Monthly Archives: July 2015

Street Preacher Cage Match, Part 2

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Here’s side 2 of the banner. (Side 1 here.)

Atheist sign

I was with this sign at an outdoor festival in Seattle one year. Some Christian group was near the entrance, haranguing the people waiting in line to get in, so I positioned myself nearby. I wasn’t saying anything, and I wasn’t close enough to be confrontational. Their group had maybe ten people, including two girls who were about 17 years old. They came over to talk. One of them asked if I had heard of somebody—a Russian numerologist or something. I hadn’t, but I wrote down the name to check later. She gave me her email address and said that she’d like to hear what I thought after doing some research.

We had a pleasant conversation for about ten minutes until the leader of their little group—the one who had been bloviating the most—came behind them and said, “Girls, you’re not to talk with this man anymore” and took them away.

That’s weird. Here they are, trying to put into practice what this crazy cult was teaching, just twenty feet away, and they get their hands slapped.

But it gets worse. A few minutes later, the Führer returns with one girl. He wanted to know, Had she given me her email address? I confirmed that she had. He said he’d like it back, so gave it to him.

If these girls had been ten years old, it would make sense to demand that dependency, but they were young adults, presumably about to go out on their own. I can’t imagine how humiliating them in public is a good thing—unless keeping them dependent was part of the plan.

If millions of people say a foolish thing, 
it’s still a foolish thing.
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/26/12.)

Street Preacher Cage Match

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The public Christmas tree lighting in Seattle is the day after Thanksgiving. I attended years ago and was surprised to see a number of people carrying big signs with Christian messages. One said: “Thanksgiving means thanking God he hasn’t killed you yet.”

Ah, what a loving deity. That’s the religion I want to join!

I got into the street sign morass myself a few years ago. I’d seen Christian sign carriers on street corners in Seattle, and I thought it’d be interesting to make an atheist rebuttal. I didn’t want to get into a shouting match, and I didn’t want to be there solo without them as a counterbalance. But it would be nice to have a polite atheist out there occasionally to give another viewpoint.

I found some great quotes and made a simple banner. With some artistic help from the very talented Kyle Hepworth, the artist who did the covers of my last two books, it looked pretty good:

Atheist sign

I made this into a large vinyl sign with a frame. As I sketched out my plans to some atheist friends, I was surprised that some weren’t on board with the project. They thought it was too hostile, too in-your-face. With that thought in mind, I was concerned as I set up for my first day of being in public, but that worry vanished when I saw the sign that the Christians brought that day.

It had flames at the bottom with the text, “Repent or Else.”

In the battle for being offensive, it’s no contest. I throw in the towel.

Continue with Part 2.

The invisible and the nonexistent 
look a lot alike.
— Julia Sweeney

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/25/12.)

10 Tips for Dealing with Creationists

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creationism evolutionI hang out with Creationists occasionally and have seen many of the arguments they make. I’d like to tell you what I’ve found.

This isn’t a rebuttal against Creationist arguments (perhaps in a future post). Rather, I’d like to sensitize you to general errors that they make. Consider this a list of cautions when evaluating a Creationist presentation. (I respond to a Chick tract full of Creationist errors here.)

1. Check the speakers’ credentials. Almost no one who speaks as a Creationist or Intelligent Design proponent has credentials in the field he’s criticizing. I’m simply asking for speakers with doctorates in the field plus work credentials. That is, a biologist speaking about biology, a geologist about geology, a cosmologist about cosmology, and so on. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists. That this seems to be a lot to ask says a lot about Creationism and related dogmas.

There are journalists without scientific degrees who popularize science, but they follow the consensus. They don’t try to apply their own agenda to overturn it. Creationists attempting to overturn the biological consensus from outside biology—that’s something different.

2. Check dates of quotes or criticisms. Words can’t express how uninterested I am in what Darwin wrote or thought or did. Almost every Darwin quote that I’ve seen used by the Creationist/ID side has been taken out of context. Anyway, Darwin’s writings are not binding on evolutionary biologists today.

And don’t get me started about Darwin’s personal life—whether Darwin ate babies with barbeque sauce or plain (actually, he lived a pretty laudable life) says nothing about the question at hand: whether evolution is the best explanation for why life is the way it is.

3. Focus on the right bin. A popular complaint is to say that evolution led to eugenics, or that the teaching of evolution in public school correlates to the tragic downward spiral that society has made in the past 50 years, and it wasn’t like this when I grew up, and don’t get me started about the kids these days, and blah, blah, blah.

Evolution is science. Eugenics is policy. The scientists give society the best approximation of the truth, and the politicians decide what to do with this information. Don’t blame science for policy.

4. Watch for Hitler entering the conversation. Godwin’s Law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Whether Hitler embraced evolution or not (unlikely, since Darwin was on the Nazi list of banned books—more here), what Hitler liked has no bearing on the accuracy of evolution.

5. Beware lists of Science’s errors. I’m thinking of lists such as the greatest hits of evolution’s mistakes—Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, “Flipperpithecus,” and so on. Or theories that have been discarded—ether, phlogiston, geocentrism, the steady-state universe.

Yeah, science makes mistakes. Get over it. And what process discovered the errors? No, not Christianity or Creationism or divine revelation, but science!

Science clearly delivers pretty good approximations of the truth. For one glaring example, consider the science underpinning all the technology by which I communicate to you right now.

6. Watch for lots of quotes. Lots of quotes by scientists (often with missing or old dates) is another bad sign. Quotes simply invite counter-quotes, where I try to trump your science-y quote with one of my own, back and forth. For discussions between non-scientists, it’s better to stick with the consensus, which needs a reference but not a quote.

7. Expect “We’ve seen that evolution is wrong, so Creationism must be right!” This is simply a false dichotomy. Evolution might be wrong (though the evidence is so overwhelming that this is hard to imagine), but even if we discarded it, that wouldn’t leave Creationism the victor.

Did some Creator put life on earth? Wow—that’s an enormous claim. Provide the evidence.

A variation of this is a confident and enthusiastic assurance that the theory of evolution is in crisis, that all the rats are jumping ship, that the latest research shows its failures, that leading biologists reject it, and so on. In lectures, articles, books, or in-person discussions, I must’ve seen this a dozen times. The claim is wrong.

8. Beware the “Gish Gallop.” Duane Gish pioneered this underhanded debate tactic. When interviewed with a biologist, he would say something like, “Well, what about X? And Y and Z? Evolution can’t explain these things.” His biologist opponent probably had explanations for these puzzles and so began a tedious (for the audience) explanation of why these are nicely handled by evolution. But when the biologist stops for a breath, Gish is back, piling on more examples. If your goal is winning the argument rather than engaging with the truth, these kinds of games can make an effective approach.

What I find especially annoying is hearing an issue get thoroughly rebutted but then reused without change by the Creationist in the very next encounter. How many times has a biologist destroyed Ray Comfort’s “Where’s the crocoduck?” argument? And yet it pops back up like we’re playing Whac-a-Mole. Does he just value effectiveness over integrity?

9. Beware lying. Okay, that sounds harsh, but I don’t know what else to make of nonsensical claims from people who should know better.

In 2007, I attended a lecture by someone from the Institute for Creation Research, a young-earth Creationist organization. This lecture was remarkable because the topic was geology, and the speaker actually had a doctorate in geology. He described taking rock samples from an amphibolite layer in the Grand Canyon and getting various radioisotope dating results. Though the rocks were all from the same layer, the date estimates were all over the map. His unsurprising conclusion: this dating technique is flawed, and the Grand Canyon layers were laid down by Noah’s flood, thousands of years ago, not hundreds of millions.

Only after the lecture, after I’d done some research, did I learn that amphibolite is a metamorphic rock, and radioisotope dating is typically reliable only for dating igneous rocks. That the geologist didn’t bring up this point makes me reject his entire premise as unreliable.

10. Beware “Science backtracks all the time!” Science does find errors and correct itself, but don’t imagine that the next correction to evolution is as likely to be a small tweak as the overturning of the entire theory. Once a field is well understood, changes obey a power law (we see this with the magnitude of earthquakes, the frequency of word use, or the size of cities and towns). For every big earthquake we see thousands of tiny ones, and for every huge correction in a theory we see many small tweaks. The overturning of a well-established theory is very unlikely.

Isaac Asimov addressed this: “When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

Since Creationists can’t be trusted to evaluate and discuss science, how can we trust their interpretation of the Bible, which is far more ambiguous?

Debating with a creationist is like playing chess with a pigeon. 
It jumps on the board, knocks all the pieces off, craps on the table, 
and flies off to its flock to claim victory.
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/19/12.)

Image credit: Rennett Stowe, flickr, CC

Are We Just Molecules in Motion?

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I’m on vacation in Europe, so I’ll be posting from the archives for a few weeks.

How can humans be nothing more than molecules on motion? From only this, how could we get consciousness or morality or other high-level human traits?

Christian apologists object to what they see as the consequences of the naturalistic view—that humans are nothing more than machines. Can this mechanistic outlook explain the facts of consciousness and morality?

In the first place, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes clear that we’re not living in a clockwork universe where, if we could only understand the state of things precisely enough, we could in theory predict the future. Quarks are not like billiard balls. Heisenberg states that there is unavoidable randomness at the quantum level, and things are not deterministic. Naturalists agree that a deterministic, molecules-in-motion worldview doesn’t work.

This caricature refuses to go beyond the simple laws governing our molecules, but reality is a bit more complicated. Consciousness, morality, and other complex human traits don’t follow directly from fundamental quantum laws, but they are examples of emergent phenomena.

Emergent phenomena in water

Consider water molecules. At the quantum level, the forces are pretty straightforward—electrostatic forces hold things together and heat drives them apart; the strong force keeps the nucleus intact and the weak force governs when it breaks apart; and so on.

The diagram above shows a water molecule, with the bonding angle and distance between nuclei shown. Imagine conveying all this information about water to quantum physicists in another galaxy who don’t have water. They would know everything about water but only at the nano scale.

From this, could they deduce the existence of whirlpools, turbulence, erosion, or waves on the shore? Would they anticipate rainbows, clouds, snowflakes, fog, and frost? Could they predict that water self-ionizes or expands as it freezes? No single water molecule possesses the properties of wetness, fluidity, pH, salinity, or surface tension, but these and other properties emerge when trillions of trillions of water molecules are put together.

Wetness isn’t a property of a water molecule; it emerges. Individually it’s not there, but it appears collectively.

Other examples

Take alloys as another example. If you add water to alcohol, you get dilute alcohol. But if you add tin to copper, you get bronze. Add carbon to iron to get steel. The resulting alloys can be more useful than the elements that make them. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 3.

Take the human brain. Our brains have roughly 100 billion (that’s 1011) neurons. A single neuron doesn’t think 10–11 times as fast; it doesn’t think at all. Thinking is another emergent phenomenon.

Similarly, consciousness doesn’t reside in any one neuron or in any section of the brain; it emerges from an entire working brain. The same is true with morality. If there’s no need to imagine a mind separate from the brain to explain consciousness in a mouse, why would it be necessary for humans?

Compare a human brain with a lizard brain. A lizard doesn’t have a poorly developed sense of humor (or wit or irony), it has none at all. Humans’ extra brain cells don’t make us a super lizard, they makes us something completely new and different, something emergent.

Denigrate the brain with “we’re just molecules in motion” if you want, but consciousness is like wetness—it emerges out of the whole. There is no need to imagine an objective morality grounded outside the human brain, or a mind to provide consciousness, or a soul to provide personality. All evidence points to their simply being properties of the brain.

Clay is molded to make a pot, 
but it is in the space where there is nothing 
that the usefulness of the pot lies.
Cut out doors and windows to make a room, 
and it is in the spaces where there is nothing 
that the usefulness of the room lies.
— Chinese classic Tao Te Ching

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/12/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

An Atheist Horror Story (Fiction)

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atheist fiction“Good morning, Dr. Jones.” Oliver Jones’ secretary smiled at him from behind her desk. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” he said. He had no memory of ever seeing the woman before. He paused to read the label on his unfamiliar office door: “Oliver Jones PhD, Chancellor.”

This was his first day back at work after his accident. He had been out for just a few days, but it felt more like nine years. His neurologist diagnosed the problem as retrograde amnesia. The nine years of memory loss could be permanent, his memory might return gradually, or it might return quite suddenly. “I’ve had patients who’ve said, ‘Oh, yeah …’ and then they can almost watch their world rebuild itself as the memories return.”

Nine years earlier, he had been a successful and ambitious college administrator and very much an atheist. Today, he was the head of Tabernacle University, perhaps America’s most aggressively Christian university.

Only his neurologist shared the secret. Jones’s public story was that he had some limited amnesia and that he needed to take things slowly. He hoped that his secretary’s prepping visitors with this vague prognosis would explain away any erratic behavior.

He looked around his big office. He saw many books on Christianity and atheism that he remembered reading. There were other familiar touches—artwork that he recognized and a few nerdy desk toys. But then there were the photos—photos of him shaking hands with televangelists, prominent religious leaders, and a presidential candidate. Who was this guy?

He looked himself up online, horrified as the details filled in the outline of what he had already learned about himself at the hospital. He had become Tabernacle’s chancellor four years earlier after some sort of religious epiphany. As a prominent and outspoken atheist, he had apparently been quite a catch for conservative Christianity.

On this first day back at work, he blundered through the day with impromptu staff meetings to update him on the latest issues. As with his first look at his secretary, each of his colleagues was a stranger.

In his house that evening—he was apparently still a single divorced man—he considered his situation. Should he come clean and quit? Find a new job? Or could he use his bully pulpit to attack Christianity from the inside?

He weighed his options as an interesting route took shape—remain as chancellor, but be a reformer. He could use his position to steer this inept leviathan onto a healthier course. The board might fire him, of course, but as an atheist who woke up at the helm of a prominent Christian institution, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He thought of the students. The image came to mind of a jungle explorer who slips into quicksand. He struggles but sinks deeper. Exhausted, he calls for help, but no one comes. His students were like that, living and breathing reason but imperceptibly slipping under. He could throw them a rope.

The university charter made clear that the Christian student had nothing to fear from an honest search for the truth. With this as his lodestar, Jones began his reforms. He sidelined projects that had been on his desk and started with a lecture series with nationally known atheists. His students needed to see the real debate, not some neutered version. No longer could his professors set up flimsy atheist arguments but would need to respond to the best.

Reactions came quickly. Alumni protested, and parents demanded that the school be turned back into a safe haven for their children. The board warned that neither group could be alienated. Jones responded by pointing to the school’s confident charter. Wasn’t it still in force? He said he wanted nothing more than to honor the founders’ vision.

Perhaps the board figured that a man who’d had a recent brush with death was entitled to a little slack. With a bit of breathing room, he courted the press and soon became the darling of the mainstream religious media. He next dropped the faith requirement for professors and created a new professorship for Atheist Studies. He charged the science department with teaching only the scientific consensus—no more Creationism or 6000-year-old earth. He launched a project to earn an honorable accreditation for the university rather than one given only to Bible colleges. Students would discover the truth, not have it imposed as dogma. Each strategically timed innovation brought a new round of interviews higher profile than the last.

Tabernacle had been a stodgy refuge from reality but was evolving in the public mind into an innovator in Christian thought and higher education. Despite continuing resistance from all sides, he convinced the board to give him room to explore his new vision.

At the end of the semester, Jones took stock of his work. Four months earlier, he had felt like Alice, newly through the looking glass. Now he could point to solid progress in smoothing off the sharp edges, at least for this Christian institution. For all the enemies he had made, he seemed to have even more allies. Who could say what additional innovations he might make in the years to come?

It finally felt right to make this office his own, to replace photos of that other guy with recent magazine cover stories and pictures with new friends.

He studied the old photos as he took them down. He was surprised as they brought to mind dreams he’d had recently—dreams of an unfamiliar past that now came more into focus—and he went through the photos again. Oh yeah, he thought, as memories finally trickled back to become ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle pieces. The man in the top photo, that was the outgoing chancellor. He remembered him now. And the photo with the famous preacher—he remembered when the photo was taken.

He even remembered the event that led to his being there, that low point when he got on his knees and embraced Jesus. He was getting his life back, though instead of walking into a welcoming and familiar new world, he felt that old life creeping up around him like a jungle vine, pulling him under, yanking him back to his Christian past.

He could call for help, but who would come?

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/1/14.)

Image credit: Paul VanDerWerf, flickr, CC

How Could God Have Screwed Up Morality?

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You know when you’re at the coffee shop and ask for the bathroom key how it comes attached to a huge soup ladle or block of wood? Why would an ordinary key need an enormous, clunky keychain? It’s so you don’t put it in your pocket or purse and forget to return it.

This idea of mistake-proofing has been around for 60 years within Japanese manufacturing, where it’s called poka-yoke. We can apply this idea to Christian morality, where it’s glaringly absent.

morality

How poka-yoke works

Suppose you’re on an assembly line, manually putting keyboards together. There are 101 keys on a standard keyboard, and each one needs a spring. Take a spring, put it in a key, and pop it into the keyboard. Then repeat, over and over. It’s neither a difficult nor an error-prone process, but if you forget a spring for just one key out of a thousand, that’s 10% of your keyboards that are broken.

Solution: use a scale to weigh out 101 springs and put them in a bowl. If you’re done with a keyboard but there are still springs in the bowl, you know immediately that you’ve made a mistake. That keyboard gets fixed.

  • Consider the humble home thermostat. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss noticed that the traditional rectangular thermostat was often mounted not perfectly level. And there it would sit on the wall for all to see for decades, crooked. Solution: the iconic round thermostat, which can’t be crooked.
  • Consider laying glue for floor tiles. It takes experience to know just how much glue to apply. Solution: a trowel with a serrated edge applies just the right amount.
  • Consider the (now obsolete) 3.5-inch floppy disk. When inserting it into the drive, there are four edges to stick in first, and you can turn it upside down to get four more. That’s seven ways to do it wrong, except that it only goes in one way. You simply can’t put it in wrong. Punch cards (even obsoleter) have a similar problem—what if one of the cards in the stack is upside down or backwards? With the top-left corner is cut off, any deviant is obvious.

Morality according to Epicurus

In the Christian story, God places moral requirements on humans, but he doesn’t give them sufficient tools to get there. Rewarding people for being good is what the other religions do, and Christians learn that their own efforts at moral perfection are insufficient. If they want what Christianity offers, they must get there by faith.

Sure, God could’ve done that, though God becomes an evil scientist who devises experiments in which his animal subjects can only sometimes get the food.

Consider the famous critique of the Problem of Evil from third-century BCE Greek philosopher Epicurus.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Epicurus takes a common-sense approach to God and morality. If God exists, he would give us the tools to reach any goal he might reasonably assign. Is moral perfection a goal? That’s not a problem with perfect wisdom. With perfect wisdom, you could choose to do evil, but who would want to when the morally perfect route is both obvious and compelling? The sensible God of Epicurus would’ve given us that. If we can make things foolproof, so can God, and if God created morality, he would’ve made it foolproof. (More on morality here and here.)

The Christian response is that we are fallible people with imperfect brains and incomplete knowledge. Who are we to judge God? But this is the Hypothetical God fallacy—assume God first and then decide how we must respond. This is backwards. Instead, we look at the evidence and ask ourselves if God even exists.

It’s not looking too good.

In the believer’s mind, God can do anything,
but in reality he can’t even say Hi.
— seen on internet

Image credit: Bill Bradford, flickr, CC