Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Atheist Prayer Experiment Begins

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Today’s the big day! It’s the beginning of my 40-day trial by prayer.
I’m to pray for two to three minutes per day as sincerely as convenient and ask God to reveal himself to me. I’m to watch for signs of God’s presence in daily life. For more on this experiment, read my earlier post.
The experiment is in response to a 2010 paper “Praying to Stop Being an Atheist” in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. I’d like to pull out from this long paper a few ideas that need critique.
Author T. J. Mawson notes the critique of other scholars of his work: “Mawson’s words are beyond parody.” I wasn’t very impressed with the arguments myself, as you’ll see, but I do appreciate an author who can be that honest and self-deprecating!
From the abstract:

In this paper, I argue that atheists who:
(1) think that the issue of God’s existence or non-existence is an important one;
(2) assign a greater than negligible probability to God’s existence; and
(3) are not in possession of a plausible argument for scepticism about the truth-directedness of uttering such prayers in their own cases,
are under a prima facie obligation to pray to God that He stop them being atheists.

Note the similarity between this argument and Pascal’s Wager. Pascal said that betting on God’s existence is the smart bet—if you win, you get bliss in heaven, and there’s not much downside if you lose. But if you bet against God and lose, you get an eternity in hell, and if you win, you can’t even say, “I told you so.”
One way Pascal’s Wager fails is that it ignores how it applies to the challenger as well as the person challenged. The same is true here. Mawson says that atheists ought to pray to an undefined god that they don’t (yet) believe in, but by the same logic, Christians should also pray to god(s) that they don’t yet believe in. This doesn’t negate his argument but says that it applies to him as much as to any atheist.
Now, on to the paper. It claims that atheists praying for God to help them is as reasonable as shouting “Is anyone there?” in a certain dark room. Some say that a wise and helpful old man lives in this dark room, though some say that this claim is false.
I disagree that these are equally reasonable things. Dark rooms and old men are things we’re all familiar with. “There’s a wise old man in this room” many not be a true statement, but it certainly can’t be dismissed out of hand. By contrast, “There’s a supernatural being who created the universe” is implausible on its face.
And if this is supposed to be an analog to religion, why imagine just one room? All gods aren’t sought in the same way. We should imagine many different rooms and perhaps different protocols to represent the wide variety of gods that Mankind conceives.
Mawson assumes that the wise old man is willing to reveal himself. And here again we have a difficulty, since Christians are quick to explain away God’s hiddenness by saying that God might not reveal himself. The simple God hypothesis has expanded to claim that God exists and he desperately wants a relationship with each of us … but he may remain silent despite our pleas. We’re told that God has his own good reasons for remaining hidden (reasons we can’t understand), but how far do we want to go to support this God hypothesis in the face of contradicting evidence? At what point does it go from honest rational inquiry, to support for preconceived beliefs with an unfalsifiable hypothesis?
I will comment more on the paper as the prayer experiment continues, but I’ll wrap up here with an anecdote that the paper concludes with. Atheist Bertrand Russell was asked, “What if you die and find yourself in front of God after all?” Russell said that he would tell God that he hadn’t provided enough evidence for his existence. Mawson imagines God responding, “Well, you didn’t ask me for any, did you?”
And we’re back to the Alice-in-Wonderland God who desperately wants a relationship with us, who knows that our not believing in him will send us to hell, and who knows that he looks indistinguishable from the thousands of other gods that humanity has invented but refuses to do anything to simply make his existence plain.
As a brief aside, let me comment on the Unbelievable podcast that is hosting this experiment. Their approach—praiseworthy, it seems to me—is typically to bring together a Christian and a non-Christian to discuss their different views. The non-Christian might be a Muslim or an atheist. The discussion might be evolution vs. Creationism. Sometimes they have two Christians with two different theological views. What it’s not is simply a sermon to tell the flock what to believe about some aspect of life or Christianity.
Why is this not the model for other podcasts? Reasonable Faith, Stand to Reason, Apologetics.com, Please Convince Me and most other Christian podcasts: I’m talking to you.

Last week I took my third acid trip.
This time I saw God.
Otherwise, it was nothing.
— Paul Krassner

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Finding Jesus Through Board Games

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The Atheist Experience podcast discussed an interesting apologetic several years ago. Here is my version.
Imagine a board game called “Monopoly Plus,” an updated version of the popular board game. There’s a track around the outside of the board that’s divided into cells. Each player is represented by a token on the board—a dog, a car, a top hat, and so on—and each player in turn rolls dice to see how many cells to advance. You start with a certain amount of money, and you can buy the properties that you land on as you move around the board. Players who then land on one of the owned properties must pay the owner rent, and the owner can pay to improve properties so that the rent is higher.
Here’s the object of the game: you must accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.
Yep, that’s a pretty bad game. The motivations within the game have absolutely nothing to do with how you win.
Now take that idea about a million times larger, and we have the game of Christianity®—ordinary reality filtered through a Christian worldview. It’s far more complicated than any board game. In Christianity, there are good things (love, friendships, possessions, accomplishments, experiences, personal victories) and bad things (illness, death, sorrow, financial difficulties, disappointment, personal defeats), and players try to maximize the good things and minimize the bad.
Immersed in this huge mass of complexity, we’re told that, in the big picture, all that doesn’t matter. To win the game you must accept Jesus as your lord and savior.
Wow—who invented the rules of that game? And why is the game of Christianity any less out of touch with reality than the game of Monopoly Plus?

God does not play dice with the universe:
He plays an ineffable game of His own devising,
which might be compared,
from the perspective of any of the other players,*
 to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker
 in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes,
with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules,
and who smiles all the time.
— Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
* i.e., everybody

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 11/26/11.)
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Failed Prophecy: Isaiah 53

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Isaiah 53 is the other chapter that apologists point to as predicting the death of Jesus, but, like the claims for Psalm 22, we’ll see that this also falls flat.
First, give the apologists their turn. They’ll point to several phrases in Isaiah 53 (and the last few verses of the preceding chapter) that parallel the crucifixion.
Verse 52:14: “there were many who were appalled at him; his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being.” Some say that this refers to the beatings Jesus received, though his ugly appearance is never mentioned in the New Testament.
Verse 53:3: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.” Jesus should have been recognized as the Messiah, but the gospels tell us that his own people rejected him.
On the other hand, “he was despised” doesn’t sound like the charismatic rabbi who preached to thousands of attentive listeners and had a triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. And “a man of suffering … familiar with pain” might’ve been the life of an ascetic like John the Baptist, but this doesn’t describe Jesus.
Verse 53:7: “he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent.” The synoptic gospels agree that Jesus was silent before his accusers (though John 18:34–19:11 doesn’t).
Verse 53:8: in response to the trial and sentencing of Jesus, “who of his generation protested?” Jesus was on his own, and none of his disciples tried to intervene.
Verse 53:9: “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.” This is often interpreted to mean that Jesus ought to have been buried with criminals but was actually buried with the rich. This ties in with the burial of Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
Finally, from 53:5 to the end of the chapter, almost every verse gives some version of the idea of the suffering servant taking on the burdens of his people—“he was pierced for our transgressions … by his wounds we are healed” (:5), “for the transgression of my people he was punished” (:8), “he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (:12), and so on.
Taken as this collection of verse fragments, the case looks intriguing, but taken as a whole—that is, letting the chapter speak for itself—the story falls apart.
First, let’s look at some of the verses discarded by the apologists.
Verse 52:15: “so will many nations be amazed at him and kings will shut their mouths because of him.”
The nations will be amazed and the kings speechless? Nope, not only was Jesus not internationally famous during his lifetime, history records nothing of his life outside the gospels. True, we have evidence of his followers from historians such as Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius, but it is curious that we have nothing about the works of Jesus himself from prolific contemporary authors such as Philo of Alexandria, Seneca, and Pliny the Elder. Apparently he wasn’t as famous as imagined prophecy would have him be.
Verse 53:10: “he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” This is a nice thought—Jesus endures great trials but then, like Job, he is rewarded with children, prosperity, and long life. As Proverbs says, “Grandchildren are the crown of old men.”
Too bad this isn’t how the gospel story plays out.
Verse 53:11: “my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.” Let’s revisit this suffering servant thing. Jesus, a person of the Trinity and equal to God the Father, is now God’s servant?
Note that “messiah” simply means “anointed one” and that the Old Testament is fairly liberal with the title messiah. Kings and high priests were anointed as messiahs. Heck, Cyrus the Great of Persia was even a messiah (see Isaiah 45:1). But surely no Christian can accept the logic, “Well, David was a messiah, and he was a servant of God; why not Jesus as well?” Jesus was certainly not in the same category as David.
And here’s the big one: “Therefore I will give him a portion among the great [or many] and he will divide the spoils with the strong [or numerous]” (verse 53:12). Like a warrior who gets a share of the spoils of the battle, the servant will be richly rewarded. This servant is just one among many who gets a portion.
Wait a minute—Jesus has peers? He’s one among equals, just “one of the great”? What kind of nonsense is this? Again, this bears no resemblance to the Jesus of the gospels.
This all makes more sense if the “he” of this chapter is seen as Israel, not Jesus.
And, as with our analysis of Psalm 22, the point of any crucifixion story would be the resurrection, which is not present in this chapter. Only with the naïve confidence of a student of Nostradamus could this baggy sack of a “prophecy” be imagined to be a trim fit.

Religion is the diaper of humanity’s childhood;
it’s OK to grow out of it
— PZ Myers

Photo credit: Jens Cramer

Should an Atheist Pray?

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Praying personI enjoy polite (or spirited) conversations with Christians. As an out atheist, I’ve attended church small groups and chatted with “Repent or Else!” sign carriers on street corners enough so that I’m rarely surprised by new arguments in favor of God’s existence. Still, the debate keeps me on my toes, and a well-educated Christian can teach me a lot about the church.
When the conversation turns to my atheism, I’m occasionally asked if I’ve ever asked God into my heart. The question never makes sense. Granted, a visitor at my front door ought to wait to be invited in, and perhaps God ought not barge in and force his way into my life. But that’s not the first step. In the case of the visitor at my front door, I have no doubt that that person exists. The Christian always glosses over that first step. Sure, I might ask God into my heart … after I know that he exists.
I don’t ask Osiris, Shiva, Xenu, or Quetzalcoatl to come into my heart (or anywhere else) because I have no reason to believe that they exist and cornucopian reasons to believe that they don’t. The same is true for the Christian god.
But my antagonist persists. “Have you tried it? Just try it. Just ask God into your heart.”
You mean, like, right now? Okay—so I try it. I think: God, if you exist, please make yourself known. And nothing happens.
I’m told that I just wasn’t sincere.
Well, yeah. Of course I wasn’t sincere. I ask God into my heart with the same sincerity as the Christian would ask Odin into their heart. Why would either of us do that with sincerity or enthusiasm?
But what if we dialed it back a bit? Drop the demand for sincerity and just pray. This is the upcoming project of the UK-based Unbelievable radio show and podcast. The instructions for participants are here. In brief:

We are asking each atheist who wishes to take part to pray for 2 to 3 minutes a day for 40 days for God to reveal Himself to them.

I presume the subjects are to go through a test for 40 days to parallel Jesus’s 40 days of trials in the wilderness (40 having the numerological meaning “lots and lots”). The experiment is to run from September 17 through October 26.
But what about that sincerity thing?

The prayer should be kept as open as possible, e.g., rather than “God of Christianity; if you’re out there, turn this water into wine for me”, “God, if you’re out there, reveal yourself to me” would be better.
We only ask that anyone taking part commits themselves to finding a quiet meditative “space” and praying there for two to three minutes each day as earnestly as they can for any God that there might be to reveal himself/herself/itself to him or her, and that he or she remains as open as possible to ways in which that prayer could be answered.

Okay—I’m in. I don’t expect that I’ll be able to be all that earnest—frankly, I don’t have much expectation of anything supernatural happening or even much desire for God to exist—but I’ll have a go. To any Christian who says that I’m not approaching this with much sincerity, you’re right. As I read it, none is required—as it should be. Sincerity comes after the fact; sincerity is earned.
Let’s take a step back to consider this interesting approach to evangelism. It’s different. More typically, a Christian will advance a particular logical argument for God, and I’ll ask if this is what convinced them that God exists.
“Oh no, of course not,” they’ll usually say.
Okay, if it didn’t convince you, why expect that it’ll convince me?
They almost always became a Christian either because they were raised that way or because they had some sort of mystical experience. They give me intellectual arguments because that’s the best they’ve got; they can’t give me the mystical experience. Maybe we have a parallel with a Zen koan—the koan doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the point. Words are an inept vehicle for conveying the truth of Zen. Are Christian apologetics an inept way of making the case that God exists?
This prayer experiment follows the road less taken. I’ll probably have more to say about walking the walk and whether that’s a reasonable request as I get into the experiment.
Will I do a Leah Libresco? Leah (of the Patheos blog Unequally Yoked) dramatically switched sides, from atheist to Catholic, in June.
No, I don’t think that will happen to me. I don’t read her blog as regularly as I’d like, so I don’t understand her position well, but if I may speculate, I think her personality is such that Christianity appealed to her in a way that it just won’t with me. (And I could be totally wrong in that guess.)
Not only do I think that I won’t convert, I think that that’s impossible. My hypothesis is that atheists like me are stuck in atheism once they get there (I’ve written more here: “I Used to be an Atheist, Just Like You”).
I now have a chance to test that hypothesis.

Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
— Psalms 34:8

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Dr Johnson: Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)

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Can science say anything about religious claims? Does religion have anything to say in the domain of science?
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) a paleontologist, biologist, and popularize of science wrote of many things, and one was this clash between religion and science (Rocks of Ages, 1999).
Like Rodney “Can’t we all get along?” King, Gould tried to get everyone to play nice. Science and Religion, he said, are two magesteria—areas of authority—that don’t overlap. He described the different domains of these two Non-Overlapping Magesteria (NOMA) this way:

Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, and religion how to go to heaven.

No one steps on anyone’s toes, and everyone’s happy.
I heard a variation of this in a lecture by Oxford mathematics professor John Lennox a year ago (“John Lennox Responds to Stephen Hawking”). Lennox argues that the two domains overlap but overlap contentedly. For example, Isaac Newton had no problem accepted both gravity and God. Gravity could both be studied scientifically and also be the product of God’s hand.
Yet another reaction is by Richard Dawkins. About Gould’s make-nice accommodation, he says in The God Delusion, “Gould carried the art of bending over backwards to positively supine lengths.” About Gould’s quote above, Dawkins says:

This sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment’s thought. What are these ultimate questions in whose presence religion is an honoured guest and science must respectfully slink away?

Lampooning NOMA further, he imagines that scientists discover DNA evidence that Jesus really did lack a biological father. Would Christian apologists who favor NOMA say that the magesteria don’t overlap and that scientific evidence is irrelevant to the study of theology? Would they dismiss the scientists with their useless evidence?
Of course not. Within certain circles of Christianity, this would be the discovery of the century. Given the choice of NOMA or evidence, they’ll take the evidence. Faith is nice as far as it goes, but it’s second best when the alternative is hard science that supports the Christian position.
Most Christians have learned from the Galileo fiasco and have no problem with evolution, though Dawkins sides with the other Christians. He agrees that they are rightly concerned that evolution and Christianity are incompatible.
NOMA is a nice idea, but given the continued clash between science and science deniers with a religious agenda, it has had little impact.

The Holy Spirit intended to teach us in the Bible
how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go
— Galileo

See all the definitions in the Cross Examined Glossary.

Nazi Soldiers Indoctrinated with Darwin? Yeah, Right.

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Koukl apologetics evolutionWhy were the Nazis so unpleasant? Because they were force-fed evolution, of course! Christian podcaster Greg Koukl thinks that he’s uncovered the missing link.
In a 2011 Stand to Reason podcast (starting at 5:00), Koukl spoke of being informed that all German soldiers during World War II were issued two books, Goethe’s Faust and a German translation of The Origin of Species. And it was Hitler himself who insisted that they get them.
About the logic behind Hitler’s assigning these books, Koukl says:

It’s because the ideas in The Origin of Species served [Hitler’s] purposes well, and if a person actually believed what Darwin taught, then they would make good Nazis.

My first complaint is that Koukl accepted the story uncritically. This story nicely supports his worldview that evolution is both harmful and wrong, so he passes it on with no fact checking. I do my best to take the opposite approach: when I find a delicious story that skewers an opponent (either a person or idea), I want to make sure that I have strong evidence so that I don’t look ridiculous after passing on flawed hearsay.
In doing my own research on books issued to German soldiers, the only page I came across was a post in another atheist blog who’d heard the podcast and asked the very same question. That blogger raised a great point: Why issue those two books but not Hitler’s own Mein Kampf?
And remember that Nazis liked to ban books. Or burn them. The official Nazi library journal in 1935 listed twelve categories of banned books. One category was:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism.

That Origin of Species supported Nazi thinking seems unlikely.
Let’s move on to Koukl’s ill-informed ramblings on evolution. One of Koukl’s favorite ploys is to try to tie eugenics with evolution.
First off, Darwin himself rejected eugenics. In The Descent of Man, he said, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that [not culling the inferiors] must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Creationists enjoy quoting just the paragraph that contains this sentence and ignoring the very … next … paragraph where he overturns this argument. (I’ve written more on Creationists taking Darwin out of context here.)
Darwin rejected eugenics, Greg. Of course, you’ll quickly backpedal and argue that Darwin’s own personal opinions say nothing about the validity of evolution. Agreed! Which is why whether or not Hitler kept his copy of Origin under his pillow or had an autographed photo of Darwin on his night table says nothing about the central issue here: Is evolution the best explanation of why life is the way it is?
Which is why this entire topic is simply mudslinging.
“Hitler was bad, and Hitler and Darwin were BFFs! And Darwin was ugly! And … and he probably ate babies! And didn’t recycle!” Whether true or not, this is irrelevant.
This is what one does when one doesn’t actually have a real argument.
Science is not policy. Evolution is science (the domain of scientists), and eugenics is policy (the domain of politicians). Any scientist who advocates eugenics has left the domain of science and jumped into policy. Eugenics isn’t science, and criticism of eugenics is no criticism of science.
Which brings up the last point: Did Hitler base his eugenics policies on evolution? Koukl seems to imagine a sweet and gentle Adolf Hitler, picking up litter and helping little old ladies cross the street, being turned to the scientific Dark Side after reading Darwin. But we don’t need to imagine any such nudging. Germany had plenty of anti-Semitism around already. In fact, Martin Luther himself wrote the violently anti-Semitic On the Jews and Their Lies.
This bypasses the issue: Is evolution correct? Bringing up eugenics is not only flawed but irrelevant.
It’s the white flag of surrender.

[Jews are a] base, whoring people,
that is, no people of God,
and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law
must be accounted as filth.
— Martin Luther, On the Jews and their Lies, ch. 4

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/24/11.)
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