Facepalm: Theism and Nihilism

Religious blathering about atheism--especially the "New Atheism"--is only good for generating facepalms. Father Edward T. Oakes thinks he's got the mean ol' atheists all figured out by quoting...

wait for it...

Friedrich Nietzsche:

In his book On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche gives us this ultimate atheist scenario: “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.” He continued:

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. . . . There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

This atheist scenario undermines science itself. If the “knowledge” delivered up by “science” only serves to puff up a pathetic animal doomed to die in an uncaring universe, why bother with science anyway? If the search for knowledge is nothing more than a vain attempt to puff oneself up like some miles gloriosus in a Falstaffian comedy, what’s the point?

I posted the following comment as a response:

This seems a bit like asking why one would use a rhetorical question. We do science because we're curious. We search for knowledge because we can.

Nihilism is theism's child, not atheism's.

What makes Oakes's rant facepalm-worthy is the grandiose claim that Nietzsche's text, here cast as The Atheist Scenario™, undermines science. Wait...undermines? No, not at all.

Oakes is just flatly wrong. He uses dead and irrelevant Nietzsche as an atheist straw man so that he can make an objectionable appeal to consequences. Even if science were merely a vain (in both senses of egotistical and trivial) enterprise of a doomed humanity, it would still be worth pursuing.

I don't doubt that there's some vanity involved in the scientific enterprise, as in all human enterprise. But who says we're doomed? Yes, the universe is uncaring, but people seem to have the capacity to care. So do other animals. People seem to be able to make judgments and to establish values. Within our own little world we seem to be able to have a great impact, for better or worse.

There's a common prayer that goes:

God,
Grant me the serenity;
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage, to change the things I can;
And the wisdom, to know the difference.

We certainly can make a difference here and now. This is not a matter of free will or control or inspiration; this is a matter of fact. The fact is that we are here. The fact is that our actions have material effects in the world. The fact is that these effects are consequential. Atheism helps us to understand and deal with the facts as facts.

Only theism sees Atheism as nihilism. Only theism fears the night. Only theism hates the question. Only theism seeks to enslave the fact.

And one important fact is that God is the product of science. God (like all gods) became established to explain natural phenomena and to authorize the religious power structure. Oakes, however, turns this around and tries to make the ridiculous claim that "If God is 'our most enduring lie,' science is inevitably founded on that same lie." No, science is not founded on God at all and has absolutely no dependence on God.

Are not the fear-mongering and irrelevance of theism becoming ever more obvious? A facepalm no longer does justice to their inanity.

Jasmine

I just received my copy of Jasmine by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden. It's a beautiful recording. So much interplay goes on between the two artists.

Jarret's liner notes are very interesting, too. Worth sharing:

Music is an amazing thing. It doesn't exist as a stationary object. It moves in real time and can be uplifting both to the player and the listener. The melting, trans-figurative moment, that feeling of everything being there, just for an instant, that surrender that overcomes us as players (if we're good enough) and leads us on to the next pregnant second, patient in the knowledge that there always is, waiting in the wings, the next chance to feel this fullness and celebrate it (as it is only in the nature of art to produce it this way); to this we dedicate our lives. But it is not for us alone; it is also made for you, the listener, to feel these same feelings along with us, to participate and to also be uplifted by it. Art is dying in this world, and so is listening, as the world becomes more full of toys and special effects. With this death will come the undoing of many possible feelings: beautiful, tender, deep, trusting, true, sad, full of internal meaning and color. Closeness won't have to necessarily be physical. Intimacy will be hard to find. Communication will be lost. Here is some music for you. Take it and it's yours. Charlie and I are obsessed with beauty. An ecstatic moment in music is worth the lifetime of mastery that goes into it, because it can be shared.

This recording was done in my small studio. It has very dry sound and we didn't want to have the recording sound like anything but exactly what we were hearing while we played. So it is direct and straightforward. I chose to use the American Steinway that really isn't at all in the best of shape, yet I have this strange connection with it, and it is better for a kind of informality and slight funkiness that was going to work with the music. With a choice of songs this good, it was hard not to become engaged right away. We did not rehearse per se, but went over chords when necessary. This was really a session that came as a result of doing an interview for a film about Charlie, after which we played a couple tunes. We had not played in over thirty years, but something magical happened and I then invited Charlie and his wife to the house to do some playing for a few days with no assurance that we'd have anything (including sound) that we'd want to release. Over close to three years we lived with these tapes, talked a lot about them, disputed over choices, but eventually I found Charlie to be the most remarkable and sensitive helper in getting this finally assembled. I wanted only the distilled essence of what we had, and it took some time to wean ourselves from going for hip solos or unevenly played tunes (even though they had wonderful things inside them). Some were too long; others were somehow out of character. Charlie and I listened to this many many times (mostly late at night) and became aware that there were some that just had more magic, more moments of surrender to the mood while retaining their essential integrity. This is what I was looking for; and then I had the unenviable job of finding the right order. After I thought I found it, Charlie called me and said, "How did you figure that out?" I think I said that none of the rational ideas of how to order things made sense, so I went into "not thinking" mode and came up with (dare I say it?) the only perfect order of these great versions.

I hope many of you can hear this on a good system. There are nuances abounding and the details make the music what it is. Jasmine is a night-blooming flower with a beautiful fragrance and I hope you can hear what went into this, as there is no way to do anything as touching as this by rehearsing it until it dies. This is spontaneous music made on the spot without any preparation save our dedication throughout our lives that we won't accept a substitute: it's either the real thing or it's nothing. It's either real life or it's a cartoon.

Call your wife or husband or lover in late at night and sit down and listen. These are great love songs played by players who are trying, mostly, to keep the message intact. I hope you can hear it the way we did.

I highly recommend Jasmine.

Love That Gives Life

Today is my tenth wedding anniversary, which has tin or aluminum as its traditional symbol. It's a happy occasion that reminds me of many things but in particular my wedding day. I'm not the kind of person who gushes about the happiest day of my life, but my wedding day really lived up to the hype.

The music for the ceremony was great -- we hired a harpist. All of our friends and family surrounded us. We held a combined Catholic-Jewish ceremony with a priest and a rabbi. My wife was so beautiful. Everything about the wedding was fun, elegant, inclusive, and meaningful.

Ten years on, we are still very happy. In one way we have grown apart: religion. But in all else we are completely together. We enjoy being with each other and spending time together. We enjoy the children, our home, and our families. We look to the future with optimism.

I wouldn't say marriage is easy, but it's not that hard either. The main thing is not to be a jerk. Anyone can blow up a good marriage, a good job, a good time. It's something else to care for people and for things that give life. Children are life and they bring life. A house gives life. So does a neighborhood, a garden, a poem, a piece of furniture, a music CD, and so on. The job of a married person is to find and grow things that give life.

When I think of my marriage and my wife, I think of the good life she has given me. This is true: she has brought a special life to my love and love to my life. It's a nice thing to be married, and I'm pretty lucky to have the wife I do and the life I do.

Can We Agree on Just This?

In the blogosphere, Socratic method is really annoying.

Here's how the method tends to be employed:

(1) I assert something, with or without additional support.
(2) Questioner asks me to clarify an element of the assertion.
(3) I make the clarification.
(4) Questioner asks me to clarify another element of the original assertion or an element of the clarification.
(5) Steps 3 and 4 get repeated infinitely.

The questioner's intent is to get me to reveal my "hidden" or latent presuppositions--which are, of course, wrong. What's supposed to happen is that when I end up exposing my own biases, I'll quiver and shake with horror at how wrong I have been all along. The questioner gets to delight in his skill at having made me defeat my own arguments, and I slink away bitter and depressed.

Unfortunately, the questioner never gets it right and winds up just being a pest. As for me, I usually understand what my presuppositions and biases are. I think about such things and find them interesting.

So instead of going all Socratic on me, why not just make a counter-argument? If you disagree with anything I say, just tell me so and let's hash the fucking thing out.

'Kay?

Evolution's Gaps versus Creationism's

We are all connected.

I recently had a conversation in which I was taken to task for talking about evolution as if it were a fact. My excuse, of course, is that evolution is very well attested. I agree with the scholarly consensus that asserts evolution rises to the level of fact. In our exchange, my conversational partner reminded me that "there are huge gaps in evolution." I may agree with the proposition of there being gaps, however large, in evolution, and I probably should have articulated my opinions on evolution with greater humility.

Nevertheless, I've been thinking about the premise that evolution has huge gaps. From this initial premise, the reasoning usually proceeds to then state that the huge gaps mean the figurative jury is still out on evolution. Therefore, if evolution remains an unresolved question, then one is justified to maintain his or her preferred religious beliefs--in particular, one may comfortably hold onto the doctrine that people were created by God. One assumption running around in this reasoning is that evolution contradicts the teachings of the Bible, so if evolution is accurate, then the teachings of the Bible are false. The resulting implication, then, is that if this one core teaching of the Bible is false, then every other teaching that follows is similarly suspect and open to question.

I want to talk here about the "gaps" reasoning by looking at the theory of evolution and how a gaps charge against it is made. My intention is to show that the charge isn't very strong and to conclude finally with some thoughts on the implications for the Bible's teachings.

Let me declare up front that I have no training at all in the biological sciences beyond high school and my own reading on the subject. I will not, therefore, try to champion or to explain the scientific merits of evolution. What I would like to do, however, is present some of the key claims or hypotheses of evolution and then relate what I see.

To start, let's take a definition of evolution from the University of California, Berkeley:

The definition
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.

The explanation
Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.

The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother.

Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.

What strikes me immediately is the elegance of the definition and what it purports to explain. The theory is really quite simple and very beautiful, which of course is not a reason to think it's accurate or wrongheaded. For me, the strength of the theory lies in its specificity: gene frequencies, populations, generations, species. It tells me that I can look at gene frequencies across populations, generations, and species to confirm or to falsify the central idea of common ancestry.

What, then, are the sources of evidence for evolution? According to the same website, the main sources include:

• Fossil evidence -- Most commonly, an organism, a physical part of an organism, or an imprint of an organism that has been preserved from ancient times in rock, amber, or by some other means. New techniques have also revealed the existence of cellular and molecular fossils.
• Homologies -- Similarities between related organisms in anatomical, molecular or cellular features.
• Distribution in space and time -- Dating of fossils and elements, and population patterns of living things across all the Earth.
• Evidence by example -- Present-day organisms and recent history as sources of information about the past. Artificial selection, experiments, and nested hierarchies all provide additional information that sheds light on the development of life forms.

With the definition of evolution and identification of the main sources of evidence for evolution, we have a rudimentary sense of what evolution is and how we know what we know about it. The third and final element of evolution that I want to introduce is how evolution works, the mechanisms that drive the modifications in "descent with modification."

I like the explanation given by doctoral student Jeremy Yoder, who describes the "Big Four" processes of population genetics:

These are the four processes that account, in one way or another, for every change in the frequency of genes within natural populations. In other words, the Big Four account for much of evolution itself. They are:

• Natural selection, changes in gene frequencies due to fitness advantages, or disadvantages, associated with different genes.
• Mutation, the source of new forms of genes;
• Genetic drift, or changes in gene frequencies that arise from the way probability works in finite populations; and
• Migration, or changes in gene frequencies due to the movement of organisms from site to site.

Lay readers may be surprised both by what we know, and what we don't, about how these four processes operate in nature. Natural selection is relatively easy to measure, and apparently ubiquitous in natural populations—but we don't know how often the resulting short-term changes impact evolution over millions of years. Mutation, the source of variation on which natural selection acts, seems to vary widely among living things. Genetic drift means that a trait can come to dominate a population even if it has no fitness effect—or sometimes a deleterious one. Finally, migration across variable landscapes can interact with selection, drift, and mutation to completely alter their effects.

I highly recommend Yoder's series of blogs on the Big Four, and his blog is quite excellent generally.

Although I think we have here a pretty good sketch of what we're talking about when we talk about evolution, I also want to devote some time and space to the idea of the "gaps" in evolution. Let me say up front that I have no doubt that there probably are "gaps," if that means unknown or unresolved elements in our picture of the historical origins and development of particular species. I don't have a problem with gaps in principle because there are a lot of species on Earth (5 to 100 million; science has identified 2 million) and there's a huge amount of time to work with. The Earth may be about 4.6 billion years old, and "[i]t is estimated that the first life forms on earth were primitive, one-celled creatures that appeared about 3 billion years ago" (extremescience.com). I don't expect minute-by-minute accounts of the development of every single population on Earth going back 3 billion years.

However, I do expect that some elements of evolutionary theory--its central claims, lines of evidence, identified processes, and the relationship between them all--would receive careful scrutiny from scientific experts and laypeople alike. Here, for example, is a description by an organization called Answers in Genesis that discusses "Gaps in the Fossil Record":

The most glaring problem with the belief that all life arose from a common ancestor is the lack of fossil evidence of the millions of transitional forms that should be evident if evolution had happened.

It must be noted that this argument is often dismissed through two lines of reasoning: 1) the lack of a complete fossil record and 2) the problems inherent in identifying what is transitional. However, this does not diminish the problem, as some evolutionists suppose, since the types of changes evolution requires to give rise to the various animal kinds over millions of years would be expected to provide ample examples in virtually every layer of the geologic record. This is not the case.

Instead, most of the geologic record is better explained by the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood (e.g., that formed the Grand Canyon).

I must say that the above passage is rather offensive because it is quite flagrantly using rhetoric and emotional language to muddy what might be a real argument. The first paragraph frames the question about the fossil record as a "problem," and a "glaring" one at that. It also characterizes (misleadingly, I would say) the hypothesis of common ancestry as a "belief." I see this particular case as an instance of trying to equate a belief derived from scientific method with one derived from traditional teachings. The first emerges as a conclusion based on observable facts, study, and experimentation. the second emerges as a sense of intellectual satisfaction based on received stories, dialogues, and personal experience. My point is, however, that before we get to the real substance of the "gaps" challenge, the writer or authorizing agent of the challenge is trying to cheat by framing the matter as one of traditional belief.

But what of the substance of the "gaps" challenge? The basic objection is the hypothesis that if evolution had happened, then there should be millions of fossils corresponding to "transitional forms." What are transitional forms? According to the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, a transitional form is:

An organism with features that it holds in common with organisms presumed to be its ancestor and descendant but that neither of these hold in common. For instance, archaeopteryx has feathers in common with birds and scales in common with reptiles, but neither of these features belong to both birds and reptiles.

A second definition comes from the UCal Berkeley site:

Fossils or organisms that show the transformation from an ancestral form to descendant species' form. For example, there is a well-documented fossil record of transitional forms for the evolution of whales from their amphibious ancestor.

So, the Answers in Genesis charge is that there are more gaps in the fossil record than we should expect. With the caveats that I'm not a biologist and not familiar with all of the evidence that we actually do or don't have for evolution, I must say that I'm not impressed with AiG's charge. My main reason for this, however, is logical: I would expect the common ancestry hypothesis to be based on the fossils that we have, not the ones we don't have. I would also expect that the fossils we have fit with the other sources of evidence. I'm not terribly concerned about missing fossils because of the number of species and the vast amount of time involved. If the two definitions above of transitional forms can be trusted, then we have at least two examples of transitional forms, so we know that in some cases we can see it. I would like to know why we wouldn't see it in other populations and species over time.

I also don't find the final paragraph of the AiG charge as helpful as it could be. There, a counter hypothesis is made that "most of the geologic record is better explained by the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood (e.g., that formed the Grand Canyon)."

First, it seems to me that we have abruptly switched gears. In evolution, fossils are one source of evidence. The fossil record shows evolution over time. In the AiG formulation, however, fossils are not a source of evidence but instead the thing to be explained. Could the location of particular fossils be the result of certain catastrophes? Why yes, I don't see why not. But catastrophism does not tell us anything about the relationship of different fossil specimens to one another, if there is a relationship.

This is the second element that makes the AiG charge unhelpful for me: the lack of a coherent formulation of the hypothesis set up as the alternate to evolution. Combining the explanation of evolution given before and the AiG charge given above, I imagine that the alternate hypothesis is:

Through the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood, God made life on Earth and gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today.

If this is an accurate representation of the special creation hypothesis, or at least a part of it, then I think it's clearly weaker than the descent with modification hypothesis. Why? Because the hypothesis will not work if

(1) We don't have positive evidence of a worldwide deluge.
(2) We don't have positive evidence of [a] God.
(3) We cannot explain what it means to use a term like "made" in the context of life formation.

I imagine a real biologist could comment much more effectively on the relative weakness of the alternate hypothesis, but I think the point can safely be made that Occam's razor applies here and we are right to approach the alternate hypothesis with extreme skepticism.

I also imagine that my conversational partner meant more than the fossil record by "huge gaps" in evolution. I won't make any guesses as to what that might mean, but I'm already not predisposed to going through another AiG-type exercise where the objection to evolution is framed misleadingly, where the objection is of seemingly minor significance, and where the alternate hypothesis actually broadens the number and scope of items to be explained.

In sum, the difference between the definition of evolution and the alternate hypothesis is that the first gives a way to solve a problem while the second one gives more problems. The descent with modification hypothesis may ultimately fail, but the hypothesis itself articulates how to go about reinforcing or falsifying it. The special creation hypothesis is less clear in its articulation and depends on unestablished categories such as global Flood and God.

When we compare evolution to creationism, then, we can fairly conclude that

Whatever the gaps in evolution, the gaps in creationism are substantially bigger and badder.

Indeed, this conclusion seems to me so obviously sensible and accurate that I really wonder why anyone would prefer creationism to evolution. Can someone explain that to me?

I'll answer my own question by returning to the idea of biblical teachings. When a believer talks about biblical teachings, the matter includes both the substance of the story told and the "lessons," the articulation of right behavior derived from the story. The matter also includes doctrinal matters, such as teachings around the "Fall," sin, afterlife, and so forth, but I am not really concerned with doctrine.

Let's say, for instance, a church teaches that the biblical story of creation, particularly the creation of humankind, implies that each person is special and valuable to God. What happens to this teaching if the story is not true? My answer is that it does not necessarily make all of the teaching untrue. The essential lesson on human specialness and value can remain intact. Specialness and value, however, become re-contextualized: humans as special against other people and other living things (which are also special), and as valuable in reference to the family and societies to which people belong.

This post is already too long, so I may continue on the above line of thinking in a separate essay, but my point here is only that evolution contradicts the factual/historical/scientific claims of the creationist's Bible. It challenges some elements of the Bible's moral teachings but allows for the core of the teachings to retain their fullest expression.

The Bad Plus

I've been too busy to post much. As compensation, here are two videos featuring the Bad Plus.

"Everywhere You Turn":

>

"Flim":

Enjoy.

The Best Case for Atheism, Christianity Edition

I recently laid out what I think is the best case for Atheism. In that essay, I summarize the concept of God this way:

It cannot really be explained, it cannot be proved, it fits nicely into a human strength for creating imaginary characters, it is deeply undermined by the problem of indiscriminate evil, it is not the best explanation for anything, and it’s the most improbable cause of observed reality.

Any one of these flaws is devastating on its own, but the collective effect of them all makes it very plain that God is almost surely a human invention.

However, as decisive as the case is against God, the story does not end here because Christians don't believe in this God. I have argued before that Christians pray to a different God than the God of the Hebrew Scriptures (see this also). They don't like the God of the "Old Testament." No one does. Before Richard Dawkins gave the definitive summation of this character, everyone already gave ol’ “I am that I am” the more pleasant sounding euphemism of being “jealous.”

My point is that Christians have always been embarrassed with the old God, and they aren’t all that bothered by dismantling him. For Christians, all roads to the True God™ run through Jesus. If Jesus is right, they believe, then the true nature of God is known only through Jesus. Indeed, the real significance of the character Jesus is not to redeem humanity for its sins but to redeem God for his. Those silly, spiritually blind Jews just got God horribly wrong.

For the Christians, then, let’s talk now about Jesus. Let's sum up what we really know about this character and how we know it.

(1) The very existence of a real Jesus corresponding to the person described in the Gospels is highly questionable--no one can assert with certainty that a real Jesus ever walked the earth.

(2) The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are our only canonical sources of information about the events of Jesus’ life.

(2.1) Mark, the earliest Gospel, is generally agreed by biblical scholars to have been composed around 65 CE. That’s about 30-65 years after the described events are supposed to have happened.

(2.2) None of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and none were written by the disciples Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

(2.3) The writers of the Gospels heard the stories of Jesus from others; we don’t know how many or how few others there were.

(2.4) Other, apocryphal gospels are presumed to have less historical value than the canonized texts. All of these, so far as I know, date to much later than the putative time of Jesus. In particular, I am thinking of the gospels of Peter, Mary, Judas, Philip, and Thomas. However, these "other" gospels indicates that several different Jesus traditions were around, possibly from very early on. This must lead us to ask why the orthodoxy is the orthodoxy; put differently, we cannot just assume the orthodoxy is most accurate, or accurate at all, simply because it's the orthodoxy.

(3) The story of Jesus’ empty tomb--perhaps the single most significant event of the Gospels--is different, even contradictory, across each Gospel.

(4) Before the Gospel stories, there is no evidence of any knowledge of a tomb of Jesus (empty or occupied).

(5) We have not one single writing from or about Jesus during his supposed lifetime (see here).

(5.1) We know of several people who lived during or very near the supposed lifetime of Jesus but who mention nothing about him, which would be strange for an influential healer, teacher, and political rebel. These people include Justus of Tiberias, Philo of Alexandria, Pliny the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Valerius Maximus, and Velleius Paterculus.

(5.2) Philo, a Jewish writer who lived from 20 BCE to 50 CE, never once wrote anything about Jesus, even though he did write about political conflicts between the Jews and Pontius Pilate in Judea.

(5.3) All non-Christian references to Jesus can be shown to have either been introduced later by Christian scribes or originally based on Christian claims.

(6) In the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries, there were many conflicting beliefs about who Jesus Christ was, including beliefs that he had never existed on earth "in the flesh."

(6.1) In Marcionism, for example, Christ was a purely spiritual entity. Other schools of thought in the first three centuries of Christianity included Nestorianism (Jesus and Christ were two different entities), Docetism (Jesus appeared physical, but he was really incorporeal), Apollinarism (Jesus had a human body and human soul, but a divine mind), Arianism (Jesus was the son of God, not God himself), and Catholicism (Jesus was fully human and fully divine, both God and the son of God).

(7) In light of modern understanding of reality and of supernatural claims, it’s irrational to believe that the supernatural claims made for Jesus would be true.

(7.1) We already reject supernatural claims that have more evidence than the Jesus claims. For example, we don’t believe that the women of 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, were actually witches. But we have more historical evidence that they were witches than we have evidence of Jesus actually being a real person.

(7.2) People 2000 years ago were more ignorant about the natural causes of events than we are today. They were less educated in critical thinking and philosophy, with virtually no access to diverse views.

As in the earlier case for Atheism, I'm seeking here to compile a list of incontrovertible statements. I don't see how much contest one can make, for example, out of statement #1. The seven basic statements above tell us that we have hardly any serious evidence at all for the existence of Jesus, let alone for the supernatural claims about him. Our textual sources are self-interested and contradictory. The idea of a historical Jesus seems to have emerged and evolved amidst other competing ideas about Jesus over the course of Christianity’s first three centuries. We make special allowance for the existence and divinity claims for Jesus that we would never give to another figure.

So, we don’t know much of anything at all about the historical Jesus. All we can say for certain is that the New Testament reports on him as a teacher, executed rebel, and religious icon. Given that the case for God is so weak, it makes little sense to grant any credibility at all to supernatural claims with respect to Jesus.

If there was a real Jesus, he was born and died as a human being, and that's it. He’s gone.

Religion as Ideological Aristocracy

Atheists: Feel our anger

On another blog, I came across a message from a commenter. The commenter, it turns out, is a theist just getting started with a new blog of his own. Indeed the theist is a bona fide pastor at a church.

His first post attempts to answer why atheists are "so angry." His answer is that it's basically a massive case of SIWOTI:

Atheist Angry Reason #1: In their minds we are basing our lives, worldviews, and important life decisions on the equivalent of a fairy tale.

I took the bait and responded, thusly:

I am an atheist -- and I suppose a new atheist, at that -- and I've always been puzzled by the charge of being angry. I don't think it's so and tend to view the charge as a what religious apologists do to rationalize and minimize atheist arguments. So, I think you are mistaking blunt talk and lack of deference for anger. Even from those folks you link to [Dawkins, Hitchins, P.Z. Myers] -- I don't receive that as anger at all.

I also disagree with what you construct as the target of atheist "anger" -- your belief in a fairy tale. The specific content of your belief is a smaller part of the issue, in my opinion. The big issue, as I see it, is the free pass given to religious figures and religious teachings to be taken as authorities on subjects they know very little about. What the Bible, for example, may or may not say about the origins of the universe and the nature of humanity is simply irrelevant to contemporary public policy. People like Pastor Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach have no special expertise or moral authority on matters of abortion, stem cell research, AIDS, the environment, natural disasters, or anything else outside. The special place given to religion and to religious leaders is something I think everyone should be concerned about.

So, I think you are playing rhetorical games with the phantom "atheist anger" and the focus on "fairy tales." Neither of these are the point. The point is that we live in a world today where we must take a hard look at the ideological aristocracy to which religion belongs. Personally, I want to see that aristocracy dismantled.

I think the term "ideological aristocracy" is quite apt. Religion is an Ancien Regime that needs to be toppled. Some sects, such as Roman Catholicism, are doing a nice job toppling themselves.

The Best Case for Atheism

Jack McCoy Could Win This Case

I usually make my Atheist posts in response to some other post made by a religious person. In the case of this post, I am responding to someone who is absolutely sure he’s proven the existence of God and the truth of his particular religion. Please forgive me for not linking to said person: I’m sure you know just the sort of bloke I’m talking about.

So, what I’d like to do in my own brief way is lay out the best case for Atheism. That is, why should someone conclude that Atheism is more probably rational and right than (any) theism? Here are the reasons why:

(1) It’s not clear that a being such as God (in the modern Judeo-Christian sense of an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful supreme being) could be at all. If the concept of God is logically inconsistent, then the God of that concept cannot be real.

(1.1) Omnipotence, for example, may not be logically possible.

(1.2) Omniscience, too, is a difficult concept and cannot simply be granted by us as a real attribute.

(2) The lack of a successful proof for God. If we cannot even make something like the ontological argument work, then maybe it’s time to reason that we cannot prove God because there is no God.

(3) We are justified in believing that many things do not exist: Santa Claus, Superman, unicorns, and so on. What makes God an exception here?

(3.1) If there were a God, there would be a steady influx of direct, unambiguous evidence to reinforce the view that there is a God. Yet, there is no direct evidence and nothing that cannot be reasonably attributed to natural causes.

(4) Widespread human and non-human animal suffering contradicts the concept of God.

(4.1) The innocent and the assholes are equally available to misfortune.

(4.2) What did the animals do to deserve death and their bloody struggle for survival?

(5) Generally in biology and cosmology, naturalism provides the better explanations of phenomena over all theistic explanations.

(6) Probability favors physical causes over intelligent causes for generation of features/phenomena and for the appearance of order.

In sum, the real problem with God is --

It cannot really be explained, it cannot be proved, it fits nicely into a human strength for creating imaginary characters, it is deeply undermined by the problem of indiscriminate evil, it is not the best explanation for anything, and it’s the most improbable cause of observed reality.

The best case for Atheism, then, is...God.

Note: Special credit and thanks to the "Atheism" article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from which much of the material in this post is based.

Quiz: Which Is the Better Love?

Which of the propositions below is morally preferable, and why?

A. I love you because God tells me to.
B. I love you because of the kind of person you are.

Is Religion a Path to Wisdom?

Yesterday, the Boston Globe featured an article by Stephen Prothero called "Separate Truths." Prothero is a religion professor at Boston University. This article is adapted from his new book, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter.

Here is the entire article:

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to “All Religions Are One” (1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing. No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so self-evidently at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, both essentially the same and basically good.

This view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and in Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller, “Eat Pray Love,” where the world’s religions are described as rivers emptying into the ocean of God. Karen Armstrong, author of “A History of God,” has made a career out of emphasizing the commonalities of religion while eliding their differences. Even the Dalai Lama, who should know better, has gotten into the act, claiming that “all major religious traditions carry basically the same message.”

Of course, those who claim that the world’s religions are different paths up the same mountain do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge in dogma, rites, and institutions. To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is to deny that those differences matter, however. From this perspective, whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) is of no account because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the nonessentials.”

This is a lovely sentiment but it is untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous.

The gods of Hinduism are not the same as the orishas of Yoruba religion or the immortals of Daoism. To pretend that they are is to refuse to take seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary religious folk who for centuries have had no problem distinguishing the Nicene Creed of Christianity from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism from the Shahadah of Islam. It is also to lose sight of the unique beauty of each of the world’s religions.

But this lumping of the world’s religions into one megareligion is not just false and condescending, it is also a threat. How can we make sense of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir if we pretend that Hinduism and Islam are one and the same? Or of the impasse in the Middle East, if we pretend that there are no fundamental disagreements between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?

This naive theological groupthink — call it Godthink — is motivated in part by a laudable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or nirvana or paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves — practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, and purveyors of fanciful myths. This way of seeing has given us religious violence from the Crusades and the Holocaust to Rwanda and Nigeria. In response to such violence, the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it.

I understand what these people are doing. They are not describing the world but reimagining it. They are hoping that their hope will call up in us feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood. In the face of religious bigotry and bloodshed, past and present, we cannot help but be drawn to such hope, and such vision. Yet we must not mistake either for clear-eyed analysis.

When it comes to safeguarding the world from the evils of religion, including violence by proxy from the hand of God, the claim that all religions are one is no more effective than the claim that all religions are poison. As the New Atheists (another species of religious lumpers) observe, we live in a world where religion seems as likely to detonate a bomb as to defuse one. So while we need idealism, we need realism even more. We need to understand religious people as they are — not just at their best but also their worst. We need to look at not only their awe-inspiring architecture and gentle mystics but also their bigots and suicide bombers.

What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: Something is wrong with the world. In the Hopi language, the word “Koyaanisqatsi” tells us that life is out of balance. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” tells us that there is something rotten not only in the state of Denmark but also in the state of human existence. Hindus say we are living in the “kali yuga,” the most degenerate age in cosmic history. Buddhists say that human existence is pockmarked by suffering. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic stories tell us that this life is not Eden; Zion, heaven, and paradise lie out ahead.

I'll interrupt here because I think this last paragraph makes a terrific point...and the point is sin.

My understanding of Christianity has always been that it's fundamentally and inextricably linked to this awful concept of sin. Now, I have never been a Christian, but I think I could never ever have been one because I could never accept the concept. There's no reasoning that explains how people could possibly inherit the sin and sinful nature of Adam and Eve. It's just a patently ridiculous claim, and I see it as profoundly contrary to the principles of American liberty.

I have been struggling to articulate the Jewish corollary to this, and I suppose it's the idea that we're away from our promised home in Israel. This is, of course, also a stupid idea, assuming I've represented it correctly.

So religious folk agree that something has gone awry. They part company, however, when it comes to stating just what has gone wrong, and they diverge even more sharply when they move from diagnosing the human problem to prescribing how to solve it. Moreover, each offers its own distinctive diagnosis of the human problem and its own prescription for a cure. Each offers its own techniques for reaching its religious goal, and its own exemplars for emulation.

Christians see sin as the human problem, and salvation from sin as the religious goal. Buddhists see suffering (which, in their tradition, is not ennobling) as the problem, and liberation from suffering as the goal. Confucians see social disorder as the problem, and social harmony as the goal. And so it goes from tradition to tradition, with Hindus seeking release from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, Muslims seeking paradise via submission to Allah, and practitioners of the Yoruba religion seeking sacred connections — among humans, between humans and the persons of power they call the orishas, and between humans and the natural environment.

The great religions also differ fundamentally when it comes to the techniques they employ to take you from problem to goal. In Confucianism, the rules and rituals of ancient Chinese civilization foster the religious goal of social harmony. But according to Daoists, these very rules and rituals cause the human problem of lifelessness. Civilization is a vampire, Daoists claim, sucking the life out of us, depleting our qi (vital energy), and taking us to an early grave. The only way to pursue the Daoist goal of fostering life is to live in harmony with the naturalness, simplicity, and spontaneity of what Daoists call the Way.

Finally, each of the world’s religions looks to different exemplars — Christian saints, Hindi holy men — to chart the path from problem to goal. Inside Buddhism alone, these exemplars include the arhat (for Theravadins), the bodhisattva (for Mahayanists), and the lama (for Tibetan Buddhists).

For more than a century, scholars have searched for the essence of religion. They thought they found this Holy Grail in God, but then they discovered Buddhists and Jains who deny God’s existence. Today it is widely accepted that there is no one essence that all religions share. What they share are family resemblances — tendencies toward this belief or that behavior. In the family of religions, kin tend to perform rituals. They tend to tell stories about how life and death began and to write down these stories in scriptures. They tend to cultivate techniques of ecstasy and devotion. They tend to organize themselves into institutions and to gather in sacred places at sacred times. They tend to instruct human beings how to act toward one another. They tend to profess beliefs about the gods and the supernatural. They tend to invest objects and places with sacred import.

These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the other men in Michael Jordan’s family was over 6 feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions. What makes the members of this family different (and themselves) is how they mix and match these dimensions. Experience is central in Daoism and Buddhism. Hinduism and Judaism emphasize the narrative dimension. The ethical dimension is crucial in Confucianism. The Islamic and Yoruba traditions are to a great extent about ritual. And doctrine is particularly important to Christians.

There is a long tradition of Christian thinkers who assume that salvation is the goal of all religions and then argue that only Christians can achieve this goal. Philosopher of religion Huston Smith, who grew up in China as a child of Methodist missionaries, rejected this argument but not its guiding assumption. “To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion,” he wrote, “is like claiming that God can be found in this room and not the next.” It might seem to be an admirable act of empathy to assert that Confucians and Buddhists can be saved. But this statement is confused to the core, since salvation is not something that either Confucians or Buddhists seek. Salvation is a Christian goal, and when Christians speak of it, they are speaking of being saved from sin. But Confucians and Buddhists do not believe in sin, so it makes no sense for them to try to be saved from it. And while Muslims and Jews do speak of sin of a sort, neither Islam nor Judaism describes salvation from sin as its aim. When a jailer asks the apostle Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30), he is asking not a generic human question but a specifically Christian one. So while it may seem to be an act of generosity to state that Confucians and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews can also be saved, this statement is actually an act of obfuscation.

A sports analogy may be in order here. Which of the following — baseball, basketball, tennis, or golf — is best at scoring runs? The answer of course is baseball, because runs is a term foreign to basketball, tennis, and golf alike. Different sports have different goals: Basketball players shoot baskets; tennis players win points; golfers sink putts. To criticize a basketball team for failing to score runs is not to besmirch them. It is simply to misunderstand the game of basketball.

So here is another problem with the pretend pluralism of the perennial philosophy sort: Just as hitting home runs is the monopoly of one sport, salvation is the monopoly of one religion. If you see sin as the human predicament and salvation as the solution, then it makes sense to come to Christ. But that will not settle as much as you might think, because the real question is not which religion is best at carrying us into the end zone of salvation but which of the many religious goals on offer we should be seeking. Should we be trudging toward the end zone of salvation, or trying to reach the finish line of social harmony? Should our goal be reincarnation? Or to escape from the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth?

While I do not believe we are witnessing a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world’s two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap. You would think that champions of multiculturalism would warm to this fact, glorying in the diversity inside and across religious traditions. But even among multiculturalists, the tendency is to pretend that the differences between religions are more apparent than real, and that the differences inside religious traditions just don’t warrant the fuss practitioners continue to make over them.

We pretend that religious differences are trivial because it makes us feel safer, or more moral. But pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous, and more deadly. False rumors of weapons of mass destruction doubtless led the United States to wade into its current quagmire in Iraq. Another factor, however, was our ignorance of the fundamental disagreements between Christians and Muslims, on the one hand, and Sunni and Shia Islam, on the other. What if we had been aware of these conflicts as of 9/11? Would we have committed 160,000 troops to a nation whose language we do not speak and whose religion we do not understand?

What we need is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. The world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

What Will Happen in the MA/US Housing Market?

[A Recent "Jump" in the Housing Market]

An AP story in today's Boston.com reports: "Sales of new homes surged 27 percent last month, bouncing off the previous month's record low and blowing past expectations as government incentives and better weather boosted sales."

Not everyone views this jump as good news. One pseudonymous commenter writes:

This is a blimp [sic] on the radar cause [sic] by the government! Here are the reasons why the housing market will continue to drop:

1. Fed's 8K house credit will end in April.
2. 10% unemployment with a higher under employment rate.
3. Fed ended the purchase of 1.2 trillion dollars of mortgage backed securities.
4. Higher percentage of people underwater. This will only mean more strategic foreclosures.
5. Feds to raise interest rate in the near future.
6. Lending standards will continue to tighten especially when Feds are no longer a player in the mortgage business.
7. In today's market, the average income cannot buy the average house.
8. More ARMs will reset this year and next year.

Buying a house now is like catching a falling knife! I find it ironic that our government caused this mess by trying to legislate "affordable housing" and now trying to legislate unaffordable housing.

Let's wait and see if the predictions bear out!

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UPDATE: Last year I posted about a prediction that came to me in the form of an email sales pitch. The emailer predicted a dramatic rise in mortgage defaults and foreclosures. Around that time, MarketWatch.com was reporting:

According to the MBA's quarterly National Delinquency Survey, 1.37% of mortgages entered the foreclosure process in the first quarter, up from 1.08% in the fourth quarter.

Total foreclosure inventory was also up, with 3.85% of all mortgages somewhere in the foreclosure process at the end of the first quarter, compared with 3.3% in the fourth quarter -- also a record jump. The delinquency rate, which includes loans that are at least one payment past due but not those in foreclosure, was a seasonally adjusted 9.12%, up from 7.88% in the fourth quarter.

The Washington-based MBA survey covers 45 million mortgages, representing between 80% and 85% of all first-lien residential mortgages outstanding in the United States.

Here is data from February 19 of this year:

The delinquency rate for mortgages on one- to four-unit residential properties was a seasonally adjusted 9.47% of all mortgages outstanding in the fourth quarter, down from 9.64% in the third quarter and up from 7.88% in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the MBA's quarterly delinquency survey. Delinquencies include mortgages that are at least one payment or more past due but not yet in foreclosure.

Meanwhile, 1.2% of outstanding mortgages entered the foreclosure process in the fourth quarter, down from 1.42% in the third quarter and up from 1.08% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The percentage of mortgages at some point in the foreclosure process at the end of the fourth quarter was 4.58%, up from 4.47% in the third quarter and 3.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Although I think the seller inflated language a bit, I'd say the prediction was accurate, by and large.

Kuzari Principle: The Sinai Argument

Previously, I introduced the Kuzari Principle and its application to the alleged Mount Sinai revelation. This was intentionally a sketch, an outline of the argument. In this installment, however, I want to look again at Kuzari to examine its details. My aim now is to achieve a faithful expression of Kuzari. I will not criticize it or raise objections, as these will be the subject of a later post.

The Kuzari Principle is derived from The Book of the Khazars, a 12th century philosophical work by Judah Halevi. In the first part of the work, the King of the Khazars and a rabbi discuss the nature and origin of Jewish knowledge, including the reckoning of the date of the world and the way to verify true reports:

46. Al Khazari: What date do you consider it at present?

47. The Rabbi: Four thousand and nine hundred years. The details can be demonstrated from the lives of Adam, Seth and Enōsh to Noah; then Shem and Eber to Abraham; then Isaac and Jacob to Moses. All of them represented the essence and purity of Adam on account of their intimacy with God. Each of them had children only to be compared to them outwardly, but not really like them, and, therefore, without direct union with the divine influence. The chronology was established through the medium of those sainted persons who were only single individuals, and not a crowd, until Jacob begat the Twelve Tribes, who were all under this divine influence. Thus the divine element reached a multitude of persons who carried the records further. The chronology of those who lived before these has been handed down to us by Moses..

48. Al Khazari: An arrangement of this kind removes any suspicion of untruth or common plot. Not ten people could discuss such a thing without disagreeing, and disclosing their secret understanding; nor could they refute any one who tried to establish the truth of a matter like this. How is it possible where such a mass of people is concerned? Finally, the period involved is not large enough to admit untruth and fiction.

49. The Rabbi: That is so. Abraham himself lived during the period of the separation of languages. He and his relatives retained the language of his grandfather Eber, which for that reason is called Hebrew. Four hundred years after him appeared Moses at a time when the world was rich in information concerning the heavens and earth. He approached Pharaoh and the Doctors of Egypt, as well as those of the Israelites. Whilst agreeing with him they questioned him, and completely refused to believe that God spoke with man, until he caused them to hear the Ten Words. In the same way the people were on his side, not from ignorance, but on account of the knowledge they possessed. They feared magic and astrological arts, and similar snares, things which, like deceit, do not bear close examination, whereas the divine might is like pure gold, ever increasing in brilliancy. How could one imagine that an attempt had been made to show that a language spoken five hundred years previously was none but Eber's own language split up in Babel during the days of Peleg; also to trace the origin of this or that nation back to Shem or Ham, and the same with their countries? Is it likely that any one could to-day invent false statements concerning the origin, history, and languages of well-known nations, the latter being less than five hundred years old?

50. Al Khazari: This is not possible. How could it be, since we possess books in the handwriting of their authors written five hundred years ago? No false interpolation could enter the contents of a book which is not above five hundred years of age, such as genealogical tables, linguistic and other works. [Emphasis added]

The argument emerging from this section concerns the transmission of historical knowledge--from single individuals in a line to Moses. Al Khazari sees the single line as a reason for believing what the rabbi says; more than one transmitter would introduce the risks of lies, spin, and "common plot." In paragraph 50, Al Khazar seems to believe that social memory is good enough to retain accuracy within 500 years and to prevent historical invention from creeping in.

Transmission of true knowledge and prevention/identification of fabricated history remain important themes in Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb's formulation of Kuzari:

in modern language the principle that the Kuzari uses is as follows. I beg you to look at it, hear it, and pay close attention to all of its details. Let E be a possible event which, had it really occurred, would have left behind enormous, easily available evidence of its occurrence. If the evidence does not exist, people will not believe that E occurred. [Emphasis in original]

In my opinion, Gottlieb gives the best expression of the modern Kuzari Principle. His call for us to pay attention to his formulation, however, suggests that Kuzari may be open to misinterpretation. Thus, to reduce the chance of misunderstanding, let us begin by breaking down the bolded portion:

(1) E is a possible event.
(2) E is an event such that its occurrence leaves behind enormous, easily available evidence.
(3) If no such evidence exists, people will not believe that E occurred.

The breakdown above departs from Gottlieb’s Kuzari formulation at (2). In order to highlight the salient features of event E, I have decided to use present indicative rather than the subjunctive that was given to us. The important feature of E is that if it really occurs, it must leave behind enormous, easily available evidence. If I have interpreted Gottlieb’s formulation correctly, a (although perhaps not the only) Sinai-oriented syllogism might go like this:

(4) Major premise: Sinai is the type of event that should have left behind enormous, easily available evidence if it occurred.
(5) Minor premise: A type of enormous, easily available evidence actually exists.
(6) Conclusion: Aware of this evidence, people believe that Sinai really occurred.
(7) Implication: The existence of the enormous, easily available evidence favors the probability that a Sinai event actually occurred.

Gottlieb also has a slightly different argument that applies directly to Sinai:

Suppose A invents a story about a national unforgettable and tries to convince B that it happened. Suppose further that B and his nation do not remember the event, and A gives no explanation why the event would not be remembered. Then B will not believe the story.

The syllogism here might run like this:

(8) Major premise: Religious leaders (A) invent a story about Sinai, an event they say was public, national, and absolutely unique (literally).
(9) Minor premise: Members of the public (B) do not remember Sinai having occurred.
(10) Minor premise: Religious leaders provide no explanation why the event would not be remembered.
(11) Conclusion: Members of the public will not believe that Sinai actually occurred [with no memory of the event and no explanation of why the event would not be remembered].
(12) Implication: The story of the Sinai event was likely unable to be invented/fabricated.

With these two syllogisms, I assert confidently that we have the proper grounding for Kuzari, particularly as it applies to the Sinai event. Following Kuzari, the belief of Jewish people--up to the Jewish Enlightenment--supports the likelihood of Sinai’s having happened. The people would not have believed for so long if there was no evidence. Furthermore, the Sinai story could not have been introduced later because people would have wondered why they didn’t know before about the story, and no explanation would be able to account for a “national unforgettable” (Gottlieb’s term).

Thus, with this grounding established, we can turn in the next installment to questions about Kuzari and its logic.

My Answers to 10 Questions for Your Pastor

On another blog, I saw these challenging questions. Although the questions are aimed at the Christian believer -- and I am neither -- I think it's a useful exercise for the Atheist to take a crack at them, too.

Here goes.

1. Why is God called loving or merciful when, in the Old Testament's stories of the Israelite conquest, he specifically orders his chosen people to massacre their enemies, showing no mercy to men, women, even children and animals?

My answer: Because people seek the interpretation that accords best with their axioms. If God's loving-kindness is taken as axiomatic, then an answer can be devised to fit with it.

2. Does it make sense to claim, as the Bible does, that wrongdoing can be forgiven by magically transferring the blame from a guilty person to an innocent one, then punishing the innocent person?

My answer: No, not really. This is quite a horrible idea.

3. Why does the Bible routinely depict God as manifesting himself in dramatic, unmistakable ways and performing obvious miracles even before the eyes of nonbelievers, when no such thing happens in the world today?

My answer: Because we know our world better than ancient people did. We know its geography, peoples, history, and physical laws better than they did. We understand human biology better and we have better medicine. We today can communicate both with people we know and whom we don't know across great distances. Our modern mindset is quite different from the ancient mindset, such that I doubt we can conceive of God or "the supernatural" in quite the same way as people actually did in biblical times. We don't see miracles now because we have learned there really aren't any

4. Why do vast numbers of Christians still believe in the imminent end of the world when the New Testament states clearly that the apocalypse was supposed to happen 2,000 years ago, during the lifetime of Jesus' contemporaries?

My answer: Because the modern faithful believe their teachers. Then, they believe the teachings of the teachers. They find little reason to challenge either because most everyone around them seems like a believer.

5. Why do Christians believe in the soul when neurology has found clear evidence that the sense of identity and personality can be altered by physical changes to the brain?

My answer: Because they distrust science and prefer the idea that "some things are forever beyond the grasp of human design."

6. If it was always God's plan to provide salvation through Jesus, why didn't he send Jesus from the very beginning, instead of confusing and misleading generations of people by setting up a religion called Judaism which he knew in advance would prove to be inadequate?

My answer: Dramatic license?

7. Since the Bible states that God does not desire that anyone perish, but also states that the majority of humankind is going to hell, doesn't this show that God's plan of salvation is a failure even by his own standard? If this outcome is a success, what would count as a failure?

My answer: I think it would rather show that God failed in his creation. He should have made better creatures. And what happens to all the little animals?

8. Why didn't God create human beings such that they freely desire to do good, thus removing the need to create a Hell at all? (If you believe this is impossible, isn't this the state that will exist in Heaven?)

My answer: Because it's more satisfying to hit a baseball that's been pitched to you than one resting on a tee. I think this might be an answer of great sublimity...or utter horseshit.

9. Is it fair or rational for God to hide himself so that he can only be known by faith, then insist that every single human being find him by picking the right one out of thousands of conflicting and incompatible religions?

My answer: No way. But the Stalinist thing is part and parcel of the God job.

10. If you had the power to help all people who are suffering or in need, at no cost or effort to yourself, would you do it? If so, why hasn't God done this already?

My answer: Yes, I would do it. God has not because he cannot.

It's Actually a Lifestyle

Critics think they are beating up on atheism by calling it a religion, a worldview, or an ideology. Sure. I agree it can hold some properties of any of these things.

For me, the logic that has led to atheism also leads to the maxim that our lives and our lifestyles are up to us -- within legal and moral boundaries, of course. Our health, fitness, and well-being do not come by the grace of God but by our own daily behavior. They come by our own efforts.

Surely, sometimes our efforts are not good enough at a particular moment. Surprises, chance occurrences, and mistakes crop up and force us to adjust our behavior temporarily or permanently.

We are in charge of our lives, if not always (or ever!) in control. The religious like to say that God is in control or the universe is in control. I disagree with this, but the practical result is the same: each of us lives by choice and subject to chance.

I'm back to lifting as well as running, although I have been running with my 7-year-old daughter, so we tend to do more jogging than actual running. But don't get me wrong: I'll take jogging with my daughter every time over running by myself. When she and I are out on the road together, I tell her that this is the only today we get, so we might as well push ourselves to do better than ever. And then we run hard to the finish.

Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, captures this same idea eloquently in a talk he gave to the Harvard Humanist Society:

Here are a few things I've learned.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them. I've looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.

See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I'm building. The same goes for my life. I've tried to pay attention. I've tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I've noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.

I've concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I've concluded that it's me. I've noticed that if I'm paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I've noticed that when I pay attention, I'm less selfish, I'm happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I'm performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody's going to take care of us, it's incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That's community.

Yes, life is cool. Living is cooler. Run hard while we can...but better to stay together.

The Kuzari Principle: Ultimate Proof of God’s Existence?

Judah Halevi (c.1075–1141), Spanish Jewish physician, poet and philosopher; author of the Book of the Khazars.

This is the first of several posts I plan to make on the Kuzari Principle, a line of reasoning often used to assert the truth of Judaism and the relative weakness of other religions.

To proponents, Kuzari provides a strong reason to believe that it would be impossible to hoax a story such as the Torah's account of the Mt. Sinai event, the National Revelation. Note that the argument concerns both the story and the event itself: Kuzari says they could not be faked and therefore both must be true.

My intent now is to give a brief and simple introduction to Kuzari. Future posts will examine Kuzari closely and assess its strengths and weaknesses as a logical argument.


What Is the Kuzari Principle?

According to Wikipedia, the Kuzari Principle

is a line of philosophic reasoning derived from the medieval work Kuzari. This principle claims to logically prove the historicity of major events recorded in the Bible from the nature of the belief in them. More specifically, it is argued that one can prove from the oral testimony of the story itself that some three million Israelites personally were led out of Egypt in an Exodus, and witnessed God's revelation to them at Mount Sinai, thus establishing the proof of the events discussed in the Torah.

David Yust views Kuzari negatively in a Talk Reason article (2002):

The Kuzari principle (KP) is a formal argument (whose ambiguous nature will be discussed further on) universally adopted by Orthodox Judaism as the sole authentic proof of the truth and exclusivity of the Jewish faith. In this sense, the KP is a materialized ideal. The invention of the KP is attributed to the famous 11th-12th century Jewish-Spanish poet and philosopher Yehudah Halevi, who allegedly formulated it in his Kuzari treatise (hence the name). Genetically, the KP may be traced to a vague sentence in the Pentateuch which enjoins the Jews to tell their sons about the Exodus from Egypt. A century after Halevi it was reiterated – again in a rather vague form – by the outstanding Jewish thinker and Pentateuch commentator Nahmanides.

In today's cyberspace, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb appears to be the foremost champion of the Kuzari Principle. Gottlieb, incidentally, is no joke. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematical logic at Brandeis University. He was Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. Today, as far as I know, he is a senior faculty member at Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem. Here is Gottlieb's introductory illustration (1997) to the Kuzari argument (he goes into much more detail later):

Take, for example, the revelation at Sinai. There are people who believe that the revelation at Sinai occurred. I'm not going to assume that because people believed it that it must have occurred. That is called "begging the question." However, it is a fact that there are people who believe it occurred.

Now they believe it because the previous generation taught it to them. Likewise, that generation believes it because the previous generation taught it to them. So you have a chain of generations of believers going back in time. That is a fact. The question then is, how did the chain get started? Who were the first believers? How did they arrive at their belief?

Again, oversimplifying, (this is only the outline): There are two broad possibilities. One: the event at Sinai took place and people witnessed it, and that caused their belief. Or two: the event did not take place. If the event did not take place, then someone invented the story and convinced the people to believe it.

The Kuzari's argument proceeds by investigating the second alternative, that the event didn't happen, that the story was made up and was sold. The argument shows that the second alternative is not credible. It is not credible to believe that the story was made up and then sold. If you can defeat the second alternative, that leaves only the first alternative, that it happened and was witnessed. That is the structure of the argument.

A recent application of Kuzari to the Sinai event is Betzalel Avraham Feinstein's (2009). Feinstein mentions that his post had benefited from feedback by Rabbi Gottlieb:

A) At least 600,000 Israelites gathered at the bottom of Mount Sinai over 3,300 years ago.

B) All of the Israelites heard G-d speak to them at Mount Sinai, and they then asked Moses to be His prophet.

C) Moses received the entire Torah from G-d and taught the Torah to all of the Israelites standing at Mount Sinai.

D) The Israelites transmitted the Torah and also the history of the transmission process of the Torah from generation to generation in an unbroken chain of generations for over 3,300 years until today, with at least one hundred thousand Israelites in each generation of the chain.[boldface in original]

With this background, we have a good-enough understanding of the Kuzari Principle and its application. In the next installment, I will introduce Rabbi Gottlieb's modern formulation of Kuzari.

In the meantime, feedback is invited!

Growing in Reason: Talking to Children About Unbelief

One thing in my life that excites me is the native intelligence of my children. For example, just this weekend my older daughter lost a tooth, her third or fourth. That night, she put her tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy. Next morning, she found one dollar. Later on, she suggested that she thought maybe Mommy or me had been giving her money for the teeth. I told her the truth, and she seemed happy to have figured it out first.

One day, maybe soon, she'll want to talk to me about God. She'll ask why I don't believe in God. What will I tell her?

(1) "Believe in God" is the wrong expression. I believe in you. I don't believe that God exists.

(2) You've gone to temple/church/whatever. You have seen people you know and love who pray to God as if He really existed. You have been told stories that are presented as true, as if they really happened. But the fact is that no one knows whether God truly exists. The stories started a long time ago and they have undergone many changes. Many people believe the stories because they believe what they are told by others whom they love and respect. Many people like all the friends they have in the group of believers. Many people like the idea that even when they are alone, they can have someone who sees them and is interested in what they do. But what people like and what's true are not always the same thing. People may want the stories to be true, but that does not mean they are true.

(3) There are many, many religions. There are also many, many gods. Most every group that's ever been has tried to explain the world by using gods to be responsible for the things that came before. Our planet and our universe are wonderful things, and it's not easy to discover how they got to be the way they are. Every religion thinks that its god is the answer and that all the other religions are wrong.

(4) We are learning so much about the universe, the world, and humanity. We use scientific methods to help us separate what might really be true from what we think might be true. And the more we learn, the more wonderful it all seems. On the other hand, with everything we learn, it becomes less likely that God really exists. No God and no heaven, but no devil and no hell either.

(5) We have each other. We have our lives together. We have our minds. We have our dreams. All of this is real enough. We talk to each other and we talk to ourselves. We laugh and we share. We sing and we learn. Why wonder about God when our lives are already filled with wonder?

(6) You are my child and I am your father. This is always true, no matter what you or I believe about God/no-God. As we live, learn, change, and move on, we'll think many things. We'll believe many things. We'll settle matters and then later overturn them. But you are always my child and I am always your father. This is one true thing, and that's all we need to build happy lives.

It's National Poetry Month

April is, appropriately, National Poetry Month.

The video below has Charles Bernstein demonstrating what makes a poem.



A radio station in my area has asked for poetry submissions, which then get entered into a drawing for prizes. Some of the poetry is being read on the air. Here's what I submitted:

On “The Madonna of Frydek”

The first note is sad and soft
And harsh
And then

She walks among open streets
Her expression only hints
How powerfully light
She is
And then

She may swim
In a city pool
In a medieval building
In a land
Of museums

The notes fade
The theme ascends
It gains weight
It asks a question
It loves her
And then wants
Her happiness.