Monthly Archives: February 2013

Religion and Sports: Just Cultural Traits?

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How similar are religion and sports?Lifelong fans of the Mariners baseball team would be Red Sox fans if they’d grown up in Boston instead of Seattle. Tarheels fans would be Trojans fans if they had gone to USC instead of UNC. People who eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast would likely prefer fermented soybeans (natto) if they grew up in Japan instead of the U.S.
And believers who think that the truth of Christianity is obvious might think that about Islam if they grew up in Morocco or Afghanistan instead of Mississippi or Alabama.
Begging the pardon of sports fans, there is no objective measure that makes their home team the only valid one, with all others being poor imitations of the real thing. The same is true for religion.
Why do people pick the religions that they pick? In fact, most don’t pick. They’re in effect assigned a religion by the randomness of their birth. They take on the religion of their parents or their community, like any other cultural trait such as customary food, dress, or etiquette.
Let’s not take this too far, however. Not everyone born in Mississippi is a Christian—atheist theologian Robert Price is an example. Not everyone raised as a Christian remains one—I’m an example.
So what we’re seeing is a strong correlation—people tend to take on the religion of their environment. What best explains this observation?
The atheist view is that all religions are fiction, but they’re sticky elements of culture. People tend to adopt these elements, but you’ll always have some outliers. In a culture where men wear neckties, a few will prefer bow ties. In a culture where one of the first questions after being introduced to someone new is, “And where do you go to church?” a few will be atheists.
The atheist says that religion is adopted because it’s a dominant cultural trait, not because it’s true.
The Christian view is much tougher to justify. Christians don’t want to discard this correlation because it helps explain why the other guy clings to his religion. Is the fact that there are a billion Muslims strong evidence that Islam is correct? Nope—their belief is just a cultural trait. With well over a dozen countries having 98 percent or greater Muslim populations, being Muslim is just what you do when you grow up in a monoculture.
Christians say that Islam, Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, and most other religions are cultural traits that are false. But they need to explain why Christianity is actually true even though it looks just like all those false cultural traits.
Seeing religion as nothing more profound or objectively accurate than a cultural trait is the best explanation of the evidence.

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed.
Everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it
that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect
never desire more of it than they already have.
— René Descartes

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Don’t Believe Christianity Until You Believe in Aliens

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If you like the Jesus resurrection story, you should like the alien story better!Do you think that Jesus rose from the dead? That he was virgin born? That he sits in heaven at the right hand of the creator of the universe?
That the gospel story is actual history is an immense claim, but Christians say they have the evidence. Let’s test that. If Christians accept this claim, then, to be consistent, they must also accept any claim with better evidence. Such a claim is that space aliens have visited the earth.
Let’s compare evidence for these two claims point by point.
1. Recentness of Event. You can interview people today who claim to have seen UFOs or encountered aliens. To understand the gospel claims, we must peer back across 2000 years of history.
2. Number of Sources. Thousands claim to have been abducted, and the number who claim only to have seen aliens or their technology must be far higher. There were only four gospels, and those aren’t even independent accounts.
3. Period of Oral History. The period of oral history is negligible for many alien claims. It may be just hours or days from a claimed event until a newspaper story. By contrast, the Gospels were written decades after the claimed events.
4. Reliability of Source. It may be easy to imagine alien claimants as insane, drunk, or uneducated, but one psychiatrist studied 800 claimed abductees and was struck with the ordinariness of the population. Another survey reported that this group is no more prone to mental disorder than the general population.
Question the sanity of those who claims to have seen aliens if you want, but we at least have something tangible—interviews with those people and people who know them, police records, and so on. With Peter and Paul or some other Christian patriarch we have 2000-year-old stories. Who’s to say if they’re accurate?
5. Natural vs. Supernatural. The supposed aliens came from a planet (we know about planets) on which there was intelligent life (we know about intelligent life), and they presumably got here in a spaceship (we know about technology and spaceships). This is 100 percent natural.
Science keeps finding strange new animals on earth living in extreme environments—worms that live miles underground, in glaciers, or in hot or cold places at the bottom of the ocean. Is it hard to imagine animals on other worlds? Their discovery would be surprising or even shocking, but we wouldn’t need to discard any scientific laws if aliens presented themselves.
By contrast, the Gospel story requires you to believe in supernatural beings and supernatural events. We have plenty of claims but no scientific consensus that even one is valid.
6. Cultural Gulf. The evidence for aliens is from our time, from our culture, and in our language. By contrast, the gospel story is from a culture long ago and far away, and the Greek gospels are already one culture removed from the actual events. Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic and came from a Jewish environment; the gospels were written in Greek by authors who lived in a Greek environment.
7. Contradictions. Any contradiction between alien claims can be chalked up to a different space ship or a different alien race. By contrast, the four gospel accounts are trying to document the same events.
8. Quality of Evidence. On the alien side, you talk directly to people who claim to be eyewitnesses. The argument that the gospel writers were eyewitnesses or close to them is a flimsy tradition.
Our oldest complete copies of the New Testament date from the fourth century. Yes, we do have fragments of New Testament books that date earlier, but these are incomplete and are still copies from one to two centuries after the original authorship.
9. Criterion of Embarrassment. Christians ask, “But who would make up the gospel story? Who would endure the persecution?” First, I never claimed that anyone made up the story, simply that the supernatural elements in the gospel story are easily explained by supposing that it evolved as it was passed along. Second, that defense crumbles when we consider that alien claimants tell their story today in the face of much potential ridicule. Is a story in the face of persecution strong support for the truth of the story? Okay—then consider it strong evidence for alien claims.
If the Gospel stories are believable, shouldn’t alien stories be far more believable? Seen the other way around, Christians who read this and think up many objections to the alien argument need to apply those same objections against the gospel story to see if it holds up.
I think they’ll find that the net that pulls in Christianity will pull in a lot of bycatch as well.

Reality is that which,
when you stop believing in it,
doesn’t go away.
— Philip K. Dick

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Thoughtless Thinking About Homosexuality

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Over a year ago, I wrote a response to the poorly formed anti-homosexuality argument in an article subtitled “Christian defense against Homosexuality.” This was written by Matt Slick of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM).
The article is still there, unchanged, ridiculous arguments and all. It’s harmful enough to deserve another thrashing. Here are the claims that most need a response.

Homosexuals want others in society to think like them (and behave like them?).

Is this the fabled Gay Agenda® where homosexuals will make all Americans homosexual to weaken the country for an eventual Communist takeover? Or something?
“If you have to ask, you are probably already under its pernicious influence and blithely hop-scotching your way straight to Hell.” We can always count on Betty Bowers to set us straight.

They want others to accept them.

Well, yeah. Is that a problem?

What gives them the right to try and change society into what they want it to be?

I’m pretty sure that’s what they said about African Americans during the Jim Crow period.

Saying that homosexuality is natural because it occurs in the animal kingdom does not mean it is morally correct. Animals also eat each other alive, devour offspring, etc. Should we imitate those things as well because the animals do it?

So then do we at least agree that homosexuality occurs in nature and then is, by definition, natural?
As for morality, let’s not get cocky. For barbarism, no one beats humans. Only humans have invented war.
But to address your point: eating someone causes harm. Homosexuality doesn’t cause harm. Simple, right?

From an evolutionary perspective how does homosexuality further the development and distribution of the human species? It cannot. Homosexuality would obviously work for self extermination. … How is it natural if what it leads to is self destruction?

Homosexuality has been well documented in 500 animal species. Your concern about evolution is laudable, and yet it has stumbled along for three billion years just fine without your help. But thanks for asking.
If we were all homosexual, that would be a problem. If we were all female, that would also be a problem. Neither possibility is on the table, so we needn’t worry about extinction from homosexuality.

It would seem that natural selection would have removed the “gene for homosexuality” since it would not lead to reproduction. It would seem then, that homosexuality is not natural but is a learned behavior.

Instead of speculating, why not see what the experts think?
As we’ve seen, homosexuality is natural and widespread. Why speculate that it’s a learned behavior just in humans?

If a behavior is said to be natural to a person and this is why homosexuality should be accepted, is it not also natural that people lie and so they too should be accepted?

Let me propose a simple rule: if it causes harm, we should minimize it. Lying causes harm; homosexuality doesn’t. Simple, right?

They are already free to marry a person of the opposite sex, the same as anyone else.

Seriously? You’re really going to make this argument?
The Colored folks had their water fountains and schools, just like the White folks did. No problem, right? Golly, Jim Crow laws aren’t so bad when you reframe them like that!

For homosexuals to advocate redefining marriage so it can include union between a man and man, and a woman and a woman, and to have it protected legally, is to want special rights for them.

Quiz time: when was marriage last defined (or redefined)? If you said, “When God invented it in the Garden of Eden, and it’s been a constant ever since,” you need to read more history and less Bible.
In fact, it was redefined in 1967. Before that point, laws in many states prohibited mixed-race marriages. African Americans could marry someone of their race, the same as anyone else. That’s fair—who could complain about that, right? The Supreme Court disagreed, and anti-miscegeny laws in 17 U.S. states were overturned.
The apostle Paul made clear that marriage was second best and that chastity was preferable (1 Cor. 7:8–9). Marriage wasn’t even a Christian sacrament until the twelfth century. Throw in polygamy from the Old Testament, and it’s clear that the church’s attitude toward marriage is a moving target.
Once again, the church is late to the party.

If freedom to marry whomever you want to is the litmus test for marriage, then marriage will become meaningless as people redefine it to include those already married, siblings, children, animals, etc., as long as “love” is the defining characteristic.

Things that cause harm are bad, and things that don’t aren’t worth a lot of concern. We’ve already figured that one out.
As for “Next, people will want to marry their sex toys,” let’s wait until that happens before we worry about it. Rights and privileges almost always have exceptions—you can own a gun, but with exceptions; you can drive a vehicle, but with exceptions; you have free speech, but with exceptions; and so on.
The same-sex marriage proposal is to adjust the exceptions, not discard them all.

Homosexuals are using the civil rights movement to force their moral agenda on the rest of society … a moral agenda based on sexual behavior.

The issue isn’t behavior; it’s who people are. People can’t change their racial appearance, and they can’t change their sexual orientation.

Unalienable rights are given by God, according to the Declaration of Independence in the U.S.A.

Whoa—you really don’t want to go there. Marriage isn’t being decided by a celestial court but a human one.
The topic is laws (how marriage is legally defined). Here’s another quiz: The Declaration of Independence says that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from …

  • Jehovah”
  • the God of the Universe”
  • the consent of the governed”

Of course, the last one is the correct answer. The government doesn’t turn to God for its authority but to the people (which is actually pretty empowering).
Anyway, the Declaration of Independence is irrelevant since it’s not the supreme law of the United States—the Constitution is. Bringing up the Declaration instead of the Constitution is an admission that our laws are in no way built on God.

What about necrophiliacs, and those who practice bestiality? They also are defined by their sexual behavior. Should they also be protected legally? If not, why not?

We have laws against behavior that hurts people. Wow. Why is this hard?
Anyway, who cares? What’s the downside to same-sex marriage? I’m married, and it wouldn’t affect me at all. If it bugs you, tell straight people to stop having gay babies.

Men will always be mad,
and those who think they can cure them
are the maddest of all.
—Voltaire

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/3/11)

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Principle of Analogy

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There’s a name for a simple and common sense idea that is often abused in apologetics circles, the Principle of Analogy.
Bob Price explained it this way:

The principle of analogy is so simple, so natural, that everyone uses it in daily life.
Imagine someone sitting down in front of the television after a long day at work. The first image he sees is that of a giant reptile squashing tall buildings. Is one’s first hunch, “Oh! The news channel!”? Probably not.
More likely one surmises the TV set had been left on the science fiction channel. Why? Because one’s world of contemporary experience does not include newscasts of giant dinosaurs wreaking havoc in modern cities, but one has seen monster movies in which such disasters are quite typical. Which analogy does the TV screen image fit?

How do we categorize a miracle claim from history? What’s it analogous to? Does it look like the plausible activities of ordinary people or does it look like legend? You can’t say for sure, of course, but which bin does this claim best fit into?
Did a winged horse fly Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and back? Did Joseph Smith find golden plates with the help of the angel Moroni? Is the “Buddha Boy” able to meditate for months without food or water? Could Sathya Sai Baba raise people from the dead? Can faith healers cure illness that modern medicine can’t? Science has no analogy to these claims, but mythology and legend do.
Incredibly, I’ve heard Christians reject this principle and argue instead that an atheist must bring positive evidence against their claims. Don’t simply say that the Jesus miracles look like myth or legends, so we should classify them that way; no—that doesn’t count.
Say for example that the question is whether Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The Christian points to this story in John—that’s the evidence in favor. And then he says, “So where’s your evidence against?”
Of course, I have no direct evidence against this particular event. I have no direct evidence that Jesus didn’t raise Lazarus or that Merlin wasn’t a shape-shifting wizard or that Paul Bunyan didn’t exist or that George Washington didn’t fly around Mount Vernon with a jet pack. The plausibility test that we all use helps ensure that we don’t simply believe everything we hear or read. Well, all of us, I guess, except someone who’s eager to make exceptions to preserve a preconception.
Something can violate the Principle of Analogy only with substantial evidence. The claim “I can see through opaque objects” properly fit into the magical category until Wilhelm Röntgen demonstrated x-rays.
Until we have an analogy to a miracle story, it properly belongs in the magical category as well.

I believe that an orderly universe,
one indifferent to human preoccupations,
in which everything has an explanation
even if we still have a long way to go before we find it,
is a more beautiful, more wonderful place
than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.
— Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

(This is a modified version of a post that originally appeared 8/29/11.)

Polytheism in the Bible

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Many gods aren't just in Greek or Roman legends. The Bible has polytheism as well.The first of the Ten Commandments says, “You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3). (There are two very different sets of Ten Commandments in Exodus, but let’s ignore that for now.)
Have you ever thought much about the wording of this commandment? Why doesn’t it say that Jehovah is the only god? It’s because this section of the Bible was written in the early days of the Israelite religion (roughly 10th century BCE) when it was still polytheistic. The next commandment notes, “I, Jehovah, your God, am a jealous God”—jealous because there were indeed other viable options, and Jehovah insisted on a commitment.
Jewish Henotheism
Let’s use the proper term for this, henotheism. Polytheists acknowledge many gods and worship many gods; henotheists acknowledge many gods but worship only one. In this view, different gods ruled different territories just as kings did, and tribes owed allegiance to whichever god protected them.
I’ve gotten a lot of insight into Old Testament henotheism from Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God. Some of what follows comes from chapter 4 of that book.
The Song of Moses (Deut. 32) is considered to be some of the oldest material in the Bible—dating to the mid-13th c. BCE. We have several somewhat-inconsistent copies, the oldest being from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam,
he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods.
Yahweh’s portion was his people, [Israel] his allotted inheritance. (Deut. 32:8–9)

Here we see Elyon, the head of the divine pantheon, dividing humankind among his children, giving each his inheritance. The idea of a divine pantheon with a chief deity, his consort, and their children (the council of the gods) was widespread through the Ancient Near East. Elyon (short for El Elyon) is the chief god, not just in Jewish writings but in Canaanite literature. The passage concludes with Yahweh getting Israel as his inheritance.
We learn more about terms like “sons of the gods” by widening our focus to consider Ugaritic (Canaanite) texts. Ugarit was a Canaanite city destroyed along with much of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age Collapse in roughly 1200 BCE, a period of widespread chaos from which Israelite civilization seems to have grown.
The Ugaritic texts state that El and his consort Asherah had 70 sons, which may be the origin of the 70 nations (or 72) that came from Noah’s descendants listed in Genesis 10.
The Old Testament is full of clues to the existence of multiple gods. Genesis is a good place to start.

Then [Elohim] said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

We also see plural gods when Jehovah warns them that man mustn’t eat the tree of life (Gen. 3:22) and that they must confuse mankind’s languages lest their projects, like the Tower of Babel, succeed (Gen. 11:7).
A common Christian spin is either to say that the “us” is the Trinity or that it is a heavenly assembly of angels. But can we imagine that the original audience for Genesis would understand the Trinity? And why imagine an angelic assembly when the polytheistic interpretation of Genesis simply growing out of preceding Canaanite culture is available and plausible?
Psalms is another old book that has fossilized the earliest forms of Judaism. We see the assembly of the gods mentioned several times.

[Elohim] stands in the assembly of El; in the midst of the gods he renders judgment (Ps. 82:1).
For who in the skies can compare to [Jehovah]? Who is like [Jehovah] among the [sons of God], a God who is honored [in the great assembly of the holy ones], and more awesome than all who surround him? (Ps. 89:6–7)

And many more verses celebrate Jehovah while acknowledging the existence of others.

For [Jehovah] is the great God, and the great King above all gods (Ps. 95:3).
All the gods bow down before [Jehovah] (Ps. 97:7).
I know [Jehovah] is great, and our Lord is superior to all gods. (Ps. 135:5)

In a recent post, we’ve recently seen where Yahweh loses a fight with the Moabite god Chemosh (2 Kings 3:27).
Migration to Monotheism
We find one indication of the move from henotheism to monotheism in later versions of the Song of Moses (above). The phrase “sons of the gods” becomes “angels” in the Septuagint (3rd century BCE) and “sons of Israel” in the Masoretic text (7th through 10th centuries CE).
Let’s consider books composed later than Genesis or Psalms.
Deuteronomy was written after the conquest of Israel and before the conquest of Judah, in the 7th century BCE. The philosophy has moved from henotheism to monolatry. Like henotheism, many gods are accepted and only one is worshipped, but now worship of other gods is forbidden.

Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you (Deut. 6:14)
But you must not turn away from all the commandments I am giving you today, to either the right or left, nor pursue other gods and worship them (Deut. 28:14–15).

Second Isaiah was written later, near the end of the Babylonian exile. Here we read that the move is complete.

Before me no god was formed, nor will there be one after me (Isa. 43:10)

The very idea of an idol is lampooned in Isa. 44:9–20. Can a man cook his meal over a fire made from half of the tree he used to carve his idol and imagine that an idol from so unrefined an origin is really a god?
What explains this migration to monotheism? A major factor was the Babylonian exile. How could Yahweh, clearly defined as the most powerful of the assembly of gods, have been defeated by the puny Babylonian god Marduk?
Maybe Yahweh let it happen to teach Israel and Judah a lesson. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Babylon didn’t defeat Yahweh’s people; they were merely a pawn in his grand plan all along.

A decent provision for the poor
is the true test of civilization.
— Samuel Johnson

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Atheists: What Would It Take to Change Your Mind?

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Atheists and Christians should be open minded about new evidence“Well, Mr. Atheist Smarty Pants, you think you’re so open minded. Prove it. Show me what would convince you to change your mind.” I recently challenged Christians to consider what it would take to convince them that their religious beliefs are wrong, and now it’s the atheists’ turn.
A good article on this question is The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists, written by fellow Patheos blogger Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism. I’ve used it here as a starting point for my own exploration on this question.
Convincing Traits
Here’s a tentative list of what would convince me of a religion’s claims (more on the tentative nature of the list below).

  • Many occurrences that are widely accepted by the scientific establishment as miracles. And “Science can’t explain it” isn’t necessarily a miracle—it’s just something science can’t yet explain.
  • Alternatively, a single crowdsourced miracle. On one day, everyone in the world sees “Yahweh exists” spelled out in stars or pebbles or lines in the sand. Or, one night, everyone has the same dream in which a god explains his plan. If either happened just to me, the obvious explanation would be that my mind (or someone) was playing tricks on me.
  • Prophecies, but not the ones that Christians often point to. I mean real ones. I’ve discussed before the properties of a reasonable prophecy—it must be startling, precise, accurate, and so on.
  • Scientific knowledge in holy books that wasn’t available at the time. The scientific knowledge in the Bible is no more advanced than would be expected from any non-divinely inspired book of that time. There’s no e = mc2, no f = ma, no Big Bang, and no geocentric solar system. What’s really surprising is nothing to do with health: no “boil your drinking water,” no “dig latrines far from the water source,” and no recipe for soap.
  • The believers would be changed in a way unexplainable by natural causes—good things would tend to happen to them more often than for nonbelievers, problems would be resolved quicker, prayers are answered, or in some other way we would see the deity assisting his people.

Necessary Traits of a Divinely Inspired Religion
These traits aren’t evidence for a religion, but they respond to arguments against. They are traits of a religion with a real deity behind.

  • The holy book would be perfect—no errors, no ambiguities, no inconsistencies. Not much to ask from a perfect deity, right?
  • As a corollary, there would be nothing in the holy book to which believers say, “I must admit that I can’t explain that. I guess I’ll just have to ask God when I get to heaven.” I’m thinking of puzzles like why God commanded genocide or allows famines. But how can a holy book contain this kind of problem? The holy book has no purpose except to explain to people here on earth what reality is and what the rules are.
  • The religion would have no internal divisions or doctrinal conflicts. To take a Christian example, Docetism (the idea that Jesus only seemed to be a human) was put to rest only at the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Other heresies took centuries more to resolve. One could pretend that the various twists and turns taken by Christianity were divinely guided, but where is the evidence for that?
  • It would not only celebrate reason, it would provide necessary evidence and wouldn’t require faith.

I wouldn’t add to this list that the god must be praiseworthy, judged by modern moral standards. The god might encourage genocide and allow slavery, but he doesn’t necessarily have to be good (the Gnostics imagined such a creator god).
Of course, you can cobble together rationalizations for religion without these properties—a religion where faith is required, where the holy book is ambiguous, where religion is split by doctrinal controversies, and so on, but don’t expect that to be a compelling argument.
Nonstarter Traits
Here’s a short list of general religious arguments that won’t get you out of the starting gate.

  • Curious things with natural explanations like speaking in tongues or other ecstatic experiences
  • Personal conversion stories or anything else that only you experienced
  • Things that can be explained as coincidences
  • And it should go without saying that anyone should be written off if they make a prophecy that fails (for starters, I’m thinking of Harold Camping).

Revisiting the List of Convincing Arguments
Let me return to the first list. I said that it was a tentative list because of Shermer’s Last Law: “Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.” How could I distinguish alien technology a million years more advanced than our own from the supernatural actions of a god? And if the aliens identified themselves, they might portray themselves as gods to get us to react in a certain way. Who knows—they might even be intergalactic practical jokers who just want to mess with us.
Given the choice of God or aliens as explanations, the aliens are more plausible because they’re intelligent life forms with technology. We already have an example: we are intelligent life forms with technology. By contrast, we have no commonly accepted examples of a supernatural anything.
So let me admit that, to the Christian’s challenge “What would it take to get you to believe in God?” it might be that no evidence would. But anything that would provoke Shermer’s Last Law would be a heckuva lot more evidence than we’ve had to date, where Christianity fades into the general background of thousands of manmade religions.
Hypocrisy?
Let’s pull back and consider two situations: (1) the atheist given substantial evidence of God’s existence (the present slate of arguments by Christian apologists doesn’t come close to being “substantial”) and (2) the Christian given substantial evidence that their faith is incorrect (discussed in a post a few days ago). I’m saying that the atheist would be reasonable in not changing to accept the supernatural, but reason compels the Christian to change and reject the supernatural.
Is this a double standard?
I don’t think so. In each case, the natural argument wins. The atheist goes with the natural explanation (it’s aliens, it’s a trick, I’m mistaken, I’m crazy, etc.), and the Christian also goes with the natural explanation by following the evidence. Science has shown us myriad examples where a natural explanation trumps a prior supernatural explanation, so it’s reasonable to bet on the natural explanation where it exists.
Perhaps the reason that Christianity isn’t compelling to many atheists is that they have no particular motivation (besides wanting to believe true things) to see it as correct. Is wanting it to be true a requirement for Christian belief?

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
— Arthur C. Clarke

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