Monthly Archives: April 2016

Do Atheists Borrow From the Christian Worldview? A Parable.

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Consider this parable:
A certain mathematician, in a philosophical mood one day, wondered what grounded his mathematics. The math works, of course, but he wonders if he’s missing something foundational.
He consults a friend of his, a theologian. The theologian knows almost nothing about mathematics, but he knows his Christianity.
The mathematician says, “Mathematics is like an inverted triangle with the most advanced math along the wide top edge. The top layer is grounded on the math below it, which is grounded on what is below, and so on through the layers, down to arithmetic and logic at the point at the bottom. And that’s where it stops.”
The theologian nodded his head wisely. “I see the problem—what does the bottom rest on?”
The mathematician was silent.
“In your view, it rests on nothing,” said the theologian. “It just sits there in midair. But the problem is easily resolved—mathematics and logic comes from God. There’s your grounding.”
“Are you saying that I need to convert to Christianity to be a mathematician?”
“No, just realize that you are borrowing from the Christian worldview every time you make a computation or write an equation.”
Satisfied that this nagging problem has been resolved, the mathematician returns to his work and thinks no more of it.
The End.
So, is the mathematician any better off? Is he faster or more accurate or more creative? Do his proofs work now where they hadn’t before? In short, did he get anything of value from the whole episode? Not at all.
And note, of course, that the axioms at the bottom of the triangle aren’t taken on faith, they’re continually tested. “1 + 1 = 2” has worked on everything so far, but we’ll take notice if we find a situation where it doesn’t. Some mathematical claims are proven and some are tested, but each is reliable.
I’ve heard this “grounding” or “atheists borrow from the Christian worldview” idea many times, but I’ve yet to discover what this missing thing is that is being borrowed. And suppose the theologian friend had been a Hindu or Buddhist and gave a claim of grounding from that perspective. Would that answer be any less plausible than the Christian one? If they conflict, doesn’t that cast doubt on both of them?
(The Transcendental Argument is the usual form of this argument, and I respond to it here.)
If we imagine that 1 + 1 equals 2 only because God says so, that means that a universe is possible where 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2. That’s a remarkable claim, and I’d like to see it supported by the theologian rather than simply asserted without evidence.
“God did it” is nothing more than a restatement of the problem. “God did it” is precisely as useful as “logic and arithmetic are simply properties of our reality” or “that’s just the way it is” or even “I don’t know.” An interesting question has been suppressed, not resolved. In fact, by the theologian’s own logic, his answer rests in midair because he provides no reason to conclude that God exists. His claim is no more believable than that of any other religion—that is, not at all. Worse, he proposes to replace the axioms at the lowest level—which continually provide evidence that they are valid—with a supernatural claim without evidence.
The person who stops at “God did it” has stated an opinion only—an opinion with no evidence to back it up. It doesn’t advance the cause of truth one bit.
Mathematics is tested, and it works. Scratch your head about what grounds it if you want, but God is an unnecessary and unedifying addition to the mix.

God is an ever-receding pocket
of scientific ignorance.
— Neil DeGrasse-Tyson

(This is an update of a post originally published 11/25/11.)

Debate Aftermath

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debate christian atheistI participated in a formal debate (20-minute opening statements, followed by rebuttals, close, and Q&A with the audience) a couple of weeks ago. The topic was “Is it Reasonable to Believe in God?” and I summarized the details here. The organizers have now supplied the video, which I include below. I think there were more than 100 people in the audience (mostly Christians, I’m sure).
Everyone treated me with respect, and I had a great time. Watch the video and tell me what you thought (the quality of the video looks to me to be excellent).
Opposing arguments
My opponent was Rob van de Weghe, and he opened with four arguments.

  1. Cosmological Argument. The universe began to exist; therefore, there must be a creator. A sub-argument was that entropy is increasing, so things must be winding down from a creation event.
  2. Fine Tuning Argument. The universe is delicately tuned for life.
  3. Design Argument. Life is complex, which points to a designer. A sub-argument was: where did life come from? God answers this question nicely.
  4. Moral Argument. Each of us is wired with a standard of moral values—where did this standard come from except from God?

My thorough responses will be found in blog posts (search and ye shall find), or you can watch the video below to see my very abbreviated response.
Debate strategy and my opening arguments
It’s important to think out one’s goals. In a public debate like this, a technical win isn’t much of a goal in my opinion. If there were judges critiquing the arguments, I would be careful to respond thoroughly to every argument, defend any attacks on my own arguments, and make clear how I thought I was doing (“I notice that my opponent has said very little about my third argument, so I must conclude that he is conceding that point …”) to help the judges see how thoroughly I was winning.
But of course there was no formal judging. Instead, my Christian opponent provided a Christian audience for me to lecture to, and my primary goal was to give them some ideas they hadn’t considered. If they heard a few simple, memorable puzzles to which they had no snappy answers, that might get them thinking. This means that standard arguments (such as, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”) were out, since those in the audience would likely have heard rationalizations already. And I had to do all this while coming across as polite, thoughtful, and intelligent.
Here are my opening arguments (I’ve written about each one in the blog):

  1. Historians Reject the Bible Story
  2. Mormonism Beats Christianity
  3. Because There’s a Map of World Religions
  4. Christianity Relies on Indoctrination
  5. The Natural Explanation Resolves the Puzzles Confronting Christians
  6. All the Other Religions Are Nonsense
  7. Jesus Is Just One More Dying and Rising God
  8. Christianity Is Unfalsifiable
  9. God Has No Impact on Reality

My debate goal was primarily to overwhelm my opponent with the quantity of arguments as well as mix up the list to add a few that I hadn’t used in prior debates so that simply watching previous debate videos wouldn’t give all my secrets. I read Rob’s book beforehand, and I assumed he’d done some preparation on me as well.
Rebuttals
Problem 1 would be being blindsided by a good argument that I’d never heard of before. Problem 2 would be getting an argument that I was familiar with and had even blogged about but for which I couldn’t remember the best points.
I’d almost welcome a bit of Problem 1, just to make life interesting and to give me something substantial to blog about later, but this didn’t happen. To avoid Problem 2, I went into the debate with printed summaries of about forty issues, distilled down from my blog posts, anticipating what might come up. Rob’s arguments were on any apologist’s top-ten list, so I was able to pull out a summary sheet for each one and circle the points that I wanted to make in my rebuttal. This made my life much easier, and it is quite satisfying to be able to say something like, “Rob quoted cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, but let me point out something else that Vilenkin said, and I quote …”
I’d like to thank the atheist friends who made the long trip to see the proceedings!
Feedback is welcome. Let me know what you think I need to work on—presentation, arguments, attitude, whatever.

To conceal a want of real ideas,
many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words,
intricate flourishes and phrases … new and unheard-of expressions,
all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned.
Yet with all this they say—just nothing.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

Image credit: Steve Maw, flickr, CC

Movie Review: “God’s Still Not Dead: You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”

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Christian film cinema movieWho enjoyed “God’s Not Dead”? If you want to relive that unrealistic bit of Christian persecution porn, read my review.
Who wants a sequel? Me neither, but journalistic integrity forces me to give you a review. I made it out of the experience intact thanks to some local atheist friends, so let’s get into “God’s Not Dead 2.”
Variety predicts a successful opening despite its harsh review: “The franchise’s disciples will surely fill its collection plate as full as 2014’s $60-million-grossing original, but this paranoid persecution-complex fantasy is unlikely to win many converts.”
Plot with spoilers
Here’s the unsurprising plot. Grace is a kind-hearted high school teacher who takes good care of her live-in grandfather (played by Pat Boone). Brooke is a student in her AP History class whose callous freethinking parents quickly got over their son’s accidental death, leaving Brooke feeling empty and alone. In a class discussion about Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Brooke asks a question about the relevance of Jesus as a peacekeeper, and Grace replies with a relevant Bible quote. Another student complains, but he’s told that the mention of Jesus, including quotes from the Bible, are not amiss in public schools, assuming that the material is stated in the context of teaching rather than proselytization, which this clearly was. The End.
Kidding! Of course, the movie lives in Everyone Is Mean to Christians and the Sky Is Falling Land, and the school board gets involved. Then the ACLU (hiss!) files a lawsuit, and the lead lawyer isn’t shy about their agenda: “We’re going to prove once and for all that God is dead.” After a little prayer in the darkest hour of the courtroom proceedings, our heroine is acquitted, and once again we’re told that God’s not dead. (And asked to tweet that to all our friends.)
Sadly, there was no April Fool’s Day gotcha at the end. Since Jesus promised persecution, maybe Christians think they’re doing it wrong if there isn’t any. (And in the U.S., there isn’t.)

GND: the franchise
The amount of continuity between the two God’s Not Dead movies surprised me. Martin the Asian student makes a return appearance. In GND1, a Muslim student was disowned by her father, but Martin takes that role in the sequel when his father disowns him for his faith. Pastors Dave and Jude are back. The atheist-now-Christian reporter who got a cancer diagnosis in GND1 has a miraculous remission. Duck Dynasty is given as an answer to “What’s your favorite TV show?” in jury selection, and the daughter of the two Duck Dynasty characters who made cameos in GND1 plays a small part. And there’s a Newsboys concert at the end.
Who’s eager for God’s Not Dead 3?
What about all those court cases showing Christian persecution?
As with the GND1, this movie ends with a handful of court cases that it claims illustrate “the very real threats to religious liberty that occur daily in the public square.” These all had the Alliance Defending Freedom on the Christian side, and the ADF web site is crowing about the release of GND2 which they say was “inspired by ADF cases.”
They may not be that good an ally when the Human Rights Campaign labeled them as “one of the nation’s most dangerous organizations working to prevent equality for LGBT people.” They seem to take a zero-sum approach to the public square, removing others’ rights to enlarge their own.
The Supreme Court’s tests for religion in public schools are clear (see my summary of the Lemon test for violations of the First Amendment’s Establishment clause and the Sherbert test for violations of the Free Exercise clause).
Is the ACLU really that evil?
The American Civil Liberties Union is a popular bad guy in conservatives’ imagination, though its mission in the religion domain seems easy to accept: “The ACLU strives to safeguard the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty by ensuring that laws and governmental practices neither promote religion nor interfere with its free exercise.”
They might talk a good story, but let’s check the evidence. In front of a list of 166 cases going back thirteen years, they say:

The ACLU vigorously defends the rights of all Americans to practice their religion. But because the ACLU is often better known for its work preventing the government from promoting and funding selected religious activities, it is sometimes wrongly assumed that the ACLU does not zealously defend the rights of all religious believers to practice their faith. The actions described below – over half of which were brought on behalf of self-identified Christians, with the remaining cases defending the rights of a wide range of minority faiths – reveal just how mistaken such assumptions are.

Random observations
I won’t do a thorough takedown of the movie, but let me touch on a few points that are too good to miss.

  • Product-Placement Santa came early for several apologists brought in as witnesses for the defense, playing themselves. Lee Strobel mentioned his Case for Christ, and J. Warner Wallace was asked for both the title (Cold-Case Christianity) and then the subtitle (A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels) of his book. And the defense lawyer is given Man, Myth, Messiah by Rice Broocks, the apologetics consultant for the movie.
  • Amy is the reporter who unexplainably recovered from cancer. Someone responded with something to the effect of, “But isn’t that what you prayed for?” Though she didn’t say this, she might as well have replied, “Well, yeah, but everyone knows it doesn’t work like that!”
  • Pat Boone the grandfather said, “Atheism doesn’t take away the pain, it just takes away the hope.”
  • The ACLU lawyer (think of him as Satan) and his team meet Brooke’s parents and say that being part of an important lawsuit would bring publicity and a financial settlement that would help Brooke get into Stanford. The scene ended with dad signing a contract—basically, a deal with the devil. (Positive publicity? Perhaps Satan forgot Jessica Ahlquist from Rhode Island who participated in a 2012 lawsuit to remove an overtly Christian prayer in her high school. She was publicly called “an evil little thing” by a state representative, and she received hate mail and death threats. No, you don’t get just accolades when you push back against Christian privilege.)
  • The case gets local publicity, and protesters from both sides are on the steps of the courthouse. The Christians are sitting silently and peacefully with their signs, and the atheists, every one of them, are facing them and shouting. Wow—I didn’t realize atheists were so universally hateful.
  • Mike Huckabee interviews yet another actual apologist (I wonder if he was able to slip in one of his books, too) and concludes that Christians will soon have to pick the law of Man or the law of God. This was echoed by a Ratio Christi promo: “If Christians don’t take a stand today, will we even have a choice tomorrow?” (In the first place, your “law of God” is legal here thanks exclusively to the U.S. Constitution. You should at least have a little appreciation as well as some knowledge of civics. In the second, atheists want only to remove excesses that favor Christianity over other worldviews. That’s it.)
  • The argument from the defense was that Grace made a justifiable secular statement in a public school classroom. But once they win, the secular pretense is out the window and everybody is chanting, “God’s not dead, he’s surely alive,” a line from a Newsboys song.

Role reversal
In the courtroom, Satan inverts the case for the jury’s benefit. Suppose that, instead of a Christian quoting from the Bible, we had a Muslim quoting from the Qur’an? Wouldn’t that clearly be proselytization? (Hardly—I can quote the Bible better than most Christians. When I do so, I most certainly am not proselytizing.)
But let’s take this further. Suppose the movie were actually changed in this way, with a Muslim teacher giving a relevant, non-proselytizing quote from the Qur’an about Mohammed in a public school history class. What would the Christian supporters of the movie say then?
The atheists would be unchanged. It wasn’t a problem with the Christian, and it’s not a problem with the Muslim. How about it, Christians? This would make your case stronger, because your support for the Muslim teacher would show that this wasn’t simply an attempt to get favors just for your religion—which, I must confess, is pretty much what it looks like. (h/t to my atheist posse)
God’s Not Dead 3?
Let me bring this too-long post to a close. I need to respond to the post-credits scene where Pastor Dave is hauled off in handcuffs, setting up the to-be-thrilling sequel.
Earlier in the movie, a group of local pastors had been told that the last four months of their sermons were being subpoenaed. No reason is given; this is just a demand from out of the blue.
The script had a 2014 Houston case in mind, and one character even alluded to it, but that was a very different case. Instead of some government body demanding pastors’ sermons for no stated reason, the Houston case started with a lawsuit from conservative groups against the city of Houston against new provisions to provide trans access to bathrooms matching gender identity. In response, the city subpoenaed five local conservative pastors to find statements they’d made relevant to the case.
The city quickly reversed itself, and even atheists pushed back against the logic of the request. Eager to crank up the hysteria dial, however, the movie turned a response to a conservative lawsuit into an unprovoked attack on Christian liberty.
 
Maybe my shock at the ridiculousness of the movie is off base. Perhaps everyone already knows that this is just persecution porn and, like a romance novel that must have a happy ending, this is just a genre thing. Staying in close contact with reality isn’t the way it works here. If so, perhaps I’m the one fooled with this April Fool’s Day movie.
(And BTW, if you’re looking for hilarious takedowns of Christian movies, I recommend my new favorite podcast, God Awful Movies. I can’t wait to hear what they do to this one.)
Review of GND3 here.

I sneezed and no one said, “Bless you.”
Will the persecution never stop??
— Friendly Atheist commenter Robert Douglas,
on a possible plot summary of God’s Not Dead 3

Image credit: PUREFLIX

Revisiting Dire Predictions of America After Obergefell

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same sex marriage obergefellCivil rights are again in the news. A month after Charlotte, North Carolina passed an LGBT anti-discrimination measure, the state general assembly convened a special session for the first time in 35 years just to pass a law that blocks such measures. That LGBT rights continue to be debated provides an opportunity to revisit a prediction about the frightful consequences of same-sex marriage.
The prediction
Conservatives claimed that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope. Once we legalize this change, what will come next? Will people demand to marry their children or pets or sex toys?
Many traditionalists back in the sixties had their own version of this: “Once black folks can marry white folks, who knows what’ll come next?”
The sky didn’t fall after Loving v. Virginia eliminated laws against mixed-race marriage in 1967, and it didn’t when the Netherlands became the first country to grant same-sex marriages in 2001 or when Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize them in 2004.
And despite what conservatives said a year ago, the sky didn’t fall when the United States legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 with the Obergefell decision.
Don’t open that Pandora’s Box labeled “same-sex marriage”!
It hasn’t been quite a year since Obergefell, but it’s easy to forget the hysteria that surrounded it. For example, fellow Patheos blogger Dwight Longenecker didn’t wonder what would come after same-sex marriage. He knew: the U.S. would become a police state.
Hold your arms out for balance, and let’s step through the prediction made two years before Obergefell. First, he points to an article titled “Legalize Polygamy!” Written by a woman, it argues that a pro-woman attitude should allow women the freedom to enter into polygamous marriages. She argues that marriage is plastic—that it can be molded to take on new shapes.
America has dramatically rejected many of the marriage customs decreed in the Bible, so, yeah, marriage is plastic. But have you considered the consequences? Longenecker has.

Marriage is only plastic … because everything else is too. In other words, there is no such thing as Truth.

This big-T Truth presumably means objective or absolute truth. And here again I agree with Longenecker’s antagonist—I see no evidence for objective truth in issues that affect society such as morality or the definition of marriage. But Longenecker wails and rends his garments:

For the Catholic everything is connected. If marriage is plastic … then everything is plastic … Everything is up for grabs, there is no certainty and if no certainty, then no security.

Changing the definition of marriage pulls the thread that unravels the entire fabric of your reality? I guess it sucks to be you then, since we’ve already resoundingly rejected many of the Bible’s conceptions of the male/female relationship.
The Bible’s nutty interpretation of marriage

  • “Do not intermarry with [those in the Canaanite tribes]” (Deut. 7:3).
  • King Solomon famously had 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
  • A raped woman must marry her rapist (Deut. 22:28–9).
  • “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” (Num. 31:17–18)
  • God said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.” (2 Sam. 12:8). God has his complaints about David, but polygamy isn’t one of them.
  • Paul said, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry” (1 Cor. 7:8–9). Marriage is clearly the second best option. Celibacy is what we should actually strive for.
  • Paul also rejects divorce (1 Cor. 7:10–11).

The Bible isn’t much of a marriage manual.
The sky is falling!
Longenecker again:

In a society where anything goes everything goes…downhill fast. Where moral disintegration exists societal disintegration soon follows. Everything starts to come apart at the seams. Societal chaos threatens.

I missed how we conclude “anything goes” from expanding one institution of society to include a disenfranchised minority.

When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules …

As for no moral absolutes … well, yeah. Why? Do you have any evidence of moral absolutes besides some vague feeling? And here again, the only one who imagines no reason and no rules is Longenecker himself.
And now the punch line:

When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules, then something must be done. People demand security. As disorder and chaos increase people demand order and control.

But, of course, this dystopia that’s around the corner won’t seek out Longenecker’s Yahweh, darn it. This obvious answer will be right in front of us, but our fallen race will appeal to government, and the government’s way to provide order and control is a police state.

Thus the ultimate irony that those who wanted a society “completely free” from absolutes where everything was plastic will end up with a police state where nothing is plastic and the total control is drastic.

This breathless argument distills down to this:

  1. A same-sex marriage proponent is now advocating that polygamy be legalized. See? Didn’t I say this would happen?!
  2. (Here is where the argument teleports to Crazy Town.) A flexible definition of marriage means that everything is flexible. Absolutes of any kind and even truth itself are no more. Anything goes.
  3. Moral disintegration and social chaos follow.
  4. The public clamors for order, and government responds with a police state.

I’ve scanned Father Longenecker’s blog for posts about marriage since Obergefell. I count four of them, none of which revisits his bold prediction. And now I feel a prediction coming on: I predict we won’t see a retraction, just a closing of the ranks and an adoption of a not-so-bad reality.
The slippery slope argument is popular, but I reject it. The definition of marriage does change; that’s a simple fact of history. Instead of focusing on that, focus on the test that doesn’t change: does it cause harm?
Does polygamy cause harm? Does same-sex marriage cause harm? These are the questions to ask. As we near the anniversary of Obergefell, the answer so far is that it doesn’t.

The very being or legal existence of the woman
is suspended during the marriage,
or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband;
under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.
— Sir William Blackstone, 1765

Photo credit: Wikimedia