism. Evolution is the creation story of atheist religion” - Joe Cienkowski, a random internet lunatic who has watched one too many Ken Ham lectures on YouTube who then proceeds to scatter his received opinion on blatant falsehoods around the internet like a shitting hippo with its ears glued shut. La la la, Iʼm not listening
" So a loyal army of non-evolved drones go out into the wicked world, armed with half truths and poorly understood non-arguments that have been debunked a million times before. The more technically adventurous among them will Google certain keywords and eventually stumble upon an enthusiastic blogger, spoiling for a fight. They read the comments from laughing out loud and rolling on the floor “atheists” (a term used by creationists even to describe other Christians who happen to understand Darwinian evolution for what it is, rather than what it isnʼt) and heroically find themselves coming to the aid of the only other fundamentalist who ventured to publish their comments for all the world to read before them. And so begins yet another unfortunate series of 28
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straw man arguments; in which misrepresenting (often wilfully) the position of their opponents, in order to debunk a truth-claim only the neophyte herself is making in the first place, is neatly ignored so as to avoid the really interesting questions. " I say that straw man arguments are unfortunate because it is as sure a sign as you could wish for, that anyone who opens their tirade (as these things often are) against, more usually, the entire scientific establishment, with sweeping generalisations about either the person of Charles Darwin himself or (more likely) the fascist perversion of his ideas in Nazi Eugenics, isnʼt ever likely to understand the logical fallacy to which they are committed, much less be dissuaded of it by mere evidence or common sense. The futility often felt by those of us who attempt, at least, to meet the demands of those who are determined nevertheless to pick the wrong fight on fraudulent credentials are often reminded of the truism, you cannot reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into. " The argument generally, or eventually, boils down to a textbook example of circular reasoning and a commitment to one or more logical fallacies. Indeed nothing acts as a more reliable indicator as to how honest the ensuing conversation with a new entrant into the game is likely to end up, than the early appearance of either the phrase, “I used to believe in evolution” or better yet, “I used to be an atheist”. " “I believe I was created by God as it says in the bible. Atheists donʼt believe in anything, therefore they canʼt account for who created them. Darwin couldnʼt explain where life came from, so to believe in evolution requires faith, just as it requires faith to believe in the bible. Who would you rather trust, the God who made you or Charles Darwin?” " " The immediately obvious thing someone new to refuting creationism is struck by, is how someone who doesnʼt understand that believing something and proving something are two very different things, managed to make it into their teens, much less their twenties and thirties, without forgetting how to 29
walk and talk at the same time. Their assertions that a lack of belief in the truth-claims of the theist are akin to therefore believing in nothing at all, are as factually flawed—and obviously so to anyone with even the slightest degree of intellectual honesty—as asserting that those who do subscribe to some kind of theistic thinking, must therefore believe in everything; that the entirety of the religious are made up of naught but super-credulous morons incapable of differentiating between fantasy and reality on any level. Pointing out that this is clearly not the case, has been known to produce an audible “swooshing” sound, directly above the creationistʼs head, which is so loud it deafens them entirely to whatever else one might say by way of a practical example of this, such as the number of evolutionary biologists who are practising, confessed Christians, or the important work of astrophysicists who also just so happen to be Catholic priests. " Similarly the assertion that not believing in God disqualifies someone from believing in anything at all, is a fatuous one and only ever made on behalf of the non-religious, by those who understand the atheistic argument the least. This, interestingly, is rarely the understanding of non-theism shown by the earnest theologians or biblical scholars, but is invariably a view held by those who presume to understand the limitations of theology, whilst in reality possessing very little knowledge outside of their particular Christian denomination as to what has, in fact, been taught in seminary colleges around the world, about the correct way to view and study scripture, for many hundreds of years. " The narrower the focus which is placed by a given church on particular areas of contention within the bible, the narrower the understanding that particular sect will have of those individual scholars and schools of theological learning who have sought to rectify the many and varied contradictions in the bible for centuriesii . These narrow focus churches breed those who preach upon logical fallacies in comment threads and debating forums right across the Internet and in all the languages of the world. If youʼve ever read something on-line which makes your head hurt with “epic fail” it is these kinds of small congregation churches which are ultimately to blame. 30
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" Armchair preachers with no more by way of research under their belts than woo-woo clips on YouTube and an extremely gullible personality disorder, are as much the product of these single issue churches, as they are too the perfect audience for much of the anti-science propaganda behind the success of The Discovery Institute, Ken Hamʼs Answers In Genesis, convicted fraudster and self-titled dinosaur expert Kent Hovind and end of the dial, late-night cable TV infomercial stalwarts Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron—who celebrated the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwinʼs first publication of ʻOn the Origin of Speciesʼ by printing and giving away on college campuses a version of the book which included a 50 page introduction, that rehashed every clichéd wilful misunderstanding of evolutionary theory which has ever been proffered since the bookʼs original publication. " It is these tactics which fly in the face of the theological traditions upon which the Christian church was founded that essentially attempts to establish a new way of understanding scripture, stripped bare of its historical framework with an intensive focus placed instead on moulding the behaviour and political idealism of a malleable and wilfully ignorant congregation; individuals highly susceptible to pseudo-science, which is often either a complete fabrication, dressed up in computer graphics and distorted, disingenuous nonsense or part made-up, part-legitimate science mixed in with purely speculative, schoolboy sci-fi, that only someone confessedly disinterested in the rational could possibly be persuade to afford it any validity. " " No one group of people are more acutely aware of the effects these programs of misinformation have in the real world, than the parents and students of Dover, York County, Pennsylvania, who were forced to sue their own school board after it was taken over by creationists, supported by The Foundation for Thought and Ethics and publisher of the book Of Pandas and People—a textbook advocating Intelligent Design and The Thomas More Law Centre, whose stated goals are “defending the religious freedom of Christians, restoring 31
"time honoured values" and protecting the sanctity of human life.” " Of Pandas and People by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon is a pseudo-science book, designed to appear like any ordinary school textbook, but which in-fact presents “various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution”. Because the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that “the teaching of creationism in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the United States constitution, but that alternative scientific theories could be taught” [authorʼs emphasis], some of the text in ʻPandasʼ had to be hastily altered so as to remove ʻcreationismʼ and replace it with new, scientific sounding buzz-words such as ʻdesign proponentsʼ, so that it might circumvent the law and be used in the Dover County classroom. Amusingly, this was done with such haste, that early drafts of the ʻnewʼ edition of ʻPandasʼ contained the term ʻcdesign proponentsistsʼ, where the word processor Find and Replace tool had simply been used to cut the word ʻcreationistʼ out and replace it with the phrase ʻdesign proponentsʼ—such is the level of interest these people actually have in genuine scientific rigouriii . " Luckily, the parents of Dover County demanded a higher standard of education for their children than the authors of ʻPandasʼ did of themselves, and not only did they successfully manage to prevent the use of the textbook in their school, but they did so by decisively winning a long a protracted legal case that drew world-wide attention, which ultimately dealt a very public and decisive blow against Intelligent Design. " In summation, the George Bush appointed, church-going, ultra-conservative judge, John E. Jones III, who was recommended to the bench by the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, Rick Santorum, ruled of the Kitzmiller Vs. Dover case, that... " “..the overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere relabelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory. " “We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking 32
Please donʼt feed the troll and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. " “The one textbook [Pandas] to which the Dover ID Policy directs students contains outdated concepts and flawed science, as recognized by even the defence experts in this case. " “ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID. " “Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.” - Judge Jones, December 20, 2005iv Irreducible Complexity
" In his books advocating Intelligent Design, which led to the attempt to introduce ʻPandasʼ into Doverʼs classrooms in the first place, Michael Behe—a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Centre for Science and Culture, introduces the scientific sounding concept, alluded to in Judge Jones summation, of Irreducible Complexity (IC). " The idea behind IC is that certain constituent parts of bacteria, such as the flagellum tail which bacteria use to drive themselves along, canʼt be observed in simpler life-forms performing more rudimentary tasks. Hence, Behe contends, they could not have evolved and therefore they must have been designed as-is. " The only problem with Michael Beheʼs impressive sounding apparent proof of design in nature, which canʼt be explained by Darwinian natural selection, is that the only science books which endorse it are written by Michael Behe and are published by The Discovery Institute. Meanwhile, in the real world, it is fully understood that all bacterial flagellum have a similar structure and partial similarity in amino acid 33
sequence, showing that the eukaryotic flagellum and cilium have evolved from the cytoskeleton—a protein found in both plant and animal cells and which is therefore, contrary to Beheʼs claims, found in a wide variety of both less complex and far more complex organisms.v " Despite that Beheʼs argument fell apart in the court room as comprehensively as it did, and despite that a major component of its defeat was contained in the expert testimony of a confessed Roman Catholic, the lead witness for the plaintiffs, Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology and Royce Family professor for teaching excellence at Brown University, this still hasn't stopped the pro-ID campaigners use of Beheʼs now completely discredited ideas, in their continuing tirade against science in the classroom. " The only thing which is guaranteed to prevent ID supporters from attempting another insertion of creationism into the public school system is a greater public awareness of what The Discovery Institute is about and on what flimsy grounds they make their claims. This, ultimately then, is about the vigilance of parents and honest school boards made of ordinary people who are interested only in giving the best education to their children possible. And for the victory scored in defence of rationalism, by the parents of Dover Country, we should be eternally grateful. " i http://www.creationism.org/csshs/v06n2p10.htm" ii http://www.harpercollins.com/author/microsite/books.aspx?authorid=28093 iii http://ncse.com/creationism/legal/pandas-drafts iv http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf v http://saier-144-51.ucsd.edu/~saier/bimm130/reading130/week4/paper4c.pdf
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Backwards and forwards " Most Christians are as much in awe of the universe around them as everyone else. They donʼt pretend that the bible answers some of the most profound questions any sentient creature must ask of itself. But that doesnʼt mean they couldnʼt do with being reminded, now and then, of what their most cherished beliefs ask the rest of us to accept without evidence. " For example, it is true that many Christians believe that by praying, the laws of nature may be suspended to fulfil the will of an individual, so long as that person commits themselves to a certain set of beliefs. There is no easy or polite way to say to someone, no matter how hard you might try, that prayer is a fallacious and deluded homage to their externalised ego—there just isn't. No matter how you phrase it, you're either being too weak, for fear of causing offence, or too strong in an attempt to define just what is at stake when someone invokes faith as a panacea for each of the valid and logical reasons to discount the invocation of faith itself. "I believe because I have faith" is not the knock-down answer far too many Christians think it is." " To disassemble that, let's look at it from another point of view. I am absolutely convinced that any one performance of the Frank Zappa band, between 1970 and 1990, stands as sufficient proof to support my belief that he was the greatest American composer of the modern era. I shouldn't need to play someone any one piece of music or any particular performance of that piece, in order to convince them as completely as I am convinced, that this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and beauty of pure music. " But if it should happen to be that, for some reason, someone isn't as moved by, say, the Terry Bozzio drum solo from 'Baby Snakes' as I am, how reasonable would it be for me to inform that person that, when they die, Frank Zappa will judge them on their subjective opinion of his music? Moreover, how do we begin to accurately measure the likelihood that this is true, versus the likelihood that this is merely my opinion of
their taste? How do we separate the two? More importantly still, what would we be saying about someone who asserted that, in their subjective opinion, Zappa will determine, in his judgement, that this person is therefore either wilfully lost or emotionally frightened of their true musical calling, which is hidden from them now but will be revealed to them at such a time as they are prepared to fundamentally shift their existing position—no matter how strong the grounds upon which their existing position is founded? " It is the case, whether the self-effacing religious appreciate it or not, that this is exactly the sort of message which is being sent out to those of us who are not religious, every time it is echoed, in statements such as those which say if you only knew what I know, you would be a Christian too. There is an assumption inherent to all such vocabulary of the religious, like this, which assumes only other people who also subscribe to a certain set of unfounded beliefs can truly claim to understand the nature of God—and I believe this, perhaps more than anything else those Christians who genuinely strive to walk the rice paper, clouds the true purpose of life and the true meaning of freedom itself; because it says that, no matter what the individual political, social, intellectual and economic circumstances of another person may be, so long as they read from and believe in the same truth-claims made on behalf of the bible as any other believer—the resurrection, the immaculate conception, the contradictory accounts of the last supper and crucifixion—there is, no matter what, a commonality between them and other believers, that transcends everything else that may be true of that person, or what they may do and say, which absolves them of any actions they may bring down upon someone else. " This is an extremely dangerous and dishonest view of the real world. It encourages forgiveness for things which are unforgivable and absolves the individual of their personal responsibility. It is the snide, passive aggressive "I'll pray for you" at the end of a conversation the religionist just flat out lost. It is the tacit acceptance, perhaps for reasons of social conformity, that Pat Robertson and Mother Teresa are at polar opposites, while in reality they are two sides of the same coin. 36
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It is the system that allows pedophile priests to continue offending while their victims are silenced. It is the collection of priceless art treasures in a tax-free palace made of gold, while the gap between the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich expands exponentially day-by-day. It is standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel while they murder people in their own land. It is Sarah Palin and Ken Ham; Ted Haggard and Rush Limbaugh. In short, it is doing to the least of our brothers that which we would not have done to ourselves. " So it is no use, whatsoever, for people like me to highlight the obvious lunacy of extremists in the Christian faith, if normal people from within that religion do and say nothing when they have the chance, in the almost perverse belief that to properly observe Christian traditions you must ignore tangible reality. You do not become more like the man they called Christ when you tolerate the spread of things which are not true about people who have done nothing wrong in merely insisting, on grounds of simple common sense, to refuse to believe in faith or have faith in belief. " There is no Christianity. There is no atheism. There is only behaviour, good and bad—just as there is good and bad music. And no amount of believing in things that are not true, or encouraging others to believe them too, will magically transform bad ideas into good ones. The only thing that will wake people up to the reality of this incredible universe we are lucky enough to inhabit at this particular moment in space-time, is the truth—and the truth is, as I believe a growing number of self-described moderate Christians are beginning to appreciate more and more, as they talk to the nonreligious both on-line and in their own communities and families—that when they truly come to understand why they do not believe in Allah, Zeus, Mithras or Ra, it will be for the same reasons atheists, like me, do not believe in Yahweh. "Isn't the garden beautiful enough, without believing there are fairies living at the bottom of it?" - Douglas Adams
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" Heidi, a Christian friend of mine, read the above text and we began a series of email exchanges. I include her responses, by her kind permission: The argument is compelling, that someone of faith misses out on the evaluation of evidence and data, reason and true analysis. I would argue that a person who grounds their life in only faith is incomplete in their approach to life, and likewise, a person who grounds their life in only reason is incomplete in their approach to life. To see life clearly and wholly, one must combine the two -- faith and reason. I've often told atheists on Twitter that faith and reason are at odds, and to a great degree they are. " But as I was thinking this through, given the videos you sent, this also occurred to me: You use music as an example, and ironically, that's the same example I was going to give you. " Let's say you are a student of Mozart. You know the ins and outs of every symphony, opera, even the compositions he wrote at a very young age. You can discuss his life, his philosophy and how it related to his compositions. And let's take this example further: you're a world-renowned expert on this composer, and even conductors come to you, seeking your input on Mozart's intentions for how the music was to be played. " OK. The twist to this story is that with all of this knowledge, reason, evidence, understanding ... you as this world expert are deaf. You've never heard the symphony, you've never listened to a classical pianist trill out the arpeggios. In short, you've never experienced Mozart. " Now let's translate this example over to Christians and their claim that "you just don't know." The reason we say this is not to be condescending or arrogant. The reason is solely tied to our experience of God. And I would go so far as to say that those atheists who say they were former Christians ... never really experienced Him. Because to experience Him, it's like absorbing Mozart, with all of that knowledge behind you about him. " Atheists say that you have to have evidence and then they'll believe. Christians say that you have to believe ... and then you'll experience the evidence. " Now you brought up something else that is a really good point -what about those so-called Christians like Joe, Juanita, Tammy Baker, etc.? Do they really experience God? " You know as well as I do that there are false people, claiming to know or believe something, all to their personal gain. These people are fraudulent. You know them the minute you see them. Just because they claim it doesn't mean it is true in their lives. And the reason I know this is that Jesus point-blank said, there are many peo"
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Please donʼt feed the troll ple who think they're getting into Heaven and will be shocked when the door is slammed in their faces. Why? Because He never knew them. Why? Because they weren't for real. " Let's bring this full circle now. Can faith and reason be combined? Absolutely. I would argue that as a Christian, I experience God in my life in innumerable ways. At the same time, I examine claims that people make, I examine scientific evidence, I dig deep into various philosophical approaches and gather opinions of people who disagree with me as well as those who agree with me. I use my reasoning capabilities to see if my belief can be affirmed. And every single time, it is affirmed. " It doesn't make me better than you. It certainly is true that there are many atheists with high morals. I don't dispute this at all. We all have that moral compass within us, and my belief is that it is further evidence of God's existence, because He gave it to all of us. The difference is that I've experienced God. You have studied God, just like that expert in my example studied Mozart, but you are deaf to Him, just like the "expert" was deaf to the music. In short, you haven't experienced Him. " That's just off the top of my head for now ... oh, and don't worry about "offending" me. I know that this is just a good exercise, that you're a good guy. Differences of opinion do not dictate someone's goodness. "
Talk soon.
To which I replied: " With respect—as always—you've rather made my point for me, perhaps half intentionally and perhaps half absentmindedly. Your analogy is sound, but it still depends on a faith position. Nevertheless, we're in danger of congratulating ourselves for agreeing to disagree, when we might otherwise constructively asses each other's position more vigorously. So let us instead switch to what can be said about the status of the truth-claims made, by the religious, precisely because they believe their experiences are proof of a supernatural aspect. " It has long been held that while we might discount habitual or cultural religion as nothing more than the subjective experiences of its adherents, we are nevertheless no closer to understanding how we got here in the first place, than were our ancient ancestors who first devised the mythology and phi39
losophy upon which so much religion is built. This why something, rather than nothing argument, also known as anthropic reasoning, is widely considered the last intellectual barrier to naturalism and it appeals to a logical fallacy known as the God of the gaps. " In June 2001, the WMAP satellite was launched into space, to study the cosmic background radiation leftover from the big bang. By triangulating distances between fixed points on what is known as the last scattering surface, after years of painstakingly finely tuned measurements, made with unrivalled accuracy, teams of scientists from all around the world, using WMAP data, proved—beyond a shadow of doubt—that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, as predicted by Edwin Hubble many years earlier. " Because of this, we are now able to say—with a degree of certainty equivalent to measuring the distance between a fixed point in New York to a fixed point in London to within half the width of a human hair—that the universe is not only flat, but it contains exactly zero energy. If that last statement doesn't blow your mind, it should, because a flat universe allows us rule out the possibility of both a closed universe and a curved universe. " An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton. The universe as we know it is, in other words, made of more 'nothing', than it is 'something'. Staggeringly, this not only fits with a prediction of a flat universe, made by cosmologists several years before WMAP, but it means that potentially, within our lifetime, we may assert for the first time in the history of time itself, an absolute truism about the nature of our existence: that the big bang was the result of an observable phenomena known as a Quantum Fluctuation. Put simply, the universe came from what we think of as 'nothing', but which is in-fact more abundant than the kind of energy we think of as 'something'. " It's at this point terms like 'nothing' and 'something' become amorphous. So we instead call this 'nothing' Dark Energy and Dark Matter. We donʼt know anything more about it by calling it something else, but itʼs better than the word ʻnothingʼ for two very important reasons. Firstly, it is often asserted on 40
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behalf of people who do not believe there is any evidence of any supernatural intervention in reality, that they must therefore believe everything came from nothing. You cannot interact with Dark Matter at all. Even the smallest of near massless particles, neutrinos—which are so abundant throughout the universe that, even as you read this, millions of them, which originated in exploding stars, billions of light years away, are passing through your body, through the Earth at your feet and are continuing out into the void of space, completely undisturbed by your existence. Even these tiny particles of energy don't interact with dark energy in any way we can detect. In fact the only reason we postulate dark energy at all is because, without it, none of our observations of the universe make any sense. We know it's there because we know everything that is there wouldn't work without it. That is why, as a second reason to avoid the word ʻnothingʼ, we also need to understand what the absence of ʻsomethingʼ really would look like—and for that we postulate Dark Matter, but it might as well be blancmange or custard for all it tells us about what else there is still to find out. " So, ask yourself this. Which is more likely to lead to a better understanding of this so-called Dark Energy? An application of the same deductive logic which lead to Einsteinʼs description of space-time, or the duplicitous behaviour of the electron and just about everything which we have begun to understand in just the last 300 years, or, are we more likely to learn something new about the universe around us by dedicating silent prayer to the Israelite God of war? Perhaps, if the latter is true, we should begin setting alight to a witches again, just in case not setting alight to them angers Him greatly? " How would a combination of these two approaches to understanding, as you have tentatively suggested we should adopt, lead to a better description of the phenomena we are charged with studying? Moreover, what does the validation of this discovery tell us about the truth-claims made by those who assert that the universe was instead created by an unchanging mind—exterior to our understanding—but who we allude to poetically and symbolically as God? What does 41
continuing to call this mystery 'God' any longer actually achieve at this point? Does it improve our understanding, or does it validate, however accidentally, those who have already held hostage to the use of the word 'God' for their own ends for far too long as it is? " And if we do continue to use this new definition of God, free of its meaningless connotations, imbued instead with intellectual honesty, we should rescue from the ashes of Christian mythology the belief that to know God, is to know yourself. Perhaps then we can abandon superstition and deadend, non-reasoning that only serves to pacify the already docile and continue instead together, as one human race in truth and love. No war, no religion, no devision. You might say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. "The real miracle is there are no miracles" - Albert Einstein
" To which Heidi replied: Maybe I'm approaching all of this too simplistically ... but I read this information and the only thing that comes to mind is this: "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." -- Genesis 1:2-3 Why doesn't anything of what you described validate this? Who says that the dark energy is God? Why couldn't God just have used the "darkness," as is described in these verses above and as you actually describe as "dark energy," as means for creation? Certainly it seems to me that they may in fact have discovered His method -- it doesn't invalidate Him at all, 42
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though. In fact, to me this could bolster everything, unless I'm mis-reading it. And to answer your question, "How would these two approaches lead to a better description of the phenomena we are charged with studying?" -- It does exactly that! It describes the method of creation in a more exact and specific way than the Genesis account -- but it certainly does not invalidate it. " To which I replied: " Heidi, you're asking me to suspend critical faculty to accommodate your subjective opinion again. I thought we'd agreed to go beyond that? You're asking me to acknowledge a link between a bronze-age creation myth—one to which you just so happen to be emotionally committed—and scientifically ascertained evidence. " There is, you'll be happy to know, an evolutionary answer to the question of why you are comfortable with this and it explains why we have the need for the scientific method in the first place. Consider 150 thousand years ago you are an ancient ancestor of Humans, the Australopithecine. You are walking along a sandy path in the baking mid-day African sun. You are walking on your back legs, with a brain in your head as complex and as capable as the one which would later evolve in Homo sapien-sapien. A thorn bush to your left rustles to the sound of breaking twigs and stops you in your stride. Is it a snake, or a mouse? You have to decide quickly over a matter of life and death. " Then out of the corner of your eye you see it. A long spindly body, covered in scales, with a flattened head and sharp protruding teeth, just about to rise up and bite your leg. In a blink of an eye you realise it's not actually a snake at all, but a branch of a dried out tree. Your eyes—or rather your brain— deceived you into thinking the worst case scenario, because it was essential for your survival in that split second to assume the object was a snake, than it was to be complacent and assume it was a fallen tree branch. 43
" This ability of the human brain to see pattern where there is none to be had, is an essential part of our survival mechanism. Our enlarged adrenal gland, disproportionately sized in comparison to our frontal lobe, gives Homo Sapiens their unique ability to think creatively and develop abstract solutions to complex problems as well as our so-called 'fight or flight' instinct. But this automatic call and response inability to see what is true from what we irrationally suppose to be so, is also our downfall, in terms of being capable of objectively processing information, because we are hard wired to see relationships, however abstract and distant, between what are more often entirely unrelated events. " It is no different when we overlay mythologies to which we happen to be emotionally committed upon an entirely coincidental series of events. For example, people who receive an early diagnosis of treatable cancer, who immediately receive medication and perhaps radiation treatment. The best medical care the 21st century can offer, delivered by the best trained doctors and nurses in the world. But because they recount the Catholic rosary twice a day, they will forever thank Our Lady of Lourdes for their successful delivery from a killer disease which for all the prayers in the world they simply wouldn't have made it through without medical science. " Similarly, I describe to you in admittedly extremely simplified terms, exactly what we know about the more than likely means by which the entire universe came into being and your immediate instinct (for want of a better word) was to seek out a relationship between the analogy and the mythology; the fact and the fiction. Again, I apologies for fictionalising something I know you are greatly attached to, but we're exploring possibilities here, not antagonising or goading. " This identifies one of the great problems of 'the God hypothesis', known as the problem of infinite regress. Suppose, as you suggest, instead of calling it Dark Matter we call it God, or DGod for clarity. Do we know anything more about the make-up of Dark Energy / Dark Matter by simply changing its name? At what rate of acceleration close to light speed would we have to collide two discrete packets of DGod into each other to observe their makeup? What can we infer from 44
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that collision about how DGod interacts with other particles of DGod? At what point did DGod come into existence? Did DGod form previous to the big bang, or was DGod made at the same time as time itself, or slightly later—perhaps at the same time as the heavy elements in collapsing stars? And if DGod only came into existence after the singularity—after the Quantum Fluctuation which led to the big bang itself—how does that tell us anything constructive about DGod's roll in the creation event itself? " You see the problem. We get ourselves no closer to describing the phenomena we want to understand by telling ourselves that we have unlocked some deep meaning in bronze-age scripture, simply by re-labelling things and cheating ourselves into some sort of poetic or symbolic relationship between what are, in fact, entirely unconnected events. We simply self-confirm what we already believed to be true before we began to investigate and without exploring the possibility we were wrong. This is the exact opposite of a scientific approach. " This leads me to a question I have asked many Christians and those who describe themselves as 'spiritual' and have yet to receive an answer for, despite that I think it genuinely confronts what we know to be true about the nature of nature, versus what the religious / spiritual would like to be so. " What, to you, would constitute reasonable evidence to conclude that you are mistaken? What would your most capable critic say that would show you, unequivocally, that Christian mythology is no more likely to be an accurate account of events in the history of the world, than any other folklore passed down from other civilisations, which predate those observed by the Judaeo-Christians—such as Easter and Christmas, for example? What more does the scientific method of deductive logic have to do, to show you that the human eye only ever sees what it wants to see? " And Heidi replied: Here's the thing, though, Jim. 45
" You're doing the same thing you're accusing me of doing. By that statement, I mean this: You say, "We simply selfconfirm what we already believed to be true before we began to investigate and without exploring the possibility we were wrong." " Here's how I look at it ... you self-confirm what you believe (or don't believe) by asking more questions that can't possibly be answered. You listed a bunch of questions about the dark energy, to which we have no answer yet. But you refuse to entertain this: How much of a coincidence is it that an ancient writer, without any of the scientific data and technology that we have today, described the darkness that has now been found? I mean, think about it! I know you say that my emotional attachment to the story and evolutionary make-up leads me to ask this question. But again, it's combining the need to collect information and seeing if it matches the Biblical account. (combination of reason and faith). " You say I've asked you to suspend critical faculty to accommodate my subjective opinion. I would respond that you're asking me to suspend my faith, to exclude it, from evaluating the scientific data and to see whether it confirms or negates the Biblical account. Which leads me to the questions you posed at the end. You asked: " "What would constitute reasonable evidence for you to conclude that you are mistaken? What could your most capable critic possibly say that would show you, unequivocally, that Christian mythology is no more likely to be an accurate account of events in the history of the world, than all the folklore and traditions of countless long forgotten civilisations? What more does the scientific method of deductive logic have to do, to show you that the human eye only ever sees what it wants to see?" " I don't know if my answer will bring us to an impasse or not, but here goes, anyway: " I don't think there is reasonable evidence to negate it. I hear things like you just described, I compare it to the Biblical account, and it matches. That's not a coincidence, in my opinion, and I have the same viewpoint that you do of me -that you swat that confirmation away like an annoying insect, unwilling to explore the possibility that there really is something to faith. 46
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" I do look at the Bible critically, and the reasons I embrace it are not tied to evolution. When I ask a question of God, He shows me through the Bible the answer. Now I know that's laughable to you, but it goes back to the supernatural relationship that we have with Him. And it also goes back to my original analogy of the deaf person who knows everything about Mozart but hasn't heard the music. If you haven't heard God speaking to your heart because you're deaf to His voice, none of this will make sense. All of it will seem like gibberish, a folklore, a fairytale. And rightly so. I would think the same thing, had I not experienced Him. " So that leads me to answer your questions with one word: Nothing. Nothing would convince me otherwise, because I know God is real, dwelling with me. I see too many miracles every day not to believe. And another thing I wanted to address -- you referenced the people dying with cancer and praying for healing and sciences' role, etc. " I myself am going through a horrific experience right now. God doesn't shield us from bad things happening to us. And I don't blame God for what has happened to me. It is what it is. I accept the good and I accept the bad. And through it all, I trust Him to guide me, and He does -- so that goes back to my "experiencing" Him. I don't know if the situation will be resolved to my liking, but I do know that God is good and that He is helping me through it. " And I might turn the question around to you: " What would it take for you to be willing to grab onto blind faith? I know that you'll say proof, but that's not what faith is about. We don't have proof. But when we grab it and accept it, all of a sudden it's as if a veil has lifted. We see everything clearly, not in one-dimensional aspects. " So I'll leave you with this ... and I usually don't like quoting Bible with atheists because I know you guys hate that, but this ties into everything we've discussed:
"The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: 47
'For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?' But we have the mind of Christ." - I Corinthians 2:14-16 " To which my reply was as follows: " I am not asking you to suspend your faith to accommodate my opinion. I am asking you to accept that your faith is informed by your subjective opinion and is therefore invalid. My opinion is as irrelevant as yours. It is what we can prove to be true that matters—as you have acknowledged in your own words when you candidly admit your faith is dependent upon their being no evidence. " It is the very lack of a credible evidence to support the truth-claims of your faith that causes you to believe in them all the more. Against that kind of thinking there is no recourse to rationalism. That you have admitted as much in your own words says more about faith than I ever could, at least without endangering the possibility that our dialogue might stray into personal attack. I do not attack your personal beliefs, when I question your logic—I don't need to. You have already conceded that there is no logic to your beliefs, but you've done so in the hope that I will accept this is why they are more likely to be true—when as I have already attempted to explain, your reason for accepting something does not constitute a reason for me to do the same. " Again, we're in danger of going over the same territory here and I've said what I have to say and you've been gracious enough to respond. But I would like to come back to what you're telling yourself to believe and why. But rather than going toe-to-toe on matters of scripture—which I'm happy to come back to in a historical context at another time—let's instead take the heat out of things a little and look at this from a statistical point of view. " You're probably familiar with the analogy that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare. This relates to the problem of chaos in a system; that given an infinite number of variables an infinite number of scenarios are 48
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just as likely to be played out as they are unlikely to ever occur. In this case we don't need an infinite number, we only need 8. " Jane places eight numbers on the National Lottery. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. The Lottery numbers are drawn and, in order, Jane's sequence from one to eight comes out and she wins the jackpot. We might be tempted to say she was not only lucky to win in the ordinary sense of the word, but that she was extra lucky because the numbers were also in a perfect ascending sequence. But in reality the odds that a perfect flush of numbers would be drawn every week is no more unusual than any other random sequence of eight numbers. There is nothing stopping this winning sequence from being drawn every time the numbers are called. We only place a greater importance on the winning numbers being sequential because we assign significance and relevance to systems which appear to display order. But every time we do this, we ignore the times the numbers are drawn where there is no particularly significant appearance of order to the sequence in which they appear. We remember the hits and ignore the misses. " So let's imagine two shepherds in a field, surrounded by their sheep, sitting on a hillside in what we today call Palestine, around 2500 years ago. One shepherd turns to the other, looks up to the stars in the sky and says, "Whoever put those stars in the sky, must have put us here as well", to which the other responds, "Yes, I agree. Everything we see and experience has a meaning beyond our understanding. We are a very special creation indeed". Impressed with their own awe and wonder at the beauty of the cosmos in the sky, they agree between themselves—and everyone else who shares in their beliefs—that what they have assumed about their place in the grand scheme of things is worthy of being passed on to future generations as if it is unquestionably true. " These future generations begin to see the same patterns in the sky that their forbears wrote about. They anthropomorphise these figures into signs of the zodiac. They see these signs appear at certain times of the year and place great importance on the rituals they associate with their recognition of 49
these symbols. Eventually they come to place great importance in adhering to the traditions passed down from those first two shepherds, now recounted in the folklore central to their way of life and they see pattern in these traditions as readily as they do the patterns in the stars. The two become synonymous and worshiped as artefacts of God. " Then, one year, they have a season where bad weather causes all the crops to fail and the infant mortality rate skyrockets. Assuming the sky God must be angry with them, for some reason, a neighbouring tribe seizes the opportunity to placate the sky God by invading their neighbouring enclaves—taking sheep and cattle, property and women. This conquering tribe settle and bring their own rites and traditions to the camp which is quickly becoming a city. Over the years these stories become written down in the history of that people, until the identity and meaning behind the traditions and ceremonial rites passed down become lost to the passage of time, until the only reason the descendants of our original two shepherds observe them any longer is because this very act of remembrance has become a tradition in its own right; an article of faith. " Remembering the analogy of the eight Lottery numbers, what can we now say about the basis upon which these rites and traditions are built? Are we telling ourselves there is a pattern and meaning to the traditions passed on from generation to generation, or are we merely imposing a meaning upon them because of how long they have stood for? What about the conquering tribe who imposed their own rituals upon their quarry which didn't survive into later generations? Why did the practise of stoning people to death for refusing to accept certain traditions fade away, while others remained strong? How did the distant relatives of our original two shepherds instinctively know that it was wrong to justify killing in the name of the traditions they grew to reject, no matter how strongly a belief in those traditions where held by their fathers? " The point is, any deeply religious person can cite scripture that chimes with their opinion until they're blue in the face. You can attach meaning to something where in reality there is 50
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none to be had all the live long day. But the very fact that the religious don't attach the same meaning to passages of the bible that don't chime with their existing beliefs is proof inand-of-itself that they are the ones making their own judgement call on scriptural meaning, not the other way around. The parts they pay attention to and the parts they ignore are as much a reflection of their innate humanity as they are proof that humanity itself transcends dogma, no matter how strong the emotional attachment that person may place upon the observance of certain traditions. " We're told that there is meaning in the bible; there is an answer to whichever question you might have within its pages—regardless of the fact that the only way you could possibly make any meaning of it in the first place, is if you have already decided, before you question, what you would like the answer to be. " And so we confront the fact that you have aligned yourself with every religionist I have asked the question in the last part of my previous reply, when you say you have never thought about what kind of evidence would cause you to accept you are mistaken—and that even if you had, it wouldn't cause you to change your mind, even if were it to present itself. Whereas what I hope I have shown you, in response to your request for me to ponder the same question in relation to my own position, is that there are myriad ways in which it is possible to deduce the odds of something being likely or unlikely to be true. All you have to do is exercise intellectual honesty and critical thinking—even if what you discover in that process challenges your most cherished beliefsi. "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" - William of Ockham, c. 1288 - 1348
" Again, Heidi replied: That you brought up the issue of personal attacks makes me think what I've said so far has angered you. If so, why? I feel no need to attack you personally or that I'm in the least angry. 51
We're just sharing differing points of view here. Am I misunderstanding what you were trying to communicate? OK, so that aside ... You sort of assumed something about me and my point of view to which I must take issue, and that is that I'm picking and choosing Scripture to quote at you to suit my opinion. This cannot be further from the truth. You bring up the issue of stoning and why don't people ever talk about something like that? Well in this context, it has none. What you're missing here is that the entirety of the Bible does fit together -- even the stoning part. And if you want, I'll walk you through it and why. But back to the issue at hand -- I brought up that particular Scripture verse because it immediately came to mind and immediately applied to this, just as I brought up the Scripture pertaining to darkness over the surface of the earth, because it pertained to what we were discussing. And this is the beauty of the whole thing. We're not talking about statistical probabilities. We're talking about a whole and complete story that is still being played out today and will be until time's end. You're assuming that people made it up and conveniently put it together and that people today conveniently use it to prove their points. How can thousands of people be using this same document like that? It must be prevalent for a good reason. Not only that, you're wrong that I decide what it's going to say to suit my needs. I had no idea what you were going to write to me. I had no way of preparing any point of view to suit my argument. I would submit that there is always an answer for you -- not only from me and others -- because this is a living document, i.e. God-breathed. But just to prove my point ... you can throw various Scriptures at me, and I guarantee you that I can show you how they are pieces of a mosaic that make up a complete picture. I'm not picking and choosing, Jim. It's all there, but you're just not seeing any of it in context at all, which is why you feel the way you do about it.
" Again, I responded: " You most certainly have not offended me. Â I was just making sure I wasn't offending you by being frank.
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" It does however amuse me no end that in response to being offered a perfectly reasonable explanation for why so many people the world over, for hundreds of years, have placed great emotional importance on scripture and the folklore and mythology upon which it is based, your counter to this, is to once again make my point for me by using the very same pattern of thinking that I was hoping to describe in your reply. Perhaps, then, this requires me to re-think some clearer analogies. " And Heidi once again was kind enough to reply: I think we're on the same page in not feeling offended. Do know that you can challenge my thinking without making me feel put down. " Now very respectfully, I have to tell you that I have understood everything you've said. Everything. I understand the reasoning, the marvelous scientific discoveries, the whole concept of reaching beyond what you think is folklore to pursuing fact and evidence. I do. " So why wouldn't I go along with this overwhelming argument? Why do other theists refuse to let go, despite all of this? Let's just try another analogy so that you can get another view. " You're stranded on a desert island. While discovering it, you walk through the brush and find a beautiful woman. She shares with you that she's the last living soul of a civilization that the world has never found. No one knows the location of this island, and no one knows about the people who lived there. Not only that, the reason she's the last person is that there was a horrific tsunami that carried everything away -- all trace evidence that this civilization existed. Somehow she survived, but no one else did. You fall in love with this woman and live a virtual Adam and Eve existence, but with no children. Eventually she gets sick and dies. You figure that you're there forever, too, so you send her off Viking style, on a burning pyle in the ocean. So now all evidence of her is gone. " A year passes. 53
" Suddenly, there's a helicopter in the air, a boat nearby, and people in the chopper have spotted you on the beach. You are rescued. " You come back to Britain and tell your story, but people tell you that you've hallucinated. They search the island and don't find any trace of this society you've described and of course all evidence of the woman has vanished. You are told by psychiatrists that you dreamed this up as a survival technique. " You know you have experienced this terrific love, however. You have absolutely no proof or evidence that it existed, but you know it's true. You cling to this knowledge until the day you die. " I don't know how else to describe the relationship with God. The reason I would reject all reason and sound argument is that I have experienced Him and His great love. I have. I would swear it on pain of death. I would. I know your arguments are fantastic. But I also know that God is a real Person. Again, this knowledge requires faith. " I know you feel like you've gone in circles with me. You may decide this has to be the end of discussion, which is fine, and I won't be angry about it. I know who I believe in -- I know He's real and I know His love is, too, just like in the story of you being on that island with that woman. "
" To which I gave one final answer: " As your example unfolded, I was thinking to myself, "How does this woman know we are the last people alive?" What kind of evidence did she present to show that this was the case and why should I accept it without corroboration? Did I simply take her at her word because she had pendulous breasts (I'm male so it's not unlikely) or did I question why she believed we were the last people alive? What did she know that I didn't and how did she come to know it? " OK, without picking apart the premise of your analogy too much—I get it—how would I describe what felt so real to me given the evidence that it was not? " Well, you're going to say I'm ducking the issue here but I promise you I'm not. If the overwhelming evidence showed that I had simply been in a coma and the whole experience had been a dream, then I would have to accept that this was 54
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the case—since I have no way of independently verifying what I have experienced. I might not like it and I might protest in the strongest terms, but it wouldn't change the fact that the burden of proof would remain upon my shoulders, to prove that the island and the girl were real, not the other way around and in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary." " Carl Sagan explores a similar thought experiment in his book 'Contact', which was later made into a film starring Jody Foster. The fact that this experience felt real to me is irrelevant. It really is. Because we only experience what our brains can interpret and our brains are incredibly susceptible to illusions precisely because they are limited to our experience. Let me expand. " Look at the squares marked A and B in the illustration below. No matter how long and hard you stare at the two squares with the naked eye, you will never see that A and B are in-fact exactly the same shade of grey. Your brain is so conditioned to accept that the checkerboard pattern is unbroken, that you completely ignore the effect of the shadow, cast by the upright green cylinder.
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We can demonstrate with a number of optical illusions like this, that the brain interprets visual stimuli against memory, or previously stored snap-shots of what it expects to see, despite that this doesn't always fit with what is actually there. " But what about emotions like love and anger? How do we know that these too are merely hormonal systems that our brain simply interprets as something more profound? " In the early-1990's scientists placed chimpanzees in an MRI scanner, to study which areas of their brains showed electrical activity when they performed certain tasks. They were studying one particular chimp who especially enjoyed eating. One day, while the chimp was sitting in the machine, they noticed that his brain showed the same activity it had shown when he was eating, even though on this occasion he didn't have anything in his mouth. They quickly realised that he was able to see a research assistant of whom he was particularly fond, eating her sandwiches through a pane of glass which connected the MRI room to the laboratory. " This led to the discovery of something called Mirror Neurons and a whole new area of neuroscience, which describes how we understand the behaviour of other people and how we learn new skills by imitation. To our brains, the experience of performing a task is no different to watching another perform that same task. The only thing stopping us from acting out that task as we watch, are motor inhibitors—which are found in areas of the brain that are faulty in people who suffer from somnambulism, or sleep walking. " If you watch a person standing up from a chair, moving across the room towards a fruit bowl, picking up a banana, pealing it and eating it, to your brain you too have just performed that exact same set of tasks. The only reason you know it is not you yourself performing that task, and that you should therefore resist the urge to physically act it out, is because of another phenomena known as theory of mind; or our ability to know not only what someone else might be thinking, but an awareness of their ability to know the same of us. Only humans have evolved this ability, but its origins in empathy and altruism are apparent in many animals besides just humansii. 56
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" So in your analogy, although I might feel great frustration that I am unable to show to others how real my experience on the desert island felt, I shouldn't let it cloud my understanding that a more rational explanation for my experience is therefore the most likely to have happened. If there is no evidence of the viking ship, the island or other physical signs that my experience actually happened; no helicopter pilot who remembers picking me up or medical staff who treated me before the flight back to the UK, then surely the most important thing for me to do is not to try and impress upon people that the whole experience did in-fact happen—whether they like it or not—but to keep it for myself, as a treasured memory of a unique experience. " There can be no-doubt that people all around the world experience things they can't explain every day. That doesn't automatically mean the only possible explanation for these experiences are supernatural—or exterior to their physical presence. We might have developed a shorthand way of alluding to these phenomena, with words like 'spiritual' or 'meditative', but we don't get any closer to understanding what these experiences actually are, simply by ascribing them to some realm which is by definition beyond our ability to test or measure. All we do by pushing back the line of demarkation between reality and imagination is shift an artificial boundary. So I might say my desert island experience; the island itself, the girl, the viking burial, the helicopter ride home and everything else, were proof enough for me that the experience actually took place—but that doesn't automatically make my beliefs proof enough for everybody else, particularly when there is a complete lack of evidence to corroborate my story. " i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham ii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally-Anne_test
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Skull KNM-ER 3733 - a 2.5 million year old Homo ergaster, which was possibly the first hominid to harness fire
Trilobites, an extinct marine arthropod, flourished 526 million years ago
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The Notothenioidei, or Antarctic Icefish, has evolved blood which contains anti-freeze
AL 288-1, or 驶Lucy始 is a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis bipedal hominid
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Random acts of kindness " You are a nurse at a military hospital in Afghanistan. Twenty young men with life threatening injuries have all arrived at once. It's chaos all around. Some are bleeding to death and some will lose limbs and gain permanent physical and emotional scars. They were attacked by a suicide bomber at a checkpoint next to a school. They have pieces of the attackerʼs shattered bones lodged in their bodies. The bomber was a 12 year old girl. Was she the child of atheists, or religious extremists? " Let me put it another way and paraphrase Christopher Hitchens. Name one act of kindness; one selfless act of good that brings real benefit to another human being, that could not be carried out by someone specifically because they are not religious. You should struggle to think of one. Now think of an act of profound evil that could only be carried out by someone in the name of their religion. You should have several examples in mind before you finish this sentence. " Since Hitchens first issued this challenge, several people have tried to suggest that saying a prayer would qualify as an act of kindness which a non-religious person can not carry out. This is not only a near perfect example of selective thinking, in that it ignores the proviso that the act should bring “real benefit” to someone, but also ignores the fact that nonreligious people are in no-way restricted from physically speaking the words of a prayer or reciting what might be referred to, somewhat cheekily as a secular prayer—such as grace before meals at a charitable banquet or wedding party, or indeed the alleged Lordʼs prayer, at a funeral or commencement ceremony. Similarly devotional music is not limited to being performed exclusively by religious singers. This is what Richard Dawkins refers to as social Christianity when
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he is challenged on his continuing love of Christmas carols and the nativity myth, despite his career as a noted polemicist and public intellectual in defence of anti-theism. " Of course the real point of the example given; of a Islamist suicide bomber or an act of cruelty done in the name of religious conviction, is that it challenges the commonly held notion that some form of religious upbringing complements or even enhances our innately human sense of right from wrong. This also speaks to a persistent problem within the study of ethics and psychology; where does our instinct to know right from wrong come from in the first place? To the religious, this is another of the gifts given to us by God—which would be a perfectly acceptable answer to the problem, if it told us something new, or proposed to explain where, in fact, God got it from in order to gift it to us in the first place. " Paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey and his wife Dr. Meave Leakey, on the other hand, believe that their life-long study of the Chronospecies to which Homo Erectus, and Homo ergaster, belong, can answer that question by giving us a strong evolutionary indicator as to the origins of altruism, morality and group solidarity. Simply put, the theory goes like this: Humans are born with a soft skull, so that it might expand once weʼre already outside of our motherʼs womb, rather than when weʼre still on the inside, which would make our heads very difficult to deliver through a narrow pelvic opening. Because of this, weʼre born vulnerable; still in a developmental stage, whereas our cousins; the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas, are born ready to literally swing into action. They cling to their mothers until they are juveniles, but that doesnʼt hinder her ability to essentially carry on as she did before they were born. She doesnʼt have to take quite so much delicate care of her new-born as will her human sisters, a few million years further up the evolutionary tree. This difference between species can be traced back to the end of the Pliocene epoch into the Pleistocene, about 1.8 to 1.3 million years ago and the emergence of Homo erectusi. " As their name suggests, these ancient human ancestors walked upright, which meant the pelvic floor of the female had 61
to be narrow, to prevent her having an unstable gate to her stride. This also means, however, that the soft and vulnerable skull of her babies, made it difficult for her to carry on her daily struggle for survival, because as well as taking care of herself, she also had to take care of her young. This alone does not make her story any different to that of other animals struggling to survive. What is unique with Homo Erectus, and Homo ergaster, the direct ancestor of later hominids such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, is that their skull cavity, because of its elastic nature, was increasingly able, over time, to accommodate a larger and larger brain. It is not clear, from modern neuroscience, if there is a direct link between brain size and intelligence. Many other factors go towards making humans intelligent than merely the size of our brains. But we do know that that the physiological evolution of skull capacity coincided with the rise in tool use, which we can see in the fossil record, indicating that at least in the case of the Hominids, the ability to comprehend and resolve complex problems runs simultaneously to an increase in skull capacity. " It is believed, because of this, that the trade off for this incredible leap in our ancient ancestorʼs capability, was that the group as a whole had to learn to care for the more vulnerable individuals in the pack while they continued to develop outside the womb. If a female is nursing, she is not able to hunt and gather for herself, much less fend-off predators, so this has to be done for her by other members of her group. The group could not survive if individuals within it were not protected and cared for. So the young and their mothers were not only looked after by their siblings, once they too reached maturity, but the whole group developed together as a hierarchy of elders which cared for individuals who they werenʼt necessarily directly related to, but for whom it provided an advantage to be close to and in turn be protected by in old age. This, it is widely believed, explains the emergence of tribalism and group reciprocity—that the evolutionary advantage to being born with what is ostensibly a disadvantage; a mutation that effects embryonic skull formation, in-fact gives rise to a much greater advantage to the species as a whole. 62
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This is but one branch of modern evolution theory which was unknown to Darwin at the time he first published his lifeʼs work, but which was nevertheless predicted by him to be an area of science which, once it was better understood, would either falsify or solidify his theory of decent by modification. As it turns out, it is an area which can only be explored fully if it is also accepted that the evidence for natural selection is beyond doubt. So in order to do that we turn to not just the genetic evidence but taxonomy; or phylogenetic systematics and cladistics—methods of classifying species of organisms into groups, to better understand the timescales involved in evolution and the complex relationships linking all the descendants (living or extinct) of our most recent common ancestor. " What is known about the sociability of much later hominids, including, of-course, their modern descendants, lends strength to the theory that altruism and group solidarity, far from being gifts uniquely afforded to man when he was created separate from the rest of Godʼs creation, in-fact have their roots in our ancient past. This assertion rests on a number of additional factors, other than the immediately obvious selection advantage in being born into a large group, tasked with the protection of the weakest, as opposed to being born into a small group of individuals operating according to a survival of the fittest paradigm—which is a common misconception of what is meant by the term natural selection when it comes to behaviour at the level of species, as opposed to organism. " We also know that there is a sexual selection advantage in walking upright, because it conceals the genitalia in the female, while exposing the penis in the male. Display and concealment are essential components in the mating and courtship rituals of every living creature on Earth. It is not known if walking upright came about as a result of this selection advantage, or if having a narrower pelvic floor and / or a combination of both these factors was ultimately responsible for the exceptional survival rate of Hominids up to this most recent period in Earthʼs history, but for a full and brilliant break down of the various arguments which have arisen in this field of un63
derstanding the triumph of the Hominids, I cannot recommend highly enough Professor Richard Dawkins book, The Ancestors Tale. " What we do know is that when our ancient ancestors left the savannah for the grasslands, they would have had no choice but to have walked on their hind legs, not just to keep from drowning in the wetlands, but so as to carry food for sharing with the group in their dextrous hands, as opposed to how they would have eaten on the move, in their more autonomous incarnation, prior to the emergence of group reciprocity and more social living. " Walking on your hind legs isnʼt an option when one of your major food sources is surrounded by long grass and 3 or 4 feet of water, but if, as it is contested by those who challenge these multifaceted arguments, that this move to bipedalism happened not over thousands and millions of years but over a very short period of time–perhaps just a few hundreds years—the changes to skeletal and muscular anatomy observed in the remains of Australopithecus anamnesis, discovered by Dr. Meave Leakey—which represents over 20 individuals in nearly one hundred Kenyan and Ethiopian fossilised remains—would not be seen as clearly as they are, both in samples which have been dated to between 4.2 and 3.9 million years oldii but, similarly, we would no longer see arm swinging, quadrumanous climbing, knuckle walking, and regular short bouts of bipedalism in the modern descendants of our ancient ancestors, such as bonobos, proboscis monkeys and baboons. "
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Dating fossils " How do we know fossils are as old as they are? Most people donʼt know much about how this is done and simply presume that scientists who use timescales of millions of years, know what they are talking about and take on trust that they are correct. Some people may perhaps know that the ageing of material can be done through some form of carbon dating; perhaps they have watched one or two TV documentaries or detective dramas, where rather like counting the rings in a cross-section of tree, to guesstimate the age of the trunk it came from, a scientist will count the amount of Carbon-14 present in an artefact to determine how old it is. " But wouldnʼt it throw a major spanner in the works if we had compelling proof that this method used to determine the age of carbonaceous materials, could be shown to be an inaccurate science and woefully insufficient for dating fossils? Well, as it turns out, young-earth creationists are right when they assert that Radiocarbon Dating is only accurate up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years. They are also correct when they say that, while it may be an ideal method for assessing the age of organic remains from archaeological sites, of only a few hundred to a few thousand years old, it falls short by several million years if it is to be used to date the remains of our most distant ancestors and it is short by further couple of hundred million years if is to be used to date the fossils found in soft-part fossil beds, such as the Burgess Shale—a 505 million year old, middle Cambrian fossil find located in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, which contained over 65,000 specimens when it was first discovered by palaeontologist Charles Walcott in 1909 iii. " Radiocarbon Dating, so goes the cry of young-earth creationists, who in-keeping with their tried and tested model of planting misinformation into the public sphere, so as to cause the appearance of a controversy where in-fact none exists, have called into question the validity of important paleontological finds, which corroborate Darwinian evolution, on the grounds that Radiocarbon Dating methods are grossly inac65
curate. Sadly, as it is with every creationist claim to have unearthed fraudulent activity in the sciences, it is a claim which is so easily debunked, that it merely serves to prove that their best honed skills are not in exposing the so-called frauds in evolution, but in their practised and wilful ignorance of the facts and an implacable desire to listen only to one another, as opposed to those who repeatedly prove their fanciful notions wrong on every level. " Contrary to the repeated assertions of the creationist cabal, fossils are not analysed using Radiocarbon Dating techniques at all, they are dated using Radiometric Datingiv, which is accurate to timescales even longer than the 4.54 billion years planet earth itself and the solar system which contains it have existed v. " First theorised by Ernest Rutherford, who built on the work of French physicist, Henry Becquerel, who discovered the natural radioactive decay of uranium, Radiometric Dating hangs on the fact that radioactivity is the transmutation of one chemical element to another and that radioactive isotopes decay at a fixed ratevi. Samples of rock are analysed using a Mass Spectrometer, which ionises chemical compounds to generate charged molecule fragments to produce a measurement of their mass-to-charge ratio; two particles that move in the same path as each other when subjected, in a vacuum, to an electromagnetic fieldvii. " Once these isotopes are captured in a device known, rather pleasingly, as a Faraday cup, the rate of decay can be measured. Radiometric Dating measures the half-life of every radioactive element in the periodic table against a known rate of decay, calculated using something called the age equation viii. In other words we know the age of rocks and fossils because we know the rate at which various radioactive materials become unstable causing their atomic nucleus to lose energy and emit ionising particles, also known as radiation. This process produces two types of atoms containing one or more electrons, known as nuclides; a parent nuclide and a daughter nuclide. The time it takes for these to lose exactly half the energy they started with is known as the halflife or quantity of exponential decay. The half-life of niobium66
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92, for example is 34.7 million years, the half-life of plutonium-244 is 80 million years. Samarium-146, 103.5 million years. 703.8 million years for uranium-235 and so on through the periodic table of elements up to vanadium-50 with a radioactive half-life of (1.4 ± 0.4) × 1017 years and bismuth209 with a half-life of (1.9 ± 0.2) × 1019 years. " These sign-posts of Radioactive decay, such as each of the 55 known isotopes and nuclear isomers of tellurium, with a half-life of (2.2 ± 0.3) × 1024 years, provide more than sufficient evidence to gauge the age of the rock strata in which fossils are found—but there are also hundreds more subclasses of various radioisotopes that we can use to, not only prove fossils also found in the strata are many hundreds of millions of years older than young-earth creationists assert, but that the material of which the very planet we live on is made from was forged in the white heat of exploding stars billions of years ago and the formation of the milky way galaxy itself ix. " There are also several different methods of analysing radioisotopes from rock samples. Fission-track datingx, for example, uses Uranium 235 to date samples up to 4,500,000,000 years old. There is Paleomagnetism xi, a technique which tracks changes in the Earthʼs magnetic orientation, which is recorded in minerals, rocks and sediments which in turn leaves a chemical remnant in the rock which is detected with Magnetostratigraphy xii and used primarily to date sedimentary and volcanic sequences. Then there is Amino-acid dating, which tracks the changes in proteins in an organism after its death. Because amino acids in living organisms are oriented to the left but, in a process called racemizationxiii flip to the right after an organism dies, an equilibrium between left and right orientated amino-acids in decaying material is eventually reached over time—a process which is dependant upon the species of the organism, providing yet more sign-post data as to the age of the material in time scales of hundreds of millions of years. So once the overall age of a particular region in which a collection of fossils have been found has been determined by Radiometric 67
Dating, amino-acid dating can be employed to fine-tune the age of specific fossil samples found at that site xiv. " The availability of this basic information on how we calculate the age of fossils is staggering. What used to take weeks and months of painstaking research; ordering books from overseas and attending lectures, studying simply for the joy of learning, is now available 24 hours a day and no further away than Google.com to whomsoever has the interest and patience to simply find out for themselves. And yet the explanation for why Radiometric Dating apparently remains “unreliable”, according to pro-creationist propaganda website answersingenesis.org, still reads like it was written by a five year old—and not a very bright one at that—who simply cannot begin to understand the scale on which they are simply wrong. They rest instead upon genuinely puzzling areas of scientific research, such as how the first multicellular organisms ordered themselves into DNA and RNA molecules and oblige their audience to insert Yahweh into that as-yet unanswered question—as if an appeal to the God of the gaps hansʼt been the undoing of each successive generation of theologists who have sought to suppress scientific discoveries, which replace superstition with science, ever since the dawning of the scientific revolution and Galileo Galileiʼs discovery, for which he was condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy", by proving empirically that the Earth isnʼt at the centre of the universe.
i http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/homoerectus.htm ii http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/australopithecusanamensis.htm iii http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/6/527 iv http://www.asa3.org/asa/resources/wines.html v http://www.universetoday.com/15575/how-old-is-the-solar-system/ vi http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/radiometric.html vii http://www.faraday-cup.com/What_is_a_Faraday_Cup.html
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Please don始t feed the troll viii http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/classes/Geo656/656notes03/656%2003Lecture0 4.pdf ix http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo x http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/archaeology/dating/dat_fission.html xi http://www.geo.arizona.edu/Paleomag/book/ xii http://www2.brevard.edu/reynoljh/vita/magnetostratigraphy.html xiii http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/tcaw/10/i02/html/02brignole.html xiv http://snakefly.tripod.com/Date.html
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Teach the controversy " " And so for hundreds of millions of years, life on Earth was subject to the ravages of nature, red in tooth and claw. For at least the last 150 thousand years, species as capable of complex thought, compassion for one another as are we, their modern descendants, and with a need to understand their place in the cosmos as vociferous as we, have wandered the surface of this mostly inhospitable rock, searching for food, while dying of their teeth, plague, childbirth, lack of clean drinking water, a violent climate and a food to predator ratio distinctly stacked against them. All of which takes place under the indifferent gaze of Yahweh. Not until 2000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years here or there, we are told by those who believe in His existence, in the face of their own disbelief in the existence of any other gods, did He intervene in our affairs. None of the desperate, painful cries of anguish, begging for His intervention over the previous 148 thousand years caused Him, in all his alleged compassion for our breed and omniscience of our struggle, to lighten our load for a single second. Indeed, by His very inaction we can assume nothing which brought about the demise of countless millions of our ancient ancestors, many and varied, gave Him cause to even consider intervening to ease their plight for a single second. Not even the emergence of waterborne parasites, that are uniquely adapted to survive in the cavity of a child始s eyeball, at first leading to debilitating blindness and eventually an excruciating death, caused Abba Father to lose a single night始s sleep at what He had done. Nor did He think to intervene, despite that by His very inaction He proved His own lack of omnibenevolence, in a single act of war perpetrated in His name. " But then, we are told, in what we today call Palestine, He decided that the best way to demonstrate his compassion for humanity and make up for His complete lack of interest for the previous couple of million years, was to impregnate His own mother with Himself, so that a race of nomadic goat herders, with a penchant for tales of hero warrior gods ap-
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pearing in the sky to rescue them from slavery and injustice, could be forgiven for the sin of being born in His likeness. “Donʼt pray in my school and I wonʼt think in your church” - Internet Meme circa 2007
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Liars for Jesus " When your mind is set against anyone different to you, but your creed compels you to love them nonetheless, you could always adopt for yourself a sounds-good, means-nothing mantra to calm your internal dialogue on those dark nights of the soul. Itʼll have to be something lots of other people can get behind too, so youʼre not out there on your own, when you regurgitate it at each other, in the car park after Sunday service, in those nasal, self-congratulatory conversations about praying for the unsaved. Something like git ʻr done, only more holy sounding. How about hate the sin, not the sinner? " Adopted by the Leviticus and Deuteronomy literalists, who are so preoccupied with what people who are not at all like them are getting up to in the bedroom, that they spend almost as much time lobbying for sexual segregation as they do on their knees praying for it, in one single phrase it encapsulates more about what turns people away from organised religion than any one thing the creationists and anti-science movement could do or say combined. Itʼs like going up to someone and saying, “You, I like, but your face is a mess and your parents didnʼt raise you right” and then having the nerve to be the one who is offended, when they punch your lights out. Whatʼs even more incredible, about the attitude of the piously homophobic, is that they appear to quite legitimately fail to understand just how repugnant their words and actions truly are. This is just as infuriating to those of us not of the gay persuasion, because we havenʼt had to grow quite such a thick skin to their playground level taunts, but are still nevertheless assumed to be just as hate filled as they are, simply because we are straight. " It would be perhaps easier to ignore them, if they were as obvious and deliberately ugly as, say, the white supremacists and the “send ʻem all back to Africa” nationalists. At least with
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that shower you know without having to read their campaign manifesto that its more than likely to contain a wish list of policies no right thinking person would ever vote for. But the campaign against equal rights for homosexuals, particularly in the United States, has a much more insidious weʼre on your side nod and a wink to another of those buzz-phrase demographics, the hard working families—that elusive societal enclave all politicians want to reach out to, usually with tax breaks and other incentives, but which as a nomenclature couldnʼt be more of a middle-management in-speak, almost double-entendre for not gay perverts if it tried. " As slogans go itʼs almost perfect. Itʼs up there with “time for change” and “no more of the old politics” or “I can see Russia from my house”. It implies youʼre only normal and therefore entitled to be included in society, if youʼre hard working and therefore a real family, which as any good Catholic will tell you is defined by a man and a women with as many children as God sees fit to leech off the state—so long as theyʼre conceived within the confines of marriage, of course. Any of that sinful behaviour before youʼre wedded will get you sent straight to hell with all the atheists, sodomites and Liberals. Once that legally binding contract is signed, though, you can go at it hammer and tongs all the live long day and it becomes no longer immoral. But woe betide anyone caught doing the beast with two backs before the Israelite God of war has watched you walk down the isle of a building lined with pictures of Himself, in the guise of his own son being tortured to death, before drinking yourself invisible and doing the funky chicken ʻtill 2 in the morning with your second cousin Billy Bob. Save your virginity for that happy spectacle and youʼre eternal happiness in the kingdom of heaven is virtually guaranteed. " But whatʼs that you say? You prefer it up the ʻarris, off another man? You dine at the Y with other ladies? DISGUSTING! Well, in that case, you can forget leaving your worldly possessions to your loved ones when you die, my old China. Buried with dignity? Forget it! Thereʼll be no loved ones by your side when youʼre dying of cancer—not in MY hospital! You gave away your right to be treated with com73
passion when you chose to fall in “love” with someone who happens to have slightly different chromosomes to NORMAL people! Let that be a lesson to you for choosing to sin instead of choosing Godʼs love. And not just any god, mind you, MY God. None of these made-up gods they have in Iran, if you please. No, sir. Itʼs Yahweh or the highway, you evil sinner! " One particularly tenacious individual, who clings on to provable falsehoods, depressingly not too dissimilar to those above, is self-styled creationist author, evolution debunker, legend in his own lunchtime and twitter lunatic, Jon Clowncarski (not his real name since heʼs American, this book is available in print and your writer is an impoverished citizen of the worldʼs libel capital). Lest I am accused of singling Jon out and of pursuing therein a petty, personal vendetta, I should say that nothing bores me more than reading about someone elseʼs internet based, keyboard hero confrontations. So let me start at the beginning and perhaps leave it to you, the dear reader, to be the judge of whether or not Jon matches the liar for Jesus archetype I assert he does. " Jonʼs tale segues nicely into a brief overview as to the various kinds of phycological conditioning techniques which are bound up in the pseudo-religious, cults of personality people like Jon buy into. " Sometime in the mid-to-late spring of 2010, Jon began posting announcements via his twitter page of a book he had written which promised to “show atheism is a religion with evolution as its creation story”. At first no-one paid too much attention. The egalitarian nature of twitter is what makes it so popular; the modern day incarnation of the IRC chat room or instant messenger—balancing out the nut-jobs with the informed and educated. One of the unique things about twitter is the ability to follow certain trending topics, which are sometimes grouped according to hash-tags; single words or compound adjectives denoted by a hash (#) or pound symbol, such as #obama or #ukelection. When Clowncarski started to hammer the hash-tag #atheism, over a period of weeks, people soon started to challenge him on his various asser74
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tions, which ranged from the usual list of logical fallacies and scientific impossibilities, to the evidence he claimed to have uncovered which corroborated these various fantasies in his book. This included such classics as “Evolution is biologically impossible”, “Donʼt take my word for it, read my book”, “I love biology, but evolution is full of faulty assumptions”, “Iʼve seen all the fossils and none are transitional” and “You must believe an old earth for your stupid evolution theory” right through the whole gamut of received opinion, neatly provided for him courtesy of the creationist propaganda machine explored in earlier chapters. " But what makes Jon particularly amusing is his backstory. He claims to be a reformed drug dealer, who having spent time in Federal Prison, Yakton, for a string of offences, had his life turned around thanks to a video presentation he watched by Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis USA—a Section 501(c)(3) Christian ministry, “dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ”. " In reality, however, Answers in Genesis is a giant tax exempt corporation, which sells creation science in various guises to the home-schooling, ultra rightwing evangelical market, predominantly in the United States of America but with notoriety in fundamentalist Christian groups around the world. AiGʼs flagship headquarters house a 95,000 square foot theme park, the Creation Museum, which in 2007 attracted 300,000 visitors in the first seven months of opening. It features an animatronic stage show, describing how dinosaurs and humans lived side-by-side, about 6000 years ago, in a re-telling of the creation myth lifted literally from the pages of Genesis. AiG also have one of the most visited religious websites on the whole of the internet, AnswersinGenesis.org with over 1 million hits permonth—each and every page of which being riddled with the kind of utter nonsense, dressed up to sound like science, youʼd be forgiven for thinking was deliberately crafted to parody creationism, rather like the excellent landoverbaptist.org which satirises religious extremism in the American deep south. 75
" AiG additionally produce teaching materials and run educational programs aimed at the young personʼs natural interest in dinosaurs and the cosmos; once again all ran through a strict biblical narrative so as to strip it of any real scientific meaning or valid intellectual rigour. " The profitability of AiG, however, is very real and staggering. From total assets of $17,368,000 in 2004 rising to $29,936,000 in 2008 with net assets of $11,282,000 in 2004 rising to $16,073,000 in 2008, AiG is one of the single most profitable, tax exempt sources of misinformation and antiscience anywhere in the world (source: ministrywatch.com) " The particular Ken Ham video lecture series and supporting literature Jon Clowncarski cites, is infamous on-line thanks to YouTube. In it, Ham, the beard with no moustache liar in chief, claims that dinosaur teeth were sharpened not for eating meat but plants, because—get this—”before sin there was no death”. Additionally, the great flood from the story of Noahʼs ark, apparently explains the entire fossil record, because animals became trapped in a rapid world-wide flood and this explains not only the illusion of fossils being millions of years old, but the formation of land mass, mountain ranges, deep-sea valleys, rock strata and volcanos. Ham confuses abiogenesis with spontaneous regeneration and pre-Darwinian evolution theory with genetics and recapitulation theory; itself the long-since falsified idea championed by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th century populariser of Darwin, a biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who also discovered, described and named thousands of new species but who is best remembered for the controversial and thoroughly debunked idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"; or that in the embryonic stage, humans and all animals share common characteristics. " Because of this, Haeckel is the focus of another set of falsehoods about evolution theory that creationists have propagated for many years. They centre around a genuine controversy over Haeckelʼs drawings of embryos, which appear to have been forged in order to present evidence of his recapitulation theory i (which has since been disproved in any case). It is asserted that Darwin relied on Haeckel's embryo 76
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drawings as proof of evolution, despite that by simply checking the publication date of both of Darwinʼs books, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) it can be seen that both of these seminal works were published before Haeckel's illustration of eight vertebrate embryos in 1874 and that Darwin, therefore, did not base any of his work on that of Haeckel's—of whom it is doubtful Darwin was even aware. " Ham merges this matter of historical fact over Haeckel with the fact that evolution theory, per-se, was not unique to Darwin and, with a carefully crafted presentation speech which mixes biblical scripture and Victorian era myths about evolution, such as “the missing link” and “gaps in the fossil record” concludes, incredibly, that modern science is therefore based not upon a desire to unearth the truth about life on Earth, but prove Darwinʼs theory is right come hell or high water—if you pardon the pun—because evolution and atheism are intrinsically linked. " Meanwhile, Clowncarskiʼs take on Hamʼs widely circulated (and rightly mocked) video, which seeks to further spread this and many other forms of deliberate misinformation, as it does that of radiocarbon dating discussed earlier, was not to seek out for himself the evidence to support these various ideas, but to instead take on faith that AiGʼs claims about the diversity of life on Earth can only be explained by a literalist interpretation of the bible and that a positivist approach to deductive logic is therefore the work of the devil. Hence, when Clowncarski was challenged to present a peer-reviewed overview of the data he claimed to have gathered in support of his bookʼs central charge, that evolution is a false science, all he had to fall back on was a regurgitation (almost word for word) of the variously debunked proclamations of his mentor, Ken Ham. But rather than admit this is what he had done, he instead began making grander and ever more outrageous claims as to the verisimilitude of his book; an Amazon.com user submitted review of which reads: " " If there is any falsification data contained in this or any of [Jonʼs] works, which genuinely achieve this lofty goal, thereby entitling the 77
author to a nobel prize and worldwide recognition, [Clowncarski] is being very secretive about how he has achieved this. One is therefore left only to assume that this deliberate omission of detail is either a phantasmagorically misguided marketing tactic, designed to sell as many copies of this book to as many already very stupid people as possible, or [Clowncarski] is as ignorant of the literary review process in journalism as he is the peer review process in scientific logic. " It is safe to conclude, then, that regardless of the author's highly belligerent attitude and maniacal insistences of being taken seriously, if the future of the Christian faith rested on [his] shoulders, the only people who would welcome it are those whose claims he asserts to have disproven, while showing little or no interest in explaining how.ii
" So why does someone, who can presumably function dayto-day; walk and chew gum at the same time, hold onto a religious conviction so strongly, despite that it has demonstrably overridden their curiosity and basic common sense? How do these people justify to themselves a wilful ignorance of perfectly rational explanations which counter their incorrect assumptions, about the nature of nature? This is especially puzzling, since they must have a basic interest in the sciences to start with and are likely therefore to have at least a vague awareness of the scientific method and hence why their position is untenable. Moreover, how do they keep two sets of books on these matters, whilst remaining just as dismissive of other common falsehoods, such as astrology or homeopathy, as everyone else? What is happening in the mind of a creationist that allows them to carry on believing in things for which the contrary evidence is so compelling, logical and well understood by the remaining 99.9% of the population? " To understand that, we have to accept that we are all susceptible to certain beliefs; not only ones derived from religious texts, but from our nurturing and life experiences. We all have more or less of a likelihood to be drawn towards or repelled by one set of biases over another, which in cognitive science is identified as “a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations�. Ordinary biases in our thinking balance themselves out, thanks to ordinary logic. For ex78
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ample, a motorcycle enthusiast will have as many good reasons to dislike motorcars, as she does to also accept that they are far more practical than a motorbike, for example, if you want to carry more than two people at the same time and a week始s worth of groceries in the pouring rain. But with certain kinds of biases in our behavioural thinking, we are literally hard wired to favour one set of beliefs over another. Indeed even our very susceptibility to cognitive bias is a category of cognitive bias in and of itself; blind spot bias, in which subjects of studies into the better-than-average effect, the halo effect and the self-serving bias, more often see themselves inaccurately as "better than average" for possible positive traits and "less than average" for negative onesiii. You始re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts " The problem with classifying various kinds of cognitive bias, however, is that we might be tempted to ascribe one or more of them to another social group or individual, precisely because we ourselves are susceptible to a bias in our thinking about that person or the group to which they belonging. So whilst Group Think or Herd Behaviour might seem to rather accurately describe the behaviour of, say, the extreme religionist behind the creationism cult, the cognitive bias to which active individuals in that group are in-fact more prone, might be one we ignore or place less significance upon, simply because it is one of the biases to which we ourselves are either susceptible to or have a blind spot against. This, I believe, goes some way towards explaining, at least in part, why Christian organisations respond with a grim determination to carry on as they were, in the face of calls for them to clean up their act. But if we try to see things from their point of view, it始s easy to see how, no matter what they might do to affect the world around them in a way which to them seems positive, such as advising against same-sex relationships for example, they know their actions are inevitably going to be met with righteous indignation from secular society, for reasons which they literally cannot allow themselves to fully under79
stand. Similarly, secular groups know full well that their various campaigns to uphold the establishment clause of the US constitution, will be met by a fundamental misunderstanding within church groups, every step of the way, despite that it is in everyoneʼs interests to block any moves which might ultimately lead to a theocratic system of government, such as that imposed upon the people of Iran. In other words, our inability to be objective about our subjective decision making is precisely the same mechanism of habitual thinking towards our opponentʼs position as theirs is of ours. " This kind of call and response thinking—free of any genuine debate or respect for interlocking opposites, speaks to the meteoric rise of the opinion former, who having usurped reportage journalism, push their own agenda driven contrivance as if it is one and the same with the opinion of a much greater number of people than it actually is. This exploitation of our primal urges is a deliberate tactic on the part of the media conglomerates and it works by hijacking our innate human need, now and then, to fling open the window and yell our dissatisfactions into the street. Instead of that, we instead project our inner desires and emotions onto the TV pundit. What we would like to have the power to say but have no real audience to say it to, becomes voiced instead by the agenda driven news networks and their superstar-like, celebrity presenters. We bask in their reflected glory and the illusion that they speak for people just like us, when in reality they serve an agenda devised by minority interest groups with strategised effective means of propagating general opinion. " In the case of Jon Clowncarski we see the results of that agenda played out and an all too predictable, familiar pattern. A complete unwillingness to accept the weaknesses in his own argument, despite being made fully aware of them, and despite that they are self-proficising. This is the very definition of circular thinking.
i http://naturalscience.com/ns/letters/ns_let17.html
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Becoming the thing you fear the most " To take a more balanced approach to understanding the mindset of the creationist, if we are to distance ourselves from our own biases about them, requires a degree of objectivity the scientific method alone is uniquely capable of allowing. Indeed that effort to understand more about this dichotomy, between group thinking and individual opinion, has given rise to one of the most influential and extensively researched areas of social psychology: the theory of cognitive dissonance. It suggests that people have an inherent drive to overcome their differences, by either changing their own attitudes and behaviour to meet their counterpartʼs argument in the middle, or seek to change attitudes and beliefs in others, by justifying or rationalising their beliefs over and above that of their social opposite. However, when an impasse is reached, where one group or individual is unwilling to compromise their stance any further, for reasons which are perceived as irrational, both parties will experience guilt, anger, frustration or embarrassment and reach a tipping point, where they instead start to seek to compensate for these emotions by mounting an ever more critical position on their opponentʼs views—despite having once been willing to accommodate them. This is what the social theorist Jon Elster calls a pattern of "adaptive preference formation”. " The lessons from history teach us what happens, when a misuse of this ability to coral people into accepting bad ideas on the spurious grounds that to be in favour of something, one must also be against something, are clear. This leads to a further supreme irony, at the heart of the ultra-rightwing conservative, biblical literalist movement; that freedom itself is defined by what you accept as true, rather than what you can prove to be so. " To wit: by far the most common argument against the nonreligious, is that most of the truly abhorrent examples of manʼs inhumanity to man, were perpetrated in the name of atheism: Mao Zedong, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler—the personifications of evil for which we have a modern framework of under-
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standing. It is presumed that because the despots of history were godless, all atheists must therefore have within them the capacity to be as evil as they were. How else, they argue, do you establish right from wrong if there is no higher power to guide and monitor your actions? The argument against nontheism is expressed in this way, because of a sub-class of confirmation bias known as Attitude Polarisation—a phenomenon in which a disagreement becomes more extreme as the different parties consider evidence on the issue. " For example, no right thinking person would accuse their neighbour of behaving like Hitler, simply because they discover one day that they do not attend church. Yet should those two families sit down to discuss their reasons for being both highly religious and atheistic respectively, it is only a matter of time before one accuses the other of being in-line with the worst example of someone or some group who just so happens to have shared either the characteristic of being highly religious, or extremely anti-religious. This phenomena has been more recently described, specifically in relation to the demonisation of atheists on the internet, as Godwinʼs law, an experiment in memetics, which states that, “as a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”i " In the case of tyrannical acts, which it is asserted could only be carried out by someone bereft of belief in a specific god of a specific religion, the general population tend to have a collective awareness of certain events, such as the holocaust, so deeply engraved in their mindʼs eye, that they will recoil in horror at being associated with them, despite that they themselves played no personal part in, nor have any personal experience of them whatsoever. This leads to a kind of historical revisionism, which plays on a general misconception of what, for example, Nazism stood for, rather than what it stood against. For example, no right minded person would argue that Hitlerʼs attempts to take over Europe were driven by a desire to spread rational enquiry and intellectual honesty in a society governed by secular humanist values. It was the Naziʼs hatred of these values and implacable belief in their polar opposite that caused their downfall. 83
And yet whenever non-theists are challenged on the kind of society which would emerge from their ideals, by those who understand them the least, the fear of being seen to be “on the same side” as Hitler and Stalin, or Pol Pot and Mao Sa Tung, often appears to give this non-argument the appearance of credibility. " In reality, of course, fascistic regimes have more in common with theocratic ones than they do secular ones. If in doubt, compare and contrast Sweden with Iran. Sweden, arguably the least religious nation in the world, also has one of the lowest teenage pregnancy rates, lowest unemployment, lowest crime rates and highest standard of living anywhere in in the world. Whereas The Islamic Republic of Iran has no freedom of assembly, massive youth unemployment and it tops Amnesty Internationalʼs list of oppressive regimes for doling out capitol punishment for the even the least serious of crimes, which include public displays of affection and playing music. " But even without resorting to extremes, the religious will often play the Nazi card, when defending the role of organised religion in general society; such as the right of the Pope or the Archbishop of Westminster to also hold diplomatic or constitutional positions in government. " In response to an accusation of this sort, in September of 2010, following the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, I penned the following reply to a Christian fundamentalist well known to the agnostic / atheist / humanist / sceptical blog-o-sphere: " There is a certain kind of "organised atheism" which, I agree, can be rather sterile and confrontational. I have to say this is a somewhat uniquely American phenomenon and not one I readily associate with or recognise in the equally European style of secular humanism. There's seems to be something about living in a vast nation of 50 individual States, with millions of voices talking at once, that forces the hand of those who passionately hold certain views into a rather adversarial roll. This, despite the commonly held view in the 84
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right wing American press, of the UK, which contrasts greatly in our Parliamentary system of (lowercase 'L') liberal (lowercase 'S') socialist democracy. All political parties here actually do a pretty good job of, firstly, keeping religion out of it and secondly listening intently to each other's point of view before arriving at an admittedly rather loose consensus—to the point, in fact, that our current government is made up of a coalition of Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. So far, at least, the sky is yet to fall in, or the gates of hades open up. For the latter to come about, could only be at the behest of a religious zealot in possession of an explosive device—as the latter half of the previous century in Northern Ireland bares out. " If, however, the burning of Obama effigies and barely concealed racism shown towards the first lady are anything to go by, this rather seems to fly in the face of your mantra that politically motivated Christianity is all sweetness and light Stateside. I would hazard a suggestion that the Tea Party movement, such as it is, isn't exactly orientated around putting flowers in the barrels of guns, or, indeed, proclaiming the parts of the gospel only a true hedonist would ignore. Paradoxically, indeed, it is it fronted, in that charming fashion almost unique to right wing America, by a Mormon TV pundit and finds itself largely funded by the same multibillionaire lobbyists who caused the financial crisis in the first place. How progressive. " If the accusation of lovelessness is to be aimed a me personally, I make no apology for keeping videos and photos of myself cavorting on the hissing of summer lawns with puppies and kittens firmly out of the public domain. I'm sorry if it offends your delicate sensibilities, that my blog isn't decked out in sky blue pink Comic Sans, where every other story begins with at least three paragraphs on how many gallons of tears I issued forth, before writing anything of substance, but from a purely aesthetic point of view there's only so much a reader wants to know about the writer personally, before it becomes rather sickly to the stomach—as anyone who rejoiced at the closure of zdenny.com will attest. 85
" If, however, the apparent lovelessness of atheism in general is where the roots of your disapproval take seed, all I can say is I profoundly disagree. Which is why you are reading this and I am writing it. The necessary and vital work of enabling people with the tools of rationalism and an ability to think for themselves, to my mind, is a profound and selfless act of love. Not least because it starts with the difficult task of conversing with oneʼs opponents one-on-one, rather than preaching to the converted en masse—and needs to be carried out with the same level of conviction you claim to have for your version of events which took place centuries before a literary system of notation for context delimited hyperbole had been devised, but without the arrogant certainty, to fall back on, that one is always in the right no matter the evidence to the contrary. " I am just as ready, in other words, to proclaim the truth and love and majesty of the universe we know exists, as you are ready to denounce as "hypothetical" that which does not require faith—either in the facts which assert the mystery and wonder of existence itself, just as it does all of this without recourse to self-important, dead philosophies. If that makes me somehow less capable than the religious emotionally, or for want of a better word spiritually, I've yet to encounter a solid example of how I have suffered unduly for this—or more importantly caused the suffering of someone else. Wish that the same could be said of the theistic. Those hundreds of thousands of children worldwide, who were systematically raped by an institution which actively protected their attackers, weren't the children of atheist agnostics. Nor were the Jews in the gas chambers murdered in their millions by advocates of the enlightenment. The skies over Auschwitz were conspicuous by their absence of any intervening force, other than the aeroplanes filled with braver men than me, whose wings obeyed the laws of physics, while the laws of the church buckled impotent and complicit under the weight of the third reich. " "The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity" - Article 20 of the program for German Workers Party
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"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" - Adolf Hitler, to General Gerhard Engel, 1941 "My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter." - Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 1922 "...the Fascist idea is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or atheism" - Adolf Hitler V枚lkischer Beobachter "We see Christianity as the most important factor for the maintenance of our society" - Adolf Hitler Reichstag, March 23, 1933 "I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity" Adolf Hitler "...so that our people may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator" - Mein Kampf Chapter 8
"The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator" - Mein Kampf Chapter 11
"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry" - Mein Kampf Vol 2 Chapter 1 "The time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god." - Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2
i http://wiki.killfile.org/projects/usenet/faqs/godwin/
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Created sick, commanded to be well " In this final section, I want to examine the popularly aired belief, among the religious, that their concern is not for this life, but the next—and that it is their love for the eternal soul, even those present in the deepest darkest depths of the nonreligious, which causes them to attack individual atheists and those who collectively reject the truth-claims of the superstitious, not as an act of hatred for that which they donʼt understand, but because they are driven to stand up for Jesus. " " Over the years, since I started actively challenging the religious on certain headline issues, such as the teaching of evolution in schools, birth control and the covering up of rampant pedophilia in the priesthood, I would be, by now, a rich man if I had £10 for every one of the self-confessed ʻsavedʼ, who invariably conclude our correspondence with either a direct condemnation to hell of me personally or all those who, in general, prefer their facts to come from careful academic study, as opposed to private revelation. " As if embarrassed by this disconnect, between the love they claim to profess and the hell fire and torment they would wish me to endure, often for no other reason than showing the effrontery to prove their beliefs false, most will attempt to infer that it is not their condemnation which one should worry about, but the condemnation of their God—come judgment day. Many have argued, along these very lines, that my worry, as a rationalist, is that God may change my mind, were I to “let Him in” and that this is why I deny Him; that I have closed myself off from Him for so long that I am reluctant to change my mind, for fear it makes me appear weak. " This concept that we need to abandon the self to faith and that it is the work of Satan when we feel arrogance or pride in our hearts, crops up time and time again. Little wonder, then, that it is the central theme of the hugely popular Alpha Course which many evangelicals attend, to embolden their faith, which has been described as "an opportunity to explore the meaning of life" by its founders the Reverend Charles Marn-
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ham and Reverend Nicky Gumbel but widely criticised, even from within many mainstream branches of Christianity itself, for its “Shake and Bake” approach to “esoteric experiences, altered states of consciousness, self-hypnosis and mindless emotionalism” i " " Make no mistake, I am and always have been perfectly open to being shown proof that there is a supernatural aspect. But the discovery of such a realm wouldn't automatically mean any of the monotheistic gods therefore dwelt within its remit. I might just as easily say, in other words, that the Christian who refuses to consider the alleged truth of Allah, or Wotan, or Zeus or any of the other hero warrior gods throughout folklore who just so happen not to be Yahweh, is proof that they do not, in fact, seek a transformative experience as they assert, but a confirmation of that which they already accept as true, without seeking evidence to the contrary—even to the point they will actively discount the truthclaims of both other religious as well as those who claim to have had transformative, numinous experiences which they do not ascribe to the supernatural. " The more tenacious correspondents will, at this point, invoke prayer—and insist that I can only experience what they have experienced when I am ready, through the power of prayer, to accept Yahweh into my heart. They usually also finish this up with a promise to pray for me—that is to say they literally ask God Himself, when he has a minute, to change his meticulously arranged plans for me, written at the beginning of time itself, and to steer me instead towards the path they would rather have me follow. The fact that this seems to show a disturbing lack of faith in his omnipotence, on their part, never seems to trouble the intercessor nearly enough when I have, on numerous occasions, pointed out the astounding arrogance of such a demand. " " Wishing someone well, despite that you disagree with them, is a perfectly acceptable, reasonable aspect of our humanity. It shows our ability to transcend our differences in recognition of our commonality is a universal ethic and not 89
one limited to the religious. The vast majority of those who prayed for Christopher Hitchens, on the sad news he was battling cancer, for example, I am sure meant to score no political points, or cause any harm by publicly declaring their intentions, whatsoever. No belief or disagreement is worth fighting over—least of all one which involves the health and wellbeing of another human being—despite how little one might think of Hitchens himself, who was quick to point out that Fox News contributor and professional pseudo-Christian, Anne Coulter, had publicly thanked the same God as that of those who wished for his speedy return to good health, that her prayers he would die in pain had finally been answered. " There is a great deal of difference between wishing someone well, despite that you disagree with them on a fundamental level, and justifying your refusal to listen to what they are attempting to explain to you, by believing that at some point in the future, no matter the weaknesses in your argument, your opponent's position will nevertheless shift in your favour, depending on how hard you wish for it—or, let us be clear, demand that the creator of the universe, no-less, intervene on your behalf. To me, this speaks to the heart of the father figure complex which feeds the ego of intercessory incantation. " What is essentially being said, in this very act, is that at some imaginary point in the future, simply because it would fit a certain set of logical fallacies, to which the intercessor is pre-subscribed, someone such as myself might accept, for example, Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, only by first disavowing myself of a whole set of values and affirmations which I have arrived upon precisely because they are not attributable to the supernatural, but in fact drawn of the logical and rational and scientifically ascertainable truth; that I will abandon reason for unreason, just as soon as I persuade myself of that which is the exact opposite of these values. " This statement of fact is sometimes taken to mean I lack awe. Although I might be legitimately accused of many things, nihilism certainly isn't one of them. What I can, however, be accused of, is that I am unapologetically pragmatic—in that I accept, on rational grounds, one does not learn anything new about the nature of existence simply by 90
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staring up intently at the billions of dead or dying stars in the night sky, thousands of billions of miles away from this rock we just so happen to have evolved upon, and wish that they had been specially placed there by a man-wizard from beyond reality, who might judge me for being born filthy and sinful, precisely in the fashion the religious would also insist He elected to make me in the first place. " Highlighting this fundamental weakness, of the theological position, and its inability to answer any of the really important questions; what we know and how we came to know it— rarely meets with the approval of those who believe their religion—and their personal interpretation of their particular religion at that—brushes off these matters as easily as simply saying, “itʼs all in Godʼs divine plan”. A belief to the contrary, however, plays rather well with those who insist you can, in fact, borrow from one set of beliefs to justify another. In reality, you can either prove prayer works, or you canʼt. The idea that it only works for those who believe it does, is tantamount to the sort of self-delusion the anti-vaccine people are committed to, when they emotionally invest in “Big Placebo” simply because they mistrust “Big Pharma”. So too are those who espouse the power of prayer employing slight of hand tactics, to alleviate themselves of the burden of proof. If something they prayed for comes to pass, itʼs Godʼs will. If something they prayed for does not come to pass, itʼs Godʼs mysterious way—which we are specifically precluded from even attempting to understand—much less have the arrogance to proffer an alternative explanation for—if, that is, we want to avoid an eternity of torment and suffering. This, simply put, is not a doctrine of love. " "Our ignorance is God; what we know is science." -Robert G. Ingersoll
i http://www.pfo.org/alpha-cr.htm
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The Ten Condiments Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you Thou shalt not travel faster than the speed of light There is no such thing as a more perfect union Wisdom is not knowledge Actions speak louder than words Believing in things that are not true is anathema to open mindedness You are not free if you are not awake The truth is not subjective Finding out for yourself and being told by someone else are two completely different things It is better to think without acting, than to act without thinking
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A single beam of light would take 170,000 years to travel across this spiral disk of stars, dust and gas. It is nearly twice the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way. M101 is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars, of which approximately 100 billion of these could be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime. It lies in the northern circumpolar constellation Ursa Major (The Great Bear), at a distance of 25 million light-years from Earth. Therefore, we are seeing the galaxy as it looked during the Miocene Period. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/h st_spiral_m10.html
Acknowledgments Heidi Rafferty, Sam Harris, Victor J. Stenger, RichardDawkins.net, Project-Reason.org, The Natural History Museum London, cultwatch.com, BBC Learning, Open University, Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth, ibiblio.org, pbs.org, archaeologyinfo.com, iupac.org, wikipedia.org, usgs.gov, ucmp.berkeley.edu and the patience and community spirit of everyone at reddit.com/r/science
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