Monthly Archives: March 2020

Bite-Size Replies to Christian “Quick Shots”

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How are arguments best presented? One approach is from the Cold Case Christianity ministry, which has a mobile app that provides brief responses to common arguments. These are mostly atheist arguments—that there are no miracles, the Problem of Evil, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster—though a few are from other spiritual perspectives—all roads lead to God and sincerity is good enough. There are 28 of these “Quick Shots,” and they’re available in blog format as well.

We’ve seen lists of “Top 10 Atheist Arguments” at Christian blogs before. What’s unusual here is the format. The attack to the Christian worldview is presented as a single sentence, and there are two or three responses, each less than 200 words long. A “click to tweet” summary ends each response.

My initial reaction was cautious, because I wouldn’t want Christians to think that, just because they’ve found a paragraph with a response, he’s necessarily answered the challenge. On the other hand, everyone has to start somewhere. Reading off a paragraph you’ve just discovered during a live argument isn’t much, but it’s something. Only by jumping into the conversation will Christians see how inadequate simple apologetic answers are. (And once they’ve discovered that, they can move on to learning how inadequate the complex answers are.)

I’d like to respond to these Quick Shots in kind—I’ll call them Bite-Sized Replies (BSR). It’ll be a challenge, because this is different than how I usually write. Lately, I often find myself writing two- or three-part posts of several thousand words total with links to posts of mine and to references outside my blog. Let’s see how it goes with this new format. (Just to be clear, I’m planning this new abbreviated format just for these 28 BSRs, while retaining the more in-depth approach for other topics.)

As this series progresses, let me know what you think.

Continue to BSR 1: There Are No Objective Truths

Confusing arguments don’t succeed,
convincing arguments succeed.
Confusing arguments usually go unchallenged.
— commenter I Came To Bring The Paine

 

That is success in apologist world.
— commenter Greg G

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Image from Daniel X. O’Neil, CC license
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Complete list of Bite-Size Replies with links

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Hey, Fundamentalists! How Do You Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?

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I’ve written before about the scientific consensus, arguing that we laymen are in no position to reject the scientific consensus and dismantling popular conservative arguments that encourage us to do exactly that.

The Discovery Institute, that fearless citadel against evolution, barfs on thoughtful discourse with its article, To Have a View on the Darwin Debate, Do You Need a PhD in Evolutionary Science?

Let me abstract this post by answering that question: you’re welcome to have a view, but if that view rejects the overwhelming consensus in favor of evolution then yes, you need a PhD. And to correct the title, there is no “debate” over evolution—at least not within biology, the only place where such a debate would be relevant.

The article begins with a tweeted exchange between Kevin Williamson (correspondent for the National Review) and David Klinghoffer (senior fellow at the Discovery Institute).

Kevin Williamson: Evolution, like similarly specialized fields, is not really subject to casual opinion.

David Klinghoffer: And that is why [anyone], if he’s more than a casual thinker, gives it the needed study

Kevin Williamson: ‘The needed study’ = graduate-level work in evolutionary science.

The author of the unattributed article disagrees.

Just as you don’t need a graduate degree in meteorology to understand why tornados will never turn rubble into houses and cars, you don’t need “graduate-level work in evolutionary science” to understand that unintelligent forces alone cannot cause civilizations to arise on barren planets, and for the very same reasons.

I agree that any process analogous to a tornado won’t drive an organism to change, adapt, and improve as happens on earth. But that’s not evolution. A tornado is just random, while evolution has random elements plus selection to pick the organisms that best fit their environments. (Why is this elementary error so common within Creationism/Intelligent Design proponents? Do they have no interest in understanding what they’re rejecting?)

And note that this quote says that you don’t need a graduate degree to understand much of science. Yes, that’s true, but you do need one to reject the scientific consensus.

The author moves from not-a-biologist David Klinghoffer as an authority to not-a-biologist Jay Homnick. Homnick is a commentator, humorist, and deputy editor of The American Spectator. His homey logic neatly punctures the evolution balloon:

Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident . . . you have essentially lost your mind.

That’s some tough love, folks. A not-a-biologist has used the Argument from Incredulity to cut the Gordian Knot and give us the painful truth. “That’s just crazy talk! It don’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true!”

Homnick apparently thinks that the process of evolution is nothing but accident. It’s not. (That demand for graduate-level education in biology for those who would upset conclusions about evolution is sounding better all the time.)

Back to the article:

Jay Homnick is not a scientist, but unlike Kevin Williamson, he understands that you don’t need a scientific background to realize something is terribly wrong with the scientific “consensus” on evolution.

Do you hear what you’re saying? You’re justifying someone deliberately rejecting the consensus and drawing his own conclusion about biology when that someone doesn’t understand biology!

You may need a PhD before people will listen to you as an authority, but you emphatically don’t need one to draw the correct conclusion for yourself.

But if you aren’t qualified to do the first, how are you qualified to do the second? You admit you’re not an authority, but then you grant yourself the ability to “draw the correct conclusion”? The author is saying that to convince others you’ll need credentials, but your own opinion isn’t that important, so—what the heck?—discard those experts and pick your own conclusion.

I bet the author wants a Kim Davis world where government employees use their own religious beliefs as the final guide to their official actions, and candidates for public office reject any unpleasant scientific consensus and substitute their own conclusion.

Often it seems it doesn’t matter how much evidence you present to these people, or how clearly you present it. They’ll just keep saying, “All our elite scientists reject ID, who am I to question elite scientists?”

No, the question is: “Who am I to question those people who understand the evidence, since I don’t?” Sometimes a little humility is appropriate.

Meanwhile, as the evidence piles up, those same scientists keep repeating, “Intelligent design is not science, intelligent design is not science.”

“Evidence piles up,” you say?? So you are in favor of following the evidence-driven consensus after all! If the evidence is piling up to create a sea change within evolution, then just give it time and then follow that new consensus. That the author doesn’t express it this way shows how little he thinks of this new “evidence.”

Maybe someday in the future, after a poll shows that most of our elite scientists have finally accepted the obvious, folks like Kevin Williamson will say, “Wow, imagine that . . . believing that the survival of the fittest was enough to generate human brains and human consciousness. I guess that was a pretty stupid idea after all.”

Wow, imagine that . . . the ideas at the frontier of science don’t always conform to common sense. Maybe we should listen to those smart people who bring science to us after all.

Let’s return to the question in the title: “How Do You Reject Science Without Looking Like a Troglodyte?” Answer: you can’t.

People say they love truth,
but in reality they want to believe
that which they love is true.
— Robert J. Ringer

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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Christians’ Relative Approach to Reality (2 of 2)

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Do Christians have a proprietary avenue to truth? We’re critiquing a Christian presentation of advice on finding Christian truth in three points. We’ve covered the first two points (study scripture and seek wise counsel) in part 1.

3. “Seek the consensus of historic Christianity”

I’m guessing this is a polite way of rejecting Roman Catholicism, the denomination that eclipses in size all the Protestant denominations put together. I imagine that the presenter, Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason ministry, would say that Catholicism relies on tradition too much, while his flavor of Christianity discards those manmade accretions and gets back to basics: nothing but the Bible.

But this doesn’t help since the Bible itself was manmade. It was written by men, and the canon (list of official books) was selected by men. And we’re back to the problem from point #1 in the previous post, that the Bible is ambiguous. You can make it into a sock puppet to make it say almost anything you want.

Shlemon said:

What has the Church taught for 2,000 years? If the idea or the claim that I am considering right now is contradicted by 2,000 years of church history, or it is a completely new idea, then it causes me to become suspicious.

“Church history”? Here again is the problem of manmade ideas. If the Roman Catholic Church’s traditions must be rejected because they were made by fallible men, why stop there? Apocalypticism, Gnosticism, Marcionism, mystery religions, and more influenced Christianity in its first couple of centuries, and there’s no reason to imagine that the crazy quilt that came out of that religious Petri dish was divinely guided. Paul documented the confusion: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ’ ” (1 Corinthians 1:12). In other words, Christianity is what it is today because of fallible men, in more areas than just Catholicism’s tradition.

Shlemon is on thin ice when he wants to go back 2000 years. To take one example of doctrine that wasn’t in the Bible but had to be decided by committee, the doctrine of the Trinity was in a form that we would recognize only after the Council of Constantinople in 381. That was just the second general church council, and there were 21 of them.

When Shlemon says, “Gimme some of that old-time religion,” what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t like this newfangled acceptance of same-sex marriage, abortion, and Christianity losing its hold on the morals of Western society (more).

I wonder what he thinks about other newfangled ideas like making slavery illegal, which, in the United States, happened in 1865. His response might be to argue that American slavery wasn’t the same as biblical slavery. (Wrong. They were pretty much identical, and the Bible gave Southern pastors the stronger argument on the slavery issue.)

We’d know that Christianity was correct if it (alone among all religions and philosophies) was dragging society into a more moral world. It isn’t, and Christianity looks like all the other religions, a conservative institution uninterested in change and trying to hold on to the status quo.

Where would Shlemon have us go? Should modern Christians try to recreate Christianity as practiced in Paul’s churches in the 50s? Paul’s idea of Jesus was very different from the gospels’. Or maybe the version practiced in the first church to use Mark’s gospel in the 70s. Or John’s significantly different gospel in the 90s. Or maybe after the Trinity was added more than two centuries later.

That’s a lot of effort just to justify wagging your finger at the Gays.

We have been divided on a whole bunch of things for hundreds if not thousands of years in some cases. But when it comes to the question of marriage and sex, all of the church, Protestant, Catholic, and even the Orthodox traditions, have been unanimous for 2,000 years.

Unanimous? Then what are these churches I see in the Pride parades? How is it that many Christians are okay with abortion? Bronze Age morality—genocide, slavery, ownership of women, rules against homosexuality, and more—has no place within modern society, and millions of Christians understand this. The 10 constitutional amendments in the Bill of Rights are much more valuable to American society today than the 10 Commandments.

The three rules in this lecture—study scripture, seek wise counsel, and seek the consensus of historic Christianity—claim to be able to reliably and honestly sift “biblical from bogus,” but they are only useful to solidify your current Christian position, whatever it is. Christians boast about their grasp of objective truth, but take them for a test drive, and these rules are relative just like everyone else’s.

Faith is to believe what you do not see;
the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
— Augustine

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Image from Lopez Robin, CC license
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Christians’ Relative Approach to Reality

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Christian apologists are eager to report that they alone have Truth with a capital T. What’s their secret? Let’s take a look at one list of rules that, we’re told, will reliably lead someone through the maze of religious claims to the truth.

The problem is real. Paul said, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). That didn’t happen, and there are now 45,000 Christian denominations. The Bible is the perfect word from a perfect divinity, and yet it’s somehow so ambiguous that Christians can’t figure out fundamental issues of doctrine (more).

Our source is an article in Christian Post that summarized a recent lecture by Alan Shlemon from Stand to Reason. Let’s see if this apologist shows us how to separate, as promised, “biblical from bogus.”

1. “Study scripture”

The first rule is that when you’re puzzled by an idea or claim, “we need to test it against Scripture.”

And there’s the problem, presupposing the Bible is correct up front. Why test an idea against the standard of the Bible? Since the Bible is full of contradictions and God has terrible morals, it should be the other way around. Presupposing the correctness of the Bible is a fundamental flaw at the argument’s foundation, but it isn’t even acknowledged.

Studying scripture gets into other dubious but popular rules of thumb like “let easy verses interpret difficult ones.” The idea here is that when you find some Bible verses that fit nicely into your Christian thinking but others that seem in opposition, don’t consider the obvious naturalistic possibility that the Bible was put together over centuries by different people with different agendas whose writings aren’t consistent. No, you should instead let the easy verses interpret difficult verses. And by this, they of course mean that you use the verses you like to reinterpret the unpleasant verses.

And there are more biased rules.

Let me respond with my own rule, that Christians must take four steps before they deliver their rationalization for why God looks like a Bronze Age barbarian. These hold Christians’ feet to the fire so they accept the consequences of their claims. I discuss them in detail here, but very briefly, Christians must:

  1. Acknowledge that God sure looks like a moral monster, even if you want to argue that, in fact, he isn’t.
  2. You say God might have his reasons for acting this way? Share them with us. Make a list of plausible reasons God might have for allowing a tsunami to kill 200,000 people or for letting a child die of leukemia.
  3. Show that this God plausibly exists. “You can’t prove no God” is no argument.
  4. A Greatest Possible Being could achieve goals without suffering. Justify why God didn’t take this route.

2. “Seek wise counsel”

Admitting that you don’t have all the answers and listening to others sounds like good advice, but the advice really is to seek wise counsel from people within your church or denomination. This isn’t a search for the truth, it’s a search for rationalizations that will keep you a Christian, preferably in the denomination of the person giving the advice. How do you know their denomination is the correct one? Not by following the evidence but by listening to faith.

Christian faith is fragile. The Christian vessel must be insulated as much as possible from outside influences. Christians acknowledge this when they fret about sending their children to secular universities, but they never stop to think what this means. If the claims of Christianity were easy to verify, who would have doubts? Why is Christian doubt even a thing? And isn’t it odd that Christians must reject, ignore, or reinterpret the doubts that their God-given brain tells them?

The religion from a real omnipotent and omniscient god would be unambiguous. It’d be simple. Christianity isn’t.

Rule 1 is “study scripture,” pretending that the Bible has a single interpretation. Rule 2 is “seek wise counsel,” but this can only be a quest to tamp down annoying doubts and maintain the status quo.

We’ll conclude with a final rule in part 2.

When it comes to Jesus,
as Albert Schweitzer pointed out long ago,
historians all too often have
“looked into the long well of history”
and seen their own reflection staring back at them.
— James Tabor at Bart Ehrman blog

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Image from commenter epeeist, used with permission
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Religions Continue to Diverge. What Does that Tell Us?

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Suppose supernatural truths exist, but we could only dimly perceive them. J.R.R. Tolkien expressed this idea this way: “We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light. . . . Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour.”

What would this look like? How could we tell that we lived in such a world?

We might see a Babel of religions because of our imperfect understanding, but we’d also see convergence. As the disparate religious groups compared notes, common supernatural truths would become apparent. Positive feedback would take hold as we matched our tentative consensus against that rudimentary understanding of the Divine. And if that supernatural Divine wanted us to understand, it would nudge us in the right direction so Humanity would gradually cobble together an accurate understanding.

Of course, in the case of Christianity where God is eager for each of us to have a relationship with him, we should see not a nudge or a vague hint of the celestial truth but overwhelming and unmistakable evidence that he exists.

Follow the evidence

What we see is neither overwhelming evidence nor even dimly perceived evidence. Humanity sees no common truth that pushes religions toward a single consensus view—there isn’t even any agreement on the number of gods or their names, let alone what it takes to please him/them. Religion’s fragmentation is bad and getting worse. For example, Christianity has 45,000 denominations now, and that is expected to grow to 70,000 by 2050.

The U.S. has bred important new Christian denominations including Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Unitarian Universalist Church, Salvation Army, Assemblies of God, Messianic Judaism, Shakers, Mormonism, and Pentecostalism. Outside of Christianity we find new religions such as Rastafari, Church of Satan, Cargo cults, Theosophical Society, Transcendental Meditation movement, Wicca, Neopaganism, and UFO cults such as Raëlism, Heaven’s Gate, Nation of Islam, and Scientology. Dozens of new religious movements spring up each year just in the United States.

The unstoppable growth of religious diversity is shown visually by the tree of world religions and the map of world religions.

If there is a supernatural truth out there and if beliefs are steered by reality (instead of wishful thinking, say), you’d think that religious claims would be tested and either kept or dropped based on how well they matched reality. With this view, we’d see humankind gradually converge on a single religious story. And yet we see the opposite because evidence doesn’t drive the search for religious truth.

Christian response

What then explains the popular Christian apologists who weave elaborate intellectual arguments for the strength of the Christian position? They’re simply supporting conclusions already made, and they get their support from Christians who want a pat on the head and assurance that there’s scholarly backing for beliefs they hold for no more substantial reason than that they were part of their environment growing up.

(Yes, adults do switch religions, but this is rare. Believers adopt a religion, not because it is the truth, but because it’s the religion of their culture. Only one percent of believers switch in as adults.)

The Christian response is often to emphasize Christianity’s unique aspects. “Okay, maybe Christianity wasn’t the first to celebrate a virgin birth or have a dying-and-rising god,” they admit, “but look how it’s different—look at its unique features!”

Sure, Christianity is unique. Every religion is unique. But the problem remains: if your religion looks like just another manmade religion, why would we think it’s correct? Why pick it over the rest? We shouldn’t, and since it looks like nothing more than a manmade religion, it should be rejected like the rest.

Another popular response is to argue that the one true God could have his reasons for not making clear the correct path. We simply don’t understand them. Yes, this is possible, but this is the “Aha—you haven’t proven me wrong!” gambit, which again is no justification for belief. You don’t hold beliefs because they haven’t been proven wrong; you hold them because there’s evidence that they’re right. Honest truth seekers follow the evidence, and it doesn’t point to Christianity.

Where does this leave Christianity?

Christians agree that people invent religions. That’s how they explain all those other religions. But in explaining away the other religions, they’ve explained away their own. Christianity looks like just one more manmade religion.

Religion is driven by human imagination and emotions, evolving as social conditions change, with no reality to tie it down. There is no loving god desiring a relationship who would make his existence known to us, and Christians use faith to camouflage this embarrassing fact. There’s not even a cosmic truth “seen through a glass, darkly” (that is, seen in a mirror, dimly). The glass isn’t dark; it’s black. There is no external truth nudging us in the right direction.

Christians, drop the pretense that this is an intellectual project. Admit, at least to yourselves, that your belief is cultural and built on nothing more solid than tradition.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/16/15.)

Image from Mike Mozart, CC license

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Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid #51: 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga (3 of 3)

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Alvin Plantinga is a professor emeritus from Notre Dame. Given that he is a philosopher, you’d expect better arguments than these three that he used in a New York Times interview.

You’d expect wrong.

I wondered if these were casual arguments, tossed out without much thought during a live interview. Could that explain why they were so poor? Nope: the original article makes clear that this interview was done by email, so Plantinga’s answers were presumably carefully considered.

Let’s move on to the final argument that I will be critiquing (part 1 here). (And there are more. Read the original interview if you want more weeds to chop down.)

#3. Evolution gives us beliefs that are just as likely to be false as true

The interviewer said, “So your claim is that if materialism is true, evolution doesn’t lead to most of our beliefs being true.”

Plantinga replied:

Right. In fact, given materialism and evolution, it follows that our belief-producing faculties are not reliable. Here’s why. If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent.

Huh? Why imagine that beliefs are as likely to be false as true? We’ve seen this odd thinking before in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (I respond to that argument here). He begins with the valid observation that beliefs honed by evolution are useful for survival but don’t need to be true. (I’d argue that supernatural beliefs are an example.) His illustration is an imaginary Neolithic man who believes two odd things: that tigers are cuddly and that the best way to pet a tiger is to run away from it. The first belief is bad for survival and the second is false, but these two beliefs combine into a protective pair.

But why imagine it ends there? If every belief is a roll of the dice, our primitive man would have no beliefs shaped by reality. He might respond to sleepiness by drinking water, to thirst by finding a warm place, to cold by getting out of the sun, and so on. He’s too dumb to live, and that’s where evolution comes in. Reality is a demanding mistress, and beliefs not in accord with reality are judged harshly. If your beliefs for finding food, water, and shelter don’t fit well with reality, evolution will have something to say about it.

Plantinga clearly has little difficulty sifting true survival beliefs from false ones, and he’ll agree that we are all pretty good at this, too. And yet his hypothetical primitive man isn’t. I assume Plantinga concludes, via reductio ad absurdum, that such a man couldn’t exist, so therefore God must step in to impose correct beliefs on us. If evolution can’t be trusted to work for human beliefs, the same must be true for other animals, so God must impose survival beliefs on them, too.

I think I’ll go with the consensus view of the people who understand the evidence, not non-biologist Alvin Plantinga.

Extrapolate to many beliefs

There’s one more bit of childish logic that needs to be addressed.

Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability—say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true—our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like .0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.

First, our beliefs aren’t independent. When one belief has proven itself to be reliable through repeated use, we might build on that foundation by trying out additional provisional beliefs.

Second, it’s true that the more imperfect beliefs you collect, the likelier that one or more are false. Plantinga’s probability of 0.0004 for 67 out of 100 beliefs to be true may be correct when these tenuous beliefs have only a probability of 0.5 of being true. Survival beliefs, whether instinctive (“things that smell bad can make you sick if you eat them”) or taught (“prey animals tend to congregate at water holes at dawn and dusk”), usually have a probability of being true far higher than 0.5.

And finally, Christians and atheists all agree that human brains are imperfect. They can be changed by an injury, drugs, or a tumor. They’re subject to mental illness, dementia, biases, and illusions. They work less well when we’re hungry, stressed, or tired. (The story of Phineas Gage is a dramatic illustration that the mind is a product of a physical brain and nothing more.)

Plantinga is correct that our brains are imperfect, but then he proposes that Christians believe them when they report that God exists? The Christian claims are about the most ludicrous possible, and they need a mountain of evidence. Plantinga doesn’t have it.

Instead of faith, science compensates for our imperfect hardware with the scientific method. Conclusions are always tentative. There are rewards for overturning the consensus view. The result is science’s imperfect but still prodigious track record of results. Religion has, not a poorer track record, but no track record of teaching us new things about reality.

These three arguments add to the pile of really poor apologetics from famous Christians. I hope they provided a little practice for you and that you’re now better prepared in case you come across them in the future.

Perhaps the most optimistic spin I can put on this exercise is Catherine Aird’s observation, “If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”

If this is the best that theology can do,
theology is in big trouble.
— Dr. Massimo Pigliucci,
in response to this interview of Alvin Plantinga

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Image public domain
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