Yearly Archives: 2011

Word of the Day: Apologetics

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Dictionary or Bible, we can ask: Does God exist?Apologetics is the discipline of defending a position using reason.  The word is so tied to the defense of Christianity that “Christian apologetics” is almost redundant.  An apologetic is a specific argument (the Design Argument or Pascal’s Wager, for example).
Though “apologetics” has its origin in common with the word “apology,” the apologist does not apologize.  The original Greek work apologia meant to make a spoken defense, such as you’d give if you were the defendant in court.
A Christian could argue for Christianity in an emotional way, but that wouldn’t be apologetics.  These nonapologetic claims might be “Christianity makes me feel good” or “I just like the worldview” or “You’ll love the community.”
Counter-apologetics uses reason to rebut specific Christian apologetic arguments.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
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Churches and the Corporate Org Chart

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(Today, I’m pleased to have a guest post from Richard S. Russell, an atheist from Wisconsin and commenter at this blog.)
In these difficult economic times, you may have heard more than usual about GDP. It’s short for “Gross Domestic Product” and is the dollar value of all the goods and services produced within a given country (or state or region) in a year. “Goods” are products, material objects that customers want; “services” are procedures, actions performed to help customers. Together, these products and procedures reflect the wealth generated by the economy.
In the U.S., a lot of goods and services are produced by big corporations, which are organized to do so effectively and efficiently, using those techniques much beloved of Econ 101 courses, division of labor and specialization.
Here’s an organization chart for a typical manufacturing corporation, one that produces material goods:

And here’s what goes on inside each of those little boxes:

(1) Management makes decisions, tells everyone else what to do, and handles investor relations.
(2) Internal Services support the rest of the company in general; the category includes accounting, info tech, personnel (human resources), labor relations (employment relations or ER), safety, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and legal.
(3) Research and Development (R&D) investigates new ways of doing things and tests them out.
(4) Purchasing acquires raw materials, equipment, and property.
(5) Manufacturing (the biggest part of the company, employing the most people) generates actual useful products.
(6) Inventory Control deals with both raw materials and finished products and includes transportation, warehousing, shipping, delivery, and quality assurance.
(7) Marketing uses media to spread the word that people should buy the company’s products.
(8) Sales works directly with individual customers to get them the products they want in exchange for their money.
(9) Customer Service works directly with customers who are having problems with a product.
The chart gets slimmed down a little if we’re talking about services instead of goods. Here’s an org chart for a typical service corporation:

Notice that manufacturing has vanished altogether (no goods being produced), and that the bulk of the people working for the company are the ones directly helping customers. You still have Purchasing and Inventory Control, but these are much smaller operations (since they now deal mainly with furniture and office supplies instead of heavy machinery and raw materials) and so are generally subsumed under Internal Services.

Finally we have the kind of organizations that produce neither goods nor services, namely churches. Here’s how they work:

There are still lots of entries under Management (bishops, archbishops, abbots, cardinals, popes, etc.), since these guys (by which I mean “men”) are really into hierarchy.

There’s the normal array of Internal Services, with the diminished activity under ER (no unions, heavy emphasis on conformity and obedience) and regulatory compliance more than offset by the need for lots of work under legal (discrimination, pedophilia, etc.).
Nothing under R&D. (Create something new?!)
Nothing under Purchasing. (Spend? Contribute to the economy?!)
Nothing under Manufacturing. (Useful products!?)
Nothing under Inventory Control.
But tons and tons o’ time is devoted to (or, more properly, “wasted on”) Marketing and Sales. In fact, in the absence of goods and services, it’s the only thing religion does at all. In other words, the priest class spends all its time pushing companionship with themselves, in return for nothing useful or even (as in the case of more traditional prostitutes) pleasurable.
The most telling part of the chart, though, is Customer “Service,” where the ironic quotation marks emphasize the difference between what a church does and what an actual contributor to GDP does. A responsible, reputable company assumes that, if you’ve got a problem, it’s their own product’s fault, or the result of shoddy service from one of the company’s representatives. But in the case of religion, any counseling they provide for people with problems is designed to show, first and foremost, how the religion itself is never, ever at fault, that the problem is entirely the customer’s, because he or she didn’t follow directions properly. In short, the motto of Customer “Service” for a church is “The customer is always wrong.”
In effect, since religion never solves any problems (not even those of its own making), Customer “Service” is just another mechanism under Sales and Marketing, which is why it’s shown as subsidiary to those activities on the skeletal org chart above.
You know the short word for any activity that’s all talk and no walk (or, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle)? Scam!
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Using the Monty Hall Problem to Undercut Christianity

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What is Christianity?I first came across the Monty Hall Problem 20 years ago in Parade magazine:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats.  You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat.  He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?”
Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Most people think that it doesn’t matter and that there’s no benefit to switching.  They’re wrong, but more on that in a moment.
Humans have a hard time with probability problems like this one.  You’d think that we’d be fairly comfortable with basic probability, but apparently not.
Here’s another popular probability problem: how many people must you have in a group before it becomes more likely than not that any two of them have the same birthday?
The surprising answer is 23.  In other words, imagine two football teams on the field (11 per team) and then throw in a referee, and it’s more than likely that you’ll find a shared birthday.  If your mind balks at this, test it at your next large gathering.
Now, back to the Monty Hall Problem.  A good way to understand problems like this is to push them to an extreme.  Imagine, for example, that there are not three doors but 300 doors.  There’s still just one good prize, with the rest being goats (the bad prize).
So you pick a door—say number #274.  There’s a 1/300 chance you’re right.  This needs to be emphasized: you’re almost certainly wrong.  Then the game show host opens 298 of the remaining doors: 1, 2, 3, and so on.  He skips door #59 and your door, #274.  Every open door shows a goat.
Now: should you switch?  Of course you should—your initial pick is still almost surely wrong.  The probabilities are 1/300 for #274 and 299/300 for #59.
Another way to look at the problem: do you want to stick with your initial door or do you want all the other doors?  Switching is simply choosing all the other doors, because (thanks to the open doors) you know the only door within that set that could be the winner.
One lesson from this is that our innate understanding of probability is poor, and a corollary is that there’s a big difference between confidence and accuracy.  That is, just because one’s confidence in a belief is high doesn’t mean that the belief is accurate.  This little puzzle does a great job of illustrating this.
Perhaps you’ve already anticipated the connection with choosing a religion.  Let’s imagine you’ve picked your religion—religion #274, let’s say.  For most people, their adoption of a religion is like picking a door in this game show.  In the game show, you don’t weigh evidence before selecting your door; you pick it randomly.  And most people adopt the dominant religion of their upbringing.  As with the game show, the religion in which you grew up is also assigned to you at random.
Now imagine an analogous game, the Game of Religion, with Truth as host.  Out of 300 doors (behind each of which is a religion), the believer picks door #274.  Truth flings open door after door and we see nothing but goats.  Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Mormonism—all goats.  As you suspected, they’re just amalgams of legend, myth, tradition, and wishful thinking.
Few of us seriously consider or even understand the religions Winti, Candomblé, Mandaeism, or the ancient religions of Central America, for example.  Luckily for the believer, Truth gets around to those doors too and opens them to reveal goats.
Here’s where the analogy between the two games fails.  First, Truth opens all the other doors.  Only the believer’s pick, door #274, is still closed.  Second, there was never a guarantee that any door contained a true religion!  Since the believer likely came to his beliefs randomly, why imagine that his choice is any more likely than the others to hold anything of value?
Every believer plays the Game of Religion, and every believer believes that his religion is the one true religion, with goats behind all the hundreds of other doors.  But maybe there’s a goat behind every door.  And given that the lesson from the 300-door Monty Hall game is that the door you randomly picked at first is almost certainly wrong, why imagine that yours is the only religion that’s not mythology?

Philosophical Grounding: A Parable

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God's existence doesn't seem likely. Why imagine that Jesus is real?Consider this parable:

A certain mathematician, in a philosophical mood one day, wonders what grounds his mathematics.  The math works, of course, but he wonders if he’s missing something foundational.

He consults a friend of his, a theologian.  The theologian knows almost nothing about mathematics, but he knows his Christianity.

The mathematician says, “Mathematics is like an inverted triangle with the most advanced math along the wide top edge.  The top layer is grounded on the math below it, which is grounded on what is below, and so on through the layers, down to arithmetic and logic at the point at the bottom.  And that’s where it stops.”

The theologian nods his head wisely.  “I see the problem—what does the bottom rest on?”

The mathematician was silent.

“In your view, it rests on nothing,” said the theologian.  “It just sits there in midair.  But the problem is easily resolved—mathematics and logic comes from God.  There’s your grounding.”

“Are you saying that I need to convert to Christianity to be a mathematician?”

“No, just realize that you are borrowing from the Christian worldview every time you make a computation or write an equation.”

Satisfied that this nagging problem has been resolved, the mathematician returns to his work and thinks no more of it. 

The End.

So, is the mathematician any better off?  Is he faster or more accurate or more creative?  Do his proofs work now where they hadn’t before?  In short, did he get anything of value from the whole episode?
I’ve heard this “grounding” or “atheists borrow from the Christian worldview” idea many times, but I’ve yet to discover what this missing thing is that is being borrowed.
“God did it” is simply a restatement of the problem.  “God did it” is precisely as useful as “logic and arithmetic are simply properties of our reality” or “that’s just the way it is” or even “I don’t know.”  A curious problem has been suppressed, not resolved.  In fact, the theologian himself has his answer resting in midair because he provides no reason to conclude that God exists.  His claim is no more believable than that of any other religion—that is, not at all.
The person who stops at “God did it” has stated an opinion only—an opinion with no evidence to back it up.  It doesn’t advance the cause of truth one bit.
Mathematics is tested, and it works.  Scratch your head about what grounds it if you want, but God is an unnecessary and unedifying addition to the mix.

Humor: Does God Exist?

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With a panel that is “a veritable smorgasbord of cleverness that the world is rightly too respectful to eat,” the talk show “Big Talk” tries to resolve the big question “Does God Exist?”  (from the BBC’s That Mitchell and Webb Look).

Don’t Move the Goalposts

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Football goalposts on an empty fieldChristian apologists often bring up unresolved scientific questions and usually conclude with, “Well, if you can’t answer that question, Christianity can!  God did it.”  For example:

  • Why is there something rather than nothing?
  • What came before the Big Bang?
  • Why does the universe look fine-tuned for life?
  • How did life come from nonlife?

Admittedly, there is no scientific consensus on these questions.  But a century ago, Christian apologists pointed to different questions if they wanted to put science in the hot seat: Okay, Science, if you’re so smart, how is heredity transmitted?  What causes cancer?  What caused the universe?
And centuries before that, Christianity asked, What causes lightning?  Disease?  Drought?  Earthquakes?  It used these questions to argue that Christianity had answers that science didn’t.
Not only is science the sole disciple that could provide answers, increasingly only science can uncover the questions.  That is, the apologist pretends to inform science of questions that science discovered itself.
If in hindsight “God did it” was a foolish resolution for the questions of previous centuries—the cause of lightning and disease, for example—why offer it now?  Why expect the results to be any different?  Wouldn’t it be wise to learn from the past and be a little hesitant to stake God’s existence on the gamble that Science will finally come up short?
What’s especially maddening is apologists like William Lane Craig putting on an imaginary lab coat and ineptly fiddling with beakers and turning dials, playing scientist like a child playing house.  He imagines himself strutting into a community of befuddled scientists and saying with a chuckle, “Okay, fellas, Christianity can take it from here” and seeing them breathe a sigh of relief that the cavalry has finally come to bail them out of their intellectual predicament.  He imagines that he can better answer questions that his discipline couldn’t even formulate.
This reminds me of the fable about Science scaling the highest peak of knowledge.  After much difficulty, Science finally summits and is about to plant his flag when he looks over and sees Theology and Philosophy sitting there, looking at him.  “What took you so long?” one of them says.  “We’ve been here for centuries.”
Uh, yeah, Theology and Philosophy can invent claims, but Science does it the hard way—it actually uncovers the facts and makes the testable hypotheses.  It gets to the summit step by step along the route of Evidence rather than floating there on a lavender cloud of imagination and wishful thinking.  Religion is like the dog that walks under the ox and thinks that he is pulling the cart.
To the Christian who thinks that science’s unanswered questions make his point, I say: make a commitment.  Publicly state that this issue (pick something—abiogenesis or the cause of the Big Bang or fine tuning or whatever) is the hill that you will fight to the death on.  Man up, commit to it, and impose consequences.  Say, “I publicly declare that God must be the resolution to this question.  A scientific consensus will never find me wrong or else I will drop my faith.”
If the Christian fails to do this (or rather, when he fails to do this), he then admits that when his cherished question du jour is resolved, he’ll discard it like a used tissue and find another in science’s long list of unanswered questions.  That is, he admits that this is just a rhetorical device, stated only for show, rather than being a serious argument.
He’ll just move the goalposts.  Again.
Photo credit: Graham Ballantyne
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