Let’s continue with our exploration of stupid arguments Christians shouldn’t use (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #20a: Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God. The origin of life? Of consciousness? Of the universe? If you don’t have an answer, I do—God did it!

Science doesn’t have answers to some questions, and we’ll have to be patient. But some apologists seem desperate and insistent in their search for answers to life’s riddles. This is because they already have an answer. They started their investigation with an answer.

“Time’s up!” they say. “Pass your tests to the front.”

This apparent eagerness to understand reality is simply a smokescreen. They want to shoehorn in their answer for all puzzles, and science’s answers are irrelevant. If science did come up with a consensus view of a Christian’s puzzle du jour, our Christian would simply drop the resolved issue and find a new one.

Don’t tell me an issue is a big deal to you if it’s not. If your faith is built on science not having an answer to abiogenesis, say, then let’s talk about it. But if you have no skin in the game and you’re simply going to move the goalposts when you lose, it’s a waste of time.

Science is the only discipline that tells us new things about reality. As just one example of well-founded science, consider that we’re communicating with computers over the internet.

Stupid Argument #20b: Science has been wrong; therefore, God. What about Piltdown Man? The steady-state universe? The origin of the moon? Science changes its mind all the time! What kind of a reliable foundation is this?

Remember what it was that uncovered the Piltdown Man hoax, discovered that the universe is expanding, and improved our understanding of the origin of the solar system—it was science every time, not the Bible and not theologians or philosophers. Science is imperfect but self-correcting. Science delivers.

Stupid Argument #21a: Scientific illiteracy. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.” — Bill O’Reilly

Actually, Bill, the big kids have understood for centuries how earth’s rotation and the gravitational effects of the sun and moon cause tides.

Another example of scientific cluelessness is Ray Comfort’s famous video where he holds up a banana and declares, “Behold the atheist’s nightmare!” No, Ray, the banana that God gave us was small, tasteless, and full of seeds. The sweet Cavendish banana that you held up is the result of thousands of years of human cultivation.

Ray’s “crocoduck” (his conclusion that since we don’t see a crocodile/duck hybrid, evolution is crap) gets an honorable mention.

We all have to start somewhere. If you’re scientifically or mathematically undereducated, compensate with an open mind. Too often what I see instead is scientific illiteracy combined, not with open-mindedness, but with hubris. If your education came from the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, or the Creation Research Institute, you’ve been poorly educated. Your confidence is misplaced.

Stupid Argument #21b: Mathematical illiteracy. The life of Jesus fulfilled 300 prophecies! The probability of just eight of these coming true randomly—that is, without him being the real deal—is 1 in 10¹⁷. Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep and find a particular one, blindfolded, by dumb luck—that’s the equivalent probability.

Whatcha gonna say against probability, right? Actually, a fair amount: I dismantle that ridiculous argument here.

We humans have a surprisingly poor native grasp of probability. Another helpful puzzle is the Monty Hall problem. Give it a try and see how you do.

Stupid Argument #22: Relying on the ignorance of your audience. Put a single cell in a normal saline solution, and poke it with a needle. You’ve got all the elements of life, and yet you’ll never get life. Don’t tell me that evolution works!

I heard this while speaking to Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells at a Discovery Institute book release event. I forgot what I asked to get this response, but it stopped me. I’d never heard this puzzle before and didn’t have anything to say in response.

But I do now. No biologist says that this was the step prior to this cell on its evolutionary progression, so the puzzle is meaningless. He’s right that you’ll never get life from that mixture, but no one said that you would. That cell came from another living cell and so on back through much speciation to the beginning of life on earth.

But, having a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology, Wells knew this. Why then pose this challenge? Why take advantage of my ignorance?

Here’s another example. I attended a presentation by Andrew Snelling (PhD in geology) of the Institute for Creation Research on radioisotope dating of Grand Canyon rocks (summary here). He collected a number of samples of amphibolite. They were from a single layer and so were all the same age. He sent them to two laboratories for four kinds of radioisotope dating. The date results were all over the map. Conclusion: radioisotope dating is unreliable.

Only after I did some research did I discover that amphibolite is metamorphic rock and that only igneous rock can be reliably radioisotope dated.

So a geologist (who knows that radioisotope dating isn’t reliable on metamorphic rocks) gets some metamorphic rocks, has them dated, and then is shocked—shocked!—when the dates aren’t reliable. A “devastating failure for long-age geology,” as the subtitle suggests? Not quite.

Snelling counted on the ignorance of his audience, and he fooled me—at least until he could get out of the auditorium. I was not amused, and this did nothing to build support for his position.

Continue with Part 7.

I conclude [that this fallacious reasoning]
must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt;
as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation.
It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely.
— Michael Shermer

Photo credit: Eric Petruno

This is a guest post from Stephen Gray, a modified excerpt from his upcoming book.

Stephen Gray has a degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, with graduate work in physics from Harvard. He has been studying science and its relationship to religion for years. He is the author of Christianity in Ruins: Refuting the Faith, which is expected to be released in a few weeks. 

Here’s his list of God’s blunders.

1. The perfect God created an imperfect universe. That was his first lapse.
2. God is merciful, just, perfect, moral, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnifree, transcendent, genderless, beginningless, causeless, infinite, spaceless, and timeless or eternal. He could easily provide evidence for these properties but doesn’t. Big error.
3. God created the world and a man and woman. He liked his creation. Adam and Eve were given free will, allowing them to disobey God’s orders. God made another blunder.
4. Adam and Eve manifested a program bug called “original sin.” That made God place an evil spell on all of humanity forever. That was extremely immoral and comprised one of his worst misdeeds.
5. God intended the Bible to be a guide to morality and to show his love for humanity, but the older part is full of things like genocides, cannibalism, murder, and blood sacrifices, all done or ordered by God himself. The contrast between what God says and what he does defines hypocrisy.
6. God had the Bible written to explain his rules and to teach us about Jesus. But the book contains contradictions, ambiguities, ridiculous science, incorrect history, pointless trivia, poor continuity, duplications, inaccurate arithmetic, wrong geography, imitations of older myths, impossible miracles, and plentiful immorality. It deserves a grade of F–, but God shows no remorse.
7. God could have made our self-control stronger without limiting free will. Not doing this was another bungle.
8. God, finding his work to be terrible, started over. He killed everything, even flowers, birds, trees, kittens, babies, and fetuses, making him the most prolific abortionist and animal killer of all time. The deaths did not help, so his mass murder was an inexcusable foulup.
9. God showed extreme sadism by telling Abraham to kill his son but stopped him at the last second. God also had Satan torture Job and kill his ten children. God never apologized or explained. These acts were unusually evil even for God.
10. God later created a “son,” who both was born at a specific time and existed eternally. This issue will remain a baffling puzzle until all theologians get fired for pointless speculation. Then we can declare it nonsense and forget about it.
11. Jesus descended from King David in two different ways, but the actual father was the Holy Spirit. Was the son descended from David or not? Confusing.
12. The son is identical to God and part of him, so he is his own father and his own son. Objective observers see that this is nuts.
13. The third part of God is identical to but separate from the first two. Its first act was to impregnate Jesus’ mother. It is not known whether this thing is a person, part of one, or something else. The parts of God are called the Trinity, but a Binity might be slightly less ridiculous.
14. How God’s third ingredient impregnated the virgin is obscure. He, she, or it may have used Joseph’s semen and, having no need to do anything the normal way, entered Mary through her ear. This avoids the problem of Mary’s vagina.
15. There are more supernatural entities in this monotheistic religion. He is called Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, etc. He practices deception and tempts humans to sin, quite superfluous given our curse of original sin. God is unable to kill him even though Satan is outnumbered three to one by the Trinity—or not.
16. The Bible explains how to be saved from Hell, but there are many different ways, each one necessary and sufficient. That is logically impossible, so believers have every right to be confused. Leaving salvation unclear is a major blunder.
17. By painfully killing his son, God punished himself or part of himself in a 1/3 suicide that lasted only a day and a half, so his self-punishment was insincere. Given his record of mistakes, he should have voluntarily disappeared.
18. The son, Jesus—that is, God, part of God, or something—was dead but is now alive and with his father, that is, himself, so the sacrifice did and did not occur. That is evidence of God’s inability to think. He needs a brain transplant.
19. The son was supposed to come back in the 1st century, but he’s been absent for 2000 years. A psychiatrist would label this extreme passive-aggressiveness, but the only word doctors have for being that late is dead.
20. God said that the postmortem life will occur in Heaven, whatever that is. There is no coherent account of what happens there, but many people are eager to go anyway. God might make a good salesman for house plots in a swamp.
21. In the second part of the book, God orders eternal roasting as punishment for disbelief, even if a person sincerely tries to believe but cannot. Giving us the ability to reason but punishing us for using it is a horrible, evil crime. God should commit suicide or permanently confine himself to a padded cell.
22. God wants humans to freely love him but issues hideous threats if we don’t. One cannot love while being threatened. Major mistake.
23. God persists in permanently hiding, perhaps out of shame for his extreme incompetence. His hiddenness makes it almost impossible for a rational person to believe in him, indicating a self-defeating personality. His failure to get help for this problem is a major offense.
24. One of God’s worst errors was creating millions of people who believe in him despite the lack of evidence and the presence of so many mistakes in his book. This proves that the human brain is defective, so its designer is also defective.
25. God let his favorite religion split into hundreds of branches. The Old Testament God has been properly called the nastiest character in all fiction. His sick behavior and failure to get it treated is negligent.

This particular God could not run a taco stand, let alone a universe.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
— Richard Dawkins