Monthly Archives: July 2016

Movie Review: Ray Comfort’s “The Atheist Delusion”

Posted on by


Well, that’s 62 minutes I’ll never get back.
I watched Ray Comfort’s new movie, The Atheist Delusion: Why Millions Deny the Obvious, which releases today. The style is trademark Ray Comfort as he interviews a dozen or so atheists, mostly 20-somethings. We follow them as Ray works through his arguments, and at the end they’re all left with either a lot to think about or a commitment to follow Jesus. Throw in some nice graphics, take a few tangents, overlay some stirring music, and he’s done. Any subject who saw through Ray’s thin arguments and made him look foolish was cut from the movie to give the impression that this approach is devastating to the brittle worldview of any atheist.
The production quality was good, but one consequence of the high-quality audio was worrisome. You almost never see Ray himself, just the subject of the moment. Often Ray would speak a seamless paragraph while we see the video cut between two or three subjects listening patiently. I see how that makes things visually more interesting, but it brings to mind old charges that in previous movies Ray had mixed and matched video segments to line up pleasing answers in response to questions, distorting what the subjects had actually said. When a subject says, “Yes,” what are they answering? Maybe it’s “Have you changed your mind?” or maybe it’s “Are you still an atheist?” (The Friendly Atheist pressed him on this question here in an interview about the movie.)
“Atheism destroyed with one scientific question …”
That got your attention, right? It’s the tag line for the movie’s trailer. Ray may be a science-denying apologist who refuses to be corrected on his childish understanding of evolution, but surely he’s not going to make a claim like that without something pretty compelling.
Or not. He gives people a book and asks, “Do you believe that book could’ve come about by accident?” That’s the scientific question. He then talks about how marvelous human DNA is and concludes that if the book had a maker, then DNA must have, too. It’s the Argument from Incredulity: “Golly, I can’t imagine a natural explanation for this, so it must be supernatural!”
Let’s revisit the “by accident” part. DNA didn’t come about by accident, it came about through mutation (random) and natural selection (not random). How many times has this guy been corrected on this? I’m convinced that this is just willful ignorance on his part. Telling the accurate story doesn’t suit his agenda, so he lies.
In fact, the sloppiness in DNA nicely defeats Ray’s Design Argument (more here).
“Could DNA make itself?”
Here’s another of Ray’s probing strawman questions. He lives in a simple world: DNA either made itself or God did it. But DNA didn’t make itself; chemistry did. DNA was simply the result of unguided processes. Again, I have to wonder if this wording was clumsy or calculated.
He talked about how nicely fit we are to our environment, which brought to mind Douglas Adams’ puddle that marveled at how well its hole had been fit to itself.
“You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”
Wow. Where do you begin with this black hole of bullshit?

  • An atheist has no god belief. That’s it. Atheists can have any views on cosmology they want.
  • Cosmologists don’t say this.
  • “Scientific impossibility”? Show me. Pop philosophy is not an asset at the frontier of science.
  • What’s the problem with something coming from nothing? Isn’t that how you say God did it?
  • You’re still stuck on “created.” You imagine a cause, but there might not have been one. The Copenhagen model of physics argues that some events don’t have causes.

In an odd attack, he claims that Richard Dawkins says that nothing created everything. Analyzing the hamster wheel that drives Ray’s brain is tricky business, but here’s my theory. Richard Dawkins says it and he’s the pope of the atheists, so therefore all atheists must believe that nothing created everything. Conclusion: “You’re an atheist, so you believe the scientific impossibility that nothing created everything.”
I could begin by saying that I’m not bound by what Dawkins says, but Dawkins didn’t even say this. Ray’s evidence for his charge is a video of Dawkins speaking about physicist Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing. Dawkins says, “Of course it’s counterintuitive that you can get something from nothing” … but how did we get from Comfort’s charge of “nothing created everything” to Dawkins’ defense of something possibly coming from nothing? Only in the hamster wheel are these equivalent.
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
In interviews years ago, I heard Ray explain his idiotic understanding of evolution. Say you have two lizards, and because of mutations, they give birth to a healthy monkey (cuz that’s what evolution says happens, right?). The monkey matures and looks for a mate, but since monkeys from lizards is quite rare, it can’t find a monkey of the opposite gender, so it dies without making more monkeys. Cue sad trombone sound.
In the movie, Ray goes down a similar line of “reasoning” to ask whether the chicken or the egg came first. He wonders where the rooster came from to fertilize the egg to continue the line. Then he asks whether it was the heart or the blood that evolved first. If the heart, what was it doing without blood? If the blood, how did it move with no heart? Ray’s questions are useful because they sometimes get a “Gee—I’ve never thought of that” from a layperson, not because they’re effective against a biologist, which would actually count for something.


See also: Fat Chance: Why Pigs Will Fly Before Ray Comfort Writes an Honest Critique of Atheists

The last third of the movie moves from “intellectual” arguments to the usual evangelism. You’re avoiding your conscience, you have selfish motives for denying what you know to be true, morals come from God, you just want to keep sinning, imagine if you died today, and more.
Several reviewers said they needed tissues. I needed a barf bag.
Then there’s Ray’s old standby, the Ten Commandments Challenge®, in which he convicts people based on their failure to satisfy the Ten Commandments. Ray, did you forget that they don’t think the Bible is binding since they’re atheists?
(How the Ten Commandments don’t say what Ray thinks they do here.)
Ray’s project was, “Atheism destroyed with one scientific question,” but that was just clickbait. I don’t remember a single correct scientific statement from Ray in the entire movie. The entire thing collapses into a pretentious pile of elementary and emotional arguments, which, unfortunately, may be effective on people who haven’t thought much about these issues.

As for the contents of his skull,
they could have changed place with the contents of a pie
and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Image credit: Living Waters

25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 12)

Posted on by

The trough of stupid arguments sloppeth over once again, so let’s put on our hazmat suits and dive in. You can begin the list here. We’re now well past 25 arguments and still going.
christianity atheism arguments
Stupid Argument #39: Were you there?
This may be Creationist Ken Ham’s favorite line to infect students’ minds. In Job, God says, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” Ken Ham paraphrases this into a challenge to the scientist that summarizes what science knows—about evolution, about the Big Bang, or about anything that happened in the past. Ham’s challenge is, “Where you there?” The implied evidence-free conclusion is, “Because if you weren’t, God was!”
Ham proudly wrote about nine-year-old Emma B. who took Ham’s advice and attacked a museum curator’s statement about the age of a moon rock with “Were you there?”
Biologist PZ Myers nicely deflated Ham’s anti-science bias with a gentle reply to Emma B. Myers noted that Ham’s “Were you there?” is designed simply to shut down discussion and is a question to which you already know the answer. He recommended instead, “How do you know that?” which is a question from which you can actually learn something.
“Were you there?” is a variation of the more general question, “Did you experience this with your own senses?” To Science, this question lost significance centuries ago. The days when Isaac Newton used taste as a method to understand new chemicals are long gone. Modern science relies on instruments to reliably provide information about nature—from simple instruments like compasses, voltmeters, Geiger counters, and pH meters to complex ones like the Mars rovers, Hubble space telescope, LIGO gravity wave observatory, and Large Hadron Collider.
Not only is Ham’s question irrelevant, not only does it attempt to shut down discourse rather than expand it, it can be confronted directly. If Ham wants to play games, he needs to expect the same:
Ken Ham: “You say there was no six-day creation? Well, Smart Guy, were you there?”
Atheist: “Why yes, as a matter of fact I was there.”
Ham: “No you weren’t!”
Atheist: “Oh? How do you know? Were you there?”
To rebut this ridiculous claim, Ham would have to use (shudder!) common sense, a tool that he doesn’t want introduced into the conversation because it is devastating to someone who wants to imagine a 6000-year-old earth, men rising from the dead, and a god who desperately wants a relationship with us but is apparently too shy to make plain his existence.
And if direct observation is so important to Ham, I wonder how he validates the Creation story—was he there?
(This ties in with Stupid Argument #6: Creationism.)
Stupid Argument #40: Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones.
This argument is an attempt to wriggle away from Bible verses that are unpleasant or that contradict each other. “Interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones” is advice from Josh McDowell’s New Evidence that Demands a Verdict (page 48). McDowell makes clear that difficult isn’t the issue at all—it’s contradictions that are the problem. They’re not difficult to understand, only to reconcile. For example, the epistle of James says that salvation is by works but Romans says that it’s by grace. The trick, McDowell tells us, is to find the interpretation that you like in the constellation of competing verses, bring that one forward, and either ignore the others or reinterpret them to be somehow subordinate or supportive of your preferred interpretation. That’s not quite how he puts it, but that’s what he means.
The quest for the “clearer” passage has become a quest for the most pleasing one.
The mere existence of what McDowell euphemistically calls “difficult” passages is an unacknowledged problem. How could verses conflict in a book inspired by a perfect god? If conflicting verses exist, doesn’t that make the Bible look like nothing more than a manmade book? How could God give humanity a book that was at all unclear or ambiguous? What does it say that 45,000 Christian denominations have sprung up over varying interpretations of a single holy book?
And no, “I’ll just have to ask that of God when I see him in heaven” won’t do because the Bible has no purpose except to be clear and convincing to people here on earth. (This argument is discussed in more detail here.)


See also: Five Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass

 
Stupid Argument #41: Appealing to polls to resolve scientific issues.
Polls of the population can be interesting and informative—percent of prison population that are atheists vs. Christian, fraction of Republicans vs. Democrats who are Christian, gender mix of Christians or atheists, the biggest issues troubling voters, the most/least religious parts of the country or world, how many Americans think the end times have arrived (41 percent, by the way), and so on.
The problem arises when polls are used to drive government policy. Public opinion should make no contribution to the scientific facts used to guide policy. Of course, elected officials must answer to their constituents, but the opinions of non-scientist constituents still count for nothing on any question of science. Politicians make policy, and scientists give us science’s best approximation to the truths of nature. “We should do nothing because acknowledging climate change is scary” is a policy option, but “Climate change is a hoax that can be ignored” isn’t.
Creationism in public schools is another area where science steps on toes. Americans are embarrassingly clueless (or willfully so) about evolution. 42 percent accept strict Creationism (God created humanity in the last 10,000 years), and an additional 31 percent accept guided evolution (evolution was tweaked by God). (Acceptance of evolution rises with education, which highlights the nonscientific agenda behind Creationism, but that’s an aside.)
Answers in Genesis said about this wide public acceptance of Creationism, “Although the vast majority of Americans desire both creation and evolution taught in school, the evolutionary naturalism worldview dominates, revealing a major disparity between the population and the ruling élite.” No, the disparity is between a population that to a large extent accepts the agenda of conservative and religious leaders on one hand and science on the other. Nonscientists don’t get to invent science.
The Discovery Institute tried to give a veneer of scholarship to the debate with its “Teach the controversy” campaign. If we’re talking about science, why can’t we present claims of both sides and let the students decide?
I wonder if they’ve thought this through. How would such a science class be graded? Would pastors be brought in to grade the tests of students who don’t like evolution? Would an answer, “I feel that the answer is …” automatically be correct? And how many “controversies” do we teach—does only the biblical idea of Creation get to come in, or are we throwing the door open to humanity’s hundreds of origin myths?
Texas governor Rick Perry put it this way, “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figure you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.”
Oh? And which one is right? How do you know? If you already know, why don’t we just teach that one instead of wasting class time teaching both?
“Teaching the controversy” isn’t what we do in science. We teach science in science class, not discarded theories like astrology, alchemy, or Creationism. And, of course, within science, there is no controversy! This is a manufactured issue, and polls of citizens do not make science.
Continued with part 13. Find the complete list in one place here. 

“Who is the right god?” is like asking,
“What is the last decimal digit of pi?”
There are ten possible answers and none of them are right.
— commenter Greg G.

Photo credit: Garry Knight, flickr, CC

What Does “God” Mean? The Answer Undercuts the Concept of the Trinity.

Posted on by

Why can’t Christianity think of a better name for its god than “God”? A god named “God” is like a cat named “Cat.”The fourth name of God
While we’re talking about names, if Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the persons, what do you call the union of these into one god? Shell, white, and yolk form an egg. Ice, water, and steam are three states of H2O. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form whom?
You need a fourth name. Do you call it “God”? That won’t do because the Bible tells us that “God” is the one who created everything, and that’s supposed to be the Father. The Father can’t be both the first person of the Trinity and the overall god at the same time.
Calling this union the Trinity would emphasize the separateness of the three and risk the heresy of Partialism. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are supposed to form a single, unified who. Another problem with “the Trinity” is that’s an odd name for a monotheistic god. It’s a label, not a name. Call the three persons “a council of three” if you want, but that doesn’t make clear the unity like a proper name would.
That the Old Testament uses one name for God (okay, it uses several names—Yahweh/Jehovah, Elohim—but that’s a different issue) makes clear that God the Father was no Trinity. Without this distinction, it’s clear that there is no Trinity in the Old Testament.
Let’s see this another way. Consider this passage from Isaiah 45:5–6:

I will gird you, though you have not known Me; that men may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides Me. I am Jehovah, and there is no other.

There are two interpretations of this passage, neither of which supports the Christian interpretation.

  • If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Father,” this means that he reigns alone (since “there is no other”), and we must discard the Trinity.
  • If Jehovah is a synonym for “the Trinity,” then it makes nonsense of the singular pronouns (Me and I) in these verses and confuses passages such as “Then Jehovah spoke to Moses” (Ex. 40:1) or “After Jehovah had spoken these things to Job” (Job 42:7).

The problem, of course, is demanding a Christian interpretation of a Jewish text. There’s nothing confusing here from a Jewish viewpoint, and that was the intended audience. There is no Trinity, and the only god that exists is Jehovah.
Well, at least the only god at this time in the evolution of Judaism. It’s a little more complicated because Old Testament Jews didn’t begin as monotheists. The Old Testament documents their evolution from a kind of polytheism (that’s an aside that I explore more here).
Admittedly, one handy feature of the Trinity is that it gives Christians a way to reinterpret some embarrassing passages from the Old Testament.

Let us make mankind in our image (Gen. 1:26).
The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:22).
Let us go down [to Babel] and confuse their language so they will not understand each other (Gen. 11:7).

These are no problem if “us” refers to, not a council of gods as a careful reading of the Old Testament reveals, but the three persons of the Trinity. But if understanding God as a trinity were important, he would’ve made this clear from the beginning. Judaism’s evolution from polytheism explains this nicely. The conflation of “God” to mean both “the Father” and “the Trinity” reveals the Trinity as a clumsy later addition.
See also “Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” as Reasonable as the Trinity

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used 
against unintelligible propositions.
— Thomas Jefferson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/12/13.)
 

“Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously” as Reasonable as the Trinity

Posted on by

christian trinity atheismLinguist Noam Chomsky suggested “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but logically ridiculous, but it is no more ridiculous than the Trinity.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity claims one God in three persons. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines it this way: “In the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another.”
Unity but also distinct? Three but also one? That makes no sense, so let’s go to the source and read about it in the Bible.
And the Bible says …
Though the Trinity is one of the most fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the Bible says nothing about it directly. Did Paul and the apostles define God in a trinitarian fashion? Nope. If the Trinity is essential to a proper understanding of Christianity as the modern church claims, the ancients’ silence on the matter makes clear that it is a later invention.
That’s not to say that one can’t use the Bible to form arguments in favor of various relationships between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Several interpretations competed in the early centuries of the church.

  • Was Jesus merely a good man, adopted by God (Adoptionism)?
  • Are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit just labels for the different roles of one being (Sabellianism or Modalism)?
  • Was Jesus created by God and subordinate to him (Arianism)?

These are all plausible interpretations, justifiable with Bible passages, but they are heresies today. It took about two centuries for the doctrine of the Trinity to enter the debate (through Tertullian), and it took almost two more centuries of haggling for the doctrine to mature into its present form and sweep away its competitors at the First Council of Constantinople (381).
While still a cardinal, the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI was asked if he was bothered by many Catholics ignoring papal dictates. He said that he was not, because “truth is not determined by a majority vote.” But a majority vote is exactly how doctrines like the Trinity came into being.


See also: Bible Contradictions to the Trinity

Comma Johanneum
You know how I said that the Bible says nothing directly about the Trinity? For completeness, we should address this:

For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. (1 John 5:7)

The part in italics is called the Comma Johanneum (a “comma” is a short clause). The oldest and most reliable manuscripts do not show the Comma. It appears first in a few seventh-century Latin manuscripts and only centuries later in Greek manuscripts. Unlike much of the rest of the New Testament, it doesn’t appear in the letters of early church fathers, many of whom would’ve delighted to support their position with such a quote.
It is agreed by scholars to be a later addition to the original.
What is the Trinity?
Lots of analogies have been proposed for the Trinity. Maybe it’s like water, which has the three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Or like a person who can be spouse, parent, and employer. But this is modalism—God acts in different modes at different times.
Okay, then maybe it’s like an egg, which has shell, white, and yolk. Or like time, which has past, present, and future. Or like the Borromean rings above—three unlinked rings that make a linked whole only when all three rings are present. But this is Partialism, the heretical claim that the three persons of God are three separate parts.
Even world famous apologist William Lane Craig commits this heresy:

[The Trinity] is the claim that the one entity we call God comprises three persons. That is no more illogical than saying that one geometrical figure which we call a triangle is comprised of three angles. Three angles in one figure. Three persons in one being.

Given the clear history of conflict on this question and the many discarded explanations, you’d think that heretical analogies wouldn’t be offered.
Many careful Christians simply say that it’s a mystery and admit that we can’t understand it. Contrast that with the monotheism celebrated by Islam. The shahadah, the basic creed of Islam, says, “There are no deities but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”—simple and unambiguous.
A few questions raised by the Trinity doctrine
Instead of the convoluted and unintelligible Trinity, why not simply embrace the polytheism? My guess is that first-century Christians so valued Jewish monotheism that this tenet couldn’t be dropped. As the stature of Jesus increased over time, from a good man adopted as messiah by God (as told in Mark) to a being who was there at the beginning (John 1:1), they were stuck with fitting the square peg of the divinity of Jesus into the round hole of monotheism.
Why not then have a duality, Yahweh + Jesus? The problem is that two is the number for male and female, which was not the symbolism they were going for. Perhaps the Holy Spirit, initially just a bit player or merely a synonym for God, was elevated into the Trinity. And even this is flexible. While the idea of Mary as Co-redemptrix is not Catholic doctrine, it has threatened to become so at various periods in the church’s history.
And now let us close …
The typical Christian response to a contradiction is to find a way to make both claims true. This is never clearer than with the Trinity. The Bible says that there is one god, but it also says that Jesus existed since the beginning of time. So they must both be true! But what first-century Christian would rationalize this with the doctrine of the Trinity?
Or, take this from the other direction. Explain the Trinity to first-century Christians and ask if that matches their understanding. If you imagine that they do, you have a new problem: why the vitally important doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t explained in the New Testament. And if they don’t, then why is the Trinity dogma today?
The Trinity is a Christian mystery—something that can’t be explained by reason alone. A supernatural explanation is necessary. (This raises the question: If it doesn’t make sense, why accept it? But let’s set that aside.) Apologists often admit that they will just have to ask God about it when they get to heaven.
That humility is laudable, but how about some of that in other areas? If you don’t trust yourself to make sense of the Trinity, why imagine that you correctly understand God’s position on polygamy, slavery, and genocide when the Old Testament gives clear support for them? Why imagine that your evaluation of abortion and gay marriage is correct when the Bible doesn’t address these topics directly?
If only the Trinity were a frequent reminder for Christians to be humble in their claims, it would be valuable for everyone.
See also: “God Has Many Names, But Do We Need One More?”

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity
to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism
that three are one and one is three,
and yet, that the one is not three, and the three are not one.
— Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 1813)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/10/13.)
Image credit: Wikipedia
 

13 More Puzzles

Posted on by

Crossword puzzleI recently explored a specific kind of puzzle in “Counterintuitive Puzzles that Should Be Easy.” I’ve explored other puzzles to shed some light on the religion question: the Monty Hall problem and the Puzzle of the Hidden Dots. There is more to be said about the odd ways the human brain works, but let’s postpone that and simply enjoy a few more puzzles for their own sake this time.
Write your answers to the puzzles that were new to you and check them with the answers below.
Got any good puzzles that you use to stump your friends? Tell us about them in the comments.
Quick ones
Let’s start with some quick ones like those in the previous post. See if the intuitive answer is correct.

  1. If fence posts are put in every 7 feet, how many posts are needed to make a fence 77 feet long?
  2. If it takes a chiming clock 3 seconds to strike 6:00, how long does it take to strike midnight? Ignore the duration of the sound of each chime. (h/t commenter Richard S. Russell)

Word sense

  1. Google’s new parser can make sense out of the following sentences. Can you? Here’s an example of a confusing sentence: “While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib.” That probably sounds odd until you mentally punctuate it like this: “While Anna dressed, the baby played in the crib.” Now try these:
  • The old man the boat.
  • While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods.
  • I convinced her children are noisy.
  • The coach smiled at the player tossed the Frisbee.
  • The cotton clothes are made up of grows in Mississippi.
  • The horse raced past the barn fell.

Easy physics puzzles
These are physics versions of the puzzles that should be easy to answer.

  1. Where does the length of a year come from?
  2. Why is it colder in the winter?
  3. A rowboat is floating in a swimming pool. Inside the rowboat is a cannonball. Take the cannonball and drop it overboard. Does the water level on the side of the pool rise, fall, or stay the same?

Something must be wrong here

  1. A friend of mine was from Iowa, and he said that there was quite a rivalry with the neighboring state of Missouri. Jokes were told in Iowa about how stupid Missourians were. They claimed that if Iowa gave the counties that bordered on Missouri to Missouri, it would raise the IQ of both states. But wait a minute—there has to be something wrong with that. Both states can’t improve, right?
  2. Proof that 1 = 2
  • Let a = b
  • Multiply both sides by a:

a2 = ab

  • Subtract b2 from each side:

a2 – b2 = ab – b2

  • Factor both sides:

(a – b)(a + b) = b(a – b)

  • Cancel (a – b) from both sides:

a + b = b

  • Substitute (remember that a = b):

a + a = a

  • Collect:

2a = a

  • Divide by a:

2 = 1 (But something has to be wrong here—what is it?)

Increasingly difficult puzzles

  1. You’re in the middle of an island covered uniformly with a dense, dry forest. Lightning sets the north end of the forest on fire, and the wind is blowing to the south. All the coast is cliff, so you can’t jump into the water to wait out the fire. The fire will reach you in an hour, and all you have is a backpack with things typically taken on a hike. What can you do to save yourself?
  2. You and I are going to meet at a cafe. The server delivers a coffee with milk on the side just as I get a text from you saying you will be 15 minutes late. Being the polite person that I am, I want to wait for you before drinking my coffee. If I want it to be as hot as possible, do I pour the milk in now or wait until you get here?
  3. Suppose we have 6-sided dice that don’t have the usual numbers 1 through 6 on them. If my die has a 6 on every face and yours has a 5 on every face, we could roll our respective die and I would beat you every time. Now suppose I change to a die with faces {6, 6, 6, 6, 1, 1}. My die is still the better one, but now I would beat your 5-faced die only 2/3 of the time. It’s easy to imagine die A being better than B, and B being better than C, but the puzzle is to make this loop around. That is, create dice such that A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A.
  4. Your company makes the metal numerals used by homeowners to identify their house number. How many of each should you make?
  5. Does the balance tip to the right, tip to the left, or remain unchanged?

Click on the Continue below for hints and then answers.
Balls and beakers

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion
but not their own facts.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Image credit: stevepb, Pixabay, CC
Hints:

Pages: 1 2 3

Insights into Bible Miracles from Magician Uri Geller

Posted on by

Remember Uri Geller? He was the psychic (or entertainer) who bent spoons and performed similar demonstrations in the 1970s and later. He claimed that extraterrestrials gave him paranormal powers, but wet blankets like magician James Randi stated that all of Geller’s claimed paranormal demonstrations were done with conventional stage magic. Randi showed this by publicly duplicating all of Geller’s tricks.
Geller responded: “Sure, there are magicians who can duplicate [my performances] through trickery.” In other words, just because others can do these things as tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them using paranormal powers. But Randi observed that if Geller was actually doing what he claims, “He is doing it the hard way.”
Miraculous Bible claims
I was reminded of Geller when I recently read a defense of one of the Bible’s miracle claims. Maybe it was the Genesis flood story (which looks a lot like the prior Gilgamesh epic). Or the creation story (which looks a lot like the prior Sumerian creation story). Or the Jesus virgin birth story (which looks a lot like prior virgin birth claims of other great men). Or the Jesus resurrection story (which looks a lot like prior dying-and-rising stories of other gods from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean).
It doesn’t much matter which Bible story the apologist was trying to shore up—the defense is the same. It’s the Uri Geller Defense. Geller would say that just because they did his stunts through tricks doesn’t mean that he’s not doing them for real. And the Bible apologist says that just because other cultures anticipated some of the Bible’s fundamental miracle claims long before the Bible story was written doesn’t mean that that Bible story isn’t for real.
Granted. But if Randi can duplicate Geller’s demonstrations as tricks, that makes the starting hypothesis that Geller did the same, and his paranormal claims are fraudulent. Geller has the burden of proof to show that this simple and obvious natural explanation is wrong. And if we have precedents for many of the Bible’s miracle stories, that makes the null hypothesis that these are just ancient Jewish versions of well-known supernatural stories. The apologist has the burden of proof to show that, while the other stories are just myths and legends, the Bible miracles actually happened.
Yes, but those earlier stories don’t count!
Some apologists try to dismiss the earlier stories, but early church father Justin Martyr tried to spin the similarities between Jesus’s virgin birth claim and those of other gods to his advantage. He turned the tables. Why should the Greeks dismiss this miracle claim of Jesus, Justin asked, when they make similar claims about their own gods?
About the Jesus resurrection story, Justin speculated that the similar Dionysus story was planted in history by the devil himself. (I give Justin’s arguments in more detail here.)
Another angle is to emphasize that each Bible story is different from its precedents. Of course it’s different—if the Jesus story were identical to that of Dionysus (say), we’d call him Dionysus instead of Jesus. The question is: how can we trust a Jewish or Christian story as history when it came out of a culture swimming with older (false) stories with the same supernatural claims?
How we deal with similar claims.
Psychics might really be talking to the dead. Though that’s not where the evidence points, desperate customers want the psychics’ story to be true.
Crop circles might really be made by extraterrestrials. Though that’s not where the evidence points (creators have documented how they do it), crop circle enthusiasts dismiss the mundane explanation.
Uri Geller might be for real, though that’s not where the evidence points. Similarly, the Bible miracle stories might be true, but similar miracle stories in nearby cultures make copying by Bible authors the best explanation.
We can’t prove that the Bible’s miracle claims aren’t for real, despite all the precedents, but that’s the way to bet. The plausible natural explanation makes the supernatural explanation unappealing and unnecessary. Only someone with a desire to support a preconception wouldn’t follow the evidence where it leads.

I don’t want to argue 
with people who believe the world is flat.
— Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong

Photo credit: Wikimedia
(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/5/13.)