Two Blog Posts on Debunking Postmodernism

Over at Rationally Speaking, here and here. The comments are especially interesting.

By the way, I don't think it's irrelevant to point out that Julia Galef, the writer of the two articles linked above, is HOT! (I'm a married spud, I'm a married spud....)

Man and Video Game Character Wed (Plus, Sex with Robots)

Apparently, this is not a joke. The man in the video, Sal9000, sets up a real wedding to marry Nene Anegasaki, a character in a game called Love Plus.

As a textuist, this odd event raises a host of questions. What, for example, would we say about a person marrying the figure of the Mona Lisa? What of a person who marries Ophelia from Hamlet? What of a person who falls in love with Otter from the movie Animal House?

On the surface it all seems a little ridiculous, yet this wedding seems to mark a (temporary? representative?) of the (imaginary?) boundary between fantasy and reality, between the fictional world and the real world, between the text and life. As my parenthetical questions indicate, while we may conventionally distinguish between our real world and that world of the game/painting/movie/text, sometimes that distinction gets violated and we're left to wonder whether the convention is inaccurate, whether the distinction is unstable, or whether the distinction is porous by nature.

Speaking of the integration of fantasy and reality, a recent story suggests that by 2011, people will be able to have sex with robots. Great sex.

All of this also casts an interesting light over recent social wrangles with the definition of "marriage." Consider also the potential ramifications in areas of insurance, health care, death benefits, and so on.

The Atheist Blogroll

I am happy to report that Textuality has been added to The Atheist Blogroll! You can see the blogroll in my sidebar.

The Atheist Blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world.

If any of you out there you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Biblical Translation: Why It Matters

I have said before that the Old Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures are different texts because the Old Testament is already rendered throughout as a translation that prefigures Jesus. People don't simply open the Old Testament and on their own start seeing Jesus parallels. Rather, the Old Testament has been translated with Christology in mind and the resulting text is available expressly to support Christian theological interpretations.

To illustrate this point, let's look at two different translations. Here is a traditional Jewish version in English of Genesis 1:1-16, from the Chabad.org site:

1. In the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth. 2. Now the earth was astonishingly empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water. 3. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4. And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated between the light and between the darkness. 5. And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night, and it was evening and it was morning, one day. 6. And God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, and let it be a separation between water and water." 7. And God made the expanse and it separated between the water that was below the expanse and the water that was above the expanse, and it was so. 8. And God called the expanse Heaven, and it was evening, and it was morning, a second day. 9. And God said, "Let the water that is beneath the heavens gather into one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. 10. And God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas, and God saw that it was good. 11. And God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, seed yielding herbs and fruit trees producing fruit according to its kind in which its seed is found, on the earth," and it was so. 12. And the earth gave forth vegetation, seed yielding herbs according to its kind, and trees producing fruit, in which its seed is found, according to its kind, and God saw that it was good. 13. And it was evening, and it was morning, a third day. 14. And God said, "Let there be luminaries in the expanse of the heavens, to separate between the day and between the night, and they shall be for signs and for appointed seasons and for days and years. 15. And they shall be for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens to shed light upon the earth." And it was so. 16. And God made the two great luminaries: the great luminary to rule the day and the lesser luminary to rule the night, and the stars.

Here is the same passage, but in the Old Testament. I have chosen to use the New International Version (NIV):

1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2. Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. 6. And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. 9. And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10. God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good. 11. Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day. 14. And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15. and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.

There are many differences between these two translations, and the differences go well beyond minor variations or shading in word and sense.

In Verse 2, for example, the traditional Jewish translation does not capitalize the 's' in 'spirit of God.' I suggest that the NIV capitalizes the 's' to foreshadow a concept such as the 'Holy Ghost.' I have seen another Jewish translation, however, that gives "Divine Presence." I have also seen one that uses "wind." It's very interesting because each word/phrase offers a slightly different connotation about God and the nature of God.

In Verse 8, the Chabad version capitalizes 'Heaven' while the NIV gives instead 'sky.' This discrepancy makes for very divergent readings, with the Chabad account establishing Heaven as the domain of god and the NIV associating the sky with our world down here. The NIV verse has our world rather distanced from the creator, with aligns nicely with Christian theology, generally speaking. Many Christian translations do use heaven, though, in capitalized or uncapitalized forms. The point still stands, though: the diction here reflects attitudes toward the topography of the divine universe.

Let's look now at Verse 16. The NIV makes a separate sentence of the clause dealing with stars. Notice how their change to light rather than luminary makes the sun and moon more instrumental than in the Chabad version, where they are almost like living governors. The traditional Jewish text is ambiguous, but might suggest the moon somehow rules the night and the stars. The NIV seeks to clarify, but I guess it also prefers a separate sentence for the stars because otherwise the moon ruling the stars seems odd against our modern knowledge about the moon and stars. This may, in fact, be a weak point, but I think that there is "supposed" to be a continuity in the description of the creation of the two luminaries and the stars. They are all made together, in one gesture. The NIV version breaks that up, for whatever reason.

Finally, notice all of the "and" words at the beginnings of the Chabad verses. When they are removed from the NIV, it's not just a matter of making the text contemporary. The NIV move alters the continuity and style of the text.

Bear in mind that we are only looking here at 16 little verses - and doing so in a superficial way - that we would expect to have far more agreement than there actually is. This is why I press the points that translation matters and that frames matter.

Let me add here a note on biblical translation generally. According to Dr. Joel Hoffman, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning, Bible translators can make three big mistakes. One: working from etymology, which doesn't really tell what a word means. Two: working from the internal structure of the words. Three: making use of cognate languages. The problem with these three mistakes is that they miss out on the context and connotations that would have been understood by people closest to the original generations of the sources. Very often, a modern reader uses a contemporary frame that makes textual context and connotations much different for a modern Jew or modern Christian than for a Jew just after the period of the Babylonian Exile or for a first or second century Christian.

This, therefore, is why I insist that a Christian Old Testament is a different text from the Hebrew Scriptures. Now, can there be multiple texts of the Old Testament? Yes, there can. I say that the NIV and the King James Version are different texts. The same principle applies to the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet, I would also posit that the Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures name two different "families" of text. They are two different families because they derive from two different interpretive frames.

These points relate to arguments I have made before on interpretation and religion-as-interpretation. As I see it, modern religions are interpretations promoting themselves and always referring back to themselves. Why is this important? Because the personal wonders we often ascribe to religion are often the product of practicing a religious interpretation and not the result of the religion’s status as truth or falsehood.

The religious frame is like an organism struggling to survive. It does so as a church, a text, a ritual. Most any religion-oriented social construct exists to establish, reinforce, and perpetuate the frame of interpretation. Whether the frame is a faithful approximation of reality is hardly the point. In fact, it's totally incidental.

The New Atheism: It's Our Time

Russell Blackford has a new essay pinpointing what's new in the so-called New Atheism. Blackford is promoting the new collection of essays he co-edited with Udo Schüklenk, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists.

According to Blackford, the New Atheists have emerged at a historical moment when growing numbers of people want religious teachings examined rationally. For far too long, particularly in America, religion has enjoyed a privileged position, with its claims and dogmas enjoying a status that protects them from being questioned and that dismisses the questioner.

Even while some New Atheists have become quasi-celebrities, we see that religious opponents rarely deal directly or rigorously with the arguments of the New Atheists, preferring instead to engage in character assassination and to forge rabbit trails of mythical New Atheist incivility, hostility, and "fundamentalism."

Without a doubt. the New Atheists have discarded the "live and let live" presumption that formerly characterized relations between the believing and un-believing public. This is a good thing, too.

But why the abandonment of the detente? Because in the post-9/11 world it's become all too clear that the push of religion and religious teachings is to assume authority in the public sphere; religion in America is not about seeking simply to worship in peace. Blackford describes the situation aptly:

For a start, a revived Christian philosophy is well entrenched within Anglo-American philosophy of religion. More importantly, perhaps, religious organisations and leaders continue to exert social power. All too often, they seek to control how we plan and run our lives, including choices about how we die. At various times, religious lobbies have opposed a vast range of beneficial, or at least essentially harmless, activities and innovations. Even now, one religion or another opposes abortion rights; most contraceptive technologies; stem-cell and therapeutic cloning research; physician-assisted suicide; and a wide range of sexual conduct involving consenting adults. We still see intense activism from the religious lobbies of all Western democracies, and even in relatively secular countries, such as the UK and Australia, governments pander blatantly to Christian moral concerns.

The situation is far worse in the US, where religious conservatives regrouped with dramatic success during the 1970s and 1980s, establishing well-financed networks, think tanks, and even their own so-called universities. Slick attempts are made to undermine public trust in science where it contradicts the literal Genesis narrative; a rampant dominionist movement wants to establish an American theocracy; the recent Bush administration took the country some considerable way down that path; and the election of a relatively liberal president has produced hysteria on the religious right (polling shows that many American conservatives now believe that Barack Obama is the Antichrist). American religiosity is real, and there is nothing subtle or liberal-minded about its most popular forms.

Meanwhile, we are confronted every day by the horrors of political Islam, with its ambitions to extend sharia law universally and its ugly violations of human rights wherever it actually has power. Many critics of religion were radicalised by the traumatic events of 9/11 when thousands of people were murdered by terrorists. Islam doubtless has moderate and even liberal manifestations, but prominent, politicised forms of Islam take a hard line against secularism, modernity, and all forms of liberal thought.

We have ample reason to contest religion's claims to pronounce authoritatively on matters of ultimate truth and moral correctness, and we have a social obligation to voice such challenges. What's more, as Blackford notes, given the enormous issues that face us both as members of a world community and as individuals - issues from climate change to end-of-life decisions - we urgently need to understand who claims to have authority and knowledge, and upon what grounds exactly:

The current debate about the truth-claims, moral authority, and social value of religion is very timely. It reflects the cold fact that the struggle of ideas is far from over, and that this is, after all, a good time to subject religions and all their claims to sceptical scrutiny. Those of us who do not believe have more than enough reason to dispute the unwarranted prestige enjoyed by the many variations of orthodox Abrahamic theism (and, indeed, all other religious systems). The time has come, once again, when critiques of theistic religion must be put strongly, clearly, openly, and unremittingly. What’s new about the New Atheism is its restoration of some balance – that, and the sheer number of people who have come to the same realisation.

To me, the New Atheist phenomenon has been about placing critical thinking and argumentation in the center of the public sphere. I take heart that so many people are engaging in dialogue, challenging claims, identifying logical fallacies, and making arguments. This is good, and I suspect that the more people engage in reasoned scrutiny of other ideas and their own, them more people will arrive at Atheism.

Debunking Biocentrism

Over at Nirmukta, Vinod K. Wadhawan and Ajita Kamal have a must-read post that explains exactly what makes "biocentrism" nonsense. Biocentrism, according to Wikipedia, claims that "life creates the universe rather than the other way around."

I'm interested in biocentrism because on the surface it seems to make claims similar to social constructionism. Both assert that the universe is a human construction, a product of the interaction between mind and world.

However, biocentrism has a different messianic/eschatological trajectory than social constructionism. As I understand it, biocentrism promises heaven to its believers in the form of a holistic communion of science and supernaturalism.

Social constructionism is a radical form of skepticism. In its most extreme forms, it views science and supernaturalism on the same continuum - they're differing degrees of bullshit but not different in nature, as in one being objective and neutral and the other being subjective and ideological.

Fortunately, biocentrism and social constructionism can be successfully challenged in similar ways. The key is to distinguish experiential truth from objective reality. Experiential truths are subjective perceptions of pre-existing physical properties, as the experience of seeing color is the mind's "interpretation" of certain physical characteristics in light. Our vision, mind, and subjectivity don't create light but can (and do) arbitrarily attach cultural and social value to some general wavelengths.

The common mistake made by biocentrism and social constructionism is the naturalistic fallacy, which mistakes a representation of a phenomenon for a natural phenomenon. Our subjective experiences of color are not our minds creating light or its physical properties Biocentrism and social constructionism try to bring everything into the subjective, representational sphere.

Ironically, however, what both biocentrism and social constructionism seem to criticize is the opposite tendency: claiming that social, subjective things are natural. Social constructionist critiques of gender and race, for example, have rightly pointed out that often what are taken to be "natural" differences between people are based instead on cultural norms and the consensus of tradition. I think the idea of "marriage" is a decent enough example, although obviously imperfect. There's nothing natural about marriage, whether it be different-sex or same-sex.

Biocentrism seems to me an obvious scheme to use a legitimate postmodern critique and convert it into feel-good prescriptions that can be packaged and sold to a public with low self-esteem and plenty of spare cash. Social constructionism has actual intellectual value for demystifying seemingly timeless and normal cultural categories. It errs only when it seeks to collapse the world into subjectivity.

With the help of Wadhawan and Kamal, I think we can make a rather provocative reformulation of the oft-repeated post-structuralist tenet, "There is nothing outside the text." When we maintain the difference between experience and physical reality, and try to be clear (insofar as we can) about when one is collapsing into the other, we see that there is nothing inside the text. There's no objective truth we can pull from the text because all we have is our interpretive experience of it, which is subjective and unique to the reader's time, place and cultural context.

Related: See also the comments posted on Pharyngula.

Objectivity, Truth, and Spin

[Image: by Brian Castellani at Sociology and Complexity Blog]

The World's Fair, which is part of the ScienceBlogs stable, has an interesting series on objectivity. Hmm. Well, maybe it's not about objectivity, or just about objectivity. It's also about art, truth, history, and historicizing. Other ideas and issues pop up along the way, but I think you can see why I find the series interesting.

Benjamin Cohen, the blogger, introduces the series by reflecting on his encounter with a 1992 article on the history of objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40: 81-128. Cohen tells us that he was shocked, and rightly so, by the idea that objectivity had (or could have) a history:

The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does not change throughout history. Subjectivity certainly does, since people change. But objectivity would seem to be ahistorical.

It is not.

I find it encouraging to have a series like Cohen's on ScienceBlogs because I might think that this subject would send up red flags to those outside the humanities. The topic, the history of objectivity, might be regarded and prejudiced at the outset as "postmodern nonsense." After all, if objectivity has a history, then perhaps it is not itself objective. Perhaps objectivity is not real but is instead a mental construct subject to placement and use in any number of cultural discourses and institutions. Discourses on science, scientific method, journalism, and so on employ objectivity. Institutions such as government agencies, colleges and universities, various companies and more have particular applications of objectivity as part of their in-house processes.

But I'm throwing out a bit of a red herring in what I have just said. I am not actually asserting, and I do not read Cohen as asserting, that "objectivity is not real but is instead a mental construct." Yet without denying the existence of a real objective world, I would also like to posit the existence of a mental construct of objectivity, a concept that can and does get put to rhetorical use. I think that both Cohen and I are interested by the rhetorical uses to which concepts such as objectivity are put. The idea of objectivity becomes part of the spin, as in "we report, you decide."

Here's Cohen again, in his concluding remarks on the series:

One can produce an image and one can say what that image represents. But what it represents is no simple claim.

It is one thing to recognize the reality of nature, another thing to make claims about that reality. That's a shift. There is a space between the two. In that space lies all the work of science.

Atheism: No Apologies

In the past, I've used the first post of the new year to describe my resolutions. Usually, these resolutions involve fitness or parenthood or finances.

However, I am not going to write about resolutions this time. It's not that I don't have any resolutions; it's that the resolutions are the same as they always have been: love my family, work, environment, body, prospects for learning, opportunities for growth, and so on. Love them all, care for them all, face them all squarely and responsibly.

So what do I want to talk about? Atheism, of course.

At Atheist Revolution, the post on "Misunderstanding Atheism" provides an opportunity to clarify my personal stance on Atheism. Now, before I continue I can already hear some person, likely a religious person or sympathizer, getting up on hind legs to bark and bay, "You see? You atheists are complete relativists. You have no objective Truth to refer to and so every belief each one of you holds, every moral principle, is in fact a matter of personal opinion."

Let me remind such folks that religion does not confer morality. If there are objective moral truths, both belief in God and adherence to religion do a piss-poor job of communicating these truths and getting people to live by them. (These folks might also want to look at all the different denominations and variations within their objectively true religious belief.)

These folks should also review the following excerpt from philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God:

16. The Argument from Moral Truth
1. There exist objective moral truths. (Slavery and torture and genocide are not just distasteful to us, but are actually wrong.)

2. These objective moral truths are not grounded in the way the world is but rather in the way that the world ought to be. (Consider: should white-supremacists succeed, taking over the world and eliminating all who don't meet their criteria for being existence-worthy, their ideology still would be morally wrong. It would be true, under this hideous counterfactual, that the world ought not to be the way they have made it.)

3. The world itself — the way that it is, the laws of science that explain why it is that way — cannot account for the way that the world ought to be.

4. The only way to account for morality is that God established morality (from 2 and 3).

5. God exists.

FLAW 1: The major flaw of this argument is revealed in a powerful argument that Plato made famous in the Euthyphro. Reference to God does not help in the least to ground the objective truth of morality. The question is: why did God choose the moral rules he did? Did he have a reason justifying his choice that, say, giving alms to the poor is good, while genocide is wrong? Either he had a good reason or he didn't. If he did, then his reasons, whatever they are, can provide the grounding for moral truths for us, and God himself is redundant. And if he didn't have a good reason, then his choices are arbitrary—he could just as easily have gone the other way, making charity bad and genocide good—and we would have no reason to take his choices seriously. According to the Euthyphro argument, then, the Argument from Moral Truth is another example of The Fallacy of Passing the Buck. The hard work of moral philosophy consists in grounding morality in some version of the Golden Rule: that I cannot be committed to my own interests mattering in a way that yours do not just because I am me and you are not.

FLAW 2: Premise 4 is belied by the history of religion, which shows that the God from which people draw their morality (for example, the God of the Bible and the Koran) did not establish what we now recognize to be morality at all. The God of the Old Testament commanded people to keep slaves, slay their enemies, execute blasphemers and homosexuals, and commit many other heinous acts. Of course, our interpretation of which aspects of Biblical morality to take seriously has grown more sophisticated over time, and we read the Bible selectively and often metaphorically. But that is just the point: we must be consulting some standards of morality that do not come from God in order to judge which aspects of God's word to take literally and which aspects to ignore.

COMMENT: Some would question the first premise, and regard its assertion as a flaw of this argument. Slavery and torture and genocide are wrong by our lights, they would argue, and conflict with certain values we hold dear, such as freedom and happiness. But those are just subjective values, and it is obscure to say that statements that are consistent with those values are objectively true in the same way that mathematical or scientific statements can be true. But the argument is fatally flawed even if Premise 1 is granted. [Emphasis added]

But I digress.

Atheist Revolution is responding to an article that appeared in the Corvallis Gazette-Times (OR). That article's misunderstanding of atheism is the point of departure for Atheist Revolution - hereafter AR. AR begins to correct the misunderstanding by defining Atheism:

Atheism in no way insists that there are no gods. Atheism is a response to theism. The theist claims that some sort of god or gods exist; the atheist does not accept this claim as accurate. Theism is the belief that a god or gods exist. Atheism is the absence of, or lack of, agreement with this belief. To say that an atheist does not believe in gods is an accurate statement, however, to insist that an atheist believes that there are no gods is erroneous. Atheism does not entail the conviction that there are no gods. Moreover, atheism says nothing whatsoever about the presence or absence of various unknown or unexplained phenomena. And finally, while lack of "proof" is a justification some atheists will offer for their unwillingness to accept theism, it is certainly not the only one. Other atheists would argue that they cannot accept the theistic belief claim because the concept of god is logically incoherent or undefined.

Although I agree with much of what AR says, I disagree that "Atheism in no way insists that there are no gods." As I understand Atheism, it asserts that there probably are no gods. Now, I have modified my words a bit because I don't see Atheism as making any kind of 100% insistence. But my point is that Atheism makes a positive claim: there probably are no gods because, among other things, the proof of gods existing is entirely lacking and the concept of god alternates between logical incoherence and complete vagueness. So I think AR errs to say that "to insist that an atheist believes that there are no gods is erroneous."

I also have a quibble when AR says, "Atheism is a response to theism. The theist claims that some sort of god or gods exist; the atheist does not accept this claim as accurate." On the contrary, I view theism as a response to atheism (not capital-A atheism), not the other way around. Capital-A atheism may indeed be a response to modern forms of theism. Indeed, I think this is probably so. But the lowercase-A atheism grounding capital-A atheism is not after, a consequence of, or derivative of theism. But this is me stating an opinion, and not issuing a full-fledged argument based on specific data. My point is that I see Atheism as drawing from ideas and arguments that go well beyond personal awareness of and experience with modern religion and theology.

Atheism has something important to say about the world, our assumptions about the world, and the institutions we use to teach us about the world (including religion and science). Atheism's boldest assertions must be made publicly and without apology or dilution. My Atheism seeks to make these assertions in just this way.

"The Goldhearted Miner," by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio

My favorite song this year, the incomparably gorgeous "Goldhearted Miner" by the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sadly, pianist Svensson died in June 2008 as the result of scuba diving accident.

Bertrand Russell on God

Feeling the need to cleanse this blog's palate after Dylanesque's abject ignorance, I'll give here a 1959 interview of Bertrand Russell.

The Religious Do Not Have an Objective Moral Standard

An apparent hit-and-run commenter thought (if you can call it that) to bring in the ol' objective morality tripe:

Morality must be linked to some truth, yup the big "T-word." Sorry, you can't get away from it. What is the truth? That's a whole 'nother discussion.

I'm almost disappointed the commenter did not quote Dostoevsky, but I'm also unsurprised that he (assuming the commenter is a male) chose to introduce a big, vague concept - capital-t truth - without describing it at all. Instead, he wanted to skip away blithely with cotton in his ears and holy lenses distorting his sight.

The poor commenter's point has been refuted since the time of Socrates, yet people STILL raise the point continually, as if it's news. Anyway, perhaps people will review this video before they think again of posting the "I-have-an-objective-standard-of-morality-while-your-morality-is-all-a-matter-of-personal-opinion" rubbish.

I hope it shuts them up, but they don't respond well to reason, so I doubt it.



As has been noted before, the objective morality of the religious usually and conveniently projects the moralizer's personal preferences onto "what God wants."

The Beginning of the Universe

Closer to Truth presents a fascinating series of interviews on whether the universe had a beginning.

The answer is yes, about 13.7 billion years ago. The universe originated spontaneously, out of nothing, because the laws of quantum physics require particles to pop in and out of existence. Yet, and this is remarkable, the laws of physics - the same laws that describe the universe - would seem to have existed before the universe itself.

The Big Bang, we learn, may have itself arisen out of cosmic inflation, which is to say that the Big Bang may have a history and pre-history. But whatever this prior state, the Big Bang happened because the laws of physics made it happen.

One nice thing about this video is that it leaves us with a question: Why? Why did our universe begin? Why the laws of physics? The video nicely suggests that the proper answer is silence. It's not god, gods or even no gods. The answer for now is silence.

Best Posts of 2009

To close out the year, I want to link to ten posts that present substantive content and best represent the development of my thought:

1. In January, I posted the first of two musings on the music and import of the Rolling Stones.

2. In April, I responded to a complicated formulation of the Argument from Ontology. I rejected God's existence on the basis of the argument because I found the initial premise flawed.

3. Also in April, I returned to one of my favorite themes, Atheism and morality. This time, I critiqued what I felt was a silly and wrongheaded post from one of the UD non-scientists.

4. In July, I expanded on a response to a book reviewer. The reviewer was squealing for joy over Paul Moser's The Elusive God. I found the review and the book's central argument to be based on an unreasonable condition: believe in God and be willing to transform yourself through God, and the evidence of God's existence will be made clear. (Posts 8, 9 and 10, below, also touch on matters that relate to why Moser's condition is unacceptable.)

5. In October, I wrote about Bob Dylan and why I think he's (still) so great.

6. Also in October, I pointed out how atheists are cast as the Other by the religious, allowing them to avoid dealing with the intrinsic contradictions and evils that ground belief.

7. In November, I returned to a subject that fascinated me this year: the historicity of Jesus. In this post, I used an article on the subject to delineate my thoughts. I lean toward the idea that Jesus was mythical but I recognize that the case is not strong and that the Jesus-was-historical argument is only slightly weaker. New evidence could easily change my mind.

8. Also in November, I made what I think is one of the more important statements I have ever made. The statement was on interpretation and how even a great and plausible interpretation need not be grounded in anything like reality. The frame is more important than the interpretation.

9. November also saw another important post, this time on the impossibilities presented in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. I focused on things that were outright unable to happen in the known universe. For some reason, we don't have high demands for independent corroboration of these impossible things. This post resulted in the best discussion of the year.

10. In December, I have posted lots. Yet, I feel that my comments on science and consistent standards of skeptical inquiry deserve most to be listed here.

This was a productive year. Much more so than I expected. As 2010 arrives, I wish to pursue many of these themes in more depth and I hope to introduce new ones, too.

2009: Year in Review

No way to deny that 2009 has been a busy year in many ways. I've posted much here in the past few months, which is a little ironic because at one point I thought about retiring the blog. This has generally been a good year, too. I'm especially happy to report this because in January 2009 I was probably as much on edge about the state of the world as anyone else:

These projects make me pretty excited about the year ahead and all that is to come. Perhaps I should acknowledge the general gloom and doom that surrounds everyone right now. Yes, the economy is dreadful and getting worse. War seems everywhere and endless. The environment seems not only to be transforming in front of us but exacting revenge. Heartache and head-shaking inanity – not to mention insanity – seem to underlie the behavior of ordinary people everywhere. I recognize this, but I don’t care. I can only do what I do, and that must be enough.

The projects I am referring to above include training for a marathon, two book projects, and a series of music retrospectives.

I never ran that marathon. I am in somewhat better shape now, but I can do better. I never got those book projects off the ground, but that was because I became involved in a few new ghostwriting efforts and also had to get my new dissertation work established.

Fortunately, I did manage to post a few articles on music, which I think came out well. I wrote about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones (first, second), Keith Jarrett (first, second), and Bob Dylan.

The kids and the family are doing well. We've had our share of health flare-ups, most recently with my mother in the hospital, but I think we'll come through OK. About health and about everything, there's not much to be except optimistic and positive - and resolved to work hard to create situations that foster these outlooks.

To all who read and follow along: I wish you good health, optimism, positivity, resolve, laughter, reason, and pleasant music. We live in great potential, and I think of humans as machines for converting potential into reality.

How I Became an Atheist

My journey to Atheism has been long and complicated. My title indicates that I "became" an Atheist, but the truth is that I always was an Atheist to some extent. I only needed to recognize and embrace it.

I grew up in a Jewish household, but my family was not particularly religious. We went to Conservative synagogues, which seemed plenty religious to me when I was a kid. At least, I thought we Conservatives were a religious cut above the Reform temples, which held services in English. In my Conservative household, though, we observed only the "big" holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover. I don't recall observing other Jewish holidays or even Shabbat.

From the time I was in third grade until I was bar mitzvahed, I went to Hebrew School. As with "regular" school, I wanted to do well in Hebrew school, so I worked at it. Nevertheless, my belief was not exactly iron-clad. One time, when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, I declared to my younger brother that I did not believe in God. On the other hand, around the time of my bar mitzvah, I had seemingly swung around the other way, as I considered going on with my Jewish education after the bar mitzvah. I even wondered whether being a rabbi was something that would suit me for a vocation.

To this day, however, I hold onto a fondness for Judaism that has little to do with religious belief or feeling and has everything to do with family. I remember being in synagogue on the High Holy Days during my youth and adolescence. I loved to pray in song alongside my father, so much did I enjoy hearing his beautiful tenor voice. Even a few weeks ago, I brought my family to my brother's home for Hanukkah. My father and mother, my brothers and their families -- we all sang together and had a delightful time. I associate these moments of family goodness and togetherness with Judaism. For me, being with my family is a Jewish thing.

However, along with my confessed soft spot for Judaism, I harbor great reservations about the religion. For example, I do not absolve Judaism of its tribalism, of its bastard children Christianity and Islam, and of its myriad hardships for those who have believed. This troubling side of Judaism is surely also part of my family heritage. Maybe because I have an indestructible core of love for Judaism, I realize now that, like all religions, Judaism must not be regarded as a statement of truth about the universe and its life forms, including people.

This realization about Judaism came slowly to me. For most of my adulthood, I regarded Judaism fondly but also harbored an unsure feeling about the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible. Why was God so present in the lives of Biblical people and so absent in the lives of modern people? Why were there so many different faiths that claimed to be the one true religion? If Judaism was true, why wasn't Christianity or Islam? Why did the Bible repeat itself in some places and contradict itself in others? Where and how were the 'books' of the Bible written? By whom were they written and for whom?

In graduate school, I learned about some of the analogues to stories in the Bible, such as the flood in Gilgamesh. I also learned about the problems of textual transmission: texts came in different versions. Some contained errors and corruptions that were preserved. Some were added to or revised. Some were re-cast in the cultural idiom of the new society. Religious doctrines appeared to me to be works in progress, the records of people trying to reconcile the incongruities of earlier texts. For all this, I never broke with Judaism.

As a matter of fact, in 2005, after I'd started this blog, I decided to become more Jewish. I wanted to live a more authentically Jewish life. I studied with Chabad rabbis. I davened every day, and donned tallit and tefillin. I read the weekly Torah portions. I lit candles on Shabbat and sought to refrain from working.

In 2007 or so, I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I wasn't impressed at first. On this very blog, I wrote this about the book:

I picked up a copy of Richard Dawkins’s The G-d Delusion. It’s a good way to test and define the faith I have been working to cultivate. I won’t give his precise argument – the title of his book does that, anyway. I appreciate the challenge offered by the book, even if the voice reminds me of everything that I associate, negatively, with British intellectualism. A kind of mean-spirited, elitist polemic presented to be wit.

Yet as a result of what I have read so far, I am more and more coming to conclude that, to twist a familiar saying, “The man who believes in G-d’s existence and the man who doesn’t are both right.” Maybe G-d, the One I hope will inhabit the place I am building in my heart, will exist only for me and only in the way I “construct” him. Hence, the “delusion” that Dawkins refers to, the self-reflecting belief, or fiction, that the constructed G-d preceded the constructor and, indeed, had constructed him instead.

Since I wrote this, I've come to find myself in close agreement with the main arguments Dawkins makes for evolution, for atheism, and against religious irrationality. Looking back, however, I see that I was struggling against reason to maintain belief in God. I wanted to believe, and Dawkins's book did not deter me from continuing in that desire. But I also see that I understood God as a personal projection, a concept useful for thinking about the world but of dubious existence in a genuine sense.

And I might have stayed in this mindset for a good long time except for what happened next: I became a ghostwriter and researcher for an Orthodox rabbi. He was looking for someone to help write his book, which would be a Jewish response to the "New Atheism." I was ambivalent about the project. Indeed, I was certain I wasn't the guy for the job. I knew some about religion but I wasn't as knowledgeable or passionate about it as I felt I needed to be. I knew even less about the natural sciences. I had read some science books, but that was it. Evolution was something I only knew in a two-sentence definition.

I wanted to do a good job for the rabbi, so I read and read and read and read. Everything I could get my hands on I devoured and annotated. At first, the rabbi wanted me simply to update material that he had used in previous debates. This material was -- no joke -- over 20 years old! I very quickly saw that the rabbi was using outdated information and arguments. I told him that everything needed to be re-done from scratch because the old arguments weren't going to cut it anymore. He wanted to use old quotes that were taken out of context. He wanted to use "gaps" reasoning. He wanted to blame Darwin for Hitler. It was bad material and, worse, it was bad reasoning.

On the other side, I found the scientists provocative, self-critical, careful in their reasoning, and measured in their words. I saw immediately the difference between people who write from direct, first-hand knowledge of the science they put forth and hacks (like me) who aren't scientists and don't do science day after day. Don't misunderstand: I am not talking about the "experience" of science or the "experience" of religion. I am talking about working closely with the primary sources of data, documenting the methodology and data, and using the findings to ask questions about the strengths and weaknesses of various relevant hypotheses about the world. In all the religious explanation of unsavory or incoherent passages in the Bible, I never saw the same level of intellectual rigor, methodological transparency, or questioning of presuppositions.

I should also mention that in the course of my research I was eager to learn about Intelligent Design (ID). However, I quickly discovered that ID was not going to help me develop what I thought would be a legitimate critique of the scientific side of the New Atheism. One big problem is that very, very few credible biologists and working scientists seem to be in the ID camp. Most of the staunch ID people seem to be lawyers, mathematicians, engineers and journalists. They focus a lot on denigrating evolution (which they call "Darwinism"). Sometimes they have critiques of science, but mostly they beef at the media presentation of scientific research and findings. The ID proponents don't seem to have any full-fledged research programs and findings that specifically advance their theory. However, my biggest problem with ID was that it was utterly superfluous. Touting intelligent design as a "best explanation" for the diversity of life earth seemed totally unnecessary in the face of the materialist phenomena which were the proper subject of science. Any preceding intention to such phenomena - whether from a super-human being or from a combination of natural factors - were actually irrelevant, so far as I could tell. In my estimation, while the New Atheists supported their rhetoric with evidence, logic and facts, the ID proponents supported their rhetoric with more rhetoric.

During the book project, I became ever more the religious skeptic. But I thought I could mount a new argument that posited the reasonableness of a certain kind of faith and that criticized the ideas of the New Atheists. The argument I eventually made for religion -- specifically about Judaism -- was that religion signified a particular way of seeking and achieving a comprehensive (cultural, moral, spiritual, etc.) personal fulfillment:

One can change affiliation, as one can switch political party affiliations. If one is born Jewish, however, one remains Jewish even if the choice is made not to exercise that inheritance. To me, choosing to be Jewish opens up many different ways to be personally fulfilled, beyond intellectual fulfillment and beyond social acceptance. To be Jewish is to be intensely curious about the universe, yet wanting more to learn from it than about it. To be Jewish is to experience real horror when people – any people, but especially Jewish people – behave barbarously, and to take some ownership and responsibility for not having fostered more peace in the world. If I am a Jew, it is not only because I say so, or because I pray and keep kosher. If I am a Jew, it is because every day, and throughout the day, I re-assert my belief that we will all make that connection with transcendence. When we do, and when we are all met together at that celestial place, these worldly identities won’t matter so much.

In the final manuscript, my critique of the New Atheism was that it over-valued science and scientific reasoning as freedom-protecting cultural forces: "Science is itself a blind watchmaker. Science theorizes nature and physical reality as a blind watchmaker because this is what science is. In essence, science projects itself onto the universe it seeks to describe." Richard Dawkins of course coined the term "blind watchmaker" to describe the way evolution worked. In applying the metaphor to science itself, I think I was getting at the idea that science was not a complete or totally consistent formal system: science needed to resist ideology and dogma, most especially from itself.

That book project was grueling for the writing, for the toll on other areas of my life, and for the stress of dealing with the person whose name would go on the published book. The project finished at the end of 2008. After this time, I kept reading the science and religion blogs that were part of the project. I continued studying the claims, reasoning, and evidence that people brought out. I began posting on some of these blogs as a commenter and debater. I kept learning, and I kept developing my positions. By summer of 2009, I realized that it was no longer rational for me to accept

• The claim of existence for God or for any divinity.
• The claim of existence for anything like the supernatural.
• The claim of divine inspiration for the scriptures of any religion.
• The claim of any sort of moral or social authority for any religious group. 

I determined that none of the religious faiths or their spokespeople were putting out anything other than fantasy. I decided that it was no longer responsible or honest for me to call myself anything other than an Atheist.

And so I say I am an Atheist.

The Lunacy of Conservapedia

Don't ask why I was there. However, I was utterly shocked to read the following blurb about Joseph McCarthy:

Joe McCarthy (Joseph Raymond McCarthy, November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was a two-term Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. He dominated the anti-communist movement in the U.S., 1950-54, until his career was ruined by censure by the Senate. "McCarthyism" is the aggressive exposure of Communists influences in America and the people who protect them, and liberals will add 'with scant regard for due process'.

This is a disgusting dereliction of duty for a site that purports to be a source of reliable information.

McCarthyism was overly aggressive and ill-conceived from the beginning. It ruined lives, careers, and families. It was one man's witch hunt and a terrible failure on the part of the U.S. government and the American people.

I voted republican in the 2008 presidential election. I prefer tighter control on the U.S. budget and a general lightening of taxes. But if Conservapedia represents the mainstream views of Republicans - or if Republicans buy into that shit - then I can't imagine looking at a Republican candidate for a long time

I Get Email, Family Edition

I thought I had inadvertently dropped my sister-in-law as a Facebook friend. So I wrote an apologetic note along with a new friend request, which she accepted. The next day, she sent me this:

Hi,

I have to be honest with you. I did remove you from my friends list awhile ago. And from J.'s. I don't wish to personally attack you, but some of your anti-Christian comments and especially the mocking remarks by some of your FB friends hurt me deeply and on a very personal level. My faith is who I am, my whole identity. I don't expect you to understand that because the Catholic Faith is experiencial; you cannot understand it all from a book, you have to experience it first hand.

J. on the other hand is a very impressionable young person who respects you. We are raising him to experience his Catholic Faith and are going to great lengths to instill this faith and a moral compass in him for life. I don't wish to have him reading Anti-Christian/Athiest and hateful remarks on your status updates or wall postings...of those of your friends.

So I hope you can forgive me, but I had to tell you the truth and I hope you can respect my feelings. I don't want to to feel like you have to "censor" your posts, so maybe it's best if we are just not FB friends...it's up to you. I love you no matter what, you are family and my love is unconditional. As far as I'm concerned our relationship as in-laws is the same as always.

M.

Um...OK.

"My faith is who I am." Wha? What a horrible thing to reduce oneself like this. By "faith," perhaps she means belief. Maybe she means the doctrines. Perhaps she means the rituals. She could be referring to the whole organization of Roman Catholicism. Maybe it's some combination of all these things. But isn't it downright creepy and sad for a person to think that her entire personal content boils down to pre-formulated, pre-packaged simulations of thinking and feeling?

The "faith is experiential" line is garbage. I've been in RC churches. I've been to the services more times than I care to recount. So she has a powerful experience in a church. Big deal. Some people experience getting abducted by aliens. Some people experience getting high on drugs and alcohol. Don't tell me I don't know or can't understand Catholicism because I've never been a Catholic and don't believe that any bit of it is true. As a medievalist, I've studied the primary texts and the formation of the church. I know the doctrines and what they say. I know the writings of the church fathers. I know what the New Testament says. I know a bit about the early church, and I know about the recent history of the church. I know Catholicism as well as she does. The only difference is that I don't ignore all the very good reasons for thinking it's hogwash.

Of course she seeks to shield her son from ideas such as atheism, from the idea that it might just be OK not to believe in Jesus or in any god or man-god. He may decide that not only is it OK not to believe but also that it's probably a more accurate view of reality.

Here is how I responded to her:

Hi M.,

Thanks for your message.

First of all, I’m grateful for your honesty. Let me also say back to you, “I love you no matter what, you are family and my love is unconditional. As far as I'm concerned our relationship as in-laws is the same as always.” I feel exactly this way, too. In your note, you ask directly for forgiveness, and I certainly do forgive you.

I apologize if anything I have written has been, or has appeared to be, “anti-Christian” or “hateful.” While I reject the idea that gods/demigods exist, and I criticize religion generally, I consciously try not to single out particular traditions. I am also sorry that your feelings have been hurt by anything I have written or by responses others have given to posts of mine.

I genuinely appreciate that you do not wish for me to “censor” my opinions, and I respect both your feelings and your decisions regarding which ideas come into contact with your children. Like you, I work to model ethical behavior and clear reasoning for my kids. And like you I strive to help them continue developing the moral character both to make mature life choices and to exercise intellectual courage.

Whatever you choose to do regarding Facebook is absolutely fine with me. Truly. I think of Facebook as rather silly theater. Like all toys, it’s fun. But it’s certainly not worth any real-life drama.

So, no problem-o. Thanks again for talking candidly with me.

I hope this reply conveys a few things:

• That I am truly sorry her feelings got hurt. I am sorry, but I have not attacked her. I have criticized bad ideas and bad thinking. I'll keep doing it, too.
  
• That I am unapologetic for my opinions and the work it took to discover what I thought was more right.
  
• That being moral and being atheist are highly compatible. One doesn't need to be religious to instill a "moral compass" in his children.
  

Historical Exodus: Probably Not

Archaeology describes the past based on scientific evidence: artifacts, architecture, settlement patterns, animal bones, seeds, soil samples, anthropological models drawn from world cultures, and other modern methods.

What does archaeology tell us about the historicity of the biblical Exodus, the miraculous escape of 600,000 people from slavery in Egypt? Not much, and so far what it does tell looks unpromising for those who desire the Exodus narrative to be true as biblically reported. In a review article of Finkelstein and Silberman's The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Sarah Belle Dougherty writes:

Physical evidence and historical texts confirm that Canaanites had traditionally settled in the prosperous east delta region of Egypt, particularly in times of drought, famine, and war. Some came as landless conscripts and prisoners of war, others as farmers, herders, or tradesmen. Egyptian historians tell of the Hyksos, Canaanite immigrants who became dominant in a great delta city and were forcibly expelled by the Egyptians around 1570 BCE. After the Hyksos expulsion, the Egyptian government controlled immigration from Canaan closely and built forts along the eastern delta and at one-day intervals along the Mediterreanean coast to Gaza. These forts kept extensive records, none of which mention the Israelites or any other foreign ethnic group entering, leaving, or living as a people in the delta.

Biblical scholars place the Exodus in the late thirteenth century BCE, and up to that time there is only one mention of the name Israel, despite many Egyptian records concerning Canaan. Nor is there any archeological evidence for a body of people encamping in the desert and mountains of Sinai in the Late Bronze Age. [Emphasis added]

Finkelstein and Silberman themselves state:

Sites mentioned in the Exodus narrative are real. A few were well known and apparently occupied in much earlier periods and much later periods -- after the kingdom of Judah was established, when the text of the biblical narrative was set down in writing for the first time. Unfortunately for those seeking a historical Exodus, they were unoccupied precisely at the time they reportedly played a role in the events of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, not only did the Israelites not escape Egypt and invade Canaan, they never left Canaan at all, say Finkelstein and Silber:

[T]he emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan -- they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people -- the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were -- irony of ironies -- themselves originally Canaanites!

What about Moses? Was there a historical Moses? According to Brian Britt, Associate Professor and Director of the Religious Studies Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University:

Current discussion of the historical Moses reflects the division between maximalists, who accept much of the Bible as historically valid, and minimalists, who accept very little....Contrary to the impression given by television documentaries, maximalists have little evidence in their favor, though James K. Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford, 1999) makes as good a case as any. Barring dramatic new discoveries of evidence or interpretation, the division between minimalists and maximalists is not likely to be resolved. In fact, both camps increasingly place the Bible at the center of polemics over theology and ideology (evangelical Christianity and nationalism, e.g.).

Britt also notes that Moses myth studies are flourishing: "Such studies go beyond historiographic debates on the Bible to consider its cultural relevance and legacy for the present." Britt explains that the Moses myth reaches far and wide:

The Moses myth is so widespread that writing about him entails writing about culture. Recent books on the Moses myth include Dale Allison’s The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Fortress, 1993), an excellent study of Moses in the Gospel of Matthew; Jan Assmann’s brilliant Moses the Egyptian (Harvard University Press, 1997); and Melanie Wright’s study of popular culture, Moses in America (Oxford University Press, 2003). All of these studies go beyond the obvious point that each generation makes Moses in its own image by exploring how and why these images are made. The new Moses studies also shift from the search for the historical Moses to current preoccupations with memory, traditions, and representation. No longer a topic only for biblical historians, the study of Moses has, like the study of tradition itself, become interdisciplinary. Biblical scholarship joins literary theory and cultural studies, philosophy borrows from psychoanalysis and Judaic studies, ancient history merges with modern intellectual history. Such work generates not only new interpretations but new categories and methods, such as Assmann’s "mnemohistory," the history of memory.

Britt also challenges us to re-think the centrality of Moses to the Torah:

The biblical Moses is not as central to the Bible as many people think. No more than fourteen chapters of the 167 chapters of the Pentateuch, which is also known as the "Torah of Moses," deal primarily with the story of Moses' life, and even these chapters bear faint resemblance to conventional ideas of biography or hagiography. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text (Continuum/ T&T Clark International), the biblical Moses is an uncanny figure; the narratives around his birth, commission, leadership, and death challenge the reader to disentangle the man from the myth. In this way, biblical texts stimulate biblical tradition, which depends on unceasing streams of commentary. Conversely, the post-biblical myth of Moses points back to the biblical texts of Moses, the basis for his legend and legitimacy. To the first-century writers Philo and Josephus, Moses represented the pinnacle of Jewish tradition, and their Hellenistic biographies elevate him far above the Bible. Most biographies of Moses, from late antiquity to the present, resemble the portraits of Philo and Josephus, placing the life story of the great man at the center of tradition. Rabbinic Judaism, on the other hand, remained much closer to the biblical tradition in which Moses always stands second to a tradition of text, covenant, and God. [Emphasis added]

People often take "myth" as a pejorative term, especially so in the context of religious narratives. Increasingly, though, I am gaining respect for myths. They are resilient, viral, and flexible. They are not about true content but about packing in data: cultural data, social mores, ideological issues, personal hopes, and more. That's a pretty great thing.

Historical Jesus: No Clear Picture

I think it’s absolutely critical to have religions and religious belief put into a proper perspective. When we do this it becomes quite clear that religion establishes itself not on historicity and data, but on narration and authority. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, but it’s important to bear in mind because we have little rational basis for asserting the truth of a religion. Yet, many people accept that their adopted religion is true.

Let’s consider Christianity for an example of how attempts to assert historicity fail. It is December, after all, and Christian groups and believers are working overtime to repeat their message, "Our religion is true! Jesus was born, lived, died, and lived again!" I also want to state a hypothesis that I do not have enough evidence to verify (yet): Belief in Christianity being true does not depend on either the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament being historically/factually true. I know, I know, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old Testament are supposed to be the same thing. But they are not. I have a quote later by Gerd Lüdemann that indicates some of the difference. The point of my hypothesis, however, is that Christianity considers its own claims as unimpeachable and only secondarily concerns itself with defending texts outside of the New Testament. Beyond the hypothesis, my point is that Christianity's own historical and factual claims become highly problematic under scrutiny, and this is a fact that ought to be emphasized more.

For this consideration, we can do much worse than listening to someone like R. Joseph Hoffmann, who is Distinguished Scholar at Goddard College and head of the Goddard Program in Human Values. He is also Former Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) and Co-chair of The Jesus Project (2007-2009).

Hoffmann explains that our sources of information – including the New Testament itself – do not give a clear answer to whether a discernibly historical Jesus existed. The methodologies we use to evaluate sources also do not yield this clear answer.

[N]either the sources we possess nor approaches to them developed over the last two centuries yield any resolution of the question of his [i.e., Jesus’s] actual existence and that the Church’s description of his reality has never depended primarily on the status of such a question.

In other words, there simply is not enough evidence to establish the historical existence of the New Testament’s Jesus. We have reports by people invested in the stories they tell, but we don’t have the historical records we need to say “Yes, this person existed.”

Historically, the existence of Jesus to be indubitable would need to be demonstrated in the same way the existence of any other human being can be shown. The standard of proof is fairly high, making allowance for the age in which the person lived or is thought to have lived. Normally we would expect records, reports, artifacts (bones are best), or the writings of people who mention Jesus in their reports of other events. For example, a chronicle of the Roman administration of Pontius Pilate in Palestine with a mention of the crucifixion of an outlaw named Yeshu, a Galilean, would be very helpful. But we do not possess such a record. Instead, we possess reports written by members of a religious group that had very specific and self-interested reasons for retelling his story. And the way in which it is told differs so markedly from the sorts of histories the Romans were writing in the second and third century CE that scholars have acknowledged for a long time the “problem” of deriving the historical Jesus from the Gospels—and even more the problem of deriving his existence from the letters of Paul or any other New Testament writings.

Religion and religious belief only complicate matters. In the case of Christianity, the Christ figure that emerges by the 4th century bears little resemblance to anything of historical or physical reality.

To accept the “reality” of Jesus after the fourth century is to accept the rather bizarre figure immortalized in the icons, the Jesus of the fertile Christian imagination. This Jesus is a myth cobbled together from other myths—imperial, soteriological, apocalyptic and messianic, priestly, gnostic, stoic with a healthy dash of byzantine splendor tossed into the mix. To the extent that every Jesus is a composite of culture and theology, the Jesus of Nicaeo-Chalcedonian orthodoxy would have been quite impossible in a first or second century context, and for the same reasons–though his image is emblazoned on cathedral walls from London to St Louis in tribute to the famous “original” in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople—impossibly exotic to later generations. The rate of change in reframing the reality of Jesus between the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and since the Reformation is enough to suggest that theological definitions of reality relate more to love than to chairs; that is to say, they are impressions of interpretation rather than interpretations of fact.

Let me depart from Hoffman now and go to Gerd Lüdemann, Professor of History and Literature of Early Christian at Georg-August-University, Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies, and Director of the Archive "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule." In the quote below, Lüdemann observes that the New Testament and the orthodox understandings of it not only affect our view of Jesus but also re-frame our view of the Hebrew Scriptures. In other words, the New Testament actually conjures and creates an “Old Testament,” a fictional/ized version of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Historical criticism has effectively undermined the validity of the great majority of Old Testament citations by the authors of the New Testament; indeed, it is seldom possible even to imagine that Old Testament writers can have had in mind the persons and events that New Testament writers claimed they did. The oft-proposed thesis that this issue cannot be resolved either negatively or positively does not hold. The long and short of it is that New Testament authors have systematically mistaken or distorted the meaning of Old Testament texts in the service of polemical and doctrinal agendas. Matthew’s five citations of prophecy in his nativity account are among the best-known examples of the practice, and perhaps the most comically inapposite. In the interest of honesty and better communication with the public, academic theology needs to demonstrate the same kind and degree of intellectual honesty that long ago led natural science to disavow the Ptolemaic world picture.

These are points that all relate to arguments I have made before on interpretation and religion-as-interpretation. As I see it, modern religions are interpretations promoting themselves and always referring back to themselves. Is this necessarily a bad thing? No, but it’s important to bear in mind because the personal wonders we often ascribe to religion are often the product of practicing a religious interpretation and not the result of the religion’s status as truth or falsehood.

The New Atheism as Seen from the Outside and the Inside

The so-called "New Atheists" include Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, P.Z. Myers, and others. They are supposedly "militant" in their criticism of religion and religiosity, which gets them millions of fans as well as detractors.

So far as I know, these people never call themselves New Atheists. This name has been bequeathed on them by those who are offended by them or shocked by them or who generally don't like them. Apparently, at some time in the past atheists were more mild mannered and not writing best-sellers or garnering so much attention in the media.

However, I am always amused when critics of the New Atheism try to use a "fight fire with fire" rhetorical strategy. These critics apparently see themselves as erudite folk who can out-do (and out-duel) any of the New Atheists in sharp, witty, and devastatingly clever ripostes. But the critics usually fail on two counts. One, they never write so well as their atheist counterparts, and two, they never fail to avoid the arguments actually made from the atheist side.

Case in point: Kathryn Lofton's recent piece, "So You Want to Be a New Atheist." Lofton opens the essay ploddingly with some gratuitous hand-waving about the New Atheists being just as fundamentalist as their religious adversaries (yawn). Fortunately, her companion point is how diverse a group of evangelists the New Atheists are, which is sooo fortunate because we readers at least know from the outset that what we'll get from this piece will be very carefully considered bullshit:

It is, by now, old hat to say that atheism is just another literalism, defined less by the content of its complaint than by the style of its conveyance. Writing of Richard Dawkins, literary critic Terry Eagleton remarked that he had more in common with American TV evangelists than the refereed scientists to whom he claimed frequent recourse. This is then to correct the caricaturist’s image of the atheist—new or old—as a nihilist. Atheism has long been described, as Julian Baggini has explained, as “by its very nature negative” and dependent “for its existence on the religious beliefs it rejects.” While the reliance on comparative religions is indisputable, the presumed inherent negativity of atheism needs some definitional fine-tuning. If the screeds, tracts, speeches and, today, documentary films demonstrate anything, it is that atheists are not bleak existentialists. They are and have been variously colored in their impulses, ranging from sweet naturalists and happy materialists to rabid idealists and polemical ideologues. Atheists are not mere merchants of the negative, but are posited—by themselves, by their fans—as knights of deliverance. As one reviewer in the Atlantic wrote, “For a man who is frequently labeled a misanthrope, Christopher Hitchens has an unexpected faith in humankind.”

Lofton at least does not here call Dawkins et al. "New Atheists." But her long-winded blah-blah finally amounts only to "today's atheism has a messianic component equal to that of any religion."

Of course, this falsehood is so very tired and, more importanly, peripheral. It completely misses the point of atheism, whether it's new atheism, old atheism, atheism 3.0 or whatever. What is the point of the new atheism? In my humble opinion, it is this:

Your religious beliefs are not above questioning and criticism, and they shouldn't be allowed to govern our personal lives and public policies.

Too bad Lofton chooses not to engage any of the atheist arguments against religion's truth claims or against religion's long history of ineluctable personal persecution and public repression. We can only wonder why she has made such a choice.

UPDATE, 12/14/2009: Apparently, Lofton's post has been removed.

(Your Imaginary) God Has No Rights on Me or You

I often get accused of holding an anti-supernatural bias, a pre-formed assumption that God does not exist. Because of this bias, I am told, I automatically close myself off to the wonder and beauty of the Bible or I blind myself to the self-evident signs in the world that ineluctably point toward "The Creator." If I were to be more open-minded, I would be amazed at how God's wisdom permeates everything that is, was, and ever will be.

I have indeed reached the conclusion that God does not exist, that no gods do or ever have existed. That conclusion came at the "end" of many years of thinking about the matter and going back and forth on it. I place end in scare quotes because it's entirely possible my view will continue to evolve over the course of my life. Since I'm parsing words I might also think more about conclusion: in some sense it was less a conclusion and more like admitting to myself that atheism was what I thought was true. Atheism did, and does, appear to me much more likely than the claims of religions about gods and miracles.

Having arrived at atheism, I now proceed in that frame of mind. I have an anti-supernatural bias insofar as I consider the matter settled. Someone once asked me what would change my mind. My answer: If my grandfather, who died in 1983, were suddenly to appear before me and my family to have a chat, then I would seriously re-think my views. If someone were to make a very specific prophecy - like, "a swarm of bees will descend upon the city and plunge it into darkness for three days" - and it came true in just this way, then I'd be very impressed. Such events nothwithstanding, I no longer find it useful or necessary to keep asking, "but what IF God exists and everything/something said in one or more holy books is true?"

My sense of being godless is that reality is far more beautiful, complex, expansive, and strange than any religion or belief can contain. The universe and its study far outshine the dessicate doctrines of the bible and its commentaries. I would much rather experience the world, know more about the universe, and learn about how humans struggle to apply ever-greater learning to ever-greater problems - problems which are usually of our own making, unfortunately. Religion to me seems limiting in the most unhealthy way: read only the holy texts, praise god/jesus/allah/ganesh, give money to the religious instituion. Lather, rinse, repeat. Trust in the lord and don't look too long at the stuff in religion that's troubling, inconsistent, or offensive.

So let me answer one more question I am often asked. What if God in fact exists? And what if it's the God of the Hebrew Scriptures that is God? Well, if it's true and if he's actually there, this is my answer:

God has no right whatsoever to obligate me - or my descendants or my ancestors or my countrymen or my fellow life forms - to behave or think in any way. God has no right to punish or reward me for what I think and what I feel. To God I owe nothing material, emotional, or intellectual. God may not infringe upon my personal liberties and I refuse to grant it permission to do so. If God and I are to be friends - and why not? - then these are some of the ground rules going in. All this applies to everyone: God has no rights on any of us.

But let's not lose ourselves in fantasy. There's every reason to think our universe and everything in it, including us, developed through natural means and without need of, or intervention by, anything that would fit mainstream definitions of "supernatural" (e.g. gods, demiurges, angels, fairies, and so on). There's no reason to think we have any knowledge of an inscrutable, onmipotent, omniscient, living, personal god.

Without such knowledge, it seems foolish to me for people to give their emotions, money, and intellect in worship of this god. Such people worship only themselves. Ironically, this is what they claim atheists do.

My question to my questioners is this: Why would we owe God anything, if he did exist and if he did make us? Why would all of our self-affirmed and self-asserted rights as individuals collapse before this being? I think it's well worth challenging the standard line of thinking that not only assumes God exists and made us but that also insists we owe God something (our worship, our praise, our labor) for this.